” ‘Well he left life, though ill he lived it.
All scores are settled by death.’
At the top is his name: ‘Sigvarth Jarl.’ ”
Brand grunted doubtfully. He had not liked Sigvarth. And yet the man had taken the death of his one son well. And there was no doubt he had saved his other son, and the Army of the Way, by enduring his last night of torture.
“Well,” he said at last. “He has his bautasteinn, right enough. It is an old saying: ‘Few stones would stand by the way, if sons did not set them up.’ But this is not where he was killed?”
“No,” said Shef. “They killed him back in the mire. It seems my other father, Wulfgar, could not wait even till he reached firm ground.” His mouth twisted, and he spat on the grass. “But if we had set it up there it would have been out of sight in the marsh in six weeks.
“Besides, I wanted you here to see this.”
He grinned, turned, and waved an arm in the direction of the almost imperceptible rise that led toward March. From somewhere out of sight there came a noise like the squealing of a dozen pigs being butchered simultaneously. Brand’s axe flicked from the ground as his eyes darted round for a lurking enemy, an attacker.
Into sight, from down the deeply rutted track, came a column of bagpipers, four abreast, cheeks puffed. As his alarm receded Brand recognized the familiar face of Cwicca, the former slave of St. Guthlac’s at Crowland, in the front rank.
“They are all playing the same tune,” he bellowed over the din. “Was that your idea?”
Shef shook his head and jerked a thumb at the pipers. “Theirs. It’s a tune they made up. They call it ‘The Boneless Boned.’ ”
Brand shook his head in disbelief. English slaves mocking the champion of the North himself. He had never thought…
Behind the pipers, a score of them, stepped a longer column of men clutching halberds, their heads hidden in shining, sharp-rimmed helmets, each man wearing a leather coat with metal plates stitched onto it, and a small round targe strapped to his left forearm. They must be English too, Brand thought as they marched on. How could he tell? Mainly, it was their size—not a man much above five and a half feet. And yet many of the English ran to size and strength as well, to look at the hulks whom Brand had seen fighting to the last round their lord King Edmund. No, these were not only Englishmen, but poor Englishmen. Not thanes of the English, not carls of the Army, but churls. Or slaves. Slaves with arms and armor.
Brand looked at them in skepticism and disbelief. All his life he had known the weight of mail, known the effort needed to swing an axe or a broadsword. A fully armed warrior might need to carry—and not just to carry, to wield—forty of fifty pounds’ weight of metal. How long could a man do that? For the first man whose arm weakened in a battle-line would be dead. In Brand’s language, to call a man “the stout” was a valued compliment. He knew seventeen words for “man of small size,” and all of them were insults.
He watched the pygmies tramp by, two hundred of them. All held their halberds the same way, he noticed, straight up above the right shoulder. Men marching close together could not afford the luxury of individual decision. But a Viking army would have straggled and held its weapons any way that seemed good, to show proper independence of spirit.
Behind the halberdiers came team after team of horses, he noticed with surprise. Not the slow, dogged ox-teams that had dragged Shef’s catapults round the flank of Ivar’s army. The first ten pairs of horses dragged the carts with the disassembled beams he had seen before, the pull-throwers, the traction-catapults that lobbed stones. By each cart walked its crew, a dozen men with the same gray jerkins and white hammer-insignia as the pipers and halberdiers. In each crew, a familiar face. Shef’s paid-off veterans of the winter campaign had seen their land, had left men to till it, and had returned to their master, the wealth-giver. Each one now captained a crew of his own, recruited from the slaves of the vanished Church.