Shef allowed concern and confusion to show on his face. “I know.” he said. “I should have done it before. But now, suddenly, I am afraid for her.”
Hund looked his friend steadily in the eye. “All right,” he said. “I dare say you have good reason for what you do. Now, how are we going to work it?”
“I’ll get out at dusk. Meet me where we used to shoot the catapults. During the day I want you to collect half a dozen men. But listen. They must not be Norse. All English. All freedmen. And they must all look like freedmen, understand. Like you.” Undersized and underfed, Shef meant. “With horses and rations for a week. But dressed shabby, not in the clothes we’ve given them.
“And there’s another thing, Hund, and this is why I need you. I am too easy to recognize with this one eye”—the one eye you left me with, Shef did not say. “When we went into the Ragnarsson camp that did not matter. Now, if I am to go into a camp with my half brother and stepfather in it, I need a disguise. Now, what I thought was…”
Shef poured out his plan, Hund occasionally altering or improving on it. At the end the little leech slowly tucked his apple-pendant, for Ithun, out of sight, adjusting his tunic so nothing showed.
“We can do it,” he remarked, “if the gods are with us. Have you thought what will happen here in the camp when they wake up and find you gone?”
They will think I have deserted them, Shef realized. I will leave a message, to let them think I have done it for a woman. And yet it will not be true.
He felt the old king’s whetstone dragging at his belt, where he had tucked it. Strange, he thought, when I went into the camp of Ivar, the only thought I had in my head was to rescue Godive, to take her away with me and find happiness together. Now I mean to do the same again. But this time—this time I am not doing it for her. I am not even doing it for me. I am doing it because it must be done. It is the answer. And she and I: we are just parts of the answer.
We are like the little cogs that turn the ropes that wind the catapults. They cannot say they do not want to turn anymore, and neither can we.
He thought of the strange tale of Frothi’s mill which Thorvin had told him, about the giant-maidens, and the king who would not let them rest. I would like to give them rest, he told himself, and the others who are caught up in this mill of war. But I do not know how to release them. Or myself.
When I was a thrall, then I was free, he thought.
Godive came through the women’s door at the back of King Burgred’s immense camp-pavilion and began to edge down the long rows of trestle-tables, at the moment unfilled. She had a task, in case anyone questioned her—a message for King Burgred’s brewer to broach extra barrels, and instructions from Alfgar to stand over him while he did it. Actually, she had had to get out of the stifling atmosphere of the women’s quarters before her heart burst with fear and grief.
She was no longer the beauty she had been. The other women, she knew, had noticed, were talking among themselves about what had happened to her, talking with malicious pleasure at the fall of a favorite. They did not know what the causes were. They must know that Alfgar beat her, beat her with increasing fury and frenzy as the weeks went by, beat her with the birch on her bare body till the blood ran and her shift stuck to her morning after morning. Such things could not be done quietly. Even in the timber hall of Tamworth, Burgred’s capital, some noise carried through the planks and panels. In the tents where kings spent the summer, the campaigning months…
But though they heard, and though they knew, there was no one who would help her. Men would hide their smiles the day after a thrashing; women, to begin with, spoke quietly and consolingly. They all thought that it was the way of the world, however they speculated on how she had failed to please her man.