“You dropped your guard,” he had said. “A Viking hit you across the face. As you fell forward you got the back of an axe, or a war-hammer, that crushed your spine. Now your legs can only trail behind you as you hobble on crutches. That’s your story.”
But no one had ever asked Shef his story. No experienced warrior needed to. Another reason that the Mercian companions did not bother to interrogate the cripple and his meager attendant was that they were afraid. Every warrior knew that such a fate one day might be his own. Kings and lords might keep a few cripples, pensioners, as signs of their own generosity or out of some family feeling. But gratitude or care for the useless were too expensive luxuries for a land at war.
The ring of listeners turned to other interests. Hund emptied the bag, passed half of the bits to Shef, squatted by him as they both devoured their gifts, heads down. Their hunger, was not an act. For two days now they had worked closer and closer into the center of Burgred’s camp, trailing behind it for ten miles each day, Shef slumped on a stolen donkey, living only on what they could pick up, sleeping each night in their clothes in the cold dew.
“You saw her,” muttered Shef.
“When she comes back I will throw her the sign,” replied Hund. Neither spoke again. They knew this was a moment of critical danger.
Eventually Godive could prolong her errand no further. Back in the women’s quarters, she knew, the old woman Alfgar had set to watch over her would be growing suspicious, fearful: Alfgar had told her that if his whore of a wife found a lover, he would sell her to the slave-market in Bristol, where the Welsh chiefs bought cheap lives.
She began to make her way back across the still-crowded courtyard. There were the minstrel and his boy still. Poor folk. A blind cripple and a starveling. Even the Welsh would not buy such. How long would they live? Till the winter, maybe. They might outlive her at that.
The minstrel had raised his coarse brown hood against the slow drizzle that was turning the dust into mud. Or maybe it was against the cruel stares of the world, for his face was in his hands. As she came level with them, the attendant bent forward and dropped something onto the ground at her feet. Instinctively, she stooped for it.
It was gold. A gold harp, a tiny brooch for a child’s dress. Small as it was, it would buy food for two men for a year. How could a wandering beggar have such a thing? Tied to it with a thread was—
It was a sheaf. Just a few cornstalks threaded together, but tied to make the shape unmistakable. But if the harp meant the minstrel, then the sheaf was—
She turned convulsively to the blind man. His hands came away from his face, bandage in them; she saw the one eye staring deep into her own. Gravely, slowly, the eye winked. As Shef dropped his face into his hands once more he said four words, low but clear. “The privy. At midnight.”
“But it’s guarded,” said Godive. “And there’s Alfgar…”
Hund stretched out his bag towards her, as if begging in desperation. As the bag touched her, he slipped a small flask from his hand to hers.
“Put it in the ale,” he whispered. “Whoever drinks it will sleep.”
Godive jerked back convulsively. As if rejected, Hund sank back, the minstrel dropped his face once more into his hands, as if too far gone in despair to look up. A few yards away, Godive saw old Polga hobbling towards her, reproaches already forming. She turned away, fighting an urge as she did so to leap, fighting an urge to run and embrace the old woman as if she was a young virgin with never a care or a fear. The lacerations on the backs of her thighs caught her woolen dress and slowed her to a cramped shuffle.
Shef had not expected to sleep on the edge of the abduction, but it had come upon him irresistibly. Too irresistibly to be natural, he feared. As he fell asleep, a voice was speaking. Not the now-recognized, amused voice of his unknown patron. The cold voice of Othin, fosterer of battle, betrayer of warriors, the god who took the sacrifices offered to Dead Man’s Strand.