An arrow. But not an arrow. No human being could have shot it, nor heaved the boulder. Yet these things had happened. Shef walked forward slowly and considered the rock lying amid the ruins of the ram, ignoring the pitiful struggles and cries for help beneath it.

These things had been done by machines. And such machines! Somewhere inside the fort, maybe among the black monks, there must be a machine-master such as he had never imagined. He must find out. But now, anyway, he knew why he had helped the Army. Because he could not bear to see a machine mishandled. But now there were machines on both sides.

Brand had seized him, thrust “Thrall’s-wreak” into his hands, was hustling him away, snarling angrily at him.

“ … standing there like a wittol, they’ll have a war-band out any moment!”

Shef saw they were almost the last men left on the cleared ground, the place of slaughter. The rest had filtered back down the hill as they had filtered up.

The Ragnarssons’ assault on York had failed.

Very carefully, tongue protruding between his teeth, Shef laid the keen blade of his meat-knife to the thread. It snapped. The weight on the end of the wooden arm dropped, the other end flew up. A pebble arced lazily across the forge.

Shef sat up with a sigh. “That is how it works,” he said to Thorvin. “A short arm, a heavy weight; a long arm, a lighter weight. There it is.”

“I am glad you are satisfied at last,” replied Thorvin. “Two days you have been playing with bits of wood and string, while I do all the work. Now maybe you can bear a hand.”

“I will, yes, but this is important too. This is the new knowledge that those of the Way must seek.”

“It is. And important. But there is the day’s work to be done as well.”

Thorvin was as keenly interested as Shef in the experiments, but, after a few attempts to help, had realized that he was merely standing in the way of the excited imagination of his former apprentice, and had gone back to the enormous pile of work an army, in being, created for its armorers.

“But is it new knowledge?” Hund asked. “Ingulf can do things no Englishman has ever been able to. And he learns how to do them by trial, and by taking to pieces the bodies of the dead. You are learning by trial, but you are only trying to learn what the black monks already know. And they are not playing with models.”