“More important even than that,” said Brand, “we must decide how this army is led, and under what law it shall live. While we were men of the Great Army we lived under the old hermanna lög of our ancestors—the warriors’ law. But Ivar the Boneless broke that and I have no wish to return to it. Now I know that not everyone in this army wears the pendant.” He looked significantly at Shef and Guthmund in the group around the table. “But it is in my mind that we should now agree to live under a new law. Vegmanna lög, I would call it. The law of the Way-folk. The first stage to that, though, is for the army to agree in open assembly to whom it will give the powers to make the laws.”

While they worked it out, Shef’s mind drifted away, as it often did, from the wrangling debate that immediately broke out. He knew what the army would now have to do. March out of Northumbria to get away from the Ragnarssons, cross the shires of Burgred, the powerful king of the Mark, as fast as possible. Establish themselves in the kingless realm of the East Angles, and take toll of the population in return for protection. Protection from kings, protection from abbots and bishops. In a short while, toll on that scale would make even Brand feel contented.

Meanwhile he would work on the mappa. And on the riddle. And most important of all, if the Army of the Way was to protect its shires from other predators, he would have to give them new weapons. New machines.

As he began to draw, in his mind’s eye, the lines of the new catapult, a voice broke through to his half-attention, arguing violently for a place in the council for all hereditary jarls.

That would include Sigvarth, his father, whose crews had joined the column leaving York almost at the last moment. He wished Sigvarth had remained behind. And his horse-toothed son, Hjörvarth. Still, maybe they need not meet. Maybe the Army would not make the rule about jarls.

Shef went back to wondering how he could replace the power of the slow and clumsy counterweight. His fingers itched again to hold a hammer.

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

Four weeks later the itch in Shef’s fingers had been eased. Outside the makeshift camp where the Wayman army had halted for the winter, he stood on the catapult range. But the machine he stood behind was not one the Rome-folk would have recognized.

“Lower away,” he shouted to his eight-man team.

The long boom creaked down towards his waiting hands, the ten-pound rock in its leather sling dangling from two hooks, one fixed, one free.