He had no choice. Thorvin and Guthmund joined him as he walked toward the advancing Mercian battle-line, different from the one they had just broken, only—to outward appearance—by the three great crosses towering above it.

Behind them the Wayman army struggled to regroup. Perhaps a third of them were dead or gravely injured. Now even the walking wounded were furiously busy: stripping the surrendered Ragnarsson warriors of weapons and armor, scavenging the battlefield for whatever was usable or valuable—with the enthusiastic assistance of Shef’s freedmen—herding the enemy wounded off in the direction of their ships still under guard by the Wash, carrying such few as had survived the attentions of the body-strippers off to the leeches.

The “army” was a mere front. A few hundreds of the fittest men in line to make a show. Behind them, rank on rank of captives, hands loosely roped, told to stand there and be counted in return for their lives. Half a mile behind them, thralls and warriors were hastily digging a ditch, setting up the machines—and rounding up horses and wagons ready for the next retreat. The Wayman army was not yet fit to fight—the heart had not gone out of it, not yet. But all tradition dictated a pause for celebration and relief after surviving a pitched battle against superior forces. Being asked to do the same again immediately was too much.

The next few minutes, Shef thought, would be very dangerous. Men were coming to meet him and his small party: three men walking together, one a priest. Two more pushing a strange, upright box on wheels. The thing in it, he realized an instant later, could only be his stepfather Wulfgar.

The two groups halted ten paces apart, surveyed each other. Shef broke the deep, hating silence.

“Well, Alfgar,” he said to his half brother, “I see you have risen in the world. Is our mother pleased?”

“Our mother never recovered from what your father did. Your late father. He told us much about you before he died. He had plenty of time.”

“Did you capture him, then? Or did you stand back as you did in the fight by the Stour?”

Alfgar stepped forward, hand reaching for his sword. The grim-faced man beside him, the one who was not a priest, caught his arm quickly.

“I am Cwichelm, marshal of King Burgred of the Mark,” he said, “charged to restore the shires of Norfolk and Suffolk to their new alderman and to make them subject to my kind. And who are you?”

Slowly, mindful of the frantic preparations still going on behind, Shef introduced the others on his side, let Cwichelm do the same. Disclaimed hostile intention. Declared intention to withdraw. Hinted at compensation for damage.