Behind the halberdiers came team after team of horses, he noticed with surprise. Not the slow, dogged ox-teams that had dragged Shef’s catapults round the flank of Ivar’s army. The first ten pairs of horses dragged the carts with the disassembled beams he had seen before, the pull-throwers, the traction-catapults that lobbed stones. By each cart walked its crew, a dozen men with the same gray jerkins and white hammer-insignia as the pipers and halberdiers. In each crew, a familiar face. Shef’s paid-off veterans of the winter campaign had seen their land, had left men to till it, and had returned to their master, the wealth-giver. Each one now captained a crew of his own, recruited from the slaves of the vanished Church.

The next ten pairs were something new again. Behind the horses came a thing on broad cart-wheels, a long trail on each lifted high so that the other end bowed like a chicken scratching for worms in the mud. A twist-shooter, the torsion-catapults that shot the great darts. Not disassembled, but ready for action, the high wheels marking the only difference from the one that had killed King Ella: the ones that had brought down the Coiling Worm standard of Ivar. Again, a dozen men crewed each, marching with their winding-levers sloped and bundles of darts over their shoulders.

As they too tramped by, Brand realized that the bagpipe music, though changed, had not moved into the distance. The five hundred men he had seen already were filing past and then turning back on themselves, lining up in ranks behind him.

But here at last was something like an army approaching, scores and scores of men, not in ranks, not marching, but slouched on ponies and flooding forward down the track like a gray tide. Mail-shirts, broadswords, helmets, familiar faces. Brand waved cheerfully as he recognized Guthmund-still known as the Greedy—in front of his ship’s crew. Others waved back, calling out as the English had not done: Magnus Gaptooth and his friend Kolbein, clutching halberds as well as the rest of their armament, Vestlithi, who had been the helmsman of Sigvarth Jarl; and a dozen others he knew for followers of the Way.

“Some went off to spend their winnings, like you,” said Shef in Brand’s ear. “Others sent the money off or kept it, and stayed on here. Many have bought land. It is their own country they are defending now.”

The pipers ceased their din simultaneously, and Brand realized he was surrounded by a ring of men. He stared round, counting, calculating.

“Ten long hundreds?” he said at last. “Half English, half Norse?”

Shef nodded. “What do you think of them?”