“Enough of both to try.”

“The dart-throwers? The stone-throwers?”

“See.”

Erkenbert clapped his hands. Immediately the monks shouted orders, their slaves began to wheel and tug at a line of machines. Ivar watched them, his face blank. After his brothers had taken the chest away, he had lain without moving for a day and a night, his cloak over his face. Then, as every man in the army knew, he had stood up, walked to the door of his room, and screamed to the sky: “Sigvarthsson did not beat me! It was the machines!”

Since then, since he had called for Erkenbert and the learned ones of York to obey his wishes, the forge-din had not ceased.

Outside the workshop, the slaves set up the dart-thrower, identical to the one that had broken the first assault on York, inside the minster-precinct itself, training across a furlong of open space to the far wall. There a dozen churls hung a great straw target. Others wound feverishly on the new-forged cogs.

“Enough!” Erkenbert himself stepped across, checked the alignment of the barbed javelin, fixed Ivar with his eye, handed him the thong attached to its iron toggle.

Ivar jerked it. The toggle flew sideways, clanging unnoticed from his helmet, the line rising and falling in the air, a monstrous thump. Before the eye could follow it, the dart was buried deep—quivering in its straw bed.

Ivar dropped the string, turned. “The other.”

This time the slaves tugged forward a strange machine. Like the twist-shooter, it had a wooden frame of stout beams. This time the cogwheels were not on top but at the side. They twisted a single rope, embedded in its strands, a wooden rod. At the end of the rod, a heavy sling, its pouch just clearing the ground. The rod quivered against its retaining-bolt as the slaves turned the levers.

“This is the stone-thrower,” declared Erkenbert.

“Not like the one that broke my ram?”

The deacon smiled with satisfaction. “No. That was a great machine that threw a boulder. But many men were needed to move it, and it could shoot only once. This throws smaller stones. No man has made such, a machine since the days of the Romans. But I, Erkenbert, the humble servant of God, I have read the words in our Vegetius. And have built this machine. The onager it is named: that is, in your tongue, ‘the wild ass.’”

A slave placed a ten-pound rock in the sling, signed to Erkenbert.

Again the deacon passed a thong to Ivar. “Pull the bolt,” he said.

Ivar jerked the string. Faster than sight the great rod leapt forward like a great swinging arm.