He was on the ground and legs were all around him; cries and blows and the clang of metal. A dozen Vikings had appeared, Viga-Brand at their head, to protect their chief. Now it was the English king whose men had to close round him, to die one by one while all the time Ivar called out for Jatmund to be spared, for the kinglet not to be killed.

Taking no notice of the fray Shef wriggled clear, saw Godive standing a few yards away from the edge of the battle, staring round in panic. He seized her by the arm and dragged her at full speed toward the dying fires of the longships and the muddy waters of the Stour. The English kingdom lay in ruins behind him, and if the pirates ever caught him again his fate would be terrible. But Godive was unhurt. He had saved her.

Though she had saved Ivar.

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

The stars were paling in the eastern sky behind them as the young man and the girl stole carefully and cautiously through the depths of the wood. If he looked back Shef could see the topmost branches now silhouetted against the sky, moving slightly in the breeze, the little wind that comes before dawn. Down at ground level nothing of it could be felt. Where the two crossed the occasional clearing created by the fall of oak or ash, the dew soaked their feet. It would be a hot day, Shef thought, one of the last of the late, event-filled summer.

It could not come soon enough for him. Both were cold. Shef wore only the boots and woolen breeches which he had snatched up when the English attack came in. Godive had only her shift. She had stripped off her long dress before slipping into the water by the fired ships. She could swim like a fish, like an otter; and like otters they had swum out, underwater for as many strokes as they could, concentrating on noiselessness and cutting out both splash and gasp. A hundred slow strokes and ten breaths up the river, against the slow, weedy current; eyes alert every time they came up for watchers on the bank. Then a careful filling of the lungs while Shef warily eyed the stockade edge, where surely guards might still be posted. Then the deep dive and the long swim underwater, till it was time to come up and repeat the otter stroke, on, on, for another quarter mile before he decided it might be safe to creep ashore.