Sorry about that," said the fat face from the other side of the table. "If I'd heard about you just a little bit earlier I'd have bought you off your Ditmarsh friends myself, and no-one would have been any the wiser. But as a king yourself, you must know how it is. No king is cleverer than the information he gets."
Shef stared, trying to bring the face into focus, shook his head to clear it, and winced.
"There," said the face. "I don't think you've heard a word I've been saying. Where does it hurt?"
Shef rubbed his left temple, realized at the same time that the lump on his skull was on the right. A hand passed in front of his eyes, and he realized he was being tested for concussion.
"Lump on one side, pain on the other. Makes you think the brain is loose inside the skull, doesn't it?" the face went on conversationally. "That's why so many veteran warriors are—well—a little strange. We call it vithrhögg, the counter-blow. But I can see you're recovering now. Let me just run over some of what I said again.
"I'm King Hrorik of Hedeby and South Jutland. And you are?"
Shef grinned suddenly, realizing the gist of what was said to him. "I am your fellow-king, King Shef of the East and Middle Angles."
"Good. I'm glad it's all coming back. We have these riots in the market-place pretty often, you know, and the lads have a drill for it. Throw sailcloth over all the weapons, and then clip everyone who looks dangerous while they're trying to get their blades free. We don't like losing customers permanently." A large hand poured wine into what Shef realized was a golden cup. "Take some water with that and you'll soon feel better."
"You lost a customer today," said Shef, remembering the knife standing from the Swedish buyer's heart.
"Yes, bad business that. But my jarl reports that the dead man gave provocation. Besides..."
A plump finger jerked Shef's pendant from under the tunic which, he realized, someone had found and put back on for him.
"You're a man of the Way, right? So you don't have much time for Christians. None at all, from what I hear of your victory over the Franks, and I dare say they have even less for you. But down here I have to keep a very close eye on them. There's only the Dane-dyke between me and Othin knows how many German lancers. It's true they fight among themselves all the time, and it's truer that they're even more frightened of us than I am of them. But I really don't like to go stirring up trouble, especially in matters of religion.
"So I've always let the Christians send their priests up here and appeal for converts, and never said a word when they started baptizing the slaves and the women. Of course, if the poor souls wander off into the countryside and end up sold, or thrown into the bog for good luck, I can't do anything about that. I keep order in Hedeby and along the trade-road, and I judge disputes at the Thing. Telling my subjects what to believe or who to leave alone..." The fat man laughed. "You know how risky that would be.
"But this is something new. This spring, when the priests came north from Hamburg, three or four of them, each one had an escort with him. Not big enough to call an army, not even big enough to be a serious menace, and plenty of cash to pay their way. So I let them in. But I tell you something," the face leaned forward, "as one king to another. Very dangerous men. Very valuable men. I wish I could hire half-a-dozen of them. That one you saw, the blond one with the hair like stiff wire, my guard captain says he's the fastest man he's ever seen. Very tricky too."
"Faster than Ivar Ragnarsson?" asked Shef.
"The Boneless One? I was forgetting that you had bested him." Shef's vision seemed to clear as the wine did its work, and he looked more sharply at the big man leaning back in his wooden chair till the stout back of it creaked. Gold circlet on his head, heavy gold chain round his neck and thick bracelets on his arms. An air of simple good-nature, like the host of a peaceful town tavern. But sharp eyes under heavy brows, and a network of scars along the muscled right forearm, the places where a dueller picked up cuts. A successful dueller, for failed ones did not live long enough for the scars to heal.
"Well. I certainly owe you one for that. He used to worry me badly, and his brothers still do." A heavy sigh. "It's a hard life for a king down here, with the Empire and the Christians growling the other side of the Dane-dyke, and fifty sea-kings to the north forever disputing which shall be king over all. The Christians say they need an emperor now. Sometimes I think we do too. But there. If we thought that we'd have to decide who it was. Maybe me. Maybe you. Maybe Sigurth Ragnarsson. If it was him neither you nor I would live to see the day, nor want to.
"But I'm forgetting myself. You've had a hard time, I can see that, and you look as if you could use a good dinner too. Why don't you sit in the sun somewhere this afternoon, till it's time for the night-meal? I'll see it's all safe."
"I owe some money," said Shef. "That man I hit in the slave-ring—he did bring me here, and feed me for a week. I ought to pay him. And then I need money to buy passage home. If there are English traders in the port, I can borrow from them, on my own credit and that of my co-king Alfred."
Hrorik held up a ringed hand. "All dealt with, all paid for. I sent the Ditmarshers off very happy, I always try to keep in with them too, they can be a nuisance when they're angry. The one young one insisted on staying behind, though. Don't thank me, you can always pay me back.
"But as for the passage home. Well, not just yet."
Shef looked at the shrewd, jolly face. In the corner behind it he could see 'Gungnir' propped against the wall. He had no illusions about being able to reach it.
"Stay here with you?"
"I've sold you on, as a matter of fact," said Hrorik, winking.
"Sold? Who to?"
"Don't worry, not Skuli. He offered me five pounds of silver. The Christians went to ten, and a pardon for all sins from the Pope written in purple ink."
"Who then?"
Hrorik winked again. "Your friends from Kaupang. The priest-college of the Way. Made me an offer much too good to refuse. Said something about a trial. Better than being tried by Sigurth Snake-eye, though? Wouldn't you say?"
With a length of stout blood-sausage in his belt, a long black loaf under his arm, and a twist of salt in one hand, Shef strolled out into the strong afternoon sunshine, bidden by King Hrorik to go out and rest till dinner. Half-a-dozen guards surrounded him, there to ensure at once that no-one molested him and that he did not escape from the town. Karli, for once rather subdued, accompanied them, sword still slung from his belt, and carrying Shef's spear over one shoulder.
For a few minutes the little group walked through the crowded streets of Hedeby, full of booths selling amber, honey, wine from the south, fine weapons, bone combs, shoes, pig-iron and everything else that might be traded into or out of the Scandinavian lands. Then, as Shef grew tired of the constant edging and jostling, he caught sight of a low green mound, within the town-stockade but without buildings or people on it. He pointed to it wordlessly and headed over. The pain in his head had gone, but he still walked slowly and carefully, afraid to set it off again by some movement. He felt also as if information from the outside was filtering through to him slowly, as if he were under a foot of clear water. He had a great deal to take in and think about.
He reached the mound and sat down on the top of it, looking out over the bay of the Schlei and the green fields to the north of it. Karli hesitated, then drove the butt-spike of the spear into the soft turf and sat down also. The guards exchanged glances. "You have no fear of the howe-bride?" asked one of them.
"I have been in a howe before," said Shef. His belt-knife had gone, he noticed: Hrorik was taking no chances at all. He passed the sausage to Karli to cut up, and began to break up the bread. The guards gingerly sat or squatted in a ring around them.
After a while, belly full, back pleasantly warmed by the sun, Shef pointed out to the fertile landscape facing them outside the town's perimeter. The river Schlei ran to the north of the town, and on the opposite shore he could see hedged fields, plowmen driving their ox-teams, brown furrows growing along the green, and rising out of the trees here and there, the curls of smoke from chimneys. To an Englishman, the Viking lands appeared as the home of fire and slaughter, its inhabitants seamen and raiders, not plowmen and charcoal-burners. Yet here, at the center of the Viking storm, the land looked more peaceful than Suffolk on a summer day.
"I have heard that this is where the English came from once upon a time," Shef said to the nearest guard. "Are there any Englishmen still living over there?"
"No," said the guard. "Just Danes. Some of them call themselves Jutes, if they don't want to admit connection with the sea-kings from the islands. But they all speak the Danish tongue, just like yourself. That bit of land is still called Angel, though. It's the angle between the Schlei here and Flensborg Fjord on the other side of it. I dare say the English came from there right enough."
Shef reflected further. So much for his hope, once upon a time, of rescuing oppressed Englishmen from Danish rule here in Denmark. Still, it was strange that the Ditmarshers did not speak Danish, living next to them as they did. Strange too what they did speak: not English, nor Danish, nor yet exactly that strange language the priest had spoken this morning, a kind of German. Something with bits of all of them, and yet perhaps most similar to the Frisian Shef had got used to hearing from the men of the islands off the Dutch coast. Once upon a time this borderland had been a melting-pot of tribes. Now lines were being drawn more carefully: Christians this side, heathens that, German spoken here, Norse there. Yet the process was a long way from finished. The guard called his language Danish, dönsk tunga, others called the same language Norse, norsk mal. The same people called themselves Danes one day and Jutes the next. Shef was king of the East Angles and Alfred of the West Saxons, but both sides would agree that they were at bottom Englishmen. The German tribes were ruled by the same Pope and the same royal family as the Frankish tribes, but did not think of themselves as connected. Swedes and Gauts, Norwegians and Gaddgedlar. One day all of this would have to be sorted out and made clear. There was an urge to do it already. But who would succeed in drawing the lines, in imposing law on some level higher than Hrorik's "good for business" ethic?
Without much surprise Shef observed the blond German walking towards them out of the town, the man who had killed the Swede and rescued the priest-slave that same morning. Hrorik's guards saw him too, reacted without even a pretense of warriorly calm. Two instantly barred his path with swords drawn and shields raised, the other four poising javelins at ten feet range. The blond man smiled, unbuckled his sword belt with exaggerated care, let it drop to the ground. As the guard commander snapped orders at him, he stripped off also his leather jacket, set it down, peeled a heavy throwing-knife from under his sleeve, a short needlepoint from inside his boot. One man closed, searched him roughly and thoroughly. Finally, grudgingly, they stood back and let him pass, the javelins still poised. As he stepped the last few feet towards Shef Karli, too, drew his sword and stood in a posture of suspicious truculence.
The blond man looked at the way Karli held the sword, sighed, and sat down cross-legged facing Shef. His smile this time indicated a secret complicity.
"My name is Bruno," he remarked. "I am here with the mission of the Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen to the Danes. Ransoming some of our people back, you know. And they tell me you are the famous Shef Sigvarthsson, the bane of the even more famous Ivar." He spoke Norse with a marked accent that made the name "Sigvarth" almost into "Siegfried."
"Who told you that?"
The smile of complicity and understanding again. "Well. As you guessed, it was your little countryman, the deacon Erkenbert. He is a passionate little fellow, and will hear no good of you at all. Yet he cannot deny that you beat the Ragnarsson sword to sword."
"Sword to halberd," corrected Shef. He added no further details.
"So. That is not often a winning game. But you use odd weapons. May I glance at your spear?" Bruno rose and studied the spear planted in the grass at Shef's side, carefully not touching it, hands behind his back.
"An excellent weapon. Newly-forged, I see. I take an interest in spears. And in other things too. May I see what you have round your neck?"
Ignoring the growl of doubt from Karli, Shef pulled out his silver pendant with the Rig-sign on it, and let Bruno, seated once more, stare intently at it.
"And what would you call that, now?"
"It is a kraki," said Shef. "A pole-ladder. A center pole, with rungs either side. It is the emblem of my god."
"Yet I believe you were baptized a Christian? Such a shame, that one who belonged to the true God should go over to a pagan idol. Do you feel no urge to change back? Might you not, if certain—difficulties—were cleared from your path?"
Shef smiled for the first time in their exchange, remembering the horrors inflicted on him and on others by the black monks, by Wulfgar and Bishop Daniel. He shook his head.
"I would not expect you to change your mind the first time anyone suggested it. But let me give you two things to think about," the blond man went on.
"One is this. I have no doubt all this fighting and struggling looks as if it is about land and money. And it is! Hrorik would not let me have you because he thought he had a better deal elsewhere, and he does not want to strengthen us in any way. I know you won over the English kingdoms to your heresy of freedom for all gods by abolishing the tithes men have to pay to the Church. But beneath that struggle, I am sure you know well that there is something deeper. A struggle not just of men, but of other powers."
Remembering the strange sights he had seen, the compelling voices of his protectors and the other gods in the strange Asgarth-world of his dreams, Shef slowly nodded.
"There are powers which it does no man good to be associated with. Our Church calls them devils and demons, and you may think that is just the Church's prejudice, protecting its—what is the word?—its single-trade in salvation for the soul. Well, I know priests too, and I too despise their concern for money, for buying and selling the things of God.
"But I tell you, Shef Siegfriedsson, as one warrior to another: a great change is coming, and there is One coming who shall bring it. On that day the kingdoms will be overthrown and cast into a new mold, and the priests—yes, and the archbishops and the Popes who think to control it, they will be controlled. On that day you do not want to be on the wrong side."
"And how will anyone know which is the right side?" said Shef, observing the gleam of passion on the hard, stony face. Hearing the ring in Bruno's voice the guards edged closer, as if expecting some outbreak of sudden violence.
Bruno's face split in another of his unexpected and strangely winning smiles. "Oh, there will be a sign. Something pretty unmistakable, I expect. A miracle, a relic, something sent from God to work in the world, a chosen leader to use it." He rose to his feet, prepared to go.
"You said you had two things to tell me," prompted Shef. "Be on the right side when the kingdoms are shaken, that was one. The other?"
"Oh yes. Of course. I have to tell you you are in part mistaken about your own sign. I hope you recognize others better. What you have round your neck, you may call it a kraki in Norse, or a 'ladder' in your language and mine. In Latin, though—you have heard Latin from the priests? Well, they would call it a graduale. From gradus, a step, you know."
Shef waited, not sure of the point.
"There are those who believe in the Holy Graduale. The Franks call it the Holy Graal. Dreadful the way the Franks talk Latin—can you imagine a language in which aqua turns into eau? Yes, the Holy Graduale, or Grail, that is what you have round your neck. It's supposed to go with the Holy Lance, some say."
Bruno stepped over to his pile of clothes and weapons, and slowly resumed them, covered all the time by javelins. Finally he looked at Shef, nodded a farewell, and strolled peacefully back towards the town and the markets.
"What was all that about?" Karli asked suspiciously. Shef did not answer. The feeling of being underwater was growing on him, as if he were now fathoms deep, but in clear water which hid nothing from his view. Still looking out over the peaceful fields of the Angle, he felt the pinch on his neck that told him his sight was being directed. On top of the green fields and the furrows and the curling smoke-plumes of cottages, other pictures began to impose themselves.
He was still looking at exactly the same place, but the buildings of Hedeby were no longer there, there were more trees, less plowland. This is the Angle as it was when the English left it, something told him. Ten long warboats were cruising into the Schlei, much the same as those of Sigurth Ragnarsson, but different, more primitive in design: no mast or sail, only oars, and a stiffer, crankier air, without the living suppleness of the full-fledged Viking ship. War canoes with rowlocks. Shef's sight followed them as they pulled up river, found an inlet, paddled along it into a small, shallow lake. The crews streamed out, never more than thigh-deep in the water, dispersed into the countryside, began to come back late in the day, laden with metal, with sacks and barrels, cattle and women. They settled down by their ships, lit fires as night came on, began to slaughter the beeves and rape the women. Shef watched unmoved: he had seen worse in reality, without the distancing of his vision.
The men of the land had not gone, had fled only to find their weapons and gather their strength. Now they had a leader. Where the canoes had paddled into the lake he felled trees, threw them in to block the exit. Then the land-folk began to close in on the scene of rape and riot. Arrows flew from the trees. The raiding party abandoned their entertainments, ran to their weapons, gathered to beat off the attack. Some women slipped away, crawled into the darkness or into the black water of the lake. Others were struck by flying arrows, cut down by angry raiders.
The people of the land made a line and pressed forward, shields raised. The raiders met them, the two sides hacked at each other over yellow linden shields for a few minutes, then the land-folk fell back. Once more arrows flew from the trees. A voice called out from the dark forest, promising to give all the raiders to the war-god, hang them on trees for the birds. The raiders gathered their ships, tried at dawn to break out the way they had come, met the tangled tree-trunks of the barricade. During a long morning's fighting, Shef saw—speeded up as if all was done by two armies of ants—the raiders defeated, split up, blankets thrown over their weapons so that the survivors were borne down or pinned between shields. In the end ten war-boats, their gunwales hacked and splintered, lay on the edge of black mud, a hundred and twenty grim-faced prisoners standing or lying by them.
The victors cleared the site of bodies and weapons, brought them all to the captured ships, urged on by the orders of their leader. Shef expected to see the prisoners stripped of armor and valuables, the loot divided. Instead the men began to smash holes in the boats' planks. They drove the captured spears into tree-trunks and bent them so that the iron shafts were useless. They snapped the bows and arrows, punched holes in the bronze helmets, took the swords, heated the blades in fire to destroy their temper, and then rolled the blades up with tongs into twisted spirals. Finally they turned to their prisoners, marched each one to a cauldron, bent him over it, cut his throat and bled him into it like a Michaelmas pig. The bodies were stacked in the boats, pushed out into the lake to sink, the broken weapons left on the boggy shore.
Everyone went away. For years everything lay as it had been left, the place avoided by all except the occasional awed or daring child. The boats and bodies and weapons sank slowly, maggot-ridden, into the black mud. Even more slowly, the lake dried out. Now cows pastured on it, all memory of what had happened there long gone, both among the victor-Angles whose descendants now lived far across the sea, and among the men of the islands to whom no word of their defeated expedition had ever come back.
And why do they do that? Shef found himself asking. The scale of what he was watching changed, he was no longer looking at real earth, at real history, instead he seemed to be viewing a drawing, a drawing that moved. Across a bare plain, the sun rose. Only it was not the sun, it was a ball of fire in a chariot, drawn by horses. The horses ran in terror, foam-flecked. Across the sky behind them ran giant wolves, tongues lolling, determined to pull down the horses and eat the sun. When the sun is hidden, or the moon, something told him, it is a wolf's shadow falling across it. One day the wolves will catch up and blood rain from the sky before sun and moon go out.
From the plain a great tree rose, giving air and shade and life to all the worlds beneath its branches. Looking closely, Shef saw that it twisted continually in pain. Beneath the earth, at its heart-root, he could see a giant serpent gnawing on it, venom dripping from its jaws. In the sea swam an even more monstrous serpent, rising from time to time to draw down a ship under full sail with one snap of its jaws. Deep beneath both the tree-serpent and the ocean-serpent Shef's new sight could see the dim outlines of some even more monstrous shape, chained to the foundations of the world, but writhing in pain so that the earth shook. It too was tormented, continually it struck back, one day it would break free to urge on the wolves of the sky and the serpent of the sea.
That is the world the pagans know of, Shef thought. No wonder they hate and fear their gods and seek only to propitiate them with cruelty. Their gods are afraid too, even Othin All-father fears Ragnarök but does not know how to avert it. If there were a better way for the pagans to follow, they would take it. He thought of Thorvin's preachings of the Asgarth Way. Thought too of the White Christ, the suffering face under a crown of thorns which he had once seen on a wooden statue at Ely Cathedral, of the martyred King Edmund who had died under Ivar's chisel.
But that is not the whole story, something told him. Only a part. One day you may see the world as the Christians see it. Till then, remember this. Remember the wolves in the sky and the serpent in the sea.
The pleasant warmth on Shef's back had faded. As his normal sight slowly returned to him he realized that he was still looking out across the Schlei, his eyes wide open and unblinking. The green fields were still there, but the afternoon sun had faded, clouded over. His guards had drawn back, were muttering anxiously to each other as they stared at him.
Closer, a man knelt on one knee, looking deeply into his face. Shef recognized the white clothes and rowan-berry necklace of a priest of the Way, noted the silver boat which said that this was a priest of Njörth, the sea-god.
"I am Hagbarth," said the priest. "I am here to take you to Kaupang. My colleagues have been very anxious to meet you, to test you on their own ground. Fortunate for us that you came here from England."
He hesitated. "Will you tell me what you have just seen."
"Nothing but the world as it is," said Shef.
"To see things the way they are, that is a rare skill," answered Hagbarth. "And even rarer in broad daylight. Maybe you are the true prophet that Thorvin says, and not the false emissary of Loki that others declare. I will bear witness for you. We must go now."
"To Hrorik's hall?"
"And on to Kaupang."
Shef rose from the ground, stiffer and more cramped than he should have been. As he plodded down from the knoll towards Hedeby, he reflected on what he had seen. Was it his own mind telling him to accept the Christian Bruno's offer? Was it a warning, telling him of the true nature of the world he was entering, the world of the sea-kings, shaped by blood and horror over a hundred generations?
As they came to the edge of the town, they saw a coffle of slaves marched by. Shef looked at them, surprised to see such wretched folk find a market: old men, old women hobbling along, all with faces marked by a lifetime of toil, mere bags of bones like old oxen fit only for slaughter and the broth-pot.
"Are they worth bringing to market?" he asked.
"The Swedes buy them for the sacrifice at Uppsala," said one of the guards. "Summer and winter, a hundred oxen, a hundred horses, a hundred men and women they sacrifice and hang in the great oak groves at Uppsala. They say that without it the kingdom of the Swedes would fall, and the sky come down on their heads. If you can get no more work out of your thrall, you can always get one last payment that way."
One of the other guards laughed. "Keeps all the thralls working as hard as ever they know how, too. Maybe it's us should pay the Swedes."
Against the startling blue sky the great mountain line stood out in brilliant white. In fold after fold the range tumbled down to the black water at its foot—black only where the outflowing river kept a channel clear. Elsewhere thick ice still covered the shallow water of the bay, joining the mainland to the islands scattered along the shore. A thin powder of fresh snow covered the trees on the islands, and the ice between them. Where wind had swept the snow away, the ice lay old and transparent, still feet in thickness, but taking its color from the black depths beneath.
In the prow of the longboat, Shef and Karli watched, awestruck. In the land they had left, spring was far advanced, the buds out and the birds singing and nesting. Here there was no fresh green, only the dark gloom of the conifers, and the bright sun seemed only to be thrown back by the hard snow. The longboat was moving slowly now, under oars alone and they at no more than the paddling stroke. Hagbarth had furled sail in the night, as soon as he felt the loom of the land on either side, as soon as he knew they were within the deep bay that ran up in the end to the town of Oslo. Now, from time to time, the crew heard the sharp rap-rap of ice chunks striking the boat's fragile planks. Standing above them on the very gunwale itself, holding on with one hand as he leaned outboard, a crewman called sharp directions to the helmsman at the steering-oar, directing him away from the greater ice-lumps, the small islands that came drifting down the current from the land.
"Not much risk from ice this late in the spring," Hagbarth had said, the first time his southern passengers had jumped to their feet in alarm at the knocking beneath their feet. "But we won't risk it just the same."
Shef had been profoundly glad, and Karli even gladder, of the reduction in speed, and not just out of fear of what awaited them at journey's end. Neither man, not even Shef, had made a fast passage in a Viking longboat before. It was an experience very different—Shef now realized—from the stately waddle of the Norfolk up the Dutch coast, the sickening roll and lurch of sailing in a Yorkshire fishing-coble. The Viking boat, Hagbarth's own Aurvendill, had seemed to slide over the water like a great, supple snake. Each wave as it came towards them rose far above the gunwales, looked down on the undecked hull, seemed certain to crash down on it in a swamping torrent. Then the prow rose, swarmed up, seemed like an intelligent creature to look over the other side and begin its downward curve while the stern-post was still rising. After a while Shef, his nerve starting to return, found Karli sitting staring in horror at the lower planks below the waterline. They shifted continually, moving away from the boat's ribs and then moving back again, held only by lashings of twisted root or sinew. Often the gaps were large enough for a man to put foot, hand, or even head through. At such moments there seemed to be nothing except habit holding the side-planks together at all. For a while after that both Karli and Shef sat together, convinced deep in their bellies that if they slackened the tension of their watch, the charm would break and the sea come rushing through.
As for anything striking the egg-shell's sides, the thought was unbearable. Shef had once asked Hagbarth if Norsemen ever carried horses or oxen from place to place, and if so, how they prevented the beasts from rushing to and fro in panic. Hagbarth had laughed. "If you put a horse in my Aurvendill," he said, "I have always found that any of them, even the fiercest stallion, takes one good look round him and then stands very, very still." Shef could see why.
And yet they had had to hurry, ice or no ice, running under full sail all the time during daylight, moving at a speed only a little under a horse's full gallop or a man's all-out sprint, as fast as a young man would go if he had nothing to carry and no more than a quarter of a mile to cover. For hour after hour. In the twelve hours of daylight on their first day Shef thought they might have traveled more than a hundred and fifty miles, though it was true they had tacked continually, making it less than that in a straight line. In the two nights and two days of their voyage, maybe four hundred all told—four hundred miles to bring them from the spring of flatland Denmark to the settled chill of Norway and the mountains.
All the way Hagbarth, explaining their haste, had commented on the immediate dangers on one or either side. Ships of King Hrorik had convoyed them up the South Jutland coast by night and through the Great Belt, the gap of water between the Danish mainland and Othin's own island of Fyn. Not too much risk there, Hagbarth had said. Hrorik has an arrangement with King Gamli of Fyn. But then they had swerved sharply out to sea with dawn and the turn-back of Hrorik's escorts. King Arnodd of Aalborg, Hagbarth had explained. Not hostile, does business like anyone else. But part of his business is robbing ships. Anyone without his leave, not related to him or his jarls, or just too weak to resist. Anyway, he feels threatened now: has to keep up a reputation.
Who's threatening him, Shef had asked, wondering already if the sea-legs he had acquired weeks before would keep off sea-sickness in the strange swoopings of the Aurvendill. Hagbarth had spat carefully past Karli's vomiting form and jerked a thumb to starboard, to the dim shapes of Fyn and Sjaelland beyond.
"The real bastards," he had said briefly. "Your friends. The Ragnarssons. Their base is over there, the Braethraborg, and the Emperor of the Greeks himself wouldn't want to meet them at sea. Don't worry," he had added. "As far as we know the Snake-eye took the whole lot south to meet you, and they haven't come back yet. If they have, they'll be coming round the point over there on the backboard right about now. Unless they've strung out to make a nice long line from coast to coast just ahead."
Even after they had cleared the menace of the Skaggerak and were sailing, wind abeam, ten miles off the long coast of the South Swedes, Hagbarth's conversation was a long list of human hazards: King Teit of the East Gauts, King Vifil of the West Gauts, reports of independent pirates off the Weder islands, rumors of a fleet of broken men out of the Small Lands trying their luck up towards Norway, King Hjalti of the Farmsteads, and always—or so Hagbarth had said, though by this time Shef was suspecting him of deliberate terrorization—the possibility of the fearsome kings of the West-fjords taking a change from their usual raiding-grounds in the Atlantic islands and against the Irish, and coming over to vex the Swedes, whom they hated.
"In your country," Karli had asked once, pale with sickness and terror, "can anyone call himself a king?"
"Not anyone," Hagbarth had said with all seriousness. "It helps if you can call yourself one of the god-born, and there are plenty of people to check that. Us for a start, we priests of the Way. And there are some who are too proud to lie about their ancestry, like the Hlathir jarls—if they are descended from anyone it must be the trolls.
"But as a rule, if you can raise a fleet, say sixty ships or so, and you can find yourself a base on land, even if it is only a few square miles like the Braethraborg—the Ragnarssons took that from old King Kolfinn of Sjaelland, and defied him to take it back—then you can call yourself a king. Sea-king is what they usually say."
"And how do you get to be a king of somewhere? Like the Farmsteads or the Small Lands or the Midden-heaps or the Further Cow-byre," asked Shef, temper strained by fear.
"Get a Thing to accept you," said Hagbarth briefly. "Easiest way to do that is to stand in the clearing and say you're king and you're going to tax everybody. If you get out of the clearing, you're probably a king. God-born or no."
The tension had only slackened at dawn that day when Hagbarth, looking carefully round him at the first blink of dawn, had pronounced them within the waters of the Norwegian kings, Olaf and Halvdan.
"Kings of Norway?" Shef had asked.
"Kings of the Westfold and the Eastfold," Hagbarth replied. "One each, but co-kings of both. And don't look like that, what about you and Alfred? You're not even brothers. Half-brothers, that is."
Further argument had been cut out by the appearance from either side of heavily-manned warships, each half the size again of the Aurvendill, long pennants flying. Shef knew enough of the sea to recognize them as coast-defense craft only, unfit for a deep-sea passage or a hard gale because of their riveted keels, but capable of jamming in a hundred warriors each for a short while, untroubled by the need to carry rations and water. As the ice narrowed in from either side they closed up, eventually falling into line astern, each ship paddling gently into the whirlpools made by the one ahead, as the oars dipped and pulled in the dark water.
Ahead Shef could see what looked like a substantial township, many log houses with plumes of smoke rising from all of them. At its center rose a large hall, horns jutting from ridge and gables. Further away, outside the town but below the mountains, he could see with his one sharp eye a collection of larger buildings, some of them strangely shaped, but all half-hidden by the firs. Where the town ran down to the shore, dozens of boats of all sizes lay at jetties. And, at the largest and longest of the jetties, he could pick out what seemed to be a welcoming committee. Or a group of jailers. Shef looked longingly at the islands scattered thickly to the left. The ice was barely fifty yards away now. Then a few hundred yards more to the land, and on every island plumes of smoke to show shelter and habitation.
All ruled by the co-kings, of whichever Fold it was. If your heart did not stop beating as soon as you touched the freezing water. If you did not freeze solid as soon as you climbed out of it.
Shef belatedly realized that he cut hardly a kingly figure himself. He had started the trip in exactly the same tunic, breeches and leather shoes that he had worn continually since he had struggled ashore on the Ditmarsh two weeks before: bemired, salt-stained, bloodstained from his own blood and the Viking he had killed on the sandbanks, with a fortnight's accumulation of tar-patches, spilt broth, and sweat on top. It was no worse than what he had worn most of his boyhood in the Norfolk marsh, but Vikings, he had noticed, were cleanlier than Englishmen, or at least than English churls. Only Karli sat next to him when they came to eat. As they sailed further north and the sea-wind came keener, Hagbarth had tossed each of them a thick blanket, which they now hugged round them.
By contrast to their squalor, Shef could pick out on the jetty scarlet capes, gleaming armor, polished shields reflecting the sun, and in a solid body at the water's edge, the shining white clothes of the priests of the Way, competing with the snow behind. Shef ran a hand ineffectually through his hair, dislodging a louse, and turned for advice to Hagbarth. Then turned back again, with sudden incredulous joy.
One figure over there by the shore stood out even among the tall shapes around him. Surely—yes, that must be Brand. Scanning quickly along the jetty, Shef realized that there were other men there in a little knot, smaller than the rest as Brand was bigger. And one of them showed up in a bright flash of scarlet—it was the silk tunic the ex-slave Cwicca wore for great occasions. Now that he knew what he was looking for, Shef could pick them out readily. Brand there well to the fore, Guthmund the Greedy standing beside him, and in a self-effacing clump to the rear Cwicca and Osmod and a gang of their mates. Shef looked again at the white tunics and cloaks of the priests of the Way, standing at the very edge of the jetty. Yes, Thorvin was there among them, and Skaldfinn too, and Hund: outnumbered, though, by a cluster of other priests, one formidable figure near the front almost rivaling Brand even in size. And there was another group there as well, standing separate both from the priests and from Brand and his friends. A puff of wind from the mountains caught the pennants held by standard-bearers, and for a moment Shef saw the Hammer of the Way, white on black, and from the group he could not identify a blue streamer with a strange design he did not recognize. He looked a mute question at Hagbarth.
"It is the Gripping Beast," said Hagbarth, dropping his voice, the jetty now only fifty yards away.
"Of King Halvdan? Or King Olaf?"
"Neither," said Hagbarth with a touch of grimness. "Of Queen Ragnhild."
The crewmen tossed oars, dropped them clattering into the bottom of the boat. Ropes flew out from prow and stern, were caught and snubbed to tree-trunk bollards. The Aurvendill settled gently alongside the jetty. The gangplank was thrown across.
Shef hesitated, conscious of his own appearance. Facing him, the big unknown priest looked down, what seemed to be scorn and mistrust on his face. Shef remembered the last time he had stood face to face with an enemy on a gangplank: when he had killed Ivar, Champion of the North. No-one else could ever say that. Shedding his blanket, and snatching the 'Gungnir' spear from Karli's ready hand, he stepped on to the gangplank, strode across it, meaning to force the priest to stand back.
As he reached the other end an arm like the base of a mast quietly thrust the priest aside, and Brand shoved forward, holding out an immense fur cape, made from the skin of a white bear, its brooch and chain of gold. In an instant he had wrapped it round Shef's shoulders, fastened the links. Then he fell to one knee, his face still only just below Shef's own level.
"Hail, King of the East and Middle Angles," he called. On the signal, Cwicca and his mates, and the crews of the Walrus and the Seamew further behind, cheered and clashed their weapons.
Brand, who had never knelt in his life before, winked one staring eye, and jerked his head infinitesimally at the others on the jetty. Shef caught the hint, turned to Hagbarth, who had followed him up the gangplank.
"You may present your colleagues," he said imperiously.
"Why, this is—ah—King Shef, may I present to you Valgrim the Wise, Head of the College of the Way and priest of Othin? Valgrim, this is..."
Valgrim was paying no attention. With a scowl for Brand, he reached out one hand, seized the spear in Shef's grip, and turned it so that he could read the runes on it. After a moment he released the spear, turned and walked wordlessly off.
"He didn't like that," muttered Brand. "What do the runes say?"
"Gungnir. It's not my spear anyway, I took it from Sigurth Ragnarsson."
Most of the other priests of the Way had moved off after their leader, leaving Thorvin and Hund behind. As they departed, Shef saw the other group coming towards them under the blue and silver banner. He gaped up at it: a strange design, of a beast with snarling face, seemingly throttling itself with one paw while clutching its own ankle with another. He dropped his eyes, found himself face to face with the most striking woman he had ever seen.
He would not have thought her beautiful if some one had described her. Since his childhood Shef had framed his ideas of beauty on Godive: tall but slight of figure, with brown hair, gray eyes, and the perfect complexion she had inherited from her Irish slave-concubine mother. This woman was tiger to Godive's sleek leopard: as tall as Shef, with broad cheekbones and great green eyes set wide apart. Her breasts swelled out the dark green gown she was wearing, and heavy hip-bones showed through as she walked. Two long plaits hung round her face and over her shoulders, held in place by a heavy gold band low over her forehead. She was not a young woman either, Shef realized belatedly, but double his age or Godive's. At her side walked a young boy, maybe ten years old.
Confused, and unwilling to face the woman's stare, Shef dropped on one knee to the boy's level.
"And who are you?"
"I am Harald, son to King Halvdan and Queen Ragnhild. What happened to your eye?"
"Someone put it out with a hot needle."
"Did it hurt?"
"I fainted before it was finished."
The boy looked scornful. "That was not drengiligr. Warriors do not faint. Did you kill the man who did it?"
"I killed the man who caused it. The one who did it is standing over there, and the one who held me. They are friends."
The boy looked nonplused. "How can they be friends if they blinded you?"
"Sometimes you will take from your friends what you will not from your enemies."
Belatedly Shef realized the boy's mother's thigh was only inches from his blind side. He rose to his feet, conscious as he did so of the strong female warmth. There, on the jetty, with dozens of men all around, he could feel his manhood stirring as it had not for all the Ditmarsh girl's efforts. In another moment he would feel the urge to throw her down on the wooden deck—if he were strong enough, which he doubted.
The queen looked scrutinizingly at him, seemingly aware of what he felt. "You will come when I call you, then," she said, and turned away.
"Most men do," muttered Brand again in Shef's ear.
Over his voice, as he watched the green gown retreating magnificently towards the snow, Shef heard a sound he would once have picked out through any distractions: the clink-clink, beat-beat of light and heavy hammers working at a forge. And other sounds too which he could not place.
"We've a lot to show you," said Thorvin, finally making his way up to his former apprentice.
"Right," said Brand. "But first, the bath-house. I can see the lice in his hair, and it puts me off even if Queen Ragnhild likes it."
"He came stalking ashore with one eye and a spear in his hand with the 'Gungnir' runes on it," growled Valgrim. "What else has he to do to declare himself Othin? Ride an eight-legged horse? He is a blasphemer!"
"Many men have one eye," replied Thorvin. "And as for the 'Gungnir' runes, he did not have them cut. The only reason he has the spear is that Sigurth Snake-eye threw it at him. If there is a blasphemer, it is Sigurth."
"You have told us that when he first appeared to you out of nowhere two winters ago he said he came from the North."
"Yes, but all that he meant was that he came from the north of his kingdom."
"And yet you have presented this to us as if this accident were proof that he is the One we await. That he is the One who will come from the North to overthrow the Christians and put the world on its better path. If this aping of Othin is an accident, then what he said to you was an accident. But if what he said to you was a sign from the gods, then this too is a sign. He is setting himself up as Othin. And I, the priest of Othin in this college, I say that such as he cannot have Othin's favor. Did he not refuse the Othin-sacrifice when he had the Christian army at his mercy?"
Thorvin fell silent, unable to see a way round Valgrim's logic.
"I can tell you that he is one who sees visions," put in Hagbarth. "And not only in his sleep."
The listening priests, a score of them together, looked at him with interest. They had not formed their holy circle nor set up the holy cordon of rowan-berries round the spear and the bale-fire: what they said was still unprivileged, not done under the guidance of the gods. Still, they were not forbidden to speak of holy things.
"How do you know?" grunted Valgrim.
"I saw him in Hedeby. He sat on a mound outside the town, a grave-mound, an old king's howe. They told me he made his way there unprompted."
"Means nothing," said Valgrim. He quoted derisively lines from one of the traditional poems of the past:
"Then the bastard sat on the barrow,
When the princes parted the spoil."
"Bastard or not," Hagbarth went on. "I saw him with his eyes wide open, seeing nothing and replying to no-one. When the fit passed I asked him what he had seen and he replied, he saw things as they were."
"What did he look like when the fit was on him?" asked a priest with the sign of Ull the hunter-god round his neck.
"Like him." Hagbarth jerked a thumb at the most respected of the priests in the conclave, Vigleik of the visions, seated unspeaking at the end of the table.
Slowly Vigleik stirred. "One other thing we must remember," he offered. "The evidence of Farman priest of Frey, our brother still in England. He says that two winters ago he was in the camp of the Ragnarssons, searching for new knowledge, trying to see whether even among the Loki-brood there might be the One we await. He had seen Thorvin's apprentice whom they now call King Shef, but he knew nothing of him, thought him only an English runaway. Yet the day after the great battle with King Jatmund he too saw a vision, in daylight. A vision of the smithy of the gods. In it he saw Thorvin's apprentice in the shape and place of Völund, the lame smith. And he saw Othin speak to him. Farman told me, though, that Othin did not take him under his protection. So maybe Valgrim, as priest of Othin, is right to fear him. There may be other plans than Othin's."
Valgrim's chest swelled with rage, both at the challenge to Othin's plans and at the thought that he might be a prey to fear. He did not venture to defy Vigleik. Among the priests who had gathered to the College from the whole of Norway, and the other Scandinavian lands, there were more who knew of Vigleik the Seer than of Valgrim the Wise—wise in the ways of kings and the arts of government. One of the arts of government was to keep silent till the moment came.
"Guidance may come to us," he said pacifically.
"Who from?" asked a priest from Ranrike to the north.
"From our holy circle, when the time comes to form it."
"Also," said Vigleik, "if we are fortunate, from King Olaf. He is the wisest of kings on the earth, though not the most lucky. I suggest we invite him to attend our conclave, to sit outside the circle. He is not the One, though once we thought he might be. Yet if anyone may recognize a true king, it is he."
"I thought Olaf Elf-of-Geirstath was dead," muttered the Ranrike priest to one of his back-country fellows.
Washed from head to foot in a great tub of heated water, his hair cut short and scrubbed again and again with lye, Shef stepped cautiously across the old, hard-packed snow of the College's precinct. His clothes had been taken away and replaced with a hemp shirt and tight-fitting woolen drawers, a thick wool tunic and trousers over them. Brand had repossessed the bearskin cape, muttering that if he found lice in that he would send Shef out to hunt down another one, but he had replaced it with a mantle of homespun. His gold bracelets again shone on Shef's biceps, though he had refused to replace the gold circlet of kingship on his cropped head. He walked clumsily in a pair of thick winter boots borrowed from Guthmund, padded out with wound rags. In spite of the cold and the snow, he felt warm for the first time in days. Udd the undersized steelmaster kept pace with him. After the rough administrations of Brand, Shef had greeted Cwicca and the rest of his faithful gang, handed Karli over to them, scowling distrustfully, and told them to consider him a new and valued recruit, and then become aware that Udd was standing to one side, tongue-tied as ever. One only became aware of Udd when he had something to say or to show. It was certainly something to do with metal. Remembering the forge-noises he had heard from the jetty, Shef clapped Udd on the shoulder, added a final warning about good behavior to Karli, and followed Udd out into the open. Cwicca and the other English ex-slaves who had come to this unknown land in the north had promptly slammed the door, wedged every chink they could find, and returned to their normal habit of clustering round the fire in as much animal warmth as they could manage.
Udd was not heading towards the place from which familiar forge-noises came, but to a small building separate from the main frequented halls and dormitories. As they walked a figure shot suddenly past them at a speed no man could match. Shef jumped to one side, fumbling for the sword at his belt, saw the figure sweep away down the slope to the township well below.
"What was that?" he gasped. "Skates? On snow? Downhill?"
"They call 'em skis," said Udd. "Or ski-runners or something. Wooden boards you tie to your feet. They all use 'em up here. Strange folk. But now look at this." He pushed the door open and led Shef into an empty shed.
For a few moments Shef could see nothing in its dark interior. Then, as Udd fumbled open a shutter he saw a great stone wheel lying in the middle of the shed. As his eyes grew used to the dimness, Shef realized that there were actually two wheels, one over the other. A machine of some kind.
"What do they do?" he asked.
Udd lifted a trapdoor, pointed under the shed to a channel below. "When the snow melts there's a stream under here. See the wheel down there? With the paddles on it? Water flows, turns the paddles. Axle on that wheel turns these two above. The surfaces touching each other have channels cut in 'em. Pour grain in. Grinds the grain."
Shef nodded, remembering the monotonous noise of the old woman grinding corn in the Ditmarsh hut, the job that never ceased, the job that warriors hated.
"Does it much faster than women with the old pestle and mortar," Udd added. "Mind you, it's been frozen solid since we got here. They say when it's working it grinds as much corn as forty women working all day. The folk come up from the town and pay the priests to use it."
Shef nodded again, reflecting on how the monks of Saint John or Saint Peter would have appreciated such an addition to their income. He saw the potential of the device. But he could not understand Udd's interest: it was notorious that the little man cared for nothing but metal. Best not to rush him.
Silently Udd led his king out and down the slope to a second shed. "This is like rung two," he said, with a glance at Shef's ladder-emblem. "And this is down to us. See, ever since last year the priests here have been fascinated by what they heard of our catapults. Cwicca and his mates have already built a couple, to show 'em how we do it. But they'd already got the idea of the little wheels: the cog-wheels, you know. And the priest who was working with the mill, he got the idea of using real big cog-wheels not to wind a catapult but to make a different mill."
The pair approached the second building. On one wall of it, another big wooden wheel with paddles, exactly like the first one: but set vertically in the snow-choked ravine, not horizontally. Clearly the water would turn this even better, with a better purchase. But what use would an axle be turning two vertical millstones? The corn would run straight through them and never be ground at all. It was the weight of the stone that did the grinding.
Still silently Udd led Shef in and pointed to the gearing. At the end of the millwheel-axle an immense iron cog-wheel stood vertical. Its teeth meshed into a matching horizontal cog, fitted over a stout oak axle. Below it, on the same axle, the two familiar stone wheels. Above them, a hopper showed where men could stand to pour in sacks of kernels.
"Yes, lord, it's well-done. But what I wanted to say was there's something to do with this that these folk haven't thought of yet. See, lord," Udd dropped his voice, though there was no-one near, no-one within a furlong of them. "What's our problem with iron? With making it, like?"
"Beating it out," said Shef.
"How many days does it take a man to get fifty pound of iron out of, say, five times that amount of ore?"
Shef whistled, remembering the hours he had spent pounding out the slag for his first home-made sword. "Ten," he guessed. "Depends how strong the smith is."
"That's why smiths have to be strong," agreed Udd, looking down at his own puny frame. "I couldn't ever be one. But then I thought, if this mill does the work of forty grinding-slaves, women that is, could it not do the work of, say, twenty smiths?"
Shef began to feel a familiar warning itch in his brain. Many minds were working here, as they had worked to make the catapults, the pulley-wound crossbow. Some priest of the Way had thought of the water-mill. Some long-dead Roman had left behind the cog-wheels. Shef and his crewmen had rebuilt the catapults. And from hearing about that alone, some other priest had worked out how to transfer the force in the flow of a river to the task he needed in a different dimension. Now Udd had returned that thought to his own obsession. It was as if people too were cog-wheels, the one fitting into the other, one brain turning the next.
"How could stone wheels grind iron?" he asked cautiously.
"Well, lord, what came to me was this." Udd dropped his voice even further. "What everyone's always thought in this line is, a wheel drives a wheel. But I thought, what if it doesn't? What if it drives something a different shape? And much, much bigger? See, axle turns here. Turns a shape like this. The shape turns, and all the time it's turning, it's lifting a heavy weight, as heavy as a millwheel. Only not a millwheel, a hammer. But when it gets to this point here—it stops lifting. The hammer drops instead. A really heavy hammer, a hammer six smiths couldn't lift, not even if they were as strong as Brand! And hammering as fast as the axle on this millwheel turns. How long would it take to beat out fifty pounds of iron then? Five hundred pounds?"
The little man's pale face shone with excitement, the thrill of the inventor. Shef caught the feeling, felt his palms itch to start the work.
"Listen, Udd," he said, trying to keep a cool head. "I don't see what you mean about the shape to lift and to drop."
Udd nodded energetically. "That's what I've been thinking about every night in my bunk. What we need, I reckon, is something like this..."
On the floor of the hut, planks overlaid with a thin layer of drifted snow from under the warped door, Udd began to draw a cross-section of a reciprocating cam. After a few moments Shef seized his own straw and began to draw as well. "If it turns like this," he said, "you'd have to have a groove on the handle of the hammer, to stop it flying off. But does it have to have a hammer-shape?"
An hour later Thorvin the smith-priest, coming from his doubtful meeting, saw the tall king and the puny freedman walking down the snowy path, their arms waving wildly as they designed imaginary machines. For an instant he understood Valgrim's doubts. Farman and Vigleik might see the One King in their visions. No vision or prophecy had ever included a word, he was sure, about scrawny foreign thrallborn assistants.
In the Scandinavian lands, in the year of Our Lord 867, the peoples were much the same, but the lands themselves greatly different. In spite of centuries of bickering, jealousy and war, the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians were all much more like each other than anyone else. There is every difference, though, between the fertile pastures of the Danish islands and the Jutland peninsula, or the long coastline of Sweden in the sheltered tideless Baltic, and the fjord-splintered Atlantic-facing stretch of Norway, with its immense and almost pathless spine of mountains, the Keel. The Norwegians said even then of the Danes that only Danes could have an eighteen-hundred foot hillock as the highest spot in all their kingdoms, and call it Himinbjerg, Sky Mountain. The Danes said of the Norwegians that if you put ten Norwegians together, eleven would call themselves kings and lead fifteen armies to war against each other. The jokes had a basis in fact, in geography and history. Travel for the Norwegians was not impossibly difficult, for there were passages all the way up the coast with its thousands of islands, and in the long winter ski-runners could travel over the snow faster than any horse could gallop. Yet it might take two days to go round by sea rather than cross a ten-thousand-foot sheer-rising mountain mass. It was easier in Norway to divide than to unite. Easy too, in a land where there was a boatyard on every one of a thousand fjords, to raise a fleet and crew it with the younger sons who counted their fathers' farmlands in fractions of an acre.
In this land of little kingdoms and brief alliances, forty years before, there had been a king called Guthroth. He was king of the Westfold, the land to the west of the great fjord that runs up to Oslo and divides the main Norwegian mass from the borders with Sweden. He was a king not much better, or much worse, than his neighbors and rivals the kings of the Eastfold, of Ranrike, Raumrike, Hedemark, Hedeland, Toten, Akershus and all the others. His subjects, a few score thousand, maybe enough to make the population of a decent English shire, called him the Huntsman because of his hobby, which was hunting women—a dangerous and difficult hobby, even for a king, in a land where every cot-carl had spear, axe and half-a-dozen Viking expeditions behind him.
But Guthroth persevered. In the end his first wife Thurith, daughter of the king of Rogaland, died, worn out with vexation at her husband's infidelities and the trouble and expense they caused, and Guthroth thought at once of replacing her. His eye fell on the daughter of the king of the tiny kingdom of Agdir, no more than a town and a handful of villages: Asa, daughter of Hunthjof the Strong, a virgin of unmatched beauty. To Guthroth it seemed that her charms might stir again in him the youth that seemed to be passing. But Hunthjof the Strong refused Guthroth's offers, saying that his daughter would not need to go sniffing other women's beds to see who had been in them. Stung by the insult and the rejection, Guthroth did his only great deed beyond the normal expected from kings of a warlike people: he gathered his men and came down on Agdir on skis on a dark winter's night, just after Yule, when men were still sleeping off the Yule-ale. He killed Hunthjof the Strong in fair fight at the door of his bedchamber, though it is true that Guthroth was fully awake and fully armored, while Hunthjof was half-drunk and wholly naked; then seized Asa, bundled her into a sleigh and dragged her back to the Westfold roped to the sleigh-posts. There Guthroth's own priests declared the wedding, and Asa was dragged off willy-nilly to the bedchamber.
Her beauty fulfilled Guthroth's expectations, and nine months later she gave birth to her son Halvdan, later called the Black from his hair and his rages. Guthroth slowly let out the breath he had been holding, and forbore to tie Asa's wrists to the bedposts every night when he slept, knowing that women with a child to defend would become more sensible and less grudge-bearing than before. He still made sure even the knife she used to pare an apple with was pointless and no sharper than would serve to cut soft cheese.
Yet he had forgotten that a woman can work through other men as easily as in her own right. One dark evening, just after Yule the year after Asa's father's death, Guthroth emptied the great aurochs-horn of beer which he kept on his table without a stand, so that it had to be drained in one draught, and shortly staggered out to piss on the snow. As he did so, while his hands were occupied with his breeches, and before he had begun to empty his bladder, a young lad stepped round the corner of the royal hall and thrust a broad-bladed spear through his belly, fleeing instantly on skis. Guthroth lived long enough to say that the killer had said only, "Those who kill drunken men should always stay sober," and then died, trying still to complete his piss.
Guthroth had an acknowledged and legitimate son by his first wife Thurith, a strong lad of eighteen winters called Olaf. Men expected that he would appease his father's ghost by sending Queen Asa into the howe with him, and make a clean sweep by leaving the child Halvdan, his half-brother, out in the forest for the wolves. He did not do so. And when asked why not—it was a sign that men did not fear him as much as a king should be feared that they were able to ask—he said that he had dreamed a dream. In it he saw a great tree spring from his step-mother's womb, a tree with blood-red roots, a white trunk, and green leaves that spread all over Norway and even further across the world. So he knew that a great destiny waited for Asa's children, and would not thwart the gods and bring down bad luck by trying to avert it.
Olaf, then, spared his stepmother and protected his half-brother, but from that time he himself had little good fortune, and men said that he had thrown away his own luck. In the years to come he was overshadowed in battle by his half-brother, Asa's son, who won himself a kingdom across the fjord in the Eastfold. And Olaf's own only son, Rognvald, whom men called the Magnificent for his courage and his gifts to poets, died when a trifling scratch in a mere skirmish swelled and went bad and defied the leeches even of the Way.
By contrast Halvdan won himself not only the new kingdom of the Eastfold, which he loyally shared with his one-time protector, and his grandfather's kingdom of Agdir, but also a wife whom even the imperious Queen Asa could not despise, as she did all other women. This was Ragnhild, daughter of King Sigurth the Hart of Ringerike. Like Asa, she too had been carried off from her father, but not by Halvdan. While her father was traveling through the mountains, he was ambushed by a mountain-chieftain, a wild man and a berserk called Haki. For all his berserkergang, Sigurth wounded Haki three times before he was killed, and cut off his left arm, so that Haki lay abed for a long winter, unable to enjoy his virgin bride. Just about the time he might be calculated to have recovered enough to do the deed, Halvdan struck first like his father. He took fifty picked men into the mountains and fired Haki's hall in the night. As Ragnhild ran out to greet her rescuers, they snatched her up and drove away across a frozen lake. When the pursuers got to the lake and saw the reindeer-sleighs disappearing, Haki knew that he would never catch them up nor live down the shame of losing both his arm and his bride. He threw himself on his own sword's point to rise again unmaimed in Valhalla. And so Halvdan won the most beautiful bride in the North and the only woman fit to match the mother-in-law for temper, and did so in time to enjoy her virginity despite the appearances: or so he always believed. Before long she too gave birth to a son, Harald, whom men called the Fairhaired in contrast to his father.
These, then, were the rulers of the Westfold in the time that the priests of the Way settled there and made the trading town of Kaupang their center and headquarters: first King Guthroth, then King Olaf, then King Olaf and King Halvdan together, with Harald Fairhair the only son of either of them able to succeed. And as important at least as any of the men, Queen Asa mother of Halvdan, and Queen Ragnhild mother of Harald.
Seated on a bench before an open window in Hedeby, Erkenbert the deacon considered the names both of King Halvdan (the Black), and King Olaf (Elf-of-Geirstath, whatever that might mean), and attached carefully the name of their kingdom or kingdoms: the Eastfold and the Westfold, both parts of that larger grouping that men called Northr Vegr, the Northway. He did not think that either of them was the man he had been told to look for. Olaf the Elf, certainly not. Erkenbert's notes said this man was over fifty, and notorious for his bad luck, though he did seem nevertheless to have retained his kingdom. But he also did not occur on any of the lists Erkenbert had made—doubtful and based on shaky memories though they were—of who had and had not been present at the great raid on Hamburg after which the Holy Lance of Longinus had disappeared.
The other one might be a bit better as a possibility. He was widely feared and respected, something of a conqueror on the tiny depressing scale of the Northern lands, said to be the main obstacle in Norway to the Ragnarssons' goal of spreading their power. His ships challenged quickly and kept all interlopers at a distance. Yet Erkenbert did not think this Halvdan fitted the bill either. When Bruno had given him the task of collecting all available information on the kings and chieftains and jarls of Scandinavia, to try to determine who might hold the Holy Lance, he had told him to look for three things. One, success. Two, connection with the raid on Hamburg. Three, sudden change: a failure who suddenly became a success would betray the mighty influence of the great relic more surely than anything else. There was no sign of that with Halvdan. He seemed to have ground his way to power in an unremitting way from birth, or at least from his youth.
Against his will—for he had not wanted to come on this mission to the north, and would rather have stayed in Cologne or Trier or even Hamburg or Bremen, finding out more of the mysteries of power—Erkenbert was beginning to feel the intellectual challenge of the problem Bruno the count's son had set him. "Someone must know the answer," Bruno had said. "They just don't know they know. Ask everyone we meet about everything. Write all the answers down. Look to see what kind of pattern emerges." And this Erkenbert had done, interrogating first the few Christian converts they had made in Hedeby—low-value informants these, mostly women and thralls who knew nothing of the reputations and records of the great ones—then the Christian priests they had rescued, then those guards of King Hrorik who would speak to them out of politeness, and finally, paying heavily in wine from the South, the skippers and helmsmen of the boats that put in, often famous warriors themselves and sensitive as harlots to shifts in reputation.
A shadow darkened the door and the senior knight of the Order of the Lance, Bruno himself, edged his freakishly broad shoulders through the opening.
He smiled, as he did so readily. "What is the betting today?" he asked. "Any new runners in our little horserace?"
Erkenbert shook his head. "If we have heard the answer already, as you say, I cannot recognize it," he said. "The one most like the picture you want is still the young man who killed Ivar and bested Charles. He has come from nowhere. Everyone talks of his deeds and his luck. He is a close associate of Viga-Brand, Brand the Killer, who was certainly present at the sack of Hamburg."
Bruno shook his head regretfully. "I thought so too," he said. "Right up till the time I spoke to him. He is a strange one, and I think maybe he has something to do with all this. Yet he had only one weapon, and though it was a spear it was most certainly not the spear. Too new, wrong shape, marked with heathen runes, though I could not read them. I think you have got him on your brain, and will not drop him. Maybe that is preventing you from recognizing the true holder. Tell me some more about some of these heathen kings."
Erkenbert shrugged, picked up once more his mounting pile of vellum. "I have told over to you the kings of Denmark and Norway," he said. "Now in Sweden and Gautland between them there may be as many as twenty more. From the north, King Vikar of Roslagen, aged fifty, elected at the Ros-Thing twenty years ago, said to be rich but peaceful, takes tribute from the Finns and never comes south."
Bruno shook his head.
"How about King Orm of Uppland, controls the great Kingdom Oak and the temple-sacrifices at Uppsala, said to be powerful but disinclined to personal combat, took the kingdom by force twenty years ago?"
"He sounds a bit more likely, but not much. We'll keep an eye on him. You know," Bruno reflected, "for all their recent defeats, I wonder if Sigurth Ragnarsson or one of his brothers couldn't be our man. After all, even Charles the Great had some setbacks, against the Saxons."
Erkenbert was unable to repress an involuntary shudder.
"I think we may have to get a little closer to the action to find out for sure..." Bruno went on.
In the hut to which they had been assigned in the college precinct at Kaupang, the English ex-slaves and Karli the Ditmarsher were exchanging stories of the Hidden Folk. There was a companionable mood in the warm tight-closed room. Hama, one of the catapulteers, had a split lip. Cwicca had an eye swollen shut. Karli was nursing a bitten ear, and had a lump on the side of his head where Osmod, seeing man after man knocked down by Karli's fists, had hit him over the head with a billet of firewood. The group had ceased to mock each other's accents, and were trying to find common ground in explaining the strange world around them.
"We believe in things called thurses," said Karli.
"Us too," agreed Cwicca the fen-man. "They live in holes in the marsh. If you're out in a punt after wild duck, you don't want to go putting your pole into any old thurs-nest. Fowler who does that, he don't come back."
"Where do these creatures come from?" asked one of the men.
"They don't come from anywhere, they've always been here."
"What I heard," said Cwicca, "is this. You know we're supposed to be descended from Adam and Eve. Well, one day the Lord God came down and asked Eve to show him her children. Well, she showed him some of them, but some of them weren't washed, 'cause she was an idle slut, so she told them to hide. And at the end the Lord God said Those children you hid from me, let them remain hidden.' And since then those of us who come from Eve's children who were seen, we're human, but those who come from the others, they're the Hidden Folk, who live in the marshes and on the moors."
The story was considered, but not much liked. Every man there but Karli had been a slave of the Church, first recruited and then freed by Shef and the army of the Way. Christian doctrine was familiar to them, but they associated it with slavery.
"I can't see that has anything to do with what they've got up here," said another voice. "No thurses up here, 'cause there's no marshes. What they've got up here is nixes. In the water. Only there's no water 'cause it's all frozen."
"And trolls," put in another.
"I never heard that word," said Osmod, "what's a troll?"
"Great gray things what live in the rocks. And they call 'em trolls because they trundle down the hill at you."
"One of the locals told me this," said the split-lipped Hama. "There was a man lived up in the mountains, called Lafi. And one day when he was hunting, two troll-wives caught him and dragged him off to their lair in the mountains, and used him as a stud. They wore nothing but raw horse-hides, and they lived on nothing but meat and fish. Sometimes the meat was horse or sheep, but sometimes they wouldn't show him where it had come from, but he had to eat it just the same. After a while he pretended to fall ill, and while the young troll-wife was out hunting, the other one asked him what would cure him. And he said, nothing but rotten meat that had been buried for five years. So she said she knew where there was some of that, and off she went. But because she thought he was too sick to get out of bed, she didn't roll the stone quite shut in front of the cave. And he got out and ran for it. They picked up his scent and came after him, but he smelt wood-smoke and ran till he got to a camp of charcoal-burners, and they got their weapons and faced out and kept the troll-wives off. And then they all went down the mountain and got to safety.
"But nine months later, when he came out of his house, there was a baby on the doorstep all covered in gray hair. After that he was afraid ever to go out at night. I don't know what happened to the baby."
"So they aren't animals, then. They can breed with us, like," reflected Osmod. "Maybe there's some truth in Cwicca's story."
"Maybe we better leave Karli out for the troll-women," came a suggestion.
"Yes, and then if there's any trouble from any old troll-daddy, he can just knock him down."
Outside, ignoring the laughter coming from the dark hut, Brand was trying to talk seriously to Shef.
"I tell you," he said, "she's dangerous. Deadly dangerous. The most dangerous thing you've met since you stepped on the gangplank to face Ivar. Worse than him, even, because when you faced him he already knew he was bound to lose in the end. She doesn't think that. She has more to play for."
"I don't know why you're worried," said Shef. "I've never so much as spoken to her."
"I saw the way you looked at her. And her at you. What you need to realize is that she's only interested in one thing, and that's her son Harald. There are prophecies about him. First people thought the prophecies meant his father. Then they switched to thinking it meant him. Ragnhild certainly thinks it means him.
"But now you come along and people start saying maybe you're the one, the big king that everyone's been waiting for, the one who'll rule all Norway."
"I wouldn't even have got to Norway if they hadn't bought me off Hrorik and brought me here."
"Well, you're here now. And people like Thorvin—he means no harm, but he's responsible just the same—people like Thorvin telling everyone you're the son of the gods and the one who comes from the north and I don't know what else. You have visions, you're in visions, Hagbarth says one thing and Vigleik says another. You have to expect people to listen. Because behind it there are things no-one can just laugh off as old wives' tales: you're a thrall who got to be a king, I saw it myself. You put Alfred to one side, and he was one of the god-born, descended from Othin, even the English admit that. You took the surrender of the king of the Franks. What are a few hedge-wife prophecies to that? Of course Ragnhild thinks you're dangerous. That's why she is."
"What happens tomorrow?" asked Shef.
"The priests of the Way meet in holy circle. They have to decide about you. You won't be there. Nor I."
"What if they decide Thorvin is wrong? Surely then they can just agree I'm nothing to do with them and let me go. After all I have supported the Way, I wear its pendant, I have helped them establish themselves on Christian soil. Any of its priests are welcome to come to my kingdom any time and pursue new knowledge. More than welcome," Shef added, thinking of what he and Udd had discussed.
"And if they decide the other way, that you are the one they seek?"
Shef shrugged. "If there's going to be any change in the world, I'm more likely to start it in England than stuck up here where no-one ever comes."
Brand frowned, displeased to hear Norway disregarded. "And what if they decide you are not the one they seek, but you have been masquerading as him? Or even more likely, that you are not the one they seek, but a rival and an enemy. That is what Valgrim the Wise thinks, and he has a point. He is sure that the great change in the world which shall destroy the Christians' power must come from Othin. And everyone agrees you are not from Othin."
He tapped Shef on the chest with a mighty forefinger. "Though you go round looking as if you ought to be, with your one eye and that damned spear. Valgrim thinks you are a threat to Othin's plan. He will try to have you condemned for that."
"So Valgrim thinks I'm a threat to Othin's plan. And Ragnhild thinks I'm a threat to her son's future. And all because I learnt to build the catapults and the crossbows, to twist rope and forge wheels and bend steel. They ought to realize the real danger is Udd."
"Udd's only five feet tall," snarled Brand. "People don't think he's a danger because they don't even know he's there."
"That's a real danger for you, then," answered Shef. Musingly he added words he had learnt from Thorvin:
"All gates, ere you go through,
Look round you, peer round you.
Not evident to any, where un-friends sit
In every hall."
Far up the mountain-side, a man sat amid the dark, who had forfeited the family luck, had felt it go out of his possession. Some men said they could see the luck, the hamingja, of a family or a land or a kingdom: usually a giant woman, fully-armed. Olaf had not seen that. But he had felt the luck flow out of him all the same. It was the loss of luck that had been the death of his son, Rognvald the Magnificent. His father had killed him.
Now the same father had to decide whether the sacrifice he had made had been pointless. It was the new one, the one-eye. Olaf had watched him come ashore, to be greeted by the Way and his dangerous bitch of a sister-in-law. Even from a distance, Olaf had felt the luck flowing from him. So great it was that it had overpowered the luck of the Othin-born kings of Wessex. It could easily now overpower even the destiny that Olaf had foreseen for his half-brother's family. For the future, as Olaf well knew, was not fixed. It was a matter of potentials. Sometimes the potentials could be changed.
Should he intervene? Olaf had brought the Way to Westfold many years before, respecting both its material power through new knowledge and the spiritual power of its visionaries and dreamers. With material power he had had little to do. With the mystical power, much. If he had not been a king, he could have rivaled Vigleik in visions. Except that Vigleik saw what had happened, what was happening. Olaf saw what would happen. If he could blot out the desire to do so.
Olaf reflected wordlessly on what part he would play in the morning, when the Way formed its circle, and called on him, as it would, to sit outside it, to listen and advise. If he chose to put down the one-eye, he knew, he would gain a majority and reestablish the plan to which he had sacrificed his own life and his son's. But if he did that, he would be sacrificing another future. From very far away, Olaf felt the faint tingle of a thought searching for his own, searching for what he knew and trying to pick a path out of the same tangled indications as his own. There were Christian priests as sensitive in their inquiries as himself. Yet they were too late: he already knew what they were looking for, he was closer to the balance point.
As the sun left the sky entirely, the man in the grove found his skis, walked to where the snow began out of the protecting trees, and began to snake his way down the hill. Behind him, wolf-howls rose. As his skis hissed past the outlying farms, the bonders caught sight of him and muttered to their wives. "There is the elf-king. He has been again to the stone ring, to Geirstath, to take counsel from the gods."
Inside the great boat-shaped hall, the priests of the Way had formed their holy circle. White cords marked it off from the outside world, with the sacred rowan-berries hanging from them—berries faded now, with the spring coming on, from their autumn scarlet. Inside the circle, more than forty priests sat together, the largest conclave any of them had ever known, drawn for the most part from Norway, where the Way was strong, but also from Denmark, from Sweden, with a few scattered converts or missionaries even from the isles of the Atlantic, from Ireland, or from Frisia where the Way had been born almost two centuries before. One even, Hund the leech, from England, accepted formally at the sponsorship of his master Ingulf the week before.
At one end of the circle stood the silver spear of Othin, at the other the burning bale-fire of Loki. By tradition, this fire, once the conclave had begun, could not be refueled: nor could conclave continue once the fire was so far dimmed that no spark could be seen in the ash.
Valgrim the Wise stood by the spear of Othin, not touching it, for no man had the right to claim it for himself, but reminding them that he was the only priest among them who dared take to himself the dangerous service of Othin. He served the God of the Hanged, Betrayer of Warriors, rather than the homelier or friendlier gods like Thor, the farmers' help, or Frey, bringer of fertility to men and animals. Ten paces behind him, almost hidden in the shadows of the shuttered hall, there stood a great chair of carved wood, with built-up sides and a canopy covered in a design of interlacing dragons. A pale face looked out from the deep shadow, the gold circle on its brow catching ruddy gleams from the Loki-fire: King Olaf, host and protector of the Way, there by invitation to observe and if need be advise, but not to vote, or speak without express request.
The shuffling of stools and muttered conversation slowly died. Valgrim let it die away, waiting for his moment: he had opposition, he knew, and needed every advantage to overbear it. The only man standing, he looked round, waited till all eyes were on him.
"The Way has come to a turning-point," he said suddenly. He waited again. "We have our first false prophet."
That is what we are here to determine, thought Thorvin. But he let Valgrim continue. Better to have the issue out in the open.
"For a hundred and fifty years the Way has spread. At first slowly, and only here in the North where the words of Duke Radbod took root. Now we begin to have followers in many places. Even followers of alien blood and language. Even followers baptized in infancy to the Christ-god. And who can doubt that this is good?
"For we must remember our aim and our purpose. Aye, and our vision. Duke Radbod saw that we who worship the true gods would be brushed aside by the Christ-god, if we did not do as his followers do: preach a word, say a message, bring news of where our spirits go to, and where they come from. And do one thing they do not do: allow all words and all messages to be spoken, not say like the Christ-priests that those who do not obey them in every respect must be tormented for ever for no sin other than disobedience.
"That was our first aim. To preserve ourselves and our peoples and our teaching against men who would destroy them all utterly. But after the aim there came the vision. I have not seen it, but there are others in this hall who have. Different men"—Valgrim looked round the circle, nodding at this face and that, showing the others that he knew exactly who he meant and that they were present to deny him if they did not agree—"different men who yet saw the same vision.
"And that vision is of another world than this one. A world where every land we know, ours among them, obeys the Christian god. But where men live like beasts on a slave's holding, so crowded that they cannot breathe, ruled by rulers they never see, sent to war like pigs to the slaughter-place. And worse things than that. Our wise men and seers call this the Skuld-world: the world that shall be—unless we stop it.
"Yet stop it we can! There is another world wise ones have seen. Aye, and this one I have seen myself"—Valgrim's gray bush of a beard nodded as he stared round. "A world so strange we see it only in fragments, and cannot understand all of those. I have seen men floating in the black of an airless sea, somewhere between the worlds, and thought at first they were the most wretched of all sinners, cast out from all the worlds because even Nithhögg could not bear to gnaw their bones. But then I saw their faces and saw that they were like men on some great adventure: and some of them men of our own blood and language, world-farers so great that any skipper alive today would be no more than a child to them. I do not know how this came about, or will come about, but I know that is the true path for true men: not the path of the Christ-fearers. So all my days I have sought new knowledge.
"One more thing I know, and that is why we must take this path besides the desire for knowledge and power and glory. That is because we are not alone."
Valgrim looked round again, trying to impress these last words, his own conviction, on men who might have agreed with everything he said so far.
"All men know that around us there are the Hidden Folk. Not dangerous to us here down in the settlements, dangerous only, it may be, to the hunters in the mountains and the children playing by the water-side. But they are not the only Hidden Folk. Somewhere out there, we know, are creatures with power to match the gods, not trolls or nixes, but the iötnar themselves, foes of god and man. And the Loki-brood as well, those who are not of one skin, those who walk in different shapes, half-human, half-dragon, or half-whale.
"In the end, we believe, the great day will come when gods and men on one side will battle the giants and the Hidden Folk on the other—and on that other side too there will be many men, the Christ-worshipers, the deserters. Those who have been misled. That is why Othin takes the warriors to him, to form the host that will march out from Valhalla on that day of Ragnarök. Other hosts there will be too, from Thruthvangar for Thor and Himinbiorg for Heimdall, and from all the others, sailors and ski-runners and leeches and bowmen. But Othin's host will be the greatest and the hardiest, and most hope of victory lies in it.
"We dare not divide our hosts. The battle is not yet certain. If the Way takes the wrong path now, we will be divided and lost. I say that the one-eyed Englishman who carries the Othin-spear and yet does no homage to Othin, I say that he is the false prophet leading us on the false path. We must reject him now to fulfill our true destiny: which is to hail the One King, the One King whom our prophecies say will come to us from the North. The One King who will change the world and bring victory instead of defeat on the day of Ragnarök."
Valgrim ceased, and settled the spear-pendant firmly on his broad chest. He waited for the denial he knew would come.
It came from a quarter he had hoped would support him. Vigleik of the many visions stirred on his stool, looked down at the unusual emblem he bore, the bowl of Suttung the mead-guardian, bringer of inspiration, and spoke.
"What you say of visions may be true, Valgrim, but while what we see is one thing, what we understand of it is another. Now I have said this to you before, and if you cannot deny it you must tell me what it means. We know our brother Farman saw the one-eyed Englishman—saw him when he had two eyes. Saw him in vision in Asgarth, home of the gods, and set in the place of Völund, lame smith of the gods. And Farman saw All-Father speak to him. None of us has seen this of any other mortal man. So why should I not think that this man has a divine destiny?"
Valgrim nodded. "I know your visions are true, Vigleik, and Farman's also. You saw the death of the tyrants last month, and news has come through on the trade-ships since, that you saw the truth. So the one-eye may have been seen as Völund. But just as you say, seeing is one thing and understanding is another. Now what does the story of Völund tell us?"
He looked round again, sure his audience was with him, all keenly interested in the story of their sacred myths. "We all know that Völund's wife was a swan-maiden, but that after she left him he was taken by Nithhad, king of the Njar-folk. Nithhad desired his craft as a smith, but feared his escape, so he cut his hamstrings with a knife and set him to work in the smithy at Saevarstath. And there what did Völund do?"
Valgrim's voice fell into the deep chant of the Way-priests:
"He sat, he did not sleep, he struck with the hammer.
Always he crafted the cunning thing for Nithhad.
"He made him fine bracelets and necklaces of gold and gems. He made him bowls for his ale and cunning runners for his sledges. He made him swords that would cut linen by sharpness and anvils by strength. But when Nithhad's two young boys came to see the marvels, what did he do? He lured them into his smithy, promised to show them fine things, showed them a chest."
Again Valgrim's voice turned to the chant:
"They came to the chest, they craved the key.
It was malice they opened when they peeped in.
"He killed them, he buried their bodies under the forge, of their teeth he made necklaces, goblets of their skulls, brooches of their shining eyeballs. Gave them all to Nithhad. And when Nithhad's daughter came to him to mend a ring, what did he do? Stupefied her with beer, raped her, thrust her out.
"She told her father, weeping. He came to Völund to take his head. And Völund, his hamstrings severed—he put on the wings he had made in the smithy, and flew away. What was the cunning thing he had made for Nithhad? It was his revenge. For that is his name, Völund. From the cunning thing, vel."
The conclave sat silent, pondering the story they all knew. "Now I ask you," said Valgrim, "who is the hero of this story? Völund for his cunning, as we are told? Or Nithhad for his attempt to restrain it? I tell you, Vigleik, where this Englishman is concerned, he is Völund, right enough. And we are Nithhad! He will kill our sons and rape our daughters. That is to say, he will deny us our own issue and turn us into creatures to breed his getting for him. Nithhad made only one mistake, which was to try to use Völund's skill and think he was safe when he was only lamed. He should have killed him and made sure work! For men like Völund or the Englishman are not safe when they are crippled. For they are like Völund's wife, the swan-maiden: they are not men of one skin. But it is not a swan that the Englishman turns into, on the other side. Rather, a dragon, or a mound-dweller, a mold-man. Hagbarth, I ask you: did you not report that he said he had been in a mound before!"
The hall stirred with excitement and appreciation at Valgrim's unexpected explanation. They saw Hagbarth nod slowly, reluctantly confirming what Valgrim had said.
Thorvin broke out in reply, as Valgrim had known he would. "This is all well enough, Valgrim, but you are only twisting words. Of course the lad had been in a mound before—he took the old king's treasure from it. He dug his way in with a mattock and fought his way out, like a hero. He did not live in one. If Viga-Brand were here he would mock you for saying he should have left the money in the ground. I ask all here, look beyond words. Look at actions. Shef Sigvarthsson, give him his proper name, he turned a whole country to the Way. He drove out the Christ-church. If he let Christ-priests stay, it was only as if they were any of us, made to pay their own way and work for their own believers. He killed Ivar Ragnarsson. And is there any doubt that he is a seeker for knowledge, who will give up anything for that knowledge?"
Thorvin raised his hand for silence. "If you do not believe me, listen."
Outside, not far away, the priests could hear a familiar sound, but not one they had expected to hear with all of them in conclave. Across the precincts of the college, across the old, much-trodden snow, there came the clink-clink of the heavy hammer, dimly over it the roaring of forced draught from a bellows. Men working at the forge.
At the forge, Shef had just completed the careful reforging and re-tempering of the sword he had given Karli. Now it was set aside to cool, before reassembly of blade, guard, hilt and pommel. Now Udd had taken over. The little man was conducting a demonstration. He stood to one side of the fire, directing, while Shef, stripped to his breeches and a protective leather overall, handled the pieces of iron and steel with tongs. Cwicca crouched on one knee, pumping the leather bellows that fed the draught to the charcoal-glowing forge. The rest of the English catapulteers, seven of them, Hama, Osmod and the others, with Karli making an eighth, squatted on their heels along the wall, enjoying the warmth and adding their comments.
"Right," said Udd. "They're all red-hot. Take the first spike and lay it down to one side."
Shef took a red-hot iron spike, the raw material for a dagger or spear-head, and laid it carefully across the mouth of a pottery bowl, not letting it touch the still-frozen earth of the floor.
"Take the next one and put it straight away into the snow-water."
Shef lifted it with the tongs and plunged the red-hot metal into a leather bucket full of barely-melted snow, gathered a few minutes before from outside. A cloud of steam rose with violent hissings.
"When the metal's cold, take it out and bend it between your hands."
Shef waited a minute or two, plucked the spike out, felt it gingerly to make sure there was no residual heat. Bent it between his hands. He had a good idea of what would happen, but was content to let Udd make his demonstration his own way. As the muscles stood out on Shef's forearm, the metal spike suddenly snapped in two.
"Now try the other one."
Shef handled this one, still warm even in the chilly air, with rags. This time he needed no force. The metal bent in his hands like wire, remained bent without any sign of springing even after he let it go.
"Same metal," lectured Udd. "If you quench it, it gets hard and brittle—takes a good edge, but no strength. But if you just cool it, it bends. Neither hard nor strong."
"As much use as an old man's dick," said a catapulteer companionably.
"More use than yours," retorted Karli.
"Shut up," said Udd, bold only in the making of steel. "Now, Shef, my lord that is to say. Take the bent one. Bend it straight again. Put it back in the fire and heat it red-hot once more.
"Now, quench it." Again the hissing and the cloud of steam. "Return it to the fire. But this time, don't let it get red-hot. Heat it gently—slow down on the bellows there, Cwicca. Let it get to the color of straw."
Udd peered over with near-sighted anxiety. "Now, that's enough. Take that out and let it cool slowly."
Shef followed instructions, this time more unsure of what would happen. As a working smith, he knew well the virtues of quenching and the dangers of annealing. His way of combining the qualities of strength, hardness and suppleness, however, had always been to work different grades of metal together in strips. The thought of going back to a strip once annealed had never occurred to him. Nor did he see the significance of the third gentle heating. As the metal cooled he looked with satisfaction at the returning blisters on his hands. They had got too soft while he had played at being a king.
"All right," said Udd. "Now try it."
Shef picked up the iron spike and bent it in his hands. It flexed powerfully, giving but then striving to regain its shape.
"This is how you made the crossbow strips," he remarked.
"In a way, lord, yes. But this is different." Udd's voice dropped with a kind of reverence. "This iron is the best I have ever seen. The ore it comes from takes half—a quarter—of the working we are used to. How long does it take a forge to make ten pounds of iron in England?"
"Two days," suggested Shef.
"Here you would get forty in the same time for the same labor. That is one reason the Vikings are so well-armed, I think. Their iron is better. It costs far less time and charcoal to make. So every man can have iron tools and weapons, not just the rich. The iron comes from Jarnberaland, far to the east across the mountains. The Way-folk say they have a mine there and men to run it.
"But there is still more we have discovered, lord."
In the heart of the forge there lay a pile of what appeared to be ash. Using long tongs, Udd hauled it out, dragged it onto the earthen floor, briskly swept away the covering cinders to reveal a metal plate.
"This has been in the fire for hours, since last night. I have kept the fire going all that time, while the rest of you were snoring."
"Karli wasn't snoring, he was out after women."
"Shut up, Fritha. It is a plate made like the spike, by cooling, and then quenching, and reheating, so it was strong and springy. Then I heated it again and kept it in the fire. And all the time it was in the fire, I kept piling the charcoal round it. Now lord, when it has cooled, I want you to thrust it with your spear, with the great spear you took from the Snake-eye."
Shef raised an eyebrow. The 'Gungnir' spear's massive head was made of the best steel he had ever seen. The plate Udd had been working on was perhaps an eighth of an inch thick, the thickness of the metal guard that protected a warrior's hand in the center of a shield. Much thicker and the shield would be too heavy to move easily. But Shef had no doubt the steel spear-head would punch straight through.
As the plate cooled, Udd set it up directly against the wooden logs of the forge wall. "Strike now, master."
Shef stepped back, balanced the shaft, imagined he had in front of him a deadly enemy. He stepped forward onto the left foot, swung body, arm and shoulder, trying to strike through plate and wall to a space a foot behind both, as Brand had often taught him.
The shaft jarred in his hands, sprang back. Incredulously, Shef looked at the thin plate. Unmarked. Undented. He looked again at the needle-point of 'Gungnir'. For half an inch the triangular point had been punched flat.
"That's hardened steel," said Udd flatly. "I thought it would be good stuff for mail. But I found you can't work it. It's unbendable. But if you made the mail, and then hardened it..."
"Or if you made thin plates like this and then just sewed them on..."
In the considering silence one of the catapulteers remarked, "What I don't see is how it all comes from the same stuff. Some's hard and brittle, some's soft and bendy, some's springy, some's so hard you can't scratch it. What makes the difference? Is it something in the water?"
"Some of the Vikings think that," said Udd: "They believe it's best to use a slave's blood for the final temper."
The ex-slaves looked at each other, reflecting on fates they had missed.
"Or some try oil. There may be some sense in that. All this steam. You've seen sweat jump off a hot blade? Well, water tries to get away from hot metal, and when you're quenching you don't want it to get away. So oil might be better.
"But I don't think it's that. It's the heating and cooling that do it. And I think it's something to do with the charcoal as well. If you can keep the metal touching the coal, something passes between them. That's my belief."
Shef walked to the door, stared out across the snow to the fjord and the islands lying in it, still trapped in thick ice. Out there on one of the furthest islands, he knew, was the queen he had seen on his first arrival, Queen Ragnhild, with her son, her husband away seeing to his taxes in the Eastfold. Out there on the island they called Drottningsholm, Queen Island. He watched his breath condensing in the frosty air, and wondered about sweat on iron, iron sizzling in the water-bucket, men blowing on their hands to warm them, steam rising from hot bodies in cold air. What was steam, he wondered?
Two men were carrying a bucket towards him across the snow, slung between them on a pole. There was something strange about that. You would expect slaves to be given a task of that kind, but those men were not slaves: too tall, too well-dressed, swords at their belts. Behind him Shef could hear Cwicca ordering Karli to the bellows and taking a turn at following Udd's instructions. Through the inexpert beating of the hammer he could hear the faint squeak of leather shoes on snow.
The men reached the forge door, set their bucket down carefully. Shef found himself, as so often with these Norwegians, looking up to meet their eyes.
"I am Stein, of the guard of Queen Ragnhild," said one of them.
"I did not know guards carried buckets," observed Shef.
Stein scowled. The noise at the forge had ceased as the men inside heard conversation, and Shef knew they were crowding into the doorway, ready to support their leader if needed.
"This is a special bucket," said Stein, mastering his temper. "A gift from the queen to you, the Ivarsbane. It is winter-ale. Do you know what that is, southerner? We brew our strongest ale, and then in the hardest of the frost we set our vats outside. The water in the ale freezes, we break the ice off the top and throw it away. The longer you do it, the more water the ale loses, and the stronger is what remains. It is a drink for heroes—like you, if you are the slayer of Ivar."
Stein's expression showed doubt, increasing as Cwicca and the others jostled their way out to peer into the tawny liquid. Not one of the Englishmen was less than head and shoulders shorter than the two Norsemen, and even the stocky Karli was dwarfed.
Stein fumbled at his belt. "The queen told me also to say this. The drink is for you and your men, as you choose. But the queen said you came ashore with nothing, so she sent you a cup. The cup is for you alone. For you alone."
He freed what he had been carrying and passed it over. Shef turned it over in his hands, surprised. From the way Stein talked he had expected a goblet of gold or silver, something precious. Instead it was a plain mug of hollowed beechwood, such as any churl might drink from. As he turned it over he saw marks on the bottom. Runes. A message.
His errand done, Stein turned away with his companion, not waiting for thanks. Shef recovered himself, called to his own companions. "All right, let's get that inside where it's warm. Fritha, run down to the hut and get your mugs and a ladle if you can find one. Let's at least have a drink. And Udd, heat up a couple of spikes, we can mull this ale and see what it's like hot. Just the thing for this country. Hama, get on the bellows for him, Osmod, get some more fuel for the fire."
As the ex-slaves bustled round, Shef stepped into the cool bright sunlight to read the scratched runes. They were in the Norse style he had learned from Thorvin, but unfamiliar in some ways. Slowly he puzzled out their sense.
"Bru er varthat, en iss er thykkr," they read. "The bridge is guarded, but the ice is thick."
What bridge? Shef looked out again over the fjord. Out there the islands lay in the dense ice. Now he looked for them, he could see thin strips running from one island to the next: long lines of logs, set in the water each autumn and allowed to freeze there. The furthest island out was Drottningsholm. She had said he would come to her when she called him. And now she had. Shef realized Karli was watching him with a raised eyebrow. For him alone, she had said. But if he were to go prowling like a tomcat, it might be best to take an experienced companion.
In the hall of conclave, tempers were running high. The higher because everyone there knew they would soon have to make a final decision. The bale-fire had long since fallen from a blaze to a glow, and now in the darkening hall only a few embers shone out. The fire might not be refueled, nor the conclave continue once no spark could be seen.
"So what is it you propose?" said Valgrim to Thorvin. As the debate had gone on, the two men had emerged as leaders of factions, increasingly speaking against each other. With Thorvin were the majority of the priests of Thor, of Njörth and of Ithun, practical men with clear skills to which they were devoted, smithcraft, seamanship and shipbuilding, medicine and surgery. These men appreciated the advances and the experiments that Shef's Way-kingdom had made, and were eager to continue on that path. Thorvin's followers also included the alien priests, the Frisians, those whose native language was not Norse. Against him were Valgrim, the one priest of Othin, and the majority of the priests of Frey, along with those of Ull, Heimdall, Tyr and the lesser gods. Devotion to them was strongest in Norway itself, and among the least-traveled or most-isolated of the followers of the Way.
"Let the lad return to England," said Thorvin promptly. "Take as many of us as we can with him. Make his kingdom there the strongest in the North, a place where we can recruit wealth and followers. From it, set up our challenge to the Christ-god. Never before have we taken followers from him, always his priests have crept into our lands to steal followers from us. Let us support this, the first true success we have had.
"And what is your proposal, Valgrim?"
The big man replied as promptly. "Hang him on a tree as a sacrifice to Othin. Fit out the greatest fleet we can, with the assistance of King Halvdan and King Olaf, and go down to take over his kingdom before the English know what has become of him. Then do as you say, Thorvin. Only with the priests of the Way in charge, not some unknown foundling."
"If you hang him on a tree you reject the messenger of the gods!"
"He cannot be the messenger of the gods. He is not a Norseman, not even a Dane. Most of all, Thorvin, even you have admitted it. He may wear a pendant, he may see visions, but he has no belief. He is not a true believer!"
"You talk like a Christian!"
Valgrim's face purpled, and he started to stride towards Thorvin, who slipped his hand down the haft of his ceremonial hammer. As the other priests started to rise from their stools, to come between the two men, another voice cut through the chill air, one that had not spoken during the angry debate: that of Vigleik of the visions.
"You spoke of fitting out a fleet, Valgrim, and you of setting up a kingdom, Thorvin. Maybe it is time, before the bale-fire goes out, to call on the advice of a king and a commander. You have heard our words, King Olaf Elf-of-Geirstath. What wisdom do you have for us?"
The figure in the carved chair rose to his feet and walked forward to the very perimeter of the corded circle. His face was grave, lined with care. In it there was something of the air of majesty: none, though, of the air of instant decision seen in every Viking jarl or skipper, let alone king. His eyes seemed to look through what was in front of them, to some event or chance beyond.
"Have I leave to speak?" asked Olaf. He waited for the growled assent of the conclave. "Then I have this to say, having heard all that has been said here on both sides.
"All of you know, I think, though you may not wish to say it to my face, that I am a man who has lost his luck. The luck of his family. I can tell you that I did not lose it, nor give it away. I only knew that it would go, and then that it had gone. I am different from other men only that I knew it, instead of finding out much later, or never. I know a great deal about luck.
"Some men will tell you that the luck of a family, the hamingja as we say, is like a giant-woman fully-armed, that the lucky can see as they see the spirits of the land. There are stories of men who saw their guardian-spirit leave them and go to another. They may be true. But that is not what I saw. Truly I saw nothing—except the dream of the great tree of which you have doubtless heard.
"What I felt was like the feeling in the air before the lightning-flash. I knew the flash would come, I knew it would go from me to another. I knew that that other was of the line of my brother. When I was young I thought it was my brother Halvdan. Now I know it was not. Till a few days ago I thought it was my brother's son Harald, whom they call Fairhair.
"Now I am not sure again. For again I have the feeling, the feeling before the flash. It comes to me that luck is going to shift again, to pass out of my line altogether—and maybe to the young man Shef."
The listeners stirred, and Valgrim's faction eyed each other doubtfully.
"Yet I was wrong before, over Halvdan. Maybe I am wrong again. But not, I think, wholly. As I grow old it seems to me more and more that luck is not a thing that one has or has not, like youth or strength. It is more like light, where a lesser light remains what it was, but cannot be seen any longer when a greater light outshines it. Like a candle still burning in a sunlit room. Except that maybe the greater light steals light from the lesser even, even puts it out.
"I have heard the history of the young man Shef. He brought bad luck to his own king Jatmund. He did not quail before the luck of Ivar. He was rescued, they tell me, by one of the god-born, the king Alfred, descended from Othin. Soon after the rescue that king was a beggar, to be rescued in his turn. I think this young man draws the luck from others. Where he comes, luck goes. He may take it even from my own blood, where I thought the luck of Norway rested—where it did rest, till you brought him here to challenge it."
"All this is mere talk," rumbled Valgrim. "We must have proof."
"Proof comes from a test. Let us test his luck against the luck of Harald and Halvdan, against the queens Asa and Ragnhild."
"How do we do that?"
"Agree to the test and I will tell you. But agree quickly, before the bale-fire goes out."
The forty priests looked at the tiny glowing spark that was all that was left, muttered together. Then, slowly, both Thorvin and Valgrim nodded their agreement. As a Tyr-priest knelt down and blew gently on the last remaining ember, King Olaf began to speak. Before he had finished, Valgrim was already shaking his head in dissatisfaction.
"Too unsure," he growled. "I need a clearer sign."
"You may get a clearer sign than you wish, Valgrim. I spoke of light and luck. There is another way to see it. Some of you believe that all our lives are spun by the three spinners, Urth, Verthandi and Skuld. But they spin not single threads, rather a great web, the threads crossing over each other. Where the threads cross each other, they fray! Beware the man with a strong life-thread, Valgrim. Especially if that thread crosses yours."
Vigleik stirred himself to speak. "I have seen the Spinners," he said. "Their loom-weights are skulls, their shuttles are swords and spears, their web is human gut."
"That is in the Skuld-world," said Thorvin flatly. "That is what we mean to change."
The two men crept cautiously through the dark woods to the edge of the ice. The snow had hampered them badly, lying in uneven drifts in the hollows and forcing them to push through the tangled fir-branches. Yet they had not dared to use the paths through the woods—anyone who saw them might have challenged them, and while they were not forbidden to move around at night, they had no wish to cause stir or comment. Karli had grumbled steadily at first as snow fell from the trees and crawled down his neck, repeating that he knew plenty of places where they could find friendly women without all this trouble. But as Shef pushed on Karli had fallen silent, accepting the expedition as one of the strange preferences for a particular woman that even the sanest of men might have. It would be an exploit, after all, he told himself, to seduce a queen. Maybe there would even be a princess for himself.
Where the wood ran down to the ice, the snow stopped, brushed away by the wind, or melted by the sunlight that got through the fringes of the fir-trees during the lengthening days. Shef and Karli walked forward more easily and stood for a few moments looking out at the scene, considering their course.
They had made a circle away from the college and the town behind it, and were now on the end of a long point jutting out on the western side of the bay. On the far side of the bay, maybe a quarter-mile off, were the chain of islands that led to Drottningsholm. There was no moon, and the sky was covered by thick cloud driven on by a strong wind from the south-west, but even so they could see the tree-covered island nearest the shore standing out black against the murk of the sea and sky. Just visible as a black streak was the long line of logs which led from mainland to island. They could not see the guard-posts at either end, but there was no doubt they were there. The question was, could the guards see two men silhouetted against the ice?
"The wind has swept the snow off," Shef whispered to Karli. "We won't stand out against the white."
"But why isn't the ice white too?" Karli replied.
Both men knelt and looked closely at the ice-cover in front of them. It seemed black and forbidding, yet still thick as cathedral walls. There was no give in it, clearly frozen still all the way down to the mud at the bottom. Shef stepped out cautiously, jumped up and down in his leather-soled boots. Both men had tied rawhide round their footwear for better grip and less noise.
"It's solid. We can do it. And if the ice is black, better for us."
Cautiously, both stepped out and began to walk gingerly across the ice to the center of the island before them. Both crouched, as if that would make them harder to see. At each step they planted their feet carefully and delicately, as if the ice might shatter beneath them at a sudden shock. Every now and then one or the other would tense, thinking he felt the first shiver that would mean thin ice. Then they plodded on again. Shef had his spear in one hand, the point carefully beaten and filed out once again to needle-sharpness. Karli had taken the wooden sword-scabbard from his belt, frightened to trip over it, and now held sword and scabbard together in both hands, as if it were a balance-pole.
As the island drew nearer both men began to breathe more freely. At the same time the sense of exposure grew on them. The trees ahead were a dark menace, they themselves out on the flat without a vestige of cover. Sense told them that the black night and low clouds covered them, that there was no light in the sky to pick them out. Nevertheless, if they could see the island, surely the island could see them. As they came up to the shore, they both accelerated their pace, darted instantly into the shadow of the trees.
They sat for a while, hearts thumping, waiting for noise of movement or challenge. Nothing came. Only the steady hiss of the wind in the trees.
Shef turned to Karli, muttered, "We'll go round the edge of this island, keeping to the ice by the shore. When we see the next bridge ahead of us we'll decide what to do about it."
For some minutes they shuffled warily round the edge of the island. Once they caught a whiff of wood-smoke and stood stock-still. But the trees remained unbroken, not even a cottager's landing-stage jutting out into the water. They shuffled on.
The bridge to the next island almost caught them by surprise. They shuffled round a small spit of land, and saw it in front of them, not twenty yards off, and plain to see, two tall men leaning on their javelins. Could even hear their muttered conversation. Quickly the two intruders pulled back into shelter.
"What we ought to do," whispered Shef, "is make a detour out to sea, to keep well away from them."
"Don't fancy that," muttered Karli. "I want to keep where the ice is thick."
"If the ice wasn't thick enough, she wouldn't have told us to take it."
"Women are funny. And she could be wrong. Anyway she's not out here with fifty feet of cold water under her."
Shef reflected for a moment. "Let's try this, then. We'll start from here, and go parallel with the bridge, where the water's shallowest and the ice thickest. But we won't walk, we'll crawl. Keep right down, there's not so much for them to see. Anyway, they're watching the path, not the ice."
As they set out, crawling awkwardly in their heavy clothing, beards skimming the ice, Karli began to wonder. If the ice is so thick, why are these Norwegians only guarding the bridges? Why are they guarded at all? Are these people just stupid? Or does the queen...?
His friend was yards in front of him and moving like an angry adder. No time for debate. And the ice seemed thick as ever. Karli crawled quickly behind, trying not to eye the seeming safety of the log-bridge twenty yards off.
As soon as they reached the second island both men crawled to the side away from the bridge, slithered round behind another of the many tiny spurs jutting out from the shore, stood up and bolted once more into the cover of the trees, breathing hard. The cold of the ice had bitten through their layers of wool and leather. They put their weapons down carefully, pulled off the sheepskin mittens Brand had given them, blew on frozen hands. Carefully Shef eased a leather bottle from its belt-sling, pulled out its stopper.
"Winter ale," he muttered. "The last of it."
Each took a long pull. "Tastes like ale," muttered Karli, "but it doesn't feel like it. You can feel your gullet glowing as it goes down, no matter how cold it is. Shame we can't make this stuff where we come from."
Shef nodded, thinking again for a moment of water freezing on ale, of steam leaping from a hot blade. No time to pursue that thought.
"Drottningholm's the next island," he said. "We know the king isn't there, and that no men are allowed to sleep overnight on it. One more crossing..."
"And we're like two cocks in the hen-roost," completed Karli.
"At least we can see what the queen wants from us."
I know what she wants from you, thought Karli, but kept silent. Slowly, they worked their way round the shore of the second island.
The bridge this time was easy to spot, but well away from the point where they caught their first sight of Drottningsholm. They stood in the trees, looking across and calculating the odds. They were on the western point of another small bay, Drottningsholm perhaps a furlong off. The eastern point was another furlong away, and the bridge ran from its tip to the further island.
"Just as easy to start from here as go over near the bridge," said Shef. "And we won't need to crawl. We're far enough away so no-one will see us from the guard-post, and we'll be getting further away all the time."
"All right," said Karli. "I guess if the ice was going to break, it would have broken by now. We've seen no holes in it. It hasn't creaked or anything."
Shef gripped his shoulder, took his spear in both hands, and set out across the flat, black, windswept expanse.
"All right, where is he?" Brand stood in the doorway of the fetid communal hut, glowering down at the eight Englishmen facing him. He had been drinking worriedly in a tavern in the port of Kaupang with Guthmund and their crews, when he had been called away by news that the Way-priests' conclave had ended. After a brief interview with Thorvin he had headed straight for the quarters Shef shared with Karli, now treated as his body-servant. Found both missing, and headed on to the catapulteers' hut.
Faced with an angry man nearer seven feet high than six, the ex-slaves reverted to servile custom. With imperceptible shuffles they moved into a tight group with at its front Osmod and Cwicca, the burliest and most self-confident of them. Their faces took on a look of stony ignorance.
"Where's who?" said Osmod, playing for time.
Brand's enormous fists opened and closed. "Where—is—your—master—Shef?"
"Don't know," said Cwicca. "Ain't he in his quarters?"
Brand took a step forward, murder in his eye, paused as he saw Osmod, once captain of the halberdiers, cast a quick glance towards a rack of weapons. He turned, marched out, slamming the door.
Outside Hund, Shef's childhood friend, now a faithful priest of Ithun, stood patiently in the crusty snow. "They won't talk to me," Brand snarled. "You're English. They know you're his friend. See if you can find out what's up."
Hund stepped into the hut. A murmur of voices, all talking English in the thick Norfolk dialect common to them all. Finally Hund appeared, beckoned Brand once more into the hut.
"They say they don't know for sure," he translated. "But putting one thing and another together, they're fairly sure he got a message of some sort. They suspect that he has gone to visit the queen Ragnhild at Drottningsholm. He has taken Karli with him."
Brand goggled. "Gone to Drottningsholm? But no man's allowed on the island overnight. And the bridges are all guarded."
Cwicca grinned, his gap teeth showing. "That's all right, skipper," he said in the Anglo-Norse pidgin of the Wayman army in England. "We're not so dumb. We know that. If he's gone, he'll have slipped across on the ice, see? We went down and had a little look this afternoon. It's still plenty thick enough, no sign of cracking."
Brand stared at Cwicca and the others, horror evident on his face. He tried to speak, failed, tried again.
"Don't you English fools know anything?" he said in a hoarse whisper. "In the fjords this time of year, the ice doesn't crack. It rots from the bottom up. Fills with water. Then one morning it isn't there any more. It doesn't crack. It just sinks!"
The wind struck them with redoubled force as soon as Shef and Karli were well out on their last stretch of ice, as if they had come out from under the lee of some unseen headland. With it came a whirl of horizontal, driving rain. Shef flinched as the first drops struck his face, expecting stinging hail or ice-storm. Then he put his hand up to the drops that trickled down his face, and wondered. Rain. So the frost had broken. Would they be able to get back, once across? No time to worry about that now. And in the rain they had no need to fear being seen by the bridge-guards.
"Listen," he said to Karli. "I don't like this rain. The ice may crack. We can both swim. The thing to do, if it cracks under us, is keep your head up. Don't get caught under the ice and not know which way to turn. If we're in a hole in the ice, swim to the edge of it and put your weight on the ice. If it cracks, go forward and try again. When we get to somewhere thick enough to bear us, crawl out and keep crawling. And Karli, tuck your sword in your belt again. You may need two hands."
As Karli fumbled to obey, moved by some impulse, Shef looked up at the dark shore still a hundred yards in front, hefted the 'Gungnir' spear in his hand, trotted two paces forward, turned and hurled the spear ahead of him. He saw it streak forward, land, and skid on along the ice, its clatter drowned by the hiss of the rain.
As his foot came down he felt the ice give. Both men stood motionless for a moment, listening for the crack. Nothing. Still ice under their feet.
"Maybe it just came loose from the shore," muttered Karli.
They stepped on, cautiously, planting their feet with utter delicacy. One step. Two.
Cold bit into Shef's boot as he put it down. Water. A puddle on the ice? Water in the other boot. Suddenly the cold was at his knees, his thighs, he felt his vitals retract convulsively. Shef stared round for the break in the ice, but there was nothing there, his feet were still planted solidly but the ice was dropping beneath...
The black water closed over Shef's head and he found himself struggling desperately to stay afloat. There were hands round his neck, clutching from behind, hands like Ivar's, as if Ivar were back from the dead.
Shef turned furiously inside Karli's panic clutch till they were face to face, brought his hands up together inside Karli's embrace, joined them and swung them down edge first on the bridge of Karli's nose. Reared up out of the water and swung again, felt gristle give beneath the blow. Reared up to swing again, felt the strangling clutch release.
"Sorry, all right, I'm all right." Karli let go and began to tread water. Shef realized at once the furious bite of the water. He had swum in cold water often enough, in the fens, for sport or to cross where there was no bridge. This was different. The cold had bitten through every garment he wore, filled them all, was draining the strength from his body with every instant that passed, the cold and the waterlogged wool and leather both combining to drag him down into the mud.
And he had lost any sense of direction. Shef thrust his body out of the water as high as he could manage, twisting his one eye round to see if he could see the island, or the other shore, or ice still solid to swim towards. Nothing. Nothing.
Or there? Was that a deeper black in the night? He caught the shape of Drottningsholm against the sky, seized Karli's shoulder, dragged him in the right direction. Both men began to strike out with the strength of panic, first with a clumsy overarm stroke, then as their sodden clothes pulled them down with a gasping short-armed breast-stroke. Their legs trailed under them. Kick your boots off, thought Shef. They always say, kick your boots off. But mine are laced with rawhide, and anyway. Anyway it's too cold. I have to get out or die.
The first touch of mud under his feet made him try to stand immediately, and his head sank instantly beneath the surface. He pulled himself up, flailed again overarm till he felt mud beneath his belly. Staggered up, felt his feet slide from under him, seized a tree-root on the shore and dragged himself forward and out. From behind came a gasp, feeble splashing. Shef marked the helpful root, turned, plunged back into the water, seized Karli and dragged him by main force the last few yards to shore. With one hand he grabbed the root again, twined the other in Karli's curly hair and shot him forward onto the freezing beach. Both men rose gasping and choking to their knees.
As they did so Shef knew for certain that if they did nothing they would die there of cold, in less time than it would take a careless priest to say a Mass. The water had burned like fire. Now they were out in the air the cold was even worse. Already he had little sensation across his body, the feeling of bitter pain was going, he felt a pleasant relaxation pulling him down.
"Strip," he snarled to Karli. "Get your clothes off. Wring them out."
His own hands fumbled at the toggles of his coat, seemed unable to find them. Karli had somehow got his sword out of his belt and out of his scabbard, was sawing at his own fastenings. He passed it to Shef, who dropped it from numb hands. For moments, a desperate silent struggle in the dark as they peeled off layer after layer. Naked at last, they were flayed by the wind, doubled over. But the rain flurry had gone, the harsh wind dried them in seconds. Shef groped for his tunic, wrung it out, doubled it and wrung it out again, driving out the half-frozen salt slush. As he struggled into it again, for an instant he felt an illusion of comparative warmth.
Pure illusion. They would still die here on the shore before daybreak. But at least a moment to think.
As Shef groped for his breeches, he saw movement in the trees. Not men. Too low down for the queen's guards. Wolf-shapes creeping closer, belly-down, lips already drawn back over snarling teeth. But not wolves. The queen's wolfhounds, bought at fabulous prices from the market in Dublin, and turned loose each night for her safety.
Only the water's edge saved the two men in their first rush, for the men backed into it by some primeval instinct, and the dogs could not come at them from all sides. As the big leader ran silently in, Karli, sword snatched up, swung a violent blow at its head. The edge turned as it connected, still gripped in inexpert hands, and the dog seized Karli's wrist in its jaws.
It had seized a fighter of instant reflex, poor swordsman though he was. In a moment Karli had thrust his left thumb deep into its eye, shaken it off, mad with pain, and thrust the sword into Shef's hands, snarling incoherently. Shef met his first attacker with a barefooted kick in the throat. As it came back for a leap at his groin he snatched the sword, dropped the point, and spitted its heart as it sprang.
The pain-crazed leader had seized another dog in its jaws and the two were rolling over and over in a snarling tangle. Padding round them a fourth animal the size of a calf gathered itself and made a leap for Karli's throat. He met it as he would a rough-and-tumble fighter in the brawls of the Ditmarsh, dropping his head instantly to butt it in the teeth, hooking with both hands at its body, trying to break ribs, rupture liver. The dog fell back, off balance, caught itself and poised for a second spring.
As it did so Shef leaned across and swept off one foreleg at the knee-joint, flashed the point in the muzzle of the dog that was threatening him, cut forehand at the dogfight still going on a yard away and instantly backhand at the last dog springing forward. Don't go for the kill, he thought. Take the easy maim instead. Dogs are safer than men for you only have their jaws to worry about.
One wolfhound was down dead, another hobbling off on three legs. The half-blind leader, further disabled by a slash on the side, had had its throat torn out by the dog it had attacked. That animal was backing off, disconcerted, a low rumble in its throat as warning, but not ready to continue the fight. Only one hound still faced them, teeth showing, lunging a few inches forward and then backing off again as it eyed the menace of the sword-point. Karli, bleeding now from both head and wrist, scrabbled in the water for a rock, dragged one out and hurled it furiously at three feet range. Struck on the shoulder, the dog whuffed indignantly, turned and streaked into the shadows.
The two half-naked men staggered again towards their clothes, groped in the freezing pile of wool and leather, struggled again to wring them out and get them on. As the adrenalin of the fight faded, Shef realized that he had no movement left in his fingers at all. He could use them as hooks, but tying a lace or fastening a belt was beyond him.
Slowly he wrapped his fingers round the sword-hilt again, knelt by the body of the dog he had spitted. Drove the point deep into its belly and sawed feebly downwards. A rank smell of punctured gut and coils of pale intestine pushing their way out. Shef dropped the sword, pushed his frozen hands into the body cavity and groped for the creature's heart.
A dog's body temperature is higher than a human's. The still-hot blood poured over Shef's fingers like liquid fire, seemed to run up his body. He thrust his arms deeper into the body cavity, up to the elbows, wishing he could crawl entirely inside. Karli, seeing what he had done and why, hobbled painfully over and fumblingly followed his example.
As sensation came back, Shef withdrew, pulled on his wet but no longer dripping breeches, fastened the belt, clambered into his water-sodden leather coat. His woolen hat was somewhere in the waters of the fjord, the sheepskin mittens lost in the darkness. Against his warmed hands, his feet felt like blocks of ice. Slice open another dog? Short of absolute necessity, he could not make himself do it. Clumsily he tipped water from his boots, thrust his feet inside, feeling as if the toes might break off at any moment. He made no effort to refasten the cut thongs on boots or coat.
"What do we do now?" asked Karli. He passed Shef the sword, holding on to the wooden scabbard as a makeshift club.
"We came to see the queen," said Shef.
Karli opened his mouth to reply, then closed it. The woman had trapped them, that was obvious. Unless maybe it was her husband all along. He had known deceits like that before. But the queen's hall and its outbuildings were the only shelter on this island. If they did not have shelter and fire they would be dead before dawn. Karli plodded after Shef through the fir-thickets, hoping to stumble on a path. He had hoped for a princess. He would settle now for a friendly drab, any draggletail housemaid with a fire and a blanket in a corner.
In the endmost room of the queen's hall at Drottningsholm, two women sat facing each other from either side of a glowing fire. Each sat straight-backed in a hard wooden chair, each glittered with ornaments, each had the air of a woman rarely refused, and never safely. Other than that they were dissimilar. They had hated each other from the moment of first meeting.
Queen Asa, widow and murderess of King Guthroth, mother of King Halvdan, had centered all her hopes on her boy. But as soon as he grew beyond infancy he had feared and distrusted her. Had she not killed his father? In youth he had pursued women as had his father and in contempt of his mother, in manhood he had turned Viking and spent every summer on campaign, every winter planning the next or consolidating the last. Disappointment had withered Asa, turned her brown, shriveled and cruel.
Queen Ragnhild, wife of King Halvdan, had no liking for her mother-in-law or the son whose bed she occasionally shared. Often she wondered whom she would have chosen for herself, if her father had been spared to arrange marriage for her. Sometimes she wondered if even Haki the one-armed berserk might not have made a better match, mountain-troll though he was. As she came to her full strength and influence she consoled herself when necessary with one or other of the stalwarts of her guard. Her husband insisted that no man might stay overnight on her island, for the sake of his own good name and the legitimacy of their one child. But much could be done in the daytime. Ragnhild was like Asa in only one further respect: she too centered her life on her only son, the boy Harald. If Ragnhild had allowed it, the boy's grandmother might have turned a fraction of her disappointed love from son to grandson. It was one theme where their interests ran together.
"Midnight already," said Ragnhild in the warm silence. "He will not come."
"Maybe he never bothered to try."
"Men do not turn their back on invitations from me. I felt his mind as he stood on the dock. He could no more refuse me than my hounds a bitch in heat."
"You describe yourself well. But you could have done as much without the play-acting. Bitch that you are, you could have sent your hound Stein to cut him down."
"His friends of the Way would have protected him. That would have drawn in Olaf."
"Olaf!" The old queen spat out the word. She owed her life to her stepson's forbearance, and the life of her child. She hated him the more, and the more still because her child did not feel as she did, consistently respected and deferred to his elder half-brother, for all Olaf's name for bad luck and Halvdan's history of conquest.
"And your son, my husband, would have supported his brother," added Ragnhild, twisting the knife she knew was there. "It was better done as I did it. His body will be found in a week's time, when it swells, and men will say what fools the Enzkir are, to walk out on rotten ice."
"You could have left him," suggested Asa, determined to give her daughter-in-law nothing. "He was no risk. A one-eyed stripling from a country far away, from the slavelands. Who would think such a man a risk to a true king like Halvdan? Or even to your puny Harald? You would do better to fear that half-troll Viga-Brand."
"It is not size that makes the king," said Ragnhild. "Or the man."
"You would know," hissed Asa.
Ragnhild smiled contemptuously. "The one-eye had luck," she said. "That was what made him dangerous. But luck lasts only till it meets a stronger luck. The luck that is in my blood, the luck of the Hartings. It is we who will make the One King in the North."
The door behind them creaked open, letting in a blast of freezing air. Both women sprang to their feet, Ragnhild seizing the iron stake she used to summon her thralls. Through the door stumbled two men, one tall, one short. The short one pushed the door closed, dropped its latch, this time pushed home the peg that prevented it being opened from the other side.
Shef pulled himself straight, walked wearily across the room, sword still in hand, forced himself not to drop groveling in front of the blessed glowing embers. His features were barely recognizable, caked with mud and the filth of shore and forest. Blood and slime covered his hands and matted the hair on his forearms. Where his skin showed it was blue with cold, a touch of deadly white on his nose and forehead.
"You sent me a message, lady," he said. "You warned me of the bridge-guards, but you lied about the ice. I met your dogs, too, here and there on the shore. Look, this is their hearts' blood."
Ragnhild raised the iron spike she had snatched up, beat with it on an iron triangle hanging above the fire. As Shef moved forward, sword raised, she stood motionless.
The slave-girls had been asleep, though not yet dismissed, on pallets out of sight. Four of them tumbled through the door that led to the main hall and the other apartments, rubbing their eyes and pulling dresses straight. It was not wise at any time of night to be slow in answering the summons of either queen. As Asa often said, she would be entering her grave-mound soon now, and she still had not chosen who should keep her company in death. The women, young or middle-aged but all with weary careworn faces, lined up hastily, daring only to cast side-glances at the two strange men. Men? Or marbendills from the deep? Queen Ragnhild might press even a marbendill into her service.
"Hot stones into the steam-room," snapped Ragnhild. "More fuel for this fire. Heat water in basins and bring towels. Bring two blankets—no, one blanket for that one and my fine robe of ermine for the English king. And girls—" The women halted in their first obedient scurry. "If I hear that anyone hears of this, I will not ask which one of you told them. There is always a Swedish ship in port, and space on the temple trees at Uppsala."
The women ran out. Ragnhild looked from her full height down at Shef, still standing irresolute in front of her, and then across at Asa.
"There is no arguing with the stronger luck," she said. "Best to join with it."