One King's Way

Chapter Ten

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.”