One King's Way

Chapter Twenty-six

On the evening of the next day, Piruusi took to Pehto the traditional offerings: the block of salt, the sack of strong-smelling half-rancid butter made from reindeer milk, the blood sausage stuffed with lumps of thick fat, the chewed and dressed reindeer hide. As the traditional extra gift he added a pair of soft boots with red thread to draw the tops tight. Pehto inspected the gifts with the expected lack of interest, and refused them twice. The third time he swept them to the side of his tent and called to his aged crone of a wife, more than forty years old already, to come and take them.

“For how many?” he asked.

“For myself and for you. For the stranger with the one eye, and for his companion.”

Pehto considered. It was a brief moment for him, not of power—for there could be no question of refusal—but at least of attention. He decided not to make the most of it. The gifts Piruusi had brought were in fact generous—so generous Pehto knew something must have made him so.

“Come when the sky is dark,” said the shaman.

Piruusi left without further ceremony. What he knew, and what the shaman did not, for all his claims of being able to look far afield and see what was hidden, was that the one-eye, when Piruusi had claimed compensation for his slaughtered reindeer, had stripped a gold ring from his arm and handed it over without further ado. It was true he had taken the reindeer, but he had returned the valuable hides again without argument. Piruusi had hardly ever seen gold before, the yellow iron as his tribe called it, but he was well aware of the value placed on it by the Norse-folk with whom he sometimes traded. For a ring of that weight he could buy everything the tribe owned, except for their reindeer herds.

Yet the stranger was not completely insane. When Piruusi had demanded further compensation for the two men killed by crossbow bolts, the stranger had waved at his own dead and said no more. Piruusi had noticed, too, the savage glare on the face of the very big man with the spiked shield and sword. Wiser not to provoke such, touched by the spirits. In any case, there was the matter of the dead reindeer. Piruusi had decided, tentatively, that the stranger was a mighty shaman of the Norsemen, of a kind he had not met before. He must be able to send himself out in a different shape, and that shape, probably a bear, had killed the reindeer while the man-shape stood in front of him.

They would know more after the seeing-drink. Eagerly, Piruusi went to his tent, called in the youngest of his wives, prepared to pass the time as well as possible till dark.

Shef was making a tour of their makeshift camp, with Hund. The two dead reindeer had vanished within a few hours as the starving men and women first built a fire, then eagerly began to toast strips of the fresh meat over it. Then they recovered themselves enough to heat stones, place them in their wooden pans and start more of the meat stewing its way towards tenderness. In the beginning they had been devouring the meat all but raw. Shef remembered the first rush of intoxication, almost like the effect of the winter wine, as he gulped down the first slice of fresh liver. But then, he reflected, not only had he been dreaming of thick bread and butter the day before, he had begun to wonder why he had not taken the chance of rotten shark while it was on offer.

“How do you think the people are?” asked Shef.

“It is surprising how quickly they recover,” Hund said. “A day and a half ago I was afraid for Udd. He has little strength. I thought we might lose him the way we lost Godsibb, just too weak for a cold night. Now, with three heavy meals inside him, and a night spent by a good fire, he is fit for another few days' travel. One thing I worry about, though. Some of the men are showing old cuts that are opening again—cuts that had healed years before.”

“What causes that?”

“No-one knows. But it comes at the end of the spring, when people have been living on stored food for the longest. All leeches of Ithun know that if you give people fresh green stuff, cabbage or kale, they recover immediately. Garlic and onions are good too. Bread is useless.”

“We are not at the end of spring now, only the start of winter, and that early.”

“True. But for how long were we living on shipboard rations? And what did we eat on Hrafnsey? Much dried meat, dried fish. It is fresh stuff we must have, eaten raw. I think the raw meat, or the half-cooked meat we ate yesterday may have done good. We can try and get some more meat, till we reach the Wayman mines. They will have some store of cabbage or onions there, even if it is pickled.”

Shef nodded. There was something strange in this, as if food were something more than fuel you burnt, the only concern being to get enough of it. Yet he had never heard of cows or sheep or horses, or dogs or wolves come to that, sickening because they had only one thing to eat. He changed the subject.

“Do you know what it is we are to drink with the headman of the Finns tonight?”

“I will know when we see it, or sniff it or taste it. But if it is a seeing-drink, there are not so many things it could be. It might be a weak draught of the henbane that Ragnhild used on her husband, or of the deadly nightshade berry. But I doubt they grow up here in the waste. Most likely—well, we will see. One thing I will say, Shef.”

Hund turned and faced Shef with unusual gravity. “We have known each other a long time, and I know you well. You are a stiff man, who has grown stiffer. Let me tell you, you are in a strange country now, stranger than Hedeby, or Kaupang, or Hrafnsey. They may ask you to do things that you would find demeaning. They mean no harm. If the headman does it, you do it.”

“How about you?”

“I am a leech. It is my place to sit and observe, and see you come to no harm. Take another man to drink with you if that is what they expect. But do what they expect.”

Shef remembered a proverb from their shared youth, that Father Andreas had been accustomed to say. “If you're in Rome, do as the Romans do, you mean?”

“The other way to say it is, ‘if you are with the wolves you must learn to howl.’ ”

A short while later Shef, lance in hand, led Hund and Karli towards the Finn encampment a short quarter-mile from their own. He felt a certain release and anticipation, as if he were going to a drinking-party in Emneth in his youth, not to some strange ritual among people who had just tried to kill him. Examining his feelings, he realized why. It was freedom from the overpowering presence of Cuthred. Obviously there could be no question of taking him among strangers who might provoke him by accident. Karli seemed relieved as well. He stared at each of the Finns who occasionally swept by over the light snow on their skis.

“Some of them must be women,” he remarked finally.

Shef led them to the tent he had heard described, the tent of the sorcerer. The flap was open, a withered old man beckoned them in to where Piruusi the headman already sat. Piruusi seemed irritated at the sight of three men.

“Only two,” he said, holding up two fingers. “Not enough for more.”

“I shall not drink,” said Hund carefully. “I watch only.”

Piruusi did not seem mollified, but he remained silent as the old man waved the others to sit on the skin floor, handed each of them a birchwood frame to support their backs. He began to sing a monotonous chanting song, from time to time shaking a rattle. From somewhere outside the tent a small drum thumped in accompaniment.

“He is calling the spirits to guide us,” said Piruusi. “How many reindeer do you want for that gold ring on other arm? I can give you two, fat ones, though no other man would give you more than one.”

Shef grinned and made a counter-offer of three entire silver pennies for three reindeer, one penny to be returned in exchange for their hides. Realizing with some relief that his guest was not completely insane, Piruusi cackled professionally and tried again.

As they reached a final agreement—ten silver pennies and a gold finger-ring for five reindeer, hides to be returned, and twenty pounds of bird feathers for sleeping bags—Pehto ended his song. With the lack of ceremony which the Finns seemed to use, he reached out of the tent and took a large steaming vessel passed in by the unknown hands that had beat the drum. He dippered out of it in turn four large mugs of hollowed pine and handed one each to Piruusi, Karli and Shef, kept the fourth himself.

“Drink,” he said, in Norse.

Shef passed his mug without words to Hund, who sniffed it carefully, dipped a finger in and licked it. As he did so Piruusi's brow cleared. At last he had realized the function of the third man. He was a taster. Certainly the one-eye was a man of great importance, to have such a functionary.

“It is water in which the fly killer mushroom has been boiled.”

“Is it safe to drink?”

“Safe for you, I think. You are used to these things. I dare say it will do Karli no harm.”

Shef raised the mug politely to his host, and drank deep. Round him the others did the same. Shef observed that it seemed to be the polite thing to drink a third, pause, drink some more, pause again, and finish the draught. The liquid tasted hot, musty, with a faint bitterness: not pleasant, but better than many things Hund had made him swallow. The men sat in silence for a while, drifting into their own thoughts.

Shef felt his soul rise through his mouth and out, through the tent as if it were impalpable, out into the wide air and wheeling like a bird over the dark wood and the great expanse of white moorland that lay all around it. He noted with interest the lake, part-frozen, that lay on the other side of the wood, not far away: Ceolwulf had been right. But while his mind was interested, his soul was not. It darted away, like a flash, winging westwards. As it shot across land and sea, as fast as thought, the light came back into the world. At the place where it hovered, it was still evening, not night. Still autumn, not winter.

It was Hedeby. Shef recognized the mound where he had sat outside the walls and seen the terrible defeat and sacrifice that took place long ago. But the air of peace that hung over the countryside then, when he had sat there, was gone now. No contented plowman, no smoking chimneys. Instead a great camp of tents outside the wall, and lining the walls hundreds of men. It was like the siege of York that Shef had seen, and ended, two years before.

Except for two things. The walls were wood, not the stone of the Rome-folk. And the defenders had no mind to let the walls do all the work for them. Many were outside, skirmishing with the besiegers, fighting it out with sword and spear and battle-axe, exiting from sally-ports and wickets, making their raids, and returning hastily or triumphantly to the stockade.

Yet there was a pattern to the confusion, Shef slowly saw. And as he saw it, the conviction grew on him that he was not seeing the past, or some mythical story, or something that might have been. What he saw was taking place at the same moment as he sat in the Finn's tent. It was a vision, but a vision of the real, one that needed no interpretation.

The besiegers were fighting to set up catapults, mules, by the knoll where Shef had sat. The besieged were trying to hinder them. Not successfully. But then they had only been playing for time. The skirmishers heard a horn blast, drew back. On the walls nearest to the three mules that the besiegers had set up were six, ten, a dozen of the simple stone-lobbing machines that Shef had himself invented, the pull-throwers. They were set up now on platforms broadening the stockade's fighting gangways.

Pull-teams clustered round each one, eight men to a machine, holding the ropes. The long arms were lowered, the thrower-captains loaded rocks into the slings, tugged the arms down. The pullers heaved in unison—not quite in unison, Shef noted professionally, the fault of the unbiddable Norsemen—the arms swept up, the slings lashed round.

A rain of stones landing round the mules, each one ten pounds' weight, coming from the top of a two-hundred-yard arc, enough to batter a helmet in on a skull and the skull into the neck. But only landing round the mules. The trouble with the pull-throwers, as Shef remembered clearly, was that they were easy to aim for line but very hard to adjust for range. The missiles were lobbed, not flung. Fine against a static army, especially one caught in a long line. Against a point target, like trying to lob stones into a bucket thirty yards off.

Shef's vision seemed to sharpen as he watched. He recognized, on the wall, shouting exhortations, the fat but formidable figure of King Hrorik, who had sold him on to the Way. He was wearing a silver helmet and carried a painted shield. And he was shouting at—in the far-off tent in the birch-woods the Shef-body grunted with surprise—shouting at Lulla, who had deserted at the Gula-Thing. So that was who had been paying the high wages for experts.

Lulla, Shef could see, was trying to set up a mule, and Edwi, the other deserter, another one ten yards away. They were having trouble. Unlike the relatively light pull-throwers, their force given by muscle-power, the mules were made of the heaviest timber to take the shock of the throwing-arm's strike. Difficult to get up high on to a fighting-platform, and not easy once you did it. But they had swayed the machines up on sheer-legs, and both the Englishmen were running round, each one trying to do, or to check, what would normally take a full catapult-team of eight.

They were going to be too late. The besiegers… Who were the besiegers? With a feeling of growing doom Shef saw the Raven Banner advancing across the battle-plain, the three Ragnarssons clustered about it. Even at a distance the strange white-surrounded pupils of the Snake-eye seemed to pierce the walls and the defenses, and Shef flinched as the gaze seemed to pass through him. They were calling their men on, rallying them for a charge, because they knew…

Their own mules shot first. Two of them. One had taken a rock from a pull-thrower right on its retainer bolt, and the crew, casualties lying around them, were struggling frantically to free the bent metal. But two was almost enough. One shot low, sent its ball skimming along into the earth-wall at the base of the stockade, where it bounced and flew just over the stockade. The second struck square on, in an instant beat flat a gap three tree-trunks wide. The Ragnarsson stormers surged forward, were stopped and heaved back.

Lulla had got his machine ready, was yelling at King Hrorik, who shouted back and hit him over the shoulders with his sword-flat. Lulla crouched behind the machine, shrieking directions—his crew seemed baffled by them—trying to get line and elevation correct. Then, battered again by the sweating Hrorik, he pulled the release.

And a hit! Shef heard voices cheering, wondered if one was his own. One of the Ragnarsson mules had disintegrated, hit square on by the much more powerful mule-ball, its crew scattered round it, laid low by splinters or the lashing twisted ropes suddenly released.

Edwi's mule shot an instant later. For a moment Shef could not follow the flight, then he realized, seeing the Ragnarsson crews duck their heads in automatic reflex, that it had shot a foot too high, skimming over the crewmen's heads and speeding on to land half a mile over.

And now the Ragnarssons had the range, had got their third mule repaired as well. Shef saw the mule-captains glance at each other, lift arms to show they were ready, drop them together as the signal to shoot. They had learnt that well. Who had taught them? More deserters? Many men had learnt how the machines worked, in Shef's army or Ivar's, or maybe even from their first makers, the black monks of York.

Shef's soul in the sky saw the flying stones trundle through the air as if they flew through treacle. He had time to project their flight, to see where they would strike, to try to gasp out warning. Then time was at the right speed again. He saw the stones smash through the logs, hurl aside the machines they had been aimed at, sweep the whole pile of wood and rope and stones and men off the wall in a shrieking pile. There was Lulla on the ground, looking up, trying to struggle up, his arm broken, while down on top of him, brushed from its base, came the ton-and-a-quarter of his machine. Shef flicked his gaze away as he heard the thud, the snap of shattered ribs. He could not see Edwi. The Ragnarssons were streaming straight for the gap in the wall. King Hrorik was in the center of it, sword drawn, calling to his men to come on. Behind him others tried to rig up a makeshift barricade, the battle was not yet lost…

Shef sprang to his feet in the tent, shouting, “The warriors round Hedeby!” Realized where he was, realized the others were all conscious and watching him. He wiped cold sweat from his brow, muttered, “I saw… I saw a siege. In Denmark.”

Piruusi caught the word “Denmark,” a place he knew was far away, and grinned. Clearly this man was a great shaman of the Norse-folk. His spirit flew wide.

“What did you see?” Shef asked Karli.

His face was full of unusual dismay. He looked down, said in a low voice, “Oh. A girl.”

The Finnish headman caught the word, slapped him on the back, grinning cheerfully. He said something Shef could not catch, said it again. Shef turned inquiringly to Hund.

“He says, do you need to piss?”

Shef realized he did indeed feel a pressure from his bladder. The mug had held at least a pint of the strange drink, and he must have sat in his vision for most of an hour.

“Yes,” he said. “Er, where?”

The old man had brought out another vessel, a larger one, again of hollowed pine. He put it on the ground, made inviting gestures, passed another to Piruusi, who began to struggle out of his laced breeches—no easy job, in cold-weather clothes. Shef looked round, wondered if it was not possible at least to go outside. Perhaps they didn't do that here. Perhaps you could get frostbite leaving the tent much of the year. Untroubled by inhibitions, he followed the lead of his hosts, as did Karli.

The old Finn picked up Piruusi's chamber pot and Shef's mug, dippered the steaming fluid out, held it out to Shef. He recoiled, pulling his hand away. An outburst of angry Finnish from both the Finns. Then old Pehto took Shef's pot and Piruusi's mug, and did the same action for him. Piruusi took it, held it up, and deliberately drank a third.

“Remember what I told you,” said Hund quietly. “ ‘Among the wolves…’ I think this is to show trust. You drink what went through him, he drinks what went through you, you share your visions.” Piruusi clearly caught the sense of what the little leech had said, nodded vigorously.

Shef saw Karli and Pehto exchanging mugs, realized he was committed. Deliberately, he lifted the mug, controlled a reflex to gag at the strong animal smell, drained a third of it. Sat down again, drained another third. Paused ritually, drained it to the dregs.

This time his soul left faster, as if it knew what to do. But though it sped away, the journey this time did not take it to a different climate and a higher sun. It went into the dark. The dark of some poor village; Shef had seen them many times, in Norway, in England, in the Ditmarsh. All much the same, one miry street, a huddle of buildings, houses in the center, on the outskirts, on the edge of the surrounding forest, barns and byres and sties.

He was inside a barn. People there, kneeling in a row on the bare ground. Shef realized from his own upbringing what they were doing. They were taking the Christian communion, the body and blood of their god, who had once been his god. Yet Father Andreas would never have countenanced this miserable procedure, in a barn piled with sacks, only two candles burning. Nor would Shef's stepfather Wulfgar. To him, the Mass was an occasion to count your tenants, be sure all were in place, and woe betide the villager who was not! It was public. This seemed almost secret.

The priest was a thin man whose face seemed to have known much hardship, and Shef did not recognize him. But following him, holding the vessel of wine to follow the makeshift dish of wafers—that was Erkenbert the deacon. Only a deacon, and so not fit to celebrate the Mass. Nevertheless participating. And that was wrong too, for his masters, the monks of York, would also not have let one of theirs participate in such a huddled and tawdry ceremony.

The celebrants were slaves, Shef realized. Or more strictly, thralls. They had the collars round their necks, most of them. All those who did not were women. Poor women, old women. That was the way the Christian church had begun, Shef seemed to remember. Among the slaves of Rome, and the outcasts.

Some of the communionists looked up in fear, hearing heavy feet and loud voices outside. Shef's view shifted. Out there, in the village street, a dozen angry men were approaching, talking loudly to each other. They had thick Swedish accents, like Guthmund's. True Swedes then, from the Swedish heartland.

“Taking my thralls from their work!” shouted one of them.

“Getting the women in there, and who's to know what happens next with their love-feast!”

“We'll teach them their place. And the priestling with them! He should have a collar on by rights.”

The one in the lead rolled a sleeve above a brawny arm. He carried a heavy leather strap. Shef's own back twinged in memory.

As the Swedes came to the door of the temporary church, two shapes moved out from the door-posts. Armored men, with helmets, cheek-flaps. In their hands they carried short pikes, though they had swords belted on as well.

“Have you come to the church to pray?” said one of them. “If you have, you will not need that strap,” said the other.

The Swedes hesitated, began to spread out. They were not armed except for knives, obviously not expecting resistance, but they were big men, angry, used to command, twelve of them, six to one. They might just try a rush.

From somewhere in the night a voice barked an order and round the corner of the barn came a double file of armored men, marching along, to Shef's surprise, with their feet all moving at the same time, a thing he had never seen. The voice barked again and they stopped all at once, again, and they turned to face the Swedes. A pause, no further order, and the front rank stepped forward, one-two-three, halting with their pike-points almost touching the leading Swede's breast. They stood, impassive.

From the rear strolled Bruno, the German Shef had met at Hedeby. As usual he seemed amused, affable. He carried a sheathed sword in one hand, drew it out a few inches, thrust it back.

“You can come into the church, you know,” he said. “We would like you to. But you have to behave, mind. And if you thought you could see who was there and maybe take it out on them later—” His voice hardened. “I wouldn't like that. Someone called Thorgisl did that, not so far away.”

“He was burnt in his house,” said one of the Swedes.

“Yes. Burnt to ashes. But, you know, not one of his household was harmed and all his thralls escaped. It must have been the hand of God.”

Bruno's good cheer vanished suddenly. He threw the sheathed sword on the ground, stepped forward to the leading man, the one still holding the strap.

“When you go home, pig, you will say, ‘Oh, they had weapons and we had not.’ Well, you have a knife, pig, and I have one too.” A flicker, and Bruno was holding a long straight single-edge with a brass hilt. “Oh, and look, you have a strap. So why don't we just strap our wrists together, and I'll teach you to dance!”

Bruno stared up at the big man, started to reach for his arm, face working like Cuthred's. But the big Swede had had enough. He said something no-one could catch, backed away, away down the dark street. The others trailed after him, their voices raised in defiance only at a safe distance. Behind them song pealed suddenly from the barn that was now a church. Shef did not recognize the mangled Latin words or the tune, but the German Ritters straightened even tauter, began to sing as well. Vexilla regis prodeunt… “The battle-standards of the King advance…”

And in a room, not so very far away, an earthly king, with a golden coronet on his long fair plaited hair, listening to a crew of men, richly dressed but carrying strange things, rattles and dried horse penises and polished skulls.

“…no respect for the gods,” they were shouting. “Bad luck for the country. Christians wandering free and never put down. The herring gone and a poor harvest and now the snow earlier than any man has ever known. Act or go the way of foolish King Orm!”

The king raised a hand. “What must I do?”

“Make the great sacrifice. The true sacrifice at Uppsala. Not nine oxen and nine horses and nine dogs, but all the worst of your realm. All the poison. Ninety men and ninety women you must hang on the sacred tree, and more to bleed on the plain outside. And not old broken slaves bought cheap, but the evildoers. Christians, and witches, and warlocks, and Finns, and the cheating priests of the Asgarth Way! Hang them high and earn the gods' favor. Leave them, and we will look again along the Eiriksgata.” The Way of the One King, Shef remembered from Hagbarth. The road every would-be king of the Swedes had to travel, to expose himself to challenge. This one must have traveled it.

“Very well,” the king's voice rumbled. “Now here is what I will do…”

Outside his palace again, Shef saw the bulk of the great heathen temple at Uppsala, rising in jagged layer above layer, dragon-heads at every corner, fantastic carvings from the age of the mythic kings on its door. And outside that, the holy oak tree where the Swedes had come to sacrifice for a thousand years. Things swayed creaking on the branches. Men, women, dogs, even horses. They hung there till they rotted and dropped, eye-sockets empty, bared teeth grinning. Over the whole place lay the holy stench.

And Shef was back in the tent, eye clearing. This time he did not jump up, for the weariness and horror on him. “What you saw?” asked Piruusi. He too looked drawn, as if he had seen something he did not want to, but he was intent as well.

“Death and danger. To me, to you. From the Swedes.”

Piruusi spat on Pehto's floor. “Always danger from the Swedes. If they find us. Maybe you see that too?”

“If I see it close, I will tell you.”

“You need piss again?”

“Not again.”

“Yes again. You great—great spamathr. Drink what went through our spamathr.”

What was that in English, Shef wondered vaguely. A man would be a wicca, a woman a wicce. A cunning one. It rhymed with pitch and flitch, a flitch of bacon. Like a halved human hanging in a smokehouse.

He struggled to his feet again, stood over the bowl.

The last two things he had seen had been “now,” he knew. Not “here” in the sense of by the Finnish wizard's tent, but “here” in the world. His spirit had traveled only in place.

Where he was this time was neither “here” nor “now,” not in the same way. He was in a different world. It felt as if he was underground in some lightless place, but there was glimmering light from somewhere. He seemed to be walking over an immense arching bridge, with a noisy river running below. Walking down the arch now, to something blocking the way. Not a wall. A lattice, really. It was the Grind-wall that blocked the road to Hel. Strange, that “grind” should mean that and also the death of the whales.

There were faces pushed up against the lattice, watching him, faces he did not wish to see. He walked on. As he had feared, the first one was Ragnhild's, twisted and hating, spitting out bitter words at him, shaking the lattice as if to get at him. That lattice would not be moved by any human hand, of dead person or alive. Her breast dripped thick blood.

Beside her was the little boy, eyes wondering. He did not seem to hate or to recognize Shef. He twisted away suddenly from a third figure, reaching out to grasp him, hold him to a skinny bosom. The old queen Asa, a rope round her neck.

What have these to tell me, Shef wondered. That I killed them? I know that.

The ghosts were backing away from the grille, reluctantly and angrily, as if compelled. Someone else was coming, another woman. Shef recognized a worn face from which he had brushed snow two mornings before, Godsibb, who had died unnoticed. Her face was tired still, but less lined than he remembered, more peaceful. She wanted to speak. Her voice was like a bat's squeak, and he bent forward to listen.

“Go on,” it said. “Go on. I am here, in Hel, from following you. I would have been anyway. If I had not followed you I would have been a slave here—a slave to those.” She nodded at the retreating ghosts of the two queens. “I am spared that.”

The voice faded, and the wall, and the bridge, and the darkness. Shef found himself once more sitting in the tent, tears rolling down his cheeks. Though the vision had seemed to take no time to him, he was the last to wake again. The others looked at him, Hund with concern and Karli with fellow-feeling. The two Finns seemed pleased, satisfied, as if his emotion proved him human, of the same flesh as themselves.

Slowly Shef rose, muttered a few words, picked up his lance from by the tent-flap. Frost glinted on its tip, yet the weight of it seemed to steady his nerves. The three walked out into the freezing night and the dark birch-woods.

As they crunched through the snow towards the fire and the sentry's challenge, Shef said to the others, “We must bury Godsibb and the others properly, not burn them or hang them in a tree. We will dig beneath the fires where the ground has been warmed. Take stones from the stream-bed and make a cairn.”

“Does that do the dead any good?” asked Hund.

“I think so.”