One King's Way

Chapter Eight

“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.”