A roar from the crowd drowned his last words. A line of light showed in the east, the sun poking up over the near-flat horizon of Sjaelland, eastmost of the Danish islands. The Snake-eye turned, threw back his cape, waved to the men in the boathouse above him.
Instantly a creaking of ropes, a simultaneous grunt of effort, fifty men, the picked champions of the Ragnarsson army, throwing their mighty weight on the ropes attached to the spiked rowlocks. Out from the boathouse loomed the dragon-prow of the Snake-eye's own ship, the Frani Ormr itself, the Shining Worm. Grinding forward along the flat on the greased rollers prepared for it, ten tons of weight on a fifty-foot keel made of the stoutest oak-tree in Denmark.
It reached the top of the slipway. The pinned man craned his neck sideways to see his fate looming against the sky, and clamped his mouth shut to avoid the scream welling from inside him. One thing only he could avoid giving his tormentors, and that was the joy of a good omen, a year launched in fear and despair and shrieks of pain.
The men heaved at the ropes together, the prow tipped and began to slide down, thumping over each roller in turn. As it ground down towards him, as the projecting prow reached over him, the sacrifice called out again, meaning it in defiance: “Where is your right, Sigurth? What made you a king?”
The keel struck him accurately in the small of the back, rode over him and crushed down with its immense weight. Involuntarily, the breath pressed from his lungs in a weird cry, turning into a shriek as pain overcame any possible self-control. As the ship roared over him, its haulers running now to keep up, the roller to which he was nailed whirled round. The blood of his crushed heart and lungs spurted up, driven out by the massive rounded keel.
It splashed upwards on to the flaring bow planks above him. The augurs watching intently, crouched low so as not to miss any detail, whooped and whirled their fringed sleeves in delight.
“Blood! Blood on the planks for the sea-king's launch!”
“And a cry! A death-cry for the lord of warriors!”
The ship surged on into the calm water of the Braethraborg fjord. As it did so the sun's disc rose fully above the line of the horizon, sending a long flat ray beneath the haze. Throwing aside his cape, the Snake-eye seized his spear by the butt and lifted it up above the shadow of the boathouse and the slipway. The sun caught it and turned its eighteen-inch triangular blade to fire.
“Red light and a red spear for the new year,” roared the watching army, drowning out the augurs' shrilling.
“What made me a king?” shouted the Snake-eye to the passing spirit. “The blood I have shed, and the blood in my veins! For I am the god-born, the son of Ragnar, the son of Volsi, the seed of the immortals. And the sons of men are logs beneath my keel.”
Behind him his army ran, crew by crew, towards their waiting ships, to take their turn by the stronghold's crowded slipways.
The same chill winter that held fast to England had fallen also on the other side of the channel. In the cold city of Cologne, on this same day, as Alfred was being crowned, eleven men met in a bare unheated room of a great church hundreds of miles to the south of the Braethraborg and its human sacrifice. Five of them wore the purple and white of archbishops' rank—none, as yet, the scarlet of a Cardinal. Slightly behind and to the right of each of the five sat a second man, each of these dressed in the plain black robe of a canon of the Order of Saint Hrodegang. Each was his archbishop's confessor, chaplain and counselor—of no rank, but of immense influence, with the best hope also of succeeding to the dignity of a Prince of the Church.
The eleventh man also wore the black robe, this time of a mere deacon. He looked covertly from side to side at the assembled gathering, recognizing and respecting power, but unsure of his own place at the table. He was Erkenbert, once deacon of the great Minster at York and servant of Archbishop Wulfhere. But the Minster was no more, sacked by the enraged heathen of the North the previous year. And Wulfhere, Archbishop though he remained, was a mere pensioner of his fellow-archbishops, an object of contemptuous charity like his co-Primate of Canterbury. The Church in England was no more: no lands, no rents, no power.
Erkenbert did not know why he had been called to this meeting. He did know that he was in deadly danger. The room was not bare because the great Prince-Archbishop of Cologne could not afford furniture. It was bare because he wished to have no cover for any possible eavesdropper or spy. Words had been said here that would mean death for all present if repeated.
The group had eventually, slowly, cautiously, come to a decision, feeling each other out. Now, the decision made, tension slackened.
“He has to go, then,” repeated Archbishop Gunther, the host of the meeting in Cologne.
A circuit of silent nods around the table.
“His failure is too great to overlook,” confirmed Theutgard of Trier. “Not only did the Crusade he sent against the province of the English meet defeat in battle…”
“Though that itself is a sign of the divine disfavor,” agreed the notoriously pious Hincmar of Rheims.
“…but he allowed a seed to be planted. A seed worse than defeat for one king or another king. A seed of apostasy.”
The word created a momentary silence. All knew what had happened the year before. How under pressure from both the Vikings of the North and his own bishops at home the youthful King Alfred of the West Saxons had made common cause with some pagan sect—called, so they heard, the Way. Had then successively defeated the dreaded Ivar Ragnarsson of the Vikings, followed by Charles the Bald, Christian king of the Franks and deputy of the Pope himself. Now Alfred ruled unchallenged in England, though sharing his dominions with some heathen jarl whose name seemed almost a joke. But it was no joke that in retaliation for the Crusade sent against him by Pope Nicholas Alfred had declared the Church in England out of communion with the Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome itself. Even less of one that he had stripped the Church in England of its lands and wealth, allowing Christ to be preached and served only by those who were prepared to earn their own livings by free offerings, or even—it was said—through supporting themselves by trade.
“For that defeat, and that apostasy, he must go,” repeated Gunther. He looked round the table. “I say, Pope Nicholas must go to God. He is an old man, but not old enough. We must hasten his departure.”
Now that the words had been spoken aloud a silence fell; it was not easy for princes of the Church to talk of killing the Pope. Meinhard, Archbishop of Mainz, a fierce, hard man, spoke in a loud voice. “Have we any way to do that?” he queried The priest to Gunther's right stirred and spoke. “There will be no difficulty. There are men we can trust in the Pope's entourage at Rome. Men who have not forgotten that they are Germans like ourselves. I do not recommend poison. A pillow in the night. When he does not waken his office can be declared vacant without scandal.”
“Good,” said Gunther, “for though I wish his death, I take my oath before God that I wish Pope Nicholas no harm.”
The group looked at him with faint signs of scepticism. All knew that only ten years before Pope Nicholas had deposed Gunther and deprived him of his see as a penalty for disobedience. As he had done also to Theutgard of Trier, while he had further rebuked and overruled even the pious Hincmar over a dispute with a mere bishop.
“He was a great man, who did his duty as he saw it. I do not blame him even for launching King Charles on his ill-fated Crusade. No, there is no harm in Crusades. But he made a mistake. Tell them, Arno,” he added to his confessor. “Tell them our appreciation of the situation.” He sank back, lifting the gold goblet of Rhenish wine on which so much of his archbishopric's revenue depended.
The younger man pulled his stool forward to the table, his sharp face gleaming with enthusiasm beneath close-cropped blond stubble. “Here in Cologne,” he began, “we have made careful study of the arts of war. Not merely on the field of battle itself, but also in its wider context. We try to think not merely like a tacticus”—he used the Latin word, though up til
l then all had spoken the Low German of Saxony and the North—“but like a strategos of the old Greeks. And if we think strategics”—Hincmar at least winced at the strange medley of Greek and Latin—“we see that Pope Nicholas made a critical error.
“He failed to see what we here call the punctum gravissimum, that is, the heavy point, the point of main weight, of an enemy's attack. He did not see at once that the real danger, the real danger to the whole Church, lay not in the schisms of the East, or in the struggles of Pope against Emperor, or in the naval raids of the followers of Mahound, but in the little-known kingdoms of the poor province of Britannia. Because only in Britannia did the Church find more than an enemy: a rival, a supplanter.”
“He is an Easterner,” said Meinhard contemptuously.
“Just so. He thinks that what happens here in the West, here in the North-West of Europe, in Germany and Frankland and the Low Countries, is of minor importance. But we know that here lies destiny. The destiny of the Church. The destiny of the world. I dare to say it, if Pope Nicholas does not: the new chosen people, the only true bulwark against the barbarians.”
He ceased, his fair face already flushing with pride.
“You will find no arguments on that score here, Arno,” Gunther remarked. “So, once Nicholas is dead, he must be replaced. I know”—he raised a hand—“the Cardinals will not elect anyone to Pope who has any more sensible opinion, and we cannot expect to sway the Italians to sense. But we can sway them to nonsense. I think we are all agreed that we will use our revenues and our influence to ensure the election of someone we can count on to be popular with the Romans, well-born among the Italians, and a complete nonentity. I believe he has already chosen his papal name: Adrian II, they tell me.
“More serious is what must be done closer to home. Not only Nicholas must go. King Charles too. He also has been defeated, and by a rabble of peasants.”
“Gone already,” said Hincmar decisively. “His barons will not forgive humiliation. Those who did not share it with him cannot believe that Frankish lancers could be defeated by slingers and bowmen. Those who did are anxious not to share his disgrace. There will be a rope round his neck or a knife in his ribs without us stirring a hand. But who is to replace him?”
“Your pardon,” said Erkenbert quietly. He had been listening with the greatest care, and slowly the conviction had come to him that these men, unlike the pompous and inefficient clerics of the English Church he had served all his life, actually respected intelligence more than rank. Juniors spoke without rebuke. They put forward their own ideas, and had them accepted. Or if they were rejected, it was with reason given, and after careful thought. Among these men, the only sin was to fail in logic, or in imagination. The excitement of abstract thought worked on Erkenbert more than the fumes of the wine in his goblet. He felt that at last he was among equals. Above all, he wished to have them accept him too as an equal:
“I understand Low German, for it is like my own English. But allow me to speak in Latin for the moment. I do not understand how King Charles the Bald of Francia can be replaced. Or what advantage any successor would be to this group. He has two sons, am I correct? Louis and Charles. He had three brothers, Ludwig and Pepin and Lothaire, of whom only Ludwig is still alive, and—is it seven living nephews, Louis and Charles and Lothaire…”
“…and Pepin and Carloman and Ludwig and Charles,” completed Gunther. He laughed briefly. “And what our English friend is too polite to say is that not one of them can be told from another. Charles the Bald. Charles the Fat. Ludwig the Saxon. Pepin the Younger. Which is which and what does it matter? So I will put it this way in his place.
“The seed of the Emperor, the great Charles, Charlemagne himself, has failed. The virtue is gone out of it. As we find a new Pope in Rome, so we must find a new king here. A new king's line.”
The men round the table looked cautiously at each other, less cautiously as each realized that the unthinkable was being thought. Gunther smiled briefly at the effect of his words.
Greatly daring again, Erkenbert spoke. “It is possible. In my own country kings' lines have been deposed. And in yours—did not the great Charlemagne himself come to power through the deeds of his ancestors, who deposed the god-born to whom they had been servants? Deposed them and sheared their hair in public, to show they were no longer holy? It could be done. What is it, after all, that makes a king?”
One man during the whole discussion had not spoken, though he had nodded in assent from time to time: the immensely-respected Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen in the far North, the disciple and successor of Saint Ansgar, Archbishop Rimbert, famous for his personal courage in fanatical missions to and against the pagans of the North. As he stirred, all eyes turned to him.
“You are right, brothers. The line of Charles has failed. And you are wrong. Wrong in many ways. You speak of this and that, of strategy and the punctum gravissimum and the West and the East, and in the world of men what you say may have a meaning.
“But we do not live only in the world of men. I say to you that Pope Nicholas and King Charles had a worse failing than any you have seen. I pray only that we may not fall into it ourselves. I say to you, they did not believe! And without belief, all their weapons and their plans were straw and chaff, to be blown away on the wind of God's displeasure.
“So I will tell you that we do not need a new king, nor a new king's line. No. What we must have now is an Emperor! An Imperator Romanorum. For we, comrades—we Germans are the new Rome. We must have an imperator to mark it.”
The others stared at him in silence, a new vision slowly forming in their minds. It was the blond-cropped Arno, Gunther's counselor, who broke it.
“And how is the new Emperor to be chosen?” he asked cautiously. “And where is such a one to be found?”
“Listen,” said Rimbert, “and I will tell you. And I will tell you also the secret of Charlemagne, the last true Emperor of Rome in the West. I will tell you what it is that makes the true king.”
Chapter Two
The strong smell of sawdust and wood chips filled the air as Shef and his companions, rested now from the long ride from Winchester, strolled down to the keelyard. Although the sun had not long cleared the eastern horizon, hundreds of men were already working—leading up great carts loaded with wood and drawn by patient oxen, clustered round forges, bustling in and out of rope-walks. The noise of hammers and saws came from all directions, mixed with the furious voices of gang foremen: but no whip-cracks, no cries of pain, no iron slave-collars.
Brand whistled slowly and shook his head as he surveyed the scene. Only just released from his sick-bed, he was still carefully watched by his physician, the diminutive Hund. Until now he had seen none of what had been achieved over the long winter. And indeed, even Shef, who had driven the work on in person or by deputy every single day, found it hard to credit. It was as if he had released a torrent of energy rather than creating it. Again and again over the winter he had found his wishes anticipated.
After the fighting had ceased last year he had found himself with the resources and wealth of a kingdom to command. His first and most urgent task had been to ensure the defense of his precarious realm. He issued the orders and his commanders applied themselves eagerly—building war machines and training their users, recruiting troops, mixing his potentially refractory groups of freed slaves, Vikings of the Way, and English thanes performing military service in return for their leases of land. This accomplished he had set himself to his second task; to ensure the royal revenues. The job of recording all details of land and tolls, debts and taxes, till then carried on by custom and memory, he had passed on to the priest Boniface. With instructions to do in all the counties Shef now controlled what he had begun in Norfolk alone. It would take time and skill, but the results had already become visible.
The third task, though, was Shef's alone: and that was to build a navy. If there was one thing that was clear, it was that all the battles of the previous two
years had been fought on English soil and paid for with English lives. The way to ensure defense, Shef had seen, was to stop the attackers, and especially the Vikings outside the Way, in the place where they reigned supreme: at sea. Supported by the accumulated wealth and taxes of East Anglia and East Mercia as well, Shef had started immediately to build a fleet.
He had had much help and experience to draw on. The Vikings of the Way contained many skilled shipwrights, quite ready to pass on their knowledge and skills if properly rewarded. Thorvin and his fellow-priests of the Way, immensely interested, had plunged into the work as if they had asked nothing better all their lives—as indeed was true. Conforming to their code of forever seeking for new knowledge and supporting themselves and their religion by their working skills alone. Smiths, carpenters, hauliers, poured from all over eastern England to the site Shef had chosen for his dock, on the north bank of the Thames. It lay within his own dominions but facing those of King Alfred, poised to guard—or to threaten—both the Channel and the North Sea, a short distance downriver from the commercial port of London, at the tiny hamlet of Creekmouth.
The problem had been direction. Holding all these skilled and experienced men to the plan Shef had formed, but which directly contradicted much of their life-times' collective experience. At first Shef had asked Thorvin to direct the site, but he had refused, saying he must be free to leave at any time if the demands of his faith required it. Then he had thought of Udd, the ex-slave who had, almost single-handed, invented the crossbow and made safe the torsion catapult. Thus—to some eyes—defeating both Ivar Ragnarsson, Champion of the North, and weeks later Charles the Bald, King of the Franks, at what men were coming to call the Battle of Hastings, 866.
Udd had been a disaster, soon replaced. Left to himself it transpired that the little man was only capable of taking an interest in things made of metal. He also could not direct so much as the boy who blew the bellows, from constitutional shyness. He had been removed and set to the much more congenial task of finding out everything that could be discovered about steel.
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