For some time the fleet had been steering for a fishing-boat running easily under its light lateen sail. It had made no attempt to escape them, the word must have got round that the strangers did no harm to the poor, even paid for news. Indeed the boat was heading towards them, had now rounded and lay easily to leeward. Skaldfinn and Solomon were shouting back and forth, calling one of the fishermen on board. Shef waited for a translation to emerge in good time.
It seemed as if he had said something important. Skaldfinn was coming over with a strange expression on his face.
“He says there's a new Pope in Rome, though the old Pope is not dead. More than that: he says the new Pope is a stranger, an alien, a foreigner. He calls him an Anglus. That's when he spat on the deck and Ordlaf hit him.”
“An English Pope?” The word had been heard and was spreading through the crew, with general laughter and derision.
“A little man, not even a priest. The fisherman says he has proclaimed a state of holy war throughout the Empire against all heathen and heretics and unbelievers. Soon, the fisherman says, the Emperor will come with his fleet of fireships and his army of iron men and destroy all those who do not bend the knee to Saint Peter. Then Rome will rule the world.”
Fireships, thought Shef. Maybe they are not so far off after all. Nor is Rome now. He remembered unbidden the map his divine patron had shown him months before: the map that centered on Rome. Rig had told him that at Rome his troubles would cease. He had no wish to go there. Like Guthmund, his thoughts were for home.
“My grandfather Ragnar tried to sack Rome once,” said Svandis. “He sacked the wrong city by mistake, but believed it was Rome because the plunder was so great.”
“If Erkenbert is at Rome preaching holy war and another Crusade, it can only be against us,” said Thorvin slowly. “Better to fight in another man's country than in your own.”
We have not quite three thousand men in the fleet, thought Shef, the Emperor will have many more. But mine are all picked men, crossbows and catapults and flares and even the Greek fire. They want me to fight again. But I have made my peace with Loki, or so I thought. I want to avert Ragnarök, not bring it about.
“Let's hear what Brand has to say,” said Skaldfinn diplomatically.
“All right,” Shef replied. “But keep heading for the fire-mountain, for the Vulcan-isle. We'll anchor off it tonight.”
Shef lay that night in his hammock in the gently-heaving cabin of the Fafnisbane. He felt as he had felt when the decision was taken to come on this journey to the center of the world, that opinion was against him, was pressing on him. He was being manipulated. They wanted him to find and fight the Emperor. He was not going to do it. He was going to go home, set his land in order, wait for fate and death to come to him in their proper season. Svandis, who lay in a hammock touching his, was pregnant with his child, he felt sure. The glow on her face and in her eyes was not merely that of sun and sea-air, it was the glow of new birth. He had seen it on Godive years before. This time he would see the child born and know it was his.
They would try to persuade him otherwise, he knew. Not just men, but gods. He was braced for the dream that would come, and whether it came from the gods, or his own mind, or from the wolf that grew amid the rye, he did not care. The night was his enemy, and he would face it.
The dream began abruptly, directly. A man hurrying through city streets, in the dark. The man was afraid, bitter afraid, and ashamed at the same time. He was afraid of something he had seen done before. He was ashamed not just because he was afraid, but because he had been afraid before, and given in before, and vowed never to do so again—and yet here he was, scuttling through the streets to get into the open country, to lose himself, to change his name. His name was Peter. Peter who had once been Simon.
As he came to the walls of the city tension increased. There was a gate, and inset in the gate a little door, one that could be slipped open without the ponderous process of lifting the great bars and thrusting back the gates on their rollers. The little door was ajar. But where was the sentry? There. Asleep, head thrown back. His spear, the Roman infantry weapon that Shef had held in his hands as the Holy Lance, was propped between his thighs. No one else around, the guard-hut shut and lightless. Creeping forward like a shadow, Peter who had been Simon and longed to be Simon again set hands on the door, inched it open waiting for the betraying creak. None came. He was through, the walls behind him, life and safety ahead of him. Just like me, thought the Shef-mind.
There was a shape in front of him. He had known there would be. A human shape, but round its head a crown of thorns. It moved forward, shedding a pale corpse-light around it. Its eyes looked down on the cringing disciple. “Petre, quo vadis?” it said. Peter, where are you going?
Tell him, the Shef-mind urged. Tell him you're escaping! Tell him he isn't even dead, the whole thing's a mistake, he's alive and well and living with Mary Magdalene in the mountains! Writing a book!
The Peter-figure had fallen back, was returning to the door, shoulders drooped. Going back to the city, to Rome, to arrest and death and crucifixion. He would ask to be crucified upside-down, Shef recalled, as unworthy of the same death as the Savior he had betrayed. That won't work, Shef thought. You can say quo vadis? to me as long as you like.
Another picture, flicked into shape like a screen being thrust in front of the eyes. Another man set on flight, but asleep this time. In his dream he saw, not the Christ-figure of the previous vision but the Peter-figure. But not shamefaced and drooping this time, rather stern, majestic, a grim look in his eyes. He was shouting, though Shef could not hear what he said. In his hand he held a scourge, the monastic disciplina, a whip with many cords and knots tied into every one. He stepped forward, knocked the sleeping man's eidolon down with one bony fist, tore his robe from his back, began to strike again and again with the disciplina, blood springing out as the man rebuked struggled and cried out.
The scene vanished and Shef found himself once more looking into the eyes of his patron. Clever, foxy eyes.
“I don't do that kind of thing,” remarked Rig. “If you want to shirk your duty, go ahead. I will not deceive you into obedience, or beat you into it. I just want you to see what shirking will mean.”
“So show me. You're going to anyway.”
Shef was braced for immediate horror, but it did not come. He saw his own city, his own foundation of Stamford. There was the Wisdom House, there its accumulation of workshops and forges and storehouses. Bigger than he remembered them, older, lichen encrusted on the grey stones. Silently, without explanation, the Wisdom House sprang apart. A flash, a crack that he knew would have been ear-splitting if there had not been some barrier between him and the substance of the dream, a cloud of smoke rising and in the smoke stones arcing up into the sky.
As they came down Shef saw what was going on in the ruins. Soldiers everywhere, wearing white surcoat and red cross: Crusaders, such as King Charles and Pope Nicholas had once brought against him. But these soldiers were not wearing the heavy mail and horsemen's boots of the Frankish knights, or the Emperor's Lanzenritter. They were lightly dressed, moved quickly, carried only long tubes in their hands.
“Freedom for Loki as well as for Thor,” said Rig. “Well and good. But whose side will Loki be on? Or stay on? Naphtha and phosphor, sulphur and saltpeter, alcohol and charcoal. Others besides Steffi can put two and two together. Or one and one and one. In the end Church and Empire united will win. Not in your time. But you will live your life knowing it will happen—and that you could have averted it. I will see to that.”
Shef lay dumb and defiant. “Let me show you some more,” the clever voice continued. “Here is the new city.”
A marvel slowly opened before Shef's closed eyes. A white city, with shining walls, and in the heart of it a cluster of spires reaching towards heaven. On every spire a banner, on every banner a device of holiness: Crossed Keys, Closed Book, Saint Sebastian and his arrows, Saint Lawrence and his gri
diron. Beneath the spires, Shef knew, lay a multitude of men whose duty it was to praise the Lord and study the Bible. It was not his Bible, but the yearning for such a life, of contemplation and study, of peace and tranquility, swept over him like hunger. Tears began to spill from his shut eyelids, at what he did not have.
“Look closer,” said the voice.
In the lecture-rooms stood men reading from their books. The students listened. They wrote nothing. Their duty was to remember. As the lectures finished the lecturers went to a central room, handed over their books. They were counted, checked against a list, placed in an iron chest, the key turned. Safely stored, till next time. In the whole city no man owned a book for himself alone. No man wrote a new word, or thought a new thought. The smiths beat out what they were told to, as their ancestors had done before them. The itch Shef so often felt, to hold a hammer, to beat out an answer for a question in his brain: that itch would remain unappeased for ever.
“It is the Skuld-world,” said Rig. “Where Loki is freed at last to serve the Church, and then cast into ever stricter bonds, till he too withers away from starvation. And the world remains the same, from one eon to the next. Ever-holy, never-changing. Every book become a Bible. Your monument, your legacy.
“And if I fight?” asked Shef. “Will Loki be with me instead? Will he weep for Balder and release his brother from Hel? What will that look like?”
In an instant the limited sight of a single city faded, expanded to become an image of the Nine Worlds of which Middle-earth is only one. Shef could see the dark-elves below the earth and the light-elves above it, could see Bifrost bridge that leads to Asgarth and the Giallar-bridge that takes the souls down to Hel. All was—not dark, but weathered, stained somehow, as if all seen through a dusty glass. Somewhere deep down Shef could hear a massive creaking, a noise of rusty machinery forced open, forced into life.
It was the Grind opening. The Grind-gate that separates the dead from the living, the metal lattice through which Shef had once seen the shapes of the child and the women whose bane he had been. Through which the slave-woman Edtheow had urged him to go on. The Grind was opening for Balder. And not just Balder. Once it was open, Shef knew, the souls might come back. Be born again in their descendants, live the happy lives that had been robbed from them. The slave-girls he had found in the old king's mound, buried alive with their backs broken. The old woman whose death he had once shared, as she strove above all to die unnoticed. Edtheow who had died in the wolf-waste, and the poor slave dying of cancer in the Norse village far from her home. Cuthred. Karli. The child Harold.
As the gate opened something leaked from it. Not light, not color, but something that seemed to wipe the dust away, to restore to the world the light and the color that it should have had. There was a noise inside, a noise of laughter and a great clear voice calling others to share new life with him. Balder the Beautiful. Coming to make the new world, the new world that should always have been, Shef was aware from the corner of one eye that all the Asgarth gods were staring at him, Thor with his red beard and fierce face, Othin with the face like a calving glacier. And standing next to Othin, Loki the traitor-god, the exile-god, now standing once again next to his father. Waiting for his brother to be released from Hel. Released by a victory. And by a sacrifice.
Shef was awake once more and lying in his hammock, tears still wet on his face. He did not come round with the familiar heart-wrenching shock and outcry, rather with one deep indrawn breath. I'll have to do it, he thought. There are too many lives on my soul already. To have them out, to give them another chance. Not much chance for me, though. Will I be released as well? Or am I the sacrifice for the others? He put a hand out, rested it on Svandis's warm hip. That is what I am giving up. In the dark night he knew with complete certainty that no-one would make the sacrifice for him, remembered with wry fellow-feeling the cry he had once heard from Christ on his cross: Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani.
My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?
Chapter Thirty-one
Tolman was signaling frantically from the end of his five-hundred-foot line. Closing warily on Ostia, the port of Rome, in double line abreast, the Wayman fleet had developed the habit of keeping a kite always aloft and floating out to leeward. The hundred yards of extra height that Tolman had at the end of his line increased his horizon by miles, gave them needed reassurance. No one had managed however to work out a way by which Tolman could pass on what he saw, other than by waving colored cloth—white for any sail, blue for land, red for danger. Specifically, for the red galleys and the Greek fire. It was red this time.
The winchmen were hauling him in already, with no need for the order. No need to bring him all the way in, he would go aloft again as soon as he had spoken. Barely fifty feet above the Fafnisbane, the kiteboy hung in the wind, a stiff one-reef breeze with a hint of oncoming chill about it.
“The galleys!” he shouted.
“Where?”
“In the harbor. In a long line, other side of the right-hand harbor-wall. Moored.”
“How many of them?”
“All of them.”
Shef waved a hand, the kitemen reeled out, sent Tolman slanting back to his position. Shef looked round, calculated the distance to the wall that marked the entrance to the harbor of Ostia. Two miles, he thought. They were making seven knots by Ordlaf's log-line. Would that give the galleys time to man the oars, light their braziers, steer to meet him? If every man was ready in place already and they had seen him at the same time as Tolman saw them. He thought not. Shef looked at Hagbarth and Ordlaf waiting for orders in his own ship, looked across at Hardred in the Wada leading the parallel column fifty yards to windward, and pointed firmly to the harbor-mouth. The galleys had caught him by surprise once, in the open sea. Now he would reverse the roles.
As they raced in under sail, the ships shook into their attack formation. The mule-carriers in the lead, in a single file as close as seamanship could make it, the longships to the left of the line and to windward. If Shef had misjudged and the enemy met them with streams of fire, then the Vikings at least ought to be able to turn and escape. But the mules should have done the business before that was necessary.
“Wind Tolman in,” Shef ordered as the harbor-mouth opened up in front of them. Tolman was still pointing firmly to the right, relieving Shef of the fear of sudden attack from an unexpected quarter. Cwicca in the forward mule-emplacement was behind the sights, training his weapon round with every heave of the bows, keeping it fixed on the very lip of the harbor-wall. What was on the other side? A galley already heading for them? If there were, she would be sunk in moments. Her fire could be launched in less than moments. As the wall came up, close enough now to be reached by a stone-throw, Shef left his place by the steering-oar and walked forward to the mule-platform in the prow. If the fire was there, the king must face it first.
As the Fafnisbane's bow nudged through the fifty-yard gap Shef saw Cwicca drop his hand. The release-man jerked the lanyard, the mule-arm smashed up, as always too fast to see, the sling on its end whirling round like a demented bowler. Shef heard a crash of timber, waited for agonizing moments as the Fafnisbane cruised on and brought the inner wall of the harbor into his vision. Then, relief like cold water. The nearest galley was thirty yards away, still moored bow and stern. There were men aboard her, and arrows flicked from her as he watched, zipping into planking, one into a shield hastily thrust in front of him. But no smoke, no roaring of bellows. They had been taken by surprise.
The first galley was already settling by the head, moored as she was, prow and keel broken by the first mule-stone. Shef ran back hastily to the stern platform, pointed out the second ship, ordered Osmod to hold his release till the widening angle gave him a clean shot. As ship after ship of the Wayman fleet poured through the harbor entrance, they swung into a long curving line, headed by Fafnisbane and Wada, and poured a rain of mule-stones on to the galleys lined up as if for target-practice against the wall, j
ust beyond weak arrow-shot.
Shef let them shoot on and on till his enemies were all but kindling wood, prows and sterns dangling from the mooring ropes but between them more smashed planking, with here and there a glint of copper. There was no resistance from the galleys. Shef saw men running from them—astonishingly few, he judged. Such opposition as there was came from Steffi, who seized his king's arm again and again, begging for the stones to stop, for permission to take a party ashore and seize the siphons and fuel-tanks of the enemy. Shef shook him off absently each time like a heifer shrugging off a horsefly. It was beginning to look as if the enemy fleet had simply not been manned. But he would take no risks for Steffi's curiosity.
He raised both hands finally in the “Cease shooting” order, turned to Ordlaf. “We'll moor over there, by the wall, where it's clear. Four ships abreast. Then we can start getting the men and the supplies off. Well, Steffi?”
Steffi's eyes were genuinely full of tears, he was begging now, imploring. “Only twenty men, lord king, twenty men for the time it'll take to moor and unload. That's all I ask. They're sunk now, but there may be something we can salvage, one tank of oil full and not split by those stones, that would do for me.”
A memory came back to Shef of himself on the walls of York, begging Brand in similar style for twenty men to retrieve a catapult, to see how it worked. Brand had refused him, ordered him to join in the sack of the city instead. There had been no sack, but now he was the incurious one, fixed on his own purposes.
“Twenty men,” he agreed. “But have them ready to march as soon as the others.”
Farman was by his side, eyes wide and unblinking as if he saw something far off. “Will you take every man with you?” he asked.
“I will leave a guard on the ships, naturally.”
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