One King's Way thatc-2

by Harry Harrison

  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.”

  Chapter Nine

  Against the startling blue sky the great mountain line stood out in brilliant white. In fold after fold the range tumbled down to the black water at its foot—black only where the outflowing river kept a channel clear. Elsewhere thick ice still covered the shallow water of the bay, joining the mainland to the islands scattered along the shore. A thin powder of fresh snow covered the trees on the islands, and the ice between them. Where wind had swept the snow away, the ice lay old and transparent, still feet in thickness, but taking its color from the black depths beneath.

  In the prow of the longboat, Shef and Karli watched, awestruck. In the land they had left, spring was far advanced, the buds out and the birds singing and nesting. Here there was no fresh green, only the dark gloom of the conifers, and the bright sun seemed only to be thrown back by the hard snow. The longboat was moving slowly now, under oars alone and they at no more than the paddling stroke. Hagbarth had furled sail in the night, as soon as he felt the loom of the land on either side, as soon as he knew they were within the deep bay that ran up in the end to the town of Oslo. Now, from time to time, the crew heard the sharp rap-rap of ice chunks striking the boat's fragile planks. Standing above them on the very gunwale itself, holding on with one hand as he leaned outboard, a crewman called sharp directions to the helmsman at the steering-oar, directing him away from the greater ice-lumps, the small islands that came drifting down the current from the land.

  “Not much risk from ice this late in the spring,” Hagbarth had said, the first time his southern passengers had jumped to their feet in alarm at the knocking beneath their feet. “But we won't risk it just the same.”

  Shef had been profoundly glad, and Karli even gladder, of the reduction in speed, and not just out of fear of what awaited them at journey's end. Neither man, not even Shef, had made a fast passage in a Viking longboat before. It was an experience very different—Shef now realized—from the stately waddle of the Norfolk up the Dutch coast, the sickening roll and lurch of sailing in a Yorkshire fishing-coble. The Viking boat, Hagbarth's own Aurvendill, had seemed to slide over the water like a great, supple snake. Each wave as it came towards them rose far above the gunwales, looked down on the undecked hull, seemed certain to crash down on it in a swamping torrent. Then the prow rose, swarmed up, seemed like an intelligent creature to look over the other side and begin its downward curve while the stern-post was still rising. After a while Shef, his nerve starting to return, found Karli sitting staring in horror at the lower planks below the waterline. They shifted continually, moving away from the boat's ribs and then moving back again, held only by lashings of twisted root or sinew. Often the gaps were large enough for a man to put foot, hand, or even head through. At such moments there seemed to be nothing except habit holding the side-planks together at all. For a while after that both Karli and Shef sat together, convinced deep in their bellies that if they slackened the tension of their watch, the charm would break and the sea come rushing through.

  As for anything striking the egg-shell's sides, the thought was unbearable. Shef had once asked Hagbarth if Norsemen ever carried horses or oxen from place to place, and if so, how they prevented the beasts from rushing to and fro in panic. Hagbarth had laughed. “If you put a horse in my Aurvendill,” he said, “I have always found that any of them, even the fiercest stallion, takes one good look round him and then stands very, very still.” Shef could see why.

  And yet they had had to hurry, ice or no ice, running under full sail all the time during daylight, moving at a speed only a little under a horse's full gallop or a man's all-out sprint, as fast as a young man would go if he had nothing to carry and no more than a quarter of a mile to cover. For hour after hour. In the twelve hours of daylight on their first day Shef thought they might have traveled more than a hundred and fifty miles, though it was true they had tacked continually, making it less than that in a straight line. In the two nights and two days of their voyage, maybe four hundred all told—four hundred miles to bring them from the spring of flatland Denmark to the settled chill of Norway and the mountains. />
  All the way Hagbarth, explaining their haste, had commented on the immediate dangers on one or either side. Ships of King Hrorik had convoyed them up the South Jutland coast by night and through the Great Belt, the gap of water between the Danish mainland and Othin's own island of Fyn. Not too much risk there, Hagbarth had said. Hrorik has an arrangement with King Gamli of Fyn. But then they had swerved sharply out to sea with dawn and the turn-back of Hrorik's escorts. King Arnodd of Aalborg, Hagbarth had explained. Not hostile, does business like anyone else. But part of his business is robbing ships. Anyone without his leave, not related to him or his jarls, or just too weak to resist. Anyway, he feels threatened now: has to keep up a reputation.

  Who's threatening him, Shef had asked, wondering already if the sea-legs he had acquired weeks before would keep off sea-sickness in the strange swoopings of the Aurvendill. Hagbarth had spat carefully past Karli's vomiting form and jerked a thumb to starboard, to the dim shapes of Fyn and Sjaelland beyond.

  “The real bastards,” he had said briefly. “Your friends. The Ragnarssons. Their base is over there, the Braethraborg, and the Emperor of the Greeks himself wouldn't want to meet them at sea. Don't worry,” he had added. “As far as we know the Snake-eye took the whole lot south to meet you, and they haven't come back yet. If they have, they'll be coming round the point over there on the backboard right about now. Unless they've strung out to make a nice long line from coast to coast just ahead.”

  Even after they had cleared the menace of the Skaggerak and were sailing, wind abeam, ten miles off the long coast of the South Swedes, Hagbarth's conversation was a long list of human hazards: King Teit of the East Gauts, King Vifil of the West Gauts, reports of independent pirates off the Weder islands, rumors of a fleet of broken men out of the Small Lands trying their luck up towards Norway, King Hjalti of the Farmsteads, and always—or so Hagbarth had said, though by this time Shef was suspecting him of deliberate terrorization—the possibility of the fearsome kings of the West-fjords taking a change from their usual raiding-grounds in the Atlantic islands and against the Irish, and coming over to vex the Swedes, whom they hated.

  “In your country,” Karli had asked once, pale with sickness and terror, “can anyone call himself a king?”

  “Not anyone,” Hagbarth had said with all seriousness. “It helps if you can call yourself one of the god-born, and there are plenty of people to check that. Us for a start, we priests of the Way. And there are some who are too proud to lie about their ancestry, like the Hlathir jarls—if they are descended from anyone it must be the trolls.

  “But as a rule, if you can raise a fleet, say sixty ships or so, and you can find yourself a base on land, even if it is only a few square miles like the Braethraborg—the Ragnarssons took that from old King Kolfinn of Sjaelland, and defied him to take it back—then you can call yourself a king. Sea-king is what they usually say.”

  “And how do you get to be a king of somewhere? Like the Farmsteads or the Small Lands or the Midden-heaps or the Further Cow-byre,” asked Shef, temper strained by fear.

  “Get a Thing to accept you,” said Hagbarth briefly. “Easiest way to do that is to stand in the clearing and say you're king and you're going to tax everybody. If you get out of the clearing, you're probably a king. God-born or no.”

  The tension had only slackened at dawn that day when Hagbarth, looking carefully round him at the first blink of dawn, had pronounced them within the waters of the Norwegian kings, Olaf and Halvdan.

  “Kings of Norway?” Shef had asked.

  “Kings of the Westfold and the Eastfold,” Hagbarth replied. “One each, but co-kings of both. And don't look like that, what about you and Alfred? You're not even brothers. Half-brothers, that is.”

  Further argument had been cut out by the appearance from either side of heavily-manned warships, each half the size again of the Aurvendill, long pennants flying. Shef knew enough of the sea to recognize them as coast-defense craft only, unfit for a deep-sea passage or a hard gale because of their riveted keels, but capable of jamming in a hundred warriors each for a short while, untroubled by the need to carry rations and water. As the ice narrowed in from either side they closed up, eventually falling into line astern, each ship paddling gently into the whirlpools made by the one ahead, as the oars dipped and pulled in the dark water.

  Ahead Shef could see what looked like a substantial township, many log houses with plumes of smoke rising from all of them. At its center rose a large hall, horns jutting from ridge and gables. Further away, outside the town but below the mountains, he could see with his one sharp eye a collection of larger buildings, some of them strangely shaped, but all half-hidden by the firs. Where the town ran down to the shore, dozens of boats of all sizes lay at jetties. And, at the largest and longest of the jetties, he could pick out what seemed to be a welcoming committee. Or a group of jailers. Shef looked longingly at the islands scattered thickly to the left. The ice was barely fifty yards away now. Then a few hundred yards more to the land, and on every island plumes of smoke to show shelter and habitation.

  All ruled by the co-kings, of whichever Fold it was. If your heart did not stop beating as soon as you touched the freezing water. If you did not freeze solid as soon as you climbed out of it.

  Shef belatedly realized that he cut hardly a kingly figure himself. He had started the trip in exactly the same tunic, breeches and leather shoes that he had worn continually since he had struggled ashore on the Ditmarsh two weeks before: bemired, salt-stained, bloodstained from his own blood and the Viking he had killed on the sandbanks, with a fortnight's accumulation of tar-patches, spilt broth, and sweat on top. It was no worse than what he had worn most of his boyhood in the Norfolk marsh, but Vikings, he had noticed, were cleanlier than Englishmen, or at least than English churls. Only Karli sat next to him when they came to eat. As they sailed further north and the sea-wind came keener, Hagbarth had tossed each of them a thick blanket, which they now hugged round them.

  By contrast to their squalor, Shef could pick out on the jetty scarlet capes, gleaming armor, polished shields reflecting the sun, and in a solid body at the water's edge, the shining white clothes of the priests of the Way, competing with the snow behind. Shef ran a hand ineffectually through his hair, dislodging a louse, and turned for advice to Hagbarth. Then turned back again, with sudden incredulous joy.

  One figure over there by the shore stood out even among the tall shapes around him. Surely—yes, that must be Brand. Scanning quickly along the jetty, Shef realized that there were other men there in a little knot, smaller than the rest as Brand was bigger. And one of them showed up in a bright flash of scarlet—it was the silk tunic the ex-slave Cwicca wore for great occasions. Now that he knew what he was looking for, Shef could pick them out readily. Brand there well to the fore, Guthmund the Greedy standing beside him, and in a self-effacing clump to the rear Cwicca and Osmod and a gang of their mates. Shef looked again at the white tunics and cloaks of the priests of the Way, standing at the very edge of the jetty. Yes, Thorvin was there among them, and Skaldfinn too, and Hund: outnumbered, though, by a cluster of other priests, one formidable figure near the front almost rivaling Brand even in size. And there was another group there as well, standing separate both from the priests and from Brand and his friends. A puff of wind from the mountains caught the pennants held by standard-bearers, and for a moment Shef saw the Hammer of the Way, white on black, and from the group he could not identify a blue streamer with a strange design he did not recognize. He looked a mute question at Hagbarth.

  “It is the Gripping Beast,” said Hagbarth, dropping his voice, the jetty now only fifty yards away.

  “Of King Halvdan? Or King Olaf?”

  “Neither,” said Hagbarth with a touch of grimness. “Of Queen Ragnhild.”

  The crewmen tossed oars, dropped them clattering into the bottom of the boat. Ropes flew out from prow and stern, were caught and snubbed to tree-trunk bollards. The Aurvendill settled gently alongside
the jetty. The gangplank was thrown across.

  Shef hesitated, conscious of his own appearance. Facing him, the big unknown priest looked down, what seemed to be scorn and mistrust on his face. Shef remembered the last time he had stood face to face with an enemy on a gangplank: when he had killed Ivar, Champion of the North. No-one else could ever say that. Shedding his blanket, and snatching the ‘Gungnir’ spear from Karli's ready hand, he stepped on to the gangplank, strode across it, meaning to force the priest to stand back.

  As he reached the other end an arm like the base of a mast quietly thrust the priest aside, and Brand shoved forward, holding out an immense fur cape, made from the skin of a white bear, its brooch and chain of gold. In an instant he had wrapped it round Shef's shoulders, fastened the links. Then he fell to one knee, his face still only just below Shef's own level.

  “Hail, King of the East and Middle Angles,” he called. On the signal, Cwicca and his mates, and the crews of the Walrus and the Seamew further behind, cheered and clashed their weapons.

  Brand, who had never knelt in his life before, winked one staring eye, and jerked his head infinitesimally at the others on the jetty. Shef caught the hint, turned to Hagbarth, who had followed him up the gangplank.

  “You may present your colleagues,” he said imperiously.

  “Why, this is—ah—King Shef, may I present to you Valgrim the Wise, Head of the College of the Way and priest of Othin? Valgrim, this is…”