One King's Way thatc-2

by Harry Harrison

Nods and general agreement.

  “Now steam is water.” There was more discussion about this point, but everyone had seen steam rising from damp ground, or sweat turning into steam when it hit a hot iron. “So if we heat beer up till the steam comes off it, we'll get the water out of it just as if it had been frozen. It won't be winter wine. It'll be kind of summer beer.”

  “But it'll be stronger,” said Cwicca, wanting to get the main point straight.

  “Right.”

  The men had got a tub of beer—most of the scanty barley production of Hrafnsey went into brewing rather than bread—put half of it into the largest copper pot they could borrow, and heated it over a gentle fire, careful not to burn the bottom of the pot out. Slowly the thick brew began to bubble, the steam rose off it in the thick-walled, low-roofed brewhouse. A score of men and half a dozen women were jammed in together, the catapult-team and with them the kraki wearers, as they were called, the rescues of the trek across the Upland.

  Udd, presiding, watched carefully, superintending the fire-tenders, beating away attempts at preliminary tasting with his largest beechwood ladle. Finally, watching the level in the pot, he judged that almost half of the beer had been steamed away. Two men lifted it carefully away from the fire, waited for it to cool.

  Udd had learnt some very elementary man-management over the months, enough for him to give the honor of first taste to someone else, and to someone who would value it. He passed over Cwicca and Osmod, the gang's natural leaders, called forward one of the recent rescues, a big silent man whom the freed but still class-conscious English suspected of having been a thane of King Burgred before the Vikings captured and enslaved him.

  “Ceolwulf,” he called out. “I expect you've been used to good stuff. Come and try this.”

  The former thane stepped forward, took the wooden mug held out to him, sniffed the liquid, drank deeply, rolling it round his mouth before swallowing.

  “What does it taste like?” asked Karli anxiously. “Is it as good as the last barrel?”

  Ceolwulf paused to give weight to his words. “What it tastes like,” he said, “is water that's been used for washing old musty grain. Or maybe it's very very thin old porridge.”

  Cwicca seized the mug from him, drank deep in his turn, lowered the mug with an expression of complete disbelief. “You're wrong there, Ceolwulf,” he said. “What this tastes like is gnat's piss.”

  As the other men dipped their mugs into the pot to confirm the judgment, Udd stared open-mouthed at the brew, the fire, the condensing steam on the membrane that covered the glassless window.

  “The strength was there,” he muttered. “It's not there now. It must have gone off in the steam. But it doesn't go off when you freeze drink. The ice and the steam are different. The ice is water. So the steam must be—something else.” Experimentally he put out a finger, ran it along the steam-wet membrane, licked it.

  “So don't keep the brew that's left,” he concluded. “Keep the steam. But how to collect it?” He looked consideringly at the copper pot.

  Weary and anxious, Shef decided to spend an afternoon in the steam-bath. It was a small wooden hut built out on the end of a pier, with a platform beside it overhanging the deep water of the fjord that led down to the Hrafnsey harbor. Every day men lifted hot stones out of the pit where they had been heating overnight and trundled them along to the hut, where they lay glowing for hour after hour. It was a common thing for those who had nothing to do, or who were weary from some task or other, to stroll along and sit in the heat for an hour or so, dropping water on to the stones, and from time to time going out on to the platform for a plunge into the freezing water.

  When Shef stepped in to the dark hut, he realized there was someone already there, sitting on one of the benches. Peering into the gloom, he saw from the light of the opened door that it was Cuthred, sitting not naked, like every other man who went there, but in a pair of ragged woolen drawers. Shef hesitated, went in. He did not know of anyone else who would willingly sit in the dark with Cuthred, but something told him he had nothing to fear. Cuthred did not forget, even in his berserkergang, who had released him from the mill. He had said, also, once he found out how Shef had recognized him, and that Shef had been there at the start of the whole story, the capture of Ragnar, that he knew their fates were twisted.

  After they had sat together in the dark for a while, Shef realized that Cuthred had started to talk, very quietly, and almost to himself. He was talking, it appeared, about Brand.

  “Big fellow, he is,” Cuthred muttered. “But there's nothing special about size. I've known some almost as big, and one or two who were taller. That Scotty I killed, he was seven feet tall, I measured him. Brittle-boned, though. No, it's not the size that gets me about that son of a bitch, he's just not normal. His bones are wrong. Look at his hands, they're twice the size of mine. And his eyes. Over his eyes.”

  A hand reached out, rubbed firmly across Shef's eyebrows, the voice muttered on. “See. Normal people, they have nothing under their eyebrows, just a socket. I haven't felt his eyebrows, can't get close enough, but I've looked carefully. He has a bone ridge there, makes his eyebrows stick out.

  “And his teeth, now.” Again the hand, peeling Shef's lower lip down. “See, most people, nearly everyone, the top set of teeth goes over the lower set. When you bite with your front teeth, it's like scissors, the one sliding over the other. Now his teeth aren't like that. I've watched for a long time, and I reckon his teeth fit edge to edge, they don't slide over each other at all. When he bites, it's like an axe on a block. And his back teeth, they must be real grinders. Something very strange about him. And not just him, quite a lot of them round here. His cousins have it too. But he's the worst.

  “And there's another thing. He's hiding something round here. You know, lord—” for the first time Cuthred acknowledged that he knew who he was talking to. “You know that these days I spend a lot of time rowing round by myself.”

  Shef nodded in the darkness. Cuthred had indeed taken to rowing round in a little two-man dory he had borrowed, or commandeered. There was a general feeling of relief that he was out of the way for as long as he was.

  “Well, I went right round the island first time, and then I went down the coast a bit to the south, and then I went up to the north, not very far, because I started late in the day. But when I got back from that one they were waiting for me at the dock. Brand, and about four of his cousins, all with spears and axes and their armor on, as if they were ready for trouble.

  “Now, that got me mad right off. But I'm not as mad as they think I am. I reckon they'd have liked me to be, that day. But I got out of the boat, and got right up close to Brand where I could get my hands on him if anything started—he knew what I was doing.

  “ ‘Now listen,’ he said, talking very carefully. ‘I mean you no harm, but I want to give you a warning. Go round in your boat. That's all right. Go anywhere you like—round the island, out to the seal-skerries, anywhere to the south. Not north.’

  “ ‘I've just been north,’ I said. ‘No harm in that that I could see.’

  “ ‘You can't have gone very far,’ he said. ‘You just went up to Naestifjorth, that's what they call the next big fjord north of here. That's all right. Most of the time. The next one is Midfjorth. You don't want to go in there.’

  “ ‘And the one after that?’ I asked him, pushing him a bit.

  “Well, he shut his jaw like a wolf-trap. In the end he just said, ‘You don't want to know about that at all. Stay away from it.’ ”

  “That's strange,” said Shef. “After all they go north often enough, all of them, to meet the Finns and collect the Finn-tax. They say no-one really lives north of here, not Norsemen anyway, just the Finns. But they seem to know their way north all right.”

  “But when the ships go north,” Cuthred answered, “they go outside the line of the skerries. I've been asking round, as much as I can, and Martha, she asks the women-folk for me. North of here, on th
e real coast, inside the skerries—that's no-go country. I wonder why. They're hiding something. When I walked off, after they'd warned me, I heard one of Brand's cousins say something to him, trying to calm him down. ‘Let him go,’ he said, ‘he's no loss.’ So he really was trying to warn me, of something they think really is dangerous. But they don't want it talked about just the same.”

  Cuthred's low voice slowly drifted off to a list of other insults and spites that had been put upon him, while he toiled at the mill. Men and women who had mocked him, the bitter cold of the mountain winter, the way he had tried to block the shutter with dirt, the way the shutter kept opening again, faces that had appeared at the window, the way they had rattled the door trying to reach him in the night…

  Relaxing in the heat, Shef's mind slowly lost its incessant turning over of the problems of Bruno and Alfred and Sigurth and Olaf, of the dead Harald and Ragnhild, yes, and Godive too. His head sank back into the corner, against the pine-scented wooden walls, he dropped into an uneasy sleep.

  He was still in the dark, but a different dark—not the warm, comfortably-scented, mildly companionable one he had left, but a place cold and still and smelling of earth and mold. Yet it was not an enclosed place. It was a road, and there was a mount beneath him, carrying him along at an unearthly pace, with a strong swarming movement, as if it had more legs than a horse should.

  The horse was Sleipnir, Shef realized, the eight-legged steed of the father of the gods. But he, the rider whom Shef was accompanying in his dream, was not All-father. He could feel what sort of a person it was, and it was not a god, but a man. A madman, like Cuthred, but without Cuthred's reasons. The main emotion he felt—he felt it all the time—was a furious glee at meeting and overcoming obstacles. His memories were a blur of slashing and slicing and trampling, broken only by the oblivion of drink. Of Othin's mead. The rider of Sleipnir, something told Shef, was Hermoth. It was a name he had met before. The name the champions had shouted in celebration and praise at the end of the long day's fighting at Valhalla. The champion for the day, before the host of Othin, the Einheriar, returned to the hall, their death-wounds magically healed, for an evening of carouse before the next day's contests. Hermoth had won more often than any other hero, more often than Sigurth Fafnisbani, more often than Böthvar Bjarki. So they had chosen him for this exploit, the most vital Othin had ever dispatched a hero on.

  To bring back Balder from the dead. The Shef-mind that observed all this knew a little of the dead god, Balder, had heard a story from Thorvin. Now it came to him not as a story but as a series of flashes of sight. Balder, Othin's son, most beautiful of all the gods. Though he was a male god, he was too beautiful to be called handsome. Shef could see no picture of him, just a blur through Hermoth's mind of brilliant light, that seemed to blaze from the flesh of the god.

  So beautiful was Balder that the gods, fearing ever to lose him, had made all created things take an oath not to harm him. Iron had sworn, and fire, and disease, and terrible old age, and the giant-brood even, unable to resist his beauty, and every fish and snake and animal in the world, and every tree in the wood. One thing had not sworn: the little, weak, sappy mistletoe plant that climbs up the oak-tree. It could do no harm if it wanted to—or so the gods reasoned.

  And once the oath had been taken, Balder was invulnerable, and so the gods, amusing themselves in much the same way as their earthly followers, made sport out of setting up Balder the beautiful as a target and throwing at him every kind of edged and pointed weapon that came to hand. One god could not join in—Hoth, Balder's brother, who was blind. But one day a voice came to him in his blindness and said, would he not like to join in. Yes, he replied, but I am blind. And the voice said, I will set you in the right place and direct your arm. Throw this. And the voice put in his hand a spear made of the mistletoe plant, but hardened with magic arts.

  The voice was Loki's, the trickster of the gods, enemy of gods and men, father of the monster-brood. Hoth took the spear and threw.

  Hermoth's ears were still ringing with the great cry of lamentation that went up when the gods, and then all other created things, realized that Balder was dead, realized because of the way the light went instantly out of the universe, so that all things became mundane and dreary and dull, as they have stayed forever since. In his mind's eye he could still see the great pyre on which Othin had laid his son, in the funeral ship that would take him down to the Hel-world. Saw how even the giants had been bidden to the funeral and had come. Saw the giant-woman Hyrrokkin push the boat out, weeping—Hermoth had been one of the four champions chosen to hold her wolf-steed with viper-reins. Saw, just as the boat was pushed out along the slipway, Othin bend and whisper something in the ear of his dead son.

  What had that word been? He did not know. It was his task, now, to ride to Hel and fetch Balder back.

  The horse was out from its constricting walls now, clattering out on to a great bridge that sprang through the air—what air this could be in the world below, Hermoth did not know. He was passing ghosts now, shades that looked anxiously at him, aware of the clatter of the hooves, unlike their own silent passage. They were insignificant ghosts, pale men and women, children, not ghosts chosen for Valhalla or the groves of Frey. And at the bottom of the bridge there, there were gates.

  As Sleipnir tore towards them they swung slowly shut. Hermoth stooped, whispered encouragement in the ear of his steed.

  A clenching of muscles, a leap so high it seemed they would strike the lower surface of Hel itself. The gates were behind them, the baffled guardians gaping in their track.

  This time it was a wall, a wall that ran up, or so it seemed, to the sky that was not there. Yet there was a crack, a tiny crack, at the top. Too small for Sleipnir, too small for Hermoth. Hermoth did not need to be told that this was magic. He drew rein, cantered up, stopped, dismounted. Beat with his massive knuckles on the stone wall, beat till his knuckles were bloody, ignoring the pain, as he always did.

  A voice from the other side. “Who is that, that does not beat like a pale ghost from Hel?”

  “Hermoth I am, Othin's boy, Othin's errand-rider. I come to speak to Balder.”

  Another voice, and this one Balder's, slow and dragging and weary, as if the mouth were filled with mold. “Go home, Hermoth, and tell them: I may not leave unless the whole world weeps for me. And I know. Just as there was one thing that would harm me, so there is one thing that will not weep. Tell them.” And the voice trailed away as if being dragged down some long and dusty corridor.

  Hermoth did not hesitate or falter, for such was not his nature. He knew certainty when he heard it. And he had no fear of returning with such a discouraging message. He mounted and turned again to ride back. Thought for a moment. Reached inside his tunic, where he had stowed a black cock from Asgarth, one of Othin's own breed.

  He whipped the knife from his belt, slashed the head from the cockerel, threw first the head, and then the body, with the accuracy of the great ones through the crack between wall and sky.

  A moment later he heard a sound through the stone wall, a sound so strong it seemed to make the wall reverberate. A cock crowing. Crowing for dawn, for new life, for resurrection.

  Wondering, Hermoth turned to ride back through Helgate and over the Giallar-bridge that divides the Hel-world from the other eight. He did not know what this meant, but he did not think it would be a surprise to Othin.

  What was it that Othin had whispered to his dead son on the pyre?

  Shef's head jerked upright, conscious that something was going on outside. His body ran with sweat, he had slept too long. For an instant he thought the shouting must mean that at long last, Ragnhild had come. As she had done once before when he slept in the steam-room. Then his ears caught the sound of exultation, delight, not dismay. They were shouting something. What was it? “The wind, the wind?”

  Cuthred was at the door, gripping the handle. The door had stuck, as they often did in the heat, and Shef's heart thumped for an
instant—few worse fates than dying baked in the heat of a steam-bath, but it had been known to happen. Then the door snapped open, and the light and cold air streamed in.

  Cuthred took two paces out and leapt over the railing into the water below. Shef followed him, gasping as the bitter-cold water closed over his head. After his experience on the ice Shef had thought he would never willingly enter cold water again, but steam-baths changed your mind. The two men swam together to the ladder that led out to the platform where they had hung their clothes, climbed out, gaping at the horde of running men who seemed to have appeared from nowhere.

  They were running down to the boats, all of them. Not the sea-going boats, the Walrus and Seamew, but the dories, the rowboats. Hauling out boats Shef had never seen. And there were other boats, pulling into the harbor like demons, with the men of the fjords shouting. All shouting the same word. This time Shef caught it. Not the wind. “The grind! The grind!”

  Shef and Cuthred stared at each other. Down below, at the harbor, Brand saw them slowly rubbing themselves dry. He made a trumpet of his hands, bellowed up to them.

  “We are leaving your men behind. No room in the boats for idiots when the grind comes! You two follow if you want to see something.”

  Then he was off, in a boat, balancing on the thwart with a great lance in his hand.

  Cuthred pointed to the little two-oar boat he had commandeered, tied up ten feet away on the shore. Shef nodded, looked round for his narwhal-hilted sword, remembered that as usual he had left it by his bunk. No time to go for it now, he had the eating-knife strapped to his belt. Cuthred stowed sword and spiked shield as ever in the bottom boards, grabbed the oars, began to pull out into the long fjord that led to the open sea. As they rowed out Shef saw the English catapulteers standing by the machines that now guarded entrance to the harbor. They were shouting “What? What is it?”

  Shef could only shrug helplessly as Cuthred rowed on.