He did not take a front-rank place himself, had ordered Agilulf to hang back likewise in the second, parallel column. The charge was spearheaded by the youngest of his Ritters, anxious for glory, afire with devotion to Savior and Emperor. As the armored men strode swiftly up the steps, the Viking swordsmen moved to block them, five men against five men on each of the two flights. Guthmund sub-king of the Swedes headed one blunt wedge, Brand's cousin Styrr the other. As the Lance-knights came on, Styrr faced them, ignoring the arrows that skipped on the stones around him, took his axe in two hands by the handle, held it horizontally with his hands shoulder-width apart. He leapt suddenly through the hoop he had made with his knees up to his chin, held the axe behind him and leapt back again. His men laughed and cheered, Styrr threw the axe gleefully high in the air, caught it as it came glinting down.
The leading Ritter sprinted the last few steps to try to catch the bearded fool while he was in mid-gambol. His sword licked out in a stab from below, aimed at the thigh. Styrr, two steps above, leapt high into the air again, above the blade, came down on his feet and swung with all his force. The Ritter caught it on the shield, as Styrr had known he would, but the axe's upper horn drove through wood and leather and metal and deep into the arm behind. Styrr was ripping back almost before the stroke had landed, too great a follow-through would leave it embedded in a shield. He parried a slash with his axe-handle against the flat of the blade, swung again backhand, saw another gash open up along the young knight's shoulder. A feint, another feint, and the third blow went home between shield and sword, splitting his enemy's breastbone.
Watching critically, Brand nodded in approval. He had spent a long time showing his cousin how to fight with axe against sword, trading the weaker wood handle against the heavier final blow. He had learned well. In a clangor of metal the Vikings heaved forward, pushed their enemies back down the upper steps, fell back again to leave a space between them, encumbered now by the dead and the wounded crawling back to each side.
Bruno looked from one side to the other. Both columns blocked, he saw, and the archers making no impact against armored men well above them. Time to take a hand himself, render his own service to God. He reached across to remove the Holy Lance from its holder, changed his mind and left it where it was. It was God's service he was doing today, perhaps the greatest he had ever done. While the Lance was with him he was invincible. He stepped forward from the massed ranks at the foot of the stair.
Brand recognized him instantly by the breadth of his shoulders, that made his medium height seem squat, ape-like. He felt a shock of cold through his belly, where Ivar's sword had driven through it. Fear, the fear he had not felt in skirmishes against lesser men. But now a real champion had come. Perhaps Styrr was the man to face him. He had the strength of their shared marbendill ancestry, the blood of Barn Troll's-son. He had never felt a serious wound, was young and confident as Brand himself was not.
Bruno went up the stairs like a leopard, taking them two at a time at first, then springing up them, leaping from side to side between the corpses as if he were on flat ground and his armor had no weight. Styrr took two steps down to meet him, his supporters hanging back to let him face the challenge alone. As the Emperor sprang up and up, Styrr whirled his axe and struck for the shield. Too soon, thought Brand, too hurried. He began to force his way through the block of watching Vikings to come to the help of his kinsman.
Bruno took the axe-blow on his shield, but the shield was already slanted, knocking the blow away instead of letting it sink in. Before Styrr could recover Bruno's own stroke was launched, parried with the iron shield-boss, the backhand recover already in motion. For ten heartbeats the axe and sword flashed back and forth, while the shields rang accompaniment. Already Styrr was bleeding from gashes on arm and shin, each time he had beaten the stroke off before it could sever bone, but in moments he would be overpowered. He stepped back to a groan from the Vikings behind him, Brand now almost at their head, the Emperor followed before he could take the breathing-space he needed…
Steffi, busy since dawn with his laboriously-hauled fire-gear and the clay pots and tankards he had rifled from the guard house, flung his first fire-ball at the Emperor's head. Without thought the Emperor blocked it with his shield, it bounced off the leather facing, struck a corpse, rolled harmlessly down the stone steps. Steffi gaped disbelievingly. If he had merely dropped it on the ground it would have shattered, the lit fuse would have caught the contents… Now, when he needed it to shatter, it behaved as if made of iron.
Styrr threw his round shield in the Emperor's face and followed it with a disemboweling stroke from below. His enemy stepped sideways like a dancer on the narrow stairs, let the axe-blow go wide, stabbed the overbalancing giant neatly in the mouth, through teeth and palate and brain, stepped back to steer the falling body past him down the stair with a twist of the wrist.
A moment's silence while both sides took in what they saw, and then a roar as the Lance-knights came on, jostling each other in their eagerness. Beside himself with rage, Brand thrust his way through and swept up “Battle-troll” to avenge his kinsman.
Steffi, ignoring the combats and their unwritten laws of honor, tried again. This time he hurled the clay tankard, its top stuffed with cloth, not at the man but at the stone steps in front of him. The clay shattered, the glowing fuse fell into the mixture of sulphur, saltpeter and oil. A flash and a gout of flame beneath the Emperor's feet. He sprang through it, aimed a blow at Brand, took a return stroke. Suddenly fell back, dropping his sword, leapt back again, beating with gauntleted hands at the flame running up his legs. Brand followed, axe raised and thoughts of drengskapr cast aside. Another tankard burst, this time at his feet, then another and another as Steffi's gang, delighted with their success, showered down the clay firepots at every strip of stone they could see on both flights.
The Lance-knights had the Emperor among them now, were stifling his burning clothes with gloves and bare hands. On the other stair Agilulf, who had come forward like his Emperor to deal with Guthmund, had frankly turned his back and fled, hurling a dozen men in front of him down the stair, panicked by the flame that had already marked him to his grave. The Vikings surged forward, met the flame underfoot themselves, hesitated.
Both sides continued to draw back, the only sound now the roar of flame on stone, an eerie flame that poured black smoke and seemed to burn on nothing. A crossbowman who had spent the morning straightening and filing a damaged quarrel lifted his weapon and sent its last shot deep through shield and body of one of the Lanzenbrüder.
“Put me down,” gasped the Emperor to the men who were hustling him out of bowshot, “put me down, throw water on me, we must try again.”
“No luck this time, Kaiser,” said Tasso the Bavarian. “You got the big bastard but they were ready for us. That's enough for now.”
There was a man pushing his way through the storming-party. One of the knights left to guard the Grail, he would not have left his post except in dire emergency. But he was smiling.
“Erkenbert, I mean His Holiness, says to come to him at once. He has something you want to see. Or someone.”
The numbness in his ankle had gone now, and pain was coming up from it in steady throbs, each beat of his heart seeming to jar the swollen joint. His bare foot was red and puffed. He had held it off the ground till his leg muscles were on the point of failing, but the thought of it touching anything filled him with nausea. He was still trying to stand up and look composed, as a drengr should when facing death, but his body was beginning to tremble with shock and pain and weariness. They would say it was fear. What was it Brand said? “A man should not limp while his legs are the same length.” He would try not to.
The muttering of the guards ceased, and Shef, left leaning against a wall, his hands lashed to a bracket above him, tried to straighten up.
Then the Emperor was there in front of him, Erkenbert at his side.
They had not seen each other since the Brae
thraborg, though each had thought of the other every intervening day. Now they stared, to check their memories, to see what time had done.
The Emperor was hurt too, Shef realized, his harsh bleak face twitching from time to time with an involuntary pulse of pain. He smelled of blood and of burning, and the grooves in his face were deeper. The Emperor saw a man not yet thirty, with the white hair over the temples and the care-lines round the eyes of one twenty years older. Round his missing eyeball the flesh was shrunken, indrawn. He seemed in the last throes of weariness, held up only by the rope round his hands. Each man had spared the other's life, once. Each recognized in the other the marks of decision and responsibility.
“You are an apostate and a rebel against God,” said Bruno.
“Not against God, your God or any other. Only against your Church. No priest is persecuted in England, no Christian harmed for being Christian.”
The Emperor's voice sharpened. “You hid from me the Holy Grail. Tricked it from under my eyes.”
“I found you the Holy Lance. It would never have come to you without me.”
The Emperor seemed unsure what to say. The voice of Erkenbert the fanatic cut across his uncertainty.
“You have made false books and false gospels and sent them out across Christendom!”
“How do you know they are false?”
“You see!” said Erkenbert to his Emperor. “You are minded to forgive him even now, in your kindness. Think of this. Other heretics sin against the Faith, but this man—if man he is—he casts doubts on all faiths together. If he had his way all books would become mere words, to be turned this way and that. Treated like the oaths of a horse-dealer or the promises of a harlot.”
“Books are mere words,” said Shef faintly, his senses beginning to leave him. “Only you cannot ask a writer if he is telling the truth. Cannot look into his eyes.”
“He doubts the Word of God,” said Bruno firmly. “It is the sin against the Holy Ghost. How shall he die, Your Holiness?”
“This is Rome. Let us do as the Romans did and crucify him.”
“Does he deserve Our Savior's death?”
“Saint Peter was crucified upside down, because he was not worthy to imitate his Lord. Nail this one with his hands over his head.”
Just don't touch my foot, thought Shef. A futile thought. They would nail that too. He was putting more and more weight on the rope now, less and less on his one good leg. The sooner he fainted the better.
“Shall we do it where his men can see?” asked a voice somewhere off in the blackness that was closing in.
“No. No. Better that there is no story of this, that he should just disappear. Take him into a garden somewhere. Use the Grail-knights to guard him till he is dead.”
The rope round his wrists was slashed free, he stumbled, came down on his injured foot, and fell headlong. The Emperor looked after him as the knights dragged him away. “He might have been a great warrior for the Lord,” he said.
“Satan was once Lucifer, brightest angel in Heaven,” replied Erkenbert.
His hands were stretched out above him, his feet stretched out below. He had not felt the nail driven through both wrists. As soon as the iron point had touched his shattered ankle he had bitten deep into his lip to keep from screaming, but after the first blow he had felt nothing at all. The cunning soldiers had fixed a tiny ledge below his feet, no more than three inches out from the tree-trunk to which he was fastened, and on this he could rest his weight. Much of his weight. When his one foot would support him no more he would sag again from his wrists, feel the stifling pressure on his ribs. When he fainted the weight would fall again on his ankle, the pain stab him awake once more. As the sun rose towards noon, Shef drifted in and out of consciousness.
The gods were looking down at him from Asgarth, without pity or concern, but with interest and calculation. There was his father Rig, fox-face and cunning eyes. Völund, the lame smith whose place Shef had once taken, once a man but taken to Asgarth for his skills. In front of them all, the one-eyed Othin, who had been Shef's enemy and the supporter of his enemies. The one standing next to him: yes, he could tell the marks of pain and poison on his face, but they seemed smoothed out, half-healed. Of all the faces he could see, Loki's was the one least hostile. Least human, too. Not for nothing was he the father, and the mother also, of the monster-brood. Shef had brought monsters into the world as well.
“He hangs as you once did, father,” said Loki. “You hung for nine days, to gain wisdom. It is too late for him to gain it.”
“He may not gain it,” replied Rig. “He has bred it in others.”
“As you did when you bred from Edda and Amma and Mothir, mother and grandmother and great-grandmother,” said Loki, truthful but sharp-tongued. “You cuckolded their husbands, made a better breed. But this one's seed dies with him. What good is that?”
“Not quite with him, it may be,” said Rig.
“In any case,” growled Völund the hamstrung, inventor of flight, “his true seed is not of the body, Loki. His sons are the slaves become men. Udd the steelmaster and Ordlaf the seaman. Cwicca the kitemaster, who wears my token now. Steffi with the squint who wears yours. You should thank him, Loki. You are freed and growing strong, and you will grow stronger, but you would still be mad beneath the serpent's fangs if he had not given men a reason to believe in you.”
“There will still be no sons of Shef, no Sheafings, as there have been sons of Shield, Shieldings,” said Othin.
Rig said nothing, but Heimdall heard his thought, and the dying man heard it too. Your Shieldings failed when Sigurth died, thought Rig. My son has set the world on the Sheafing path. Not of peace alone, nor war alone, but a path where our sons and daughters will be free to make themselves, and make gods in their own likeness. For good or ill, as they choose.
Maybe Völund will keep a place for me in his smithy, thought Shef, ignoring Rig's silent thought. That would be a better place for me than the kennels of Rig my father.
The vision faded, Shef came back to the world of hot sun and pain. The sun was no longer in his eyes, it was over his head, seeming to burn even through his thick whitened hair. Would they give me water? he wondered. The Roman soldiers gave it to Jesus, I saw them do it. What of the White Christ then? I do not believe in him, but he must be my enemy now.
It was his sometime king, King Edmund of East Anglia, who came to him the next time. They had waited for death together one summer's night ten years before. The king had gone before him, died under the knife and chisel of Ivar and his blood-eagle. He had come to Shef as he too lay in pain from his half-blinding, imagining then that he hung from Hlithskjalf with a spike through his eye, as he hung now in reality spiked through wrists and ankles. But where had the king gone? He had fought and died for his Christian faith, refused to abjure it under torture. If the White Christ could save anyone, surely it would have been him?
The king no longer held his backbone in his hand. He seemed to be looking down from far away, far further than Hlithskjalf, where the Asgarth gods watched the affairs of men with keen interest. Edmund King and Martyr had no such interest, no longer. He had gone elsewhere.
“In the beginning was the Word,” he said, his voice drifting down like ash-seeds on a breeze. “And the Word was with God.” His voice changed. “But the Word was not God. The Word was made by men. Bible, Testament, Talmud, Torah, hadith, Koran, commentary. They are the works of men. It is men who made the works of men into the words of God.”
“Greater is work than the naked word,” replied Shef in his mind, quoting the English proverb.
“That is true. And so you may be forgiven. What you have done may make the words pass away, lose their authority, the authority no-one would grant their authors, mere men as they were. The authority that comes from faith—that may remain. Those who wish to believe in the salvation of the Christians, in the shari'a of Islam, in the Law of the Jews—that is still open to them. But they may not tell people that their w
ords are holy, not to be challenged. Every interpretation may be challenged. You showed your friend Thorvin that. Your friend Svandis showed you that. There is truth in the Word, but not a single truth.”
“Can I believe in your word?” Shef tried to say to the fading figure. “Is there truth in my visions?”
“Ask Farman,” said the king's voice in a shrill receding pipe. “Ask Farman.”
He's by the ships, Shef thought. By the water. Is there any water here? The sun is on the side of my face now. He tried to call to the knights guarding him, for water or for death, but his voice came out only as a rusty croak like a crow's.
The knights were talking, they did not hear him.
“If he does not break them this time, they will break him.”
“He will break them.”
“The Italians are gathering to defend their anti-Pope.”
A bark of laughter. “The Italians!”
“They say an Arab fleet has been sighted…”
“The Greeks will sink it. Where is your faith?”
A silence. The doubtful voice said, “I wish we could fight with the Emperor.”
“We are here to guard the Grail. And this heretic here.”
“Who from?” muttered the doubter.
Shef knew he was near death now, and thirst had ceased to bother him. What did he wish? That he could see Godive again? No, she would live and die happily, as far away from him as King Edmund. That he might see the child he and Svandis would have? If the child was born, with such a mother it needed no father to protect it. He wished he had not struck Cwicca. He wished he could see the Wisdom House again, and what Udd had made in another peaceful summer.
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