The Hammer and The Cross

“Also the Christian place of bliss after death. The word was there before the Christians came. They just borrowed it, gave it a new meaning. Same with Hell. What does hulda mean?” This time he used the Norse word.

“It means to cover, to hide something. Like helian in English.”

“So. Hell is what is covered. What's underground. Simple word, just like heaven. You can put what meaning you like to it after that.

“But your other question: Yes, we do believe there is a place of punishment for your sins after death. Some of us have seen it.”

Thorvin sat silent for a while, as if brooding, unsure how far to speak further. When he broke the silence it was in a half chant, slow and sonorous, like the monks of Ely Minster Shef had heard once, long ago, singing on the vigil of Christmas Eve.

“A hall stands, no sunlight on it,
On Dead Man's Strand: its doors face northward.
From its roof rain poison drops.
Its walls are made of woven serpents.
There men writhe in woe and anguish:
Murder-wolves and men forsworn,
Those who lie to lie with women.“

Thorvin shook his head. “Yes, we believe in punishment for sins. Maybe we have a different idea from the Christians about what is a sin and what is not.”

“Who are ‘we’?”

“It is time I told you. It has come to me several times that you were meant to know.” As they sipped their warm, herb-scented ale in the glow of the dying fire, the camp quietening around them, Thorvin, fingering his amulet, spoke. “This is how it was.”

All this began, he said, many generations before, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago. At that time a great jarl of the Frisians—the people on the North Sea coast opposite England—had been a pagan. But because of the tales that had been told him by missionaries from Frankland and from England, and because of the old kinship felt between his people and the now-Christian English, he had decided to take baptism.

As was the custom, baptism was to take place publicly, in the open air, in a great tank that the missionaries had constructed for all to see. After the jarl Radbod had been immersed and baptized, the nobles of his court were to follow and soon after that the whole earldom, all the Frisians. Earldom, not kingdom, for the Frisians were too proud and independent to allow anyone the title of king.

So the jarl had stepped to the side of the tank, clad in his robes of ermine and scarlet over the white baptismal garment, and put one foot down onto the first step of the tank. He actually had his foot in the water, Thorvin asserted. But then he turned and asked the head of the missionaries—a Frank, whom the Franks called Wulfhramn, or Wolfraven—whether it was true that as soon as he, Radbod, accepted baptism, his ancestors, who now lurked in Hell along with the other damned, would be released and allowed to wait for their descendants' coming in the courts of heaven.

No, said the Wolfraven, they were pagans who had never been baptized, and they could not receive salvation. No salvation except in the Church, reinforcing what he said with the Latin words: Nulla salvatio extra ecclesiam. And for that matter no redemption once in hell. De infernis nulla est redemptio.

But my ancestors, said the jarl Radbod, never had anyone speak to them of baptism. They had not even the chance to refuse it. Why should they be tormented forever for something they knew nothing about?

Such is the will of God, said the Frankish missionary, perhaps shrugging his shoulders. At that Radbod took his foot out of the baptismal tank and declared with oaths that he would never become a Christian. If he had to choose, he said, he would rather live in Hell with his blameless ancestors than go to heaven with saints and bishops who had no sense of what was right. And he began a great persecution of Christians throughout all the jarldom of the Frisians, arousing the fury of the Frankish king.

Thorvin drank deep of the ale, then touched the small hammer that hung about his neck.

“Thus it began,” he said. “Radbod Jarl was a man of great vision. He foresaw that as long as the Christians were the only ones with priests and books and writing, then what they said would come in the end to be accepted. And that is the strength and at the same time the sin of the Christians. They will not accept that anyone else has so much as a splinter of the truth. They will not deal. They will not go halfway. So to defeat them, or even to hold them at arm's length, Radbod decided that the lands of the North must have their own priests and their own tales of what is the truth. That was the foundation of the Way.”

“The Way,” prompted Shef, when Thorvin seemed disinclined to continue.

“That is who we are. We are the priests of the Way. And our duties are threefold, and ever have been since first the Way came to the lands of the North. One is to preach the worship of the old gods, the Aesir: Thor and Othin, Frey and Ull, Tyr and Njorth and Heimdall and Balder. Those who put full faith in these gods carry an amulet like mine, made in the sign of whichever god they love the best: a sword for Tyr, a bow for Ull, a horn for Heimdall. Or a hammer for Thor, such as I wear. Many men carry that sign.

“Our second duty is to support ourselves by some trade, as I support myself by smithcraft. For we are not permitted to be like the priests of the Christ-god, who do no work themselves but take tithes and offerings from those who do, and enrich themselves and their minsters till the land groans beneath their exactions.

“But our third duty is hard to explain. We must take thought for what is coming, what will happen in this world—not the next. The Christian priests, you see, believe that this world is only a resting place on the way to eternity, and that the true duty of mankind is to get through it with as little harm to the soul as possible. They do not believe that this world is in any way important. They are not curious about it. They do not want to know any more about it.

“But we of the Way, we believe that in the end a battle will be joined, so great that no man can conceive of it. Yet it will be fought in this world, and it is the duty of us all to make our side, the side of gods and men, stronger when that day comes.

“So the duty laid on us all, besides practicing our skill or art, is to make that skill or art the better for what we learn. Always we must try to think what we can do that is different, that is new. And the most honored among us are those who can think of a skill or art that is entirely new in itself, that no man has ever heard of or thought of before. I am far from the heights of such men as those. Yet many new things have been learned in the North since the time of Radbod the Jarl.

“Even in the South they have heard of us. In the cities of the Moors, in Cordoba and Cairo and the lands of the blue men, there is talk of the Way and what is happening in the North among the majus, the ‘fire-worshippers’ as they call us. They have sent emissaries to watch and learn.

“But the Christians do not send to us. They are still confident in their single truth. They alone know what is salvation and what is sin.”

“Is it not a sin to make a man a heimnar?” asked Shef.

Thorvin looked up sharply. “That is not a word I have taught you. But I forgot—you know more of many things than I have thought fit to ask you.

“Yes, it is a sin to make a man a heimnar, whatever he has done. It is a work of Loki—the god in whose memory we burn the fire in our enclosures next to the spear of his father Othin. But few of us wear the sign of Othin, and none wear that of Loki.

“To make a man a heimnar. No. That has the mark of the Boneless One about it, whether he did it himself or not. There are more ways than one of defeating the Christians, and Ivar Ragnarsson's way is foolish. It would come to nothing in the end. But there—you have seen already for yourself that I have no love for the creatures and the hirelings of Ivar.

“Now. Go to sleep.” And with that Thorvin swilled down his mug, retired to the sleeping tent, and left Shef to