The Hammer and The Cross

bickering over the limp shape of its leader.

Chapter Seven

We cannot afford to wait any longer,“ said Thorvin. ”We must settle this matter for good. And now.“

“The army is divided,” objected Geirulf, the priest of Tyr. “If the men see you too ride away, they will lose heart even more.”

Thorvin brushed the objection aside with an impatient gesture. Round him ran the cords with their holy rowan berries; the spear of Othin stood in the ground beside him next to the burning fire of Loki. Just as the time before, only priests of the Way sat in the sacred circle, with no laymen present. They meant to speak of things no layman should hear.

“That is what we have told ourselves for too long,” replied Thorvin. “Always there is something more important to think of than this central one. We should have solved the riddle long ago, as soon as we began to think the boy Shef might indeed be what he said: the one who will come from the North. We asked the question, we asked his friend, we asked Sigvarth Jarl—who thought he was his father. When we could find no answer we passed to other things.

“But now we must be sure. When he would not wear the pendant, I said, ‘there is still time.’ When he left the army and rode to find his woman, we thought, ‘he is a boy.’ Now he pretends to lead the army and leaves it in disorder. Next time what will he do? We have to know. Is he a child of Othin? And if he is, what will he be to us? Othin Allfather, father of gods and men? Or Othin Bolverk, God of the Hanged, Betrayer of Warriors, who gathers the heroes to himself only for his own purposes?

“Not for nothing is there no priest of Othin with the army, and few within the Way. If that is his birth, we must know. And it may be that is not his birth. There are other gods than Allfather who walk in the world.”

Thorvin looked meaningfully at the crackling fire to his left. “So: let me do what should have been done before. Ride to ask his mother. We know which village she comes from. It is not twenty miles off. If she is still there I will ask her—and if her answer is wrong, then I say we must cast him off before worse befalls us. Remember the warning of Vigleik!”

A long silence followed Thorvin's words. Finally Farman, the priest of Frey, broke it.

“I remember Vigleik's warning, Thorvin. And I too fear the treachery of Othin. Yet I ask you to think that Othin, and his followers, may be as they are for a reason. To keep off worse powers.”

He too looked thoughtfully at the Loki-fire. “As you know, I have seen your former apprentice in the Otherworld, standing in the place of Volund the smith. But I have seen other things in that world. And I can tell you that not far from here there is far worse than your apprentice: one of the brood of Fenris himself, a grandchild of Loki. If you had seen them in the Otherworld, you would never again confuse the two, Othin and Loki, or think that the one might be the other.”

“Very well,” replied Thorvin. “But I ask you, Farman, to think this. If there is a war between two powers in this world, gods and giants, with Othin at the head of one and Loki at the other—how often do we see it even in this world, that as the war goes on, the one side begins to resemble the other?”

Slowly the heads nodded, even, in the end, Geirulf's, then Farman's.

“It is decided,” said Farman. “Go to Emneth. Find the boy's mother and ask her whose son hers is.”

Ingulf the healer, priest of Ithun, spoke for the first time. “A deed of kindness, Thorvin, that may come to good. When you go, take with you the English girl Godive. She has realized in her way what we have. She knows he did not rescue her for love. Only to use her as bait. That is no good thing for anyone to know.”

Shef had been dimly aware, through first the racking cramps and then the paralyzing weakness that succeeded them, of the leaders of his army's factions arguing. At some point Alfred had threatened to draw sword on Brand, an action dismissed like some great dog brushing aside a puppy. He could remember Thorvin pleading passionately for something, some rescue or expedition. But most of the day he had been aware of nothing except hands lifting him, attempts made to get him to drink, hands holding him through the retchings that followed: Ingulf's hands sometimes, then Godive's. Never Hund's. With just a fragment of mind Shef realized that Hund feared his leech-detachment might suffer if he saw too closely what he had done. Now, as the dark came on, he felt recovered, weary, ready to sleep: to wake to action.

But first the sleep must come. It had the nauseous taste about it of Hund's mold-and-carrion draft.

He was in a gully, a rocky defile, in the dark. Slowly he clambered forward, unable to see more than a few feet, lit only by a last pale light in the sky—the sky visible only many yards above his head, where the gully's jagged outline showed black against gray. He moved with agonized care. No stumble, no dislodgement of stone. Or something would be on him. Something no human could fight against.

He had a sword in his hand, gleaming very faintly in the starlight. There was something about the sword: it had a will of its own, a fierce urge. It had already killed its creator and master, and would gladly do so again, even though he was its master now. It tugged at his hand, and from time to time it rang faintly, as if he had knocked it on stone. It seemed to know about the need for stealth, though. The sound would be inaudible to anyone or anything except himself. It was covered, too, by the rushing of the water at the bottom of the gully. The sword was anxious to kill, and ready to keep silent till its chance came.

As he moved into the dream, Shef realized, as he often did, what sort of person he himself was. This time, a man impossibly broad of hip and shoulder, with wrists so thick they bulged round the gold bracelets he wore. Their weight would have dragged a lesser man's arms down. He did not notice them.

The man he was, was frightened. His breath came short, not from the climbing, but from fear. There was a sense in his stomach of emptiness and chill. It was especially frightening to this man, Shef realized, because he had never felt such a feeling before. He did not even understand it, and could not name it. It was bothering him, but not affecting him, because this man did not know it was possible to turn back from an enterprise once begun. He had never done it before; he would never do so till the day he died. Now he was climbing beside the stream, holding his drawn sword carefully, to reach the position he had decided on and to do the thing he had planned, though his heart turned over inside him at the thought of what he must face.

Or not face. Even this man, Sigurth Sigmundsson, whose name would live till the end of the world, knew he could not face what he had to kill.

He came to a place where the gully wall on one side was broken down, falling into a jumble of scree and broken stone, as if some great metal creature had smashed it and rolled it flat so that it could get down to the water. And as he reached it, a sudden overwhelming reek stopped the hero in his tracks, a reek like a solid wall. It stank of dead things, of a battlefield two weeks old in the summer sun—but also of soot, of burning, with some extra tang about it that attacked the nostrils, as if the smell itself would catch fire if someone struck a spark.

It was the smell of the worm. The dragon. Dawn-ravager, venom-blower, the naked spite- creature that crawled on its belly. The legless one.

As the hero found, in the jumble of stone, a crack large enough to take his body and crawled inside it, he realized he had not been too early. For the dragon was not legless, and seemed so only to those who saw it crawling forward from a distance. Through the stone the hero could hear a heavy stumping, as one foot after another groped forward; in between and all the time, the heavy slither of the belly dragging on the ground. The leather belly, if reports were true. They had better be.

The hero tried to lie on his back, then hesitated, changing position rapidly. Now he lay on one side, facing the direction from which the dragon must come, propped on his left elbow, right elbow down and sword across his body. His eyes and the top of his head projected above the track. It would look like another stone, he told himself. The truth was that even this hero could not lie still and wait for the thing to appear above him, or he—even he—would be unmanned. He had to see.

And there it was, the great head silhouetted against the gray like some stone outcrop. But moving; its armored crest and skull-bones like a metal war-machine rotating. The bloated swag body behind it. Some trick of the starlight caught one foot planted on the stone, and the hero stared at it, shocked almost into