One King's Way

with an adder's speed before Karli could recover. Karli had no shield, no helmet. Shef heard the butcher's chunk of cleaver into bone as sword bit deep into skull. The stocky man from the Ditmarsh dropped his weapon, sprawled at the Snake-eye's feet.

Downslope Cuthred was beating Halvdan to his knees with a furious assault. Ubbi, head slashed from shoulders, lay a few yards from him. Sigurth saw the scene out of the corner of his eye and turned again to Shef.

“I'd better make sure of you, then,” he said, stepping round Karli's body. Shef faced the veteran warrior with knife alone, too close to turn his back and run.

From far above Othin the one-eyed god looked down on his devotee, Sigurth son of Ragnar. “He is a great warrior,” he said ruefully.

“But he has lost the battle,” came the reply from the clever-faced god beside him.

“If it had been a fair match he would have won.”

“Take him for your Einheriar then.”

Othin paused in thought. Should he allow his worshiper one last victory? The words of his son Rig came back to him, and his own words too, the words he had whispered in the ear of his beloved son Balder on the funeral pyre. “Would that some god would bring you back to me, my son.” No god had, no hero had, not even his trusted Hermoth. Maybe they were right. Blood was not the cure, but tears. He would never draw tears from the Snake-eye. Regretfully, he made his decision. “Not for nothing do they call me Bolverk, doer of evil, betrayer of warriors,”. he muttered, heard only by Rig and the all-hearing ears of Heimdall.

He whistled a call to his Valkyriar, who fly unseen over every battlefield, choosing the slain and throwing over them their nets of weakness, paralysis, making weapons turn in the hand and eyes miss the flight of spear or arrow. With his great spear he pointed out the Snake- eye.

Sigurth came up the slight slope like a hunting beast, sword-point low, shield high, his white-rimmed eyes never leaving Shef's face. Shef backed away from him, short knife in hand, open to slash or thrust as soon as Sigurth could close the six bare feet between them. As he backed he felt, suddenly, the ground beneath him at a different angle. They had reached the top of the slope, were starting to cross it. In a few moments they would be among the abandoned catapults, in sight from the Fearnought. If he could delay a hundred heartbeats longer… The same thought came to Sigurth. He came on faster, determined to make sure work before anyone could intervene.

All day the lace on his rawhide shoe had worked looser and looser. Now it trailed in the short grass. As he took the pace forward that would set up the killing thrust, Sigurth trod on the lace, tried to step forward with the foot that was trapped, slipped and stumbled off balance. He dropped his shield-arm, bracing himself for a moment with his left hand on the grass.

Shef, backing away, stepped forward on pure reflex and stabbed forward with the Rogaland knife. It drove home through the beard and under the chin, exactly as it had done with Kjallak. For an instant Sigurth stared up at him, the strange eyes widening in shock. Then they seemed to see something behind Shef's back, a look of mingled recognition and disgust crossed the dying face. The sword lifted as if to stab at some shape, some betrayer in the sky.

Shef twisted the knife savagely once and leaped back, as Sigurth fell face down.

Cuthred was limping up the slope towards him. His face was gashed open, a long unbleeding split, like the wound a butcher makes in long-dead meat. His mail was hacked and torn in a dozen places. It seemed impossible that he could walk, one thigh seemingly half-severed again, the one slashed open by Vigdjarf.

“You got one, I got two,” he remarked. “I avenged King Ella. I will speak well of you to him.” As he stood swaying the crazy light died in his eyes. In a more normal voice he added, “I wish you could bury me whole. Send word to the trolls for me, to Miltastaray. I would have been her man.”

Suddenly blood began to flow from his wounds, as the strange auto-control of berserkergang left him. He sank down, rolled on to his back. When Shef felt for a pulse, there was none. He walked across the blood-stained grass to look to Karli, but without hope. Warriors like the Snake-eye did not miss their stroke. Not unless they were prevented. His guess was right. Karli was stone-dead as well, brains mixed with the blood around him, his cheerful expression faded for ever to one of surprise and dismay. Bad news for Edith, and a score of others. Bad news for Miltastaray.

Shef mechanically retrieved Cuthred's sword, started to trudge back to the ship, shoulders bowed. As he reached the abandoned catapults, to his surprise he saw Bruno the German standing in front of him. Behind him, Shef saw that Hagbarth had noticed as well, was calling men from their work on the Fearnought and directing them over the side. But for the moment they were alone.

“I saw your duel,” said Bruno. “Now you have killed two Ragnarssons. But I don't know how you do it. It seemed that he should kill you easily. Any one of my men could have done it. I doubt you would be any match for me.”

“Why should we be a match?”

“You have something I want. Where is your lance?”

Shef waved over one shoulder. “Back there. What is it to you?”

As if in answer Bruno aimed a blow at him with his long horseman's sword. Shef parried automatically with the sword he had taken from Cuthred, parried again and again, found the sword spinning from his hand and the point of Bruno's resting in the hollow of his throat, exactly where he had stabbed Sigurth the Snake-eye.

“What is it to me?” repeated Bruno. “It is the Holy Lance with which Jesus Christ was slain. By a German centurion. The Lance that shed the Holy Blood.”

Shef remembered the vision he had seen of a crucifixion, the man in the red-crested helmet speaking German words. “Yes,” he said, speaking carefully with the cold point pricking his skin. “I believe you.”

“He who holds it will be the Emperor. True Emperor of the West, successor of Charlemagne, uniter once more of the Roman Empire. The German Roman Empire.”

Shef felt immense pressure bearing down on him, pressure greater than the fear of the sharp steel point at his throat. Twice men had tried to make him release the lance, twice he had resisted them. If he handed it over now he might be condemning the whole world to a new domination, a new tyranny from a new Rome, stronger than the old Rome and the old Pope. If he refused he would die. Had he the right to save his life at such a price? With Karli and Cuthred dead in the grass beside him?

And yet the Lance was not his. So much was clear. It belonged to the Christians. What they would do with it, only their God knew. But they had the right to follow their vision, as he and the Way, he and Thorvin and Vigleik and all the others had the right to follow theirs. Remembering his own vision of the dying Christ, remembering King Edmund of the East Angles and the old woman he and Alfred had met lamenting in the forest-clearing, he felt there was something yet to come from the Cross. If not from the Church. Yet Bruno was no Churchman.

“If the Lance is to make a German Empire,” said Shef stiffly, “it had better be a German who holds it, then. You will find the lance-head by my companion's body there, where Sigurth cut it from its shaft. Only the head is ancient work. The shaft has been many times renewed.”

Bruno seemed, for a moment, nonplused. “You are prepared to give it up? I would not do so, even with a point at my throat.” He thought a moment longer, ignoring the men now running up the hill towards them. “It is true. Your emblem is not the spear, whether of Othin or of the centurion Longinus. What you wear round your neck, as I have told you, is the graduale. It is your destiny to pursue that, as mine was to retrieve the Lance.”

He twitched his blade back, raised it in salute. “I ought to kill you just the same,” he said. “I fear you are a dangerous man, though no swordsman. But it would not be knightly, in cold blood. Farewell, then, King of the North. Remember I was the first to hail you so.”

He ran down the slope, picked something from the bloody grass, kissed it, and sped away towards a line of horses being led towards him from the Braethraborg corrals.

Shef took a crossbow from one of the lightly-armed skogarmenn who came panting