One King's Way

the men in the boathouse above him.

Instantly a creaking of ropes, a simultaneous grunt of effort, fifty men, the picked champions of the Ragnarsson army, throwing their mighty weight on the ropes attached to the spiked rowlocks. Out from the boathouse loomed the dragon-prow of the Snake-eye's own ship, the Frani Ormr itself, the Shining Worm. Grinding forward along the flat on the greased rollers prepared for it, ten tons of weight on a fifty-foot keel made of the stoutest oak-tree in Denmark.

It reached the top of the slipway. The pinned man craned his neck sideways to see his fate looming against the sky, and clamped his mouth shut to avoid the scream welling from inside him. One thing only he could avoid giving his tormentors, and that was the joy of a good omen, a year launched in fear and despair and shrieks of pain.

The men heaved at the ropes together, the prow tipped and began to slide down, thumping over each roller in turn. As it ground down towards him, as the projecting prow reached over him, the sacrifice called out again, meaning it in defiance: “Where is your right, Sigurth? What made you a king?”

The keel struck him accurately in the small of the back, rode over him and crushed down with its immense weight. Involuntarily, the breath pressed from his lungs in a weird cry, turning into a shriek as pain overcame any possible self-control. As the ship roared over him, its haulers running now to keep up, the roller to which he was nailed whirled round. The blood of his crushed heart and lungs spurted up, driven out by the massive rounded keel.

It splashed upwards on to the flaring bow planks above him. The augurs watching intently, crouched low so as not to miss any detail, whooped and whirled their fringed sleeves in delight.

“Blood! Blood on the planks for the sea-king's launch!”

“And a cry! A death-cry for the lord of warriors!”

The ship surged on into the calm water of the Braethraborg fjord. As it did so the sun's disc rose fully above the line of the horizon, sending a long flat ray beneath the haze. Throwing aside his cape, the Snake-eye seized his spear by the butt and lifted it up above the shadow of the boathouse and the slipway. The sun caught it and turned its eighteen-inch triangular blade to fire.

“Red light and a red spear for the new year,” roared the watching army, drowning out the augurs' shrilling.

“What made me a king?” shouted the Snake-eye to the passing spirit. “The blood I have shed, and the blood in my veins! For I am the god-born, the son of Ragnar, the son of Volsi, the seed of the immortals. And the sons of men are logs beneath my keel.”

Behind him his army ran, crew by crew, towards their waiting ships, to take their turn by the stronghold's crowded slipways.

The same chill winter that held fast to England had fallen also on the other side of the channel. In the cold city of Cologne, on this same day, as Alfred was being crowned, eleven men met in a bare unheated room of a great church hundreds of miles to the south of the Braethraborg and its human sacrifice. Five of them wore the purple and white of archbishops' rank—none, as yet, the scarlet of a Cardinal. Slightly behind and to the right of each of the five sat a second man, each of these dressed in the plain black robe of a canon of the Order of Saint Hrodegang. Each was his archbishop's confessor, chaplain and counselor—of no rank, but of immense influence, with the best hope also of succeeding to the dignity of a Prince of the Church.

The eleventh man also wore the black robe, this time of a mere deacon. He looked covertly from side to side at the assembled gathering, recognizing and respecting power, but unsure of his own place at the table. He was Erkenbert, once deacon of the great Minster at York and servant of Archbishop Wulfhere. But the Minster was no more, sacked by the enraged heathen of the North the previous year. And Wulfhere, Archbishop though he remained, was a mere pensioner of his fellow-archbishops, an object of contemptuous charity like his co-Primate of Canterbury. The Church in England was no more: no lands, no rents, no power.

Erkenbert did not know why he had been called to this meeting. He did know that he was in deadly danger. The room was not bare because the great Prince-Archbishop of Cologne could not afford furniture. It was bare because he wished to have no cover for any possible eavesdropper or spy. Words had been said here that would mean death for all present if repeated.

The group had eventually, slowly, cautiously, come to a decision, feeling each other out. Now, the decision made, tension slackened.

“He has to go, then,” repeated Archbishop Gunther, the host of the meeting in Cologne.

A circuit of silent nods around the table.

“His failure is too great to overlook,” confirmed Theutgard of Trier. “Not only did the Crusade he sent against the province of the English meet defeat in battle…”

“Though that itself is a sign of the divine disfavor,” agreed the notoriously pious Hincmar of Rheims.

“…but he allowed a seed to be planted. A seed worse than defeat for one king or another king. A seed of apostasy.”

The word created a momentary silence. All knew what had happened the year before. How under pressure from both the Vikings of the North and his own bishops at home the youthful King Alfred of the West Saxons had made common cause with some pagan sect—called, so they heard, the Way. Had then successively defeated the dreaded Ivar Ragnarsson of the Vikings, followed by Charles the Bald, Christian king of the Franks and deputy of the Pope himself. Now Alfred ruled unchallenged in England, though sharing his dominions with some heathen jarl whose name seemed almost a joke. But it was no joke that in retaliation for the Crusade sent against him by Pope Nicholas Alfred had declared the Church in England out of communion with the Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome itself. Even less of one that he had stripped the Church in England of its lands and wealth, allowing Christ to be preached and served only by those who were prepared to earn their own livings by free offerings, or even—it was said—through supporting themselves by trade.

“For that defeat, and that apostasy, he must go,” repeated Gunther. He looked round the table. “I say, Pope Nicholas must go to God. He is an old man, but not old enough. We must hasten his departure.”

Now that the words had been spoken aloud a silence fell; it was not easy for princes of the Church to talk of killing the Pope. Meinhard, Archbishop of Mainz, a fierce, hard man, spoke in a loud voice. “Have we any way to do that?” he queried The priest to Gunther's right stirred and spoke. “There will be no difficulty. There are men we can trust in the Pope's entourage at Rome. Men who have not forgotten that they are Germans like ourselves. I do not recommend poison. A pillow in the night. When he does not waken his office can be declared vacant without scandal.”

“Good,” said Gunther, “for though I wish his death, I take my oath before God that I wish Pope Nicholas no harm.”

The group looked at him with faint signs of scepticism. All knew that only ten years before Pope Nicholas had deposed Gunther and deprived him of his see as a penalty for disobedience. As he had done also to Theutgard of Trier, while he had further rebuked and overruled even the pious Hincmar over a dispute with a mere bishop.

“He was a great man, who did his duty as he saw it. I do not blame him even for launching King Charles on his ill-fated Crusade. No, there is no harm in Crusades. But he made a mistake. Tell them, Arno,” he added to his confessor. “Tell them our appreciation of the situation.” He sank back, lifting the gold goblet of Rhenish wine on which so much of his archbishopric's revenue depended.

The younger man pulled his stool forward to the table, his sharp face gleaming with enthusiasm beneath close-cropped blond stubble. “Here in Cologne,” he began, “we have made careful study of the arts of war. Not merely on the field of battle itself, but also in its wider context. We try to think not merely like a tacticus”—he used the Latin word, though up till then all had spoken the Low German of Saxony and the North—“but like a strategos of the old Greeks. And if we think strategics”—Hincmar at least winced at the strange medley of Greek and Latin—“we see that Pope Nicholas made a critical error.

“He failed to see what we here call the punctum gravissimum, that is, the heavy point, the point of main weight, of an enemy's attack. He did not see at once that the real danger, the real danger to the whole Church, lay not in the schisms of the East, or in the struggles of Pope against Emperor, or in the naval raids of the followers of Mahound, but in the little-known kingdoms of the poor province of Britannia. Because only in Britannia did the Church find more than an enemy: a rival, a supplanter.”