One King's Way

meant to follow the Einriksgata himself, to make them Christian by force from above rather than by conversion from below. If so, the Wayman victory in England with East Anglia and Alfred's kingdom would be canceled out, and more, by Christian victory in the North. He could not imagine it would be so. Still, it fretted him that he had no news, no further news once every last bit of nourishment had been chewed from what his men reported. It fretted him even more that he was up here at the very last edge of the inhabited world, while great matters were stirring in the center. Driven away to a land of birds' eggs and shark liver, while the armies marched in the south.

And indeed the armies marched and the fleets maneuvered. While Shef and his men twisted rope and shaped wood, setting up catapults, mules and dart-shooters to cover every seaward entrance to Hrafnsey for the attack of Ragnhild, the Ragnarssons came down like a cloud on the Ditmarsh and the islands of North Frisia, sending King Hrorik into a frenzy of recruiting and appealing and gathering stores for siege in Hedeby. The Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, the ascetic Rimbert, hearing stronger and stronger reports from his agents in the North, doubled the forces of the Knights of the Holy Lance and sent them in their own ships across the Baltic, with the enthusiastic support of his brothers in Cologne and Mainz and Trier and even beyond. The Frankish descendants of Charlemagne bickered and sparred for the succession to Charles the Bald, with the new Pope—the Popelet, men called him— lending his support now to one, now to the other. And in a season of unexpected peace Godive's child grew in her womb, while her husband received the deputations of many kingless English counties, anxious to join in what they saw as the new Golden Age without either Church or pagans.

But Shef waited on events, his whereabouts known to none, relieving his feelings only by constant work at the forge and among his fellow craftsmen.

Cwicca's gang were attempting to make winter wine in summer. They had been vastly impressed by the strong drink they had been given in Kaupang, and had managed to buy a small barrel between them at the Gula- Thing. It was gone now, but they had time on their hands, and Udd had explained his theory to them.

“What they do with winter wine,” he lectured, “is freeze the water out of it, so that what remains is stronger.”

Nods and general agreement.

“Now steam is water.” There was more discussion about this point, but everyone had seen steam rising from damp ground, or sweat turning into steam when it hit a hot iron. “So if we heat beer up till the steam comes off it, we'll get the water out of it just as if it had been frozen. It won't be winter wine. It'll be kind of summer beer.”

“But it'll be stronger,” said Cwicca, wanting to get the main point straight.

“Right.”

The men had got a tub of beer—most of the scanty barley production of Hrafnsey went into brewing rather than bread—put half of it into the largest copper pot they could borrow, and heated it over a gentle fire, careful not to burn the bottom of the pot out. Slowly the thick brew began to bubble, the steam rose off it in the thick-walled, low-roofed brewhouse. A score of men and half a dozen women were jammed in together, the catapult-team and with them the kraki wearers, as they were called, the rescues of the trek across the Upland.

Udd, presiding, watched carefully, superintending the fire-tenders, beating away attempts at preliminary tasting with his largest beechwood ladle. Finally, watching the level in the pot, he judged that almost half of the beer had been steamed away. Two men lifted it carefully away from the fire, waited for it to cool.

Udd had learnt some very elementary man-management over the months, enough for him to give the honor of first taste to someone else, and to someone who would value it. He passed over Cwicca and Osmod, the gang's natural leaders, called forward one of the recent rescues, a big silent man whom the freed but still class-conscious English suspected of having been a thane of King Burgred before the Vikings captured and enslaved him.

“Ceolwulf,” he called out. “I expect you've been used to good stuff. Come and try this.”

The former thane stepped forward, took the wooden mug held out to him, sniffed the liquid, drank deeply, rolling it round his mouth before swallowing.

“What does it taste like?” asked Karli anxiously. “Is it as good as the last barrel?”

Ceolwulf paused to give weight to his words. “What it tastes like,” he said, “is water that's been used for washing old musty grain. Or maybe it's very very thin old porridge.”

Cwicca seized the mug from him, drank deep in his turn, lowered the mug with an expression of complete disbelief. “You're wrong there, Ceolwulf,” he said. “What this tastes like is gnat's piss.”

As the other men dipped their mugs into the pot to confirm the judgment, Udd stared open-mouthed at the brew, the fire, the condensing steam on the membrane that covered the glassless window.

“The strength was there,” he muttered. “It's not there now. It must have gone off in the steam. But it doesn't go off when you freeze drink. The ice and the steam are different. The ice is water. So the steam must be —something else.” Experimentally he put out a finger, ran it along the steam-wet membrane, licked it.

“So don't keep the brew that's left,” he concluded. “Keep the steam. But how to collect it?” He looked consideringly at the copper pot.

Weary and anxious, Shef decided to spend an afternoon in the steam-bath. It was a small wooden hut built out on the end of a pier, with a platform beside it overhanging the deep water of the fjord that led down to the Hrafnsey harbor. Every day men lifted hot stones out of the pit where they had been heating overnight and trundled them along to the hut, where they lay glowing for hour after hour. It was a common thing for those who had nothing to do, or who were weary from some task or other, to stroll along and sit in the heat for an hour or so, dropping water on to the stones, and from time to time going out on to the platform for a plunge into the freezing water.

When Shef stepped in to the dark hut, he realized there was someone already there, sitting on one of the benches. Peering into the gloom, he saw from the light of the opened door that it was Cuthred, sitting not naked, like every other man who went there, but in a pair of ragged woolen drawers. Shef hesitated, went in. He did not know of anyone else who would willingly sit in the dark with Cuthred, but something told him he had nothing to fear. Cuthred did not forget, even in his berserkergang, who had released him from the mill. He had said, also, once he found out how Shef had recognized him, and that Shef had been there at the start of the whole story, the capture of Ragnar, that he knew their fates were twisted.

After they had sat together in the dark for a while, Shef realized that Cuthred had started to talk, very quietly, and almost to himself. He was talking, it appeared, about Brand.

“Big fellow, he is,” Cuthred muttered. “But there's nothing special about size. I've known some almost as big, and one or two who were taller. That Scotty I killed, he was seven feet tall, I measured him. Brittle-boned, though. No, it's not the size that gets me about that son of a bitch, he's just not normal. His bones are wrong. Look at his hands, they're twice the size of mine. And his eyes. Over his eyes.”

A hand reached out, rubbed firmly across Shef's eyebrows, the voice muttered on. “See. Normal people, they have nothing under their eyebrows, just a socket. I haven't felt his eyebrows, can't get close enough, but I've looked carefully. He has a bone ridge there, makes his eyebrows stick out.

“And his teeth, now.” Again the hand, peeling Shef's lower lip down. “See, most people, nearly everyone, the top set of teeth goes over the lower set. When you bite with your front teeth, it's like scissors, the one sliding over the other. Now his teeth aren't like that. I've watched for a long time, and I reckon his teeth fit edge to edge, they don't slide over each other at all. When he bites, it's like an axe on a block. And his back teeth, they must be real grinders. Something very strange about him. And not just him, quite a lot of them round here. His cousins have it too. But he's the worst.

“And there's another thing. He's hiding something round here. You know, lord—” for the first time Cuthred acknowledged that he knew who he was talking to. “You know that these days I spend a lot of time rowing round by myself.”

Shef nodded in the darkness. Cuthred had indeed taken to rowing round in a little two-man dory he had borrowed, or commandeered. There was a general feeling of relief that he was out of the way for as long as he was.

“Well, I went right round the island first time, and then I went down the coast a bit to the south, and then I went up to the north, not very far, because I started late in the day. But when I got back from that one they were waiting for me at the dock. Brand, and about four of his cousins, all with spears and axes and their armor on, as if