And in a room, not so very far away, an earthly king, with a golden coronet on his long fair plaited hair, listening to a crew of men, richly dressed but carrying strange things, rattles and dried horse penises and polished skulls.
“…no respect for the gods,” they were shouting. “Bad luck for the country. Christians wandering free and never put down. The herring gone and a poor harvest and now the snow earlier than any man has ever known. Act or go the way of foolish King Orm!”
The king raised a hand. “What must I do?”
“Make the great sacrifice. The true sacrifice at Uppsala. Not nine oxen and nine horses and nine dogs, but all the worst of your realm. All the poison. Ninety men and ninety women you must hang on the sacred tree, and more to bleed on the plain outside. And not old broken slaves bought cheap, but the evildoers. Christians, and witches, and warlocks, and Finns, and the cheating priests of the Asgarth Way! Hang them high and earn the gods' favor. Leave them, and we will look again along the Eiriksgata.” The Way of the One King, Shef remembered from Hagbarth. The road every would-be king of the Swedes had to travel, to expose himself to challenge. This one must have traveled it.
“Very well,” the king's voice rumbled. “Now here is what I will do…”
Outside his palace again, Shef saw the bulk of the great heathen temple at Uppsala, rising in jagged layer above layer, dragon-heads at every corner, fantastic carvings from the age of the mythic kings on its door. And outside that, the holy oak tree where the Swedes had come to sacrifice for a thousand years. Things swayed creaking on the branches. Men, women, dogs, even horses. They hung there till they rotted and dropped, eye-sockets empty, bared teeth grinning. Over the whole place lay the holy stench.
And Shef was back in the tent, eye clearing. This time he did not jump up, for the weariness and horror on him. “What you saw?” asked Piruusi. He too looked drawn, as if he had seen something he did not want to, but he was intent as well.
“Death and danger. To me, to you. From the Swedes.”
Piruusi spat on Pehto's floor. “Always danger from the Swedes. If they find us. Maybe you see that too?”
“If I see it close, I will tell you.”
“You need piss again?”
“Not again.”
“Yes again. You great—great spamathr. Drink what went through our spamathr.”
What was that in English, Shef wondered vaguely. A man would be a wicca, a woman a wicce. A cunning one. It rhymed with pitch and flitch, a flitch of bacon. Like a halved human hanging in a smokehouse.
He struggled to his feet again, stood over the bowl.
The last two things he had seen had been “now,” he knew. Not “here” in the sense of by the Finnish wizard's tent, but “here” in the world. His spirit had traveled only in place.
Where he was this time was neither “here” nor “now,” not in the same way. He was in a different world. It felt as if he was underground in some lightless place, but there was glimmering light from somewhere. He seemed to be walking over an immense arching bridge, with a noisy river running below. Walking down the arch now, to something blocking the way. Not a wall. A lattice, really. It was the Grind-wall that blocked the road to Hel. Strange, that “grind” should mean that and also the death of the whales.
There were faces pushed up against the lattice, watching him, faces he did not wish to see. He walked on. As he had feared, the first one was Ragnhild's, twisted and hating, spitting out bitter words at him, shaking the lattice as if to get at him. That lattice would not be moved by any human hand, of dead person or alive. Her breast dripped thick blood.
Beside her was the little boy, eyes wondering. He did not seem to hate or to recognize Shef. He twisted away suddenly from a third figure, reaching out to grasp him, hold him to a skinny bosom. The old queen Asa, a rope round her neck.
What have these to tell me, Shef wondered. That I killed them? I know that.
The ghosts were backing away from the grille, reluctantly and angrily, as if compelled. Someone else was coming, another woman. Shef recognized a worn face from which he had brushed snow two mornings before, Godsibb, who had died unnoticed. Her face was tired still, but less lined than he remembered, more peaceful. She wanted to speak. Her voice was like a bat's squeak, and he bent forward to listen.
“Go on,” it said. “Go on. I am here, in Hel, from following you. I would have been anyway. If I had not followed you I would have been a slave here—a slave to those.” She nodded at the retreating ghosts of the two queens. “I am spared that.”
The voice faded, and the wall, and the bridge, and the darkness. Shef found himself once more sitting in the tent, tears rolling down his cheeks. Though the vision had seemed to take no time to him, he was the last to wake again. The others looked at him, Hund with concern and Karli with fellow-feeling. The two Finns seemed pleased, satisfied, as if his emotion proved him human, of the same flesh as themselves.
Slowly Shef rose, muttered a few words, picked up his lance from by the tent-flap. Frost glinted on its tip, yet the weight of it seemed to steady his nerves. The three walked out into the freezing night and the dark birch- woods.
As they crunched through the snow towards the fire and the sentry's challenge, Shef said to the others, “We must bury Godsibb and the others properly, not burn them or hang them in a tree. We will dig beneath the fires where the ground has been warmed. Take stones from the stream-bed and make a cairn.”
“Does that do the dead any good?” asked Hund.
“I think so.”
Two nights and a day later, the party stood ready to move on, on a bright windless day, in light snow. Shef would willingly have assembled them all and set off the day before, but Hund had vetoed it.
“Some of us are too weak,” he said sharply. “Hurry them on and you will find more of them not waking up in the morning, like Godsibb.”
Shef, haunted by the memory of her peering through the lattice of Hel-gate, gave way unwillingly. Yet even as he hauled stones out of the freezing stream-bed for her cairn, watched by interested but disbelieving Finns, he thought to himself, she said “Go on.”
“I have to get out of this wasteland,” he had told Hund, trying to get some urgency into him. “I told you, I saw the warriors round Hedeby. It may have fallen by now, and the Ragnarssons will be richer and stronger. At the rate we're going, Sigurth will be King of all Denmark by the time we are there.”
“And is it your duty to stop him?” Hund looked at his friend and reconsidered. “Well, maybe it is. But you cannot stop him from here. We will just have to move on as fast as we can.”
“Do you think these visions of mine are true?” Shef asked him. “Or is it just the drink that does it, as beer and mead make men think they are mightier than they are? Maybe all my visions—maybe Vigleik's visions and all the things the Way sees, maybe they are just some kind of delusion, some kind of drunkenness.”
Hund hesitated for a while before replying. “That could be,” he admitted. “I will tell you one thing, Shef. That fly killer mushroom, the red one with the white spots on it, that men crush and put on the walls to keep insects off, you would not eat that by accident. But there are other things like it that sometimes grow in the corn, get reaped with it. Maybe find their way into the bread. Or the porridge. Especially if the corn has been left damp in store.”
“It's always damp in store in England,” said Shef. “So why doesn't everybody have these visions all the time?”
