The rope round his wrists was slashed free, he stumbled, came down on his injured foot, and fell headlong. The Emperor looked after him as the knights dragged him away. “He might have been a great warrior for the Lord,” he said.
“Satan was once Lucifer, brightest angel in Heaven,” replied Erkenbert.
His hands were stretched out above him, his feet stretched out below. He had not felt the nail driven through both wrists. As soon as the iron point had touched his shattered ankle he had bitten deep into his lip to keep from screaming, but after the first blow he had felt nothing at all. The cunning soldiers had fixed a tiny ledge below his feet, no more than three inches out from the tree-trunk to which he was fastened, and on this he could rest his weight. Much of his weight. When his one foot would support him no more he would sag again from his wrists, feel the stifling pressure on his ribs. When he fainted the weight would fall again on his ankle, the pain stab him awake once more. As the sun rose towards noon, Shef drifted in and out of consciousness.
The gods were looking down at him from Asgarth, without pity or concern, but with interest and calculation. There was his father Rig, fox-face and cunning eyes. Volund, the lame smith whose place Shef had once taken, once a man but taken to Asgarth for his skills. In front of them all, the one-eyed Othin, who had been Shef's enemy and the supporter of his enemies. The one standing next to him: yes, he could tell the marks of pain and poison on his face, but they seemed smoothed out, half-healed. Of all the faces he could see, Loki's was the one least hostile. Least human, too. Not for nothing was he the father, and the mother also, of the monster-brood. Shef had brought monsters into the world as well.
“He hangs as you once did, father,” said Loki. “You hung for nine days, to gain wisdom. It is too late for him to gain it.”
“He may not gain it,” replied Rig. “He has bred it in others.”
“As you did when you bred from Edda and Amma and Mothir, mother and grandmother and great-grandmother,” said Loki, truthful but sharp-tongued. “You cuckolded their husbands, made a better breed. But this one's seed dies with him. What good is that?”
“Not quite with him, it may be,” said Rig.
“In any case,” growled Volund the hamstrung, inventor of flight, “his true seed is not of the body, Loki. His sons are the slaves become men. Udd the steelmaster and Ordlaf the seaman. Cwicca the kitemaster, who wears my token now. Steffi with the squint who wears yours. You should thank him, Loki. You are freed and growing strong, and you will grow stronger, but you would still be mad beneath the serpent's fangs if he had not given men a reason to believe in you.”
“There will still be no sons of Shef, no Sheafings, as there have been sons of Shield, Shieldings,” said Othin.
Rig said nothing, but Heimdall heard his thought, and the dying man heard it too. Your Shieldings failed when Sigurth died, thought Rig. My son has set the world on the Sheafing path. Not of peace alone, nor war alone, but a path where our sons and daughters will be free to make themselves, and make gods in their own likeness. For good or ill, as they choose.
Maybe Volund will keep a place for me in his smithy, thought Shef, ignoring Rig's silent thought. That would be a better place for me than the kennels of Rig my father.
The vision faded, Shef came back to the world of hot sun and pain. The sun was no longer in his eyes, it was over his head, seeming to burn even through his thick whitened hair. Would they give me water? he wondered. The Roman soldiers gave it to Jesus, I saw them do it. What of the White Christ then? I do not believe in him, but he must be my enemy now.
It was his sometime king, King Edmund of East Anglia, who came to him the next time. They had waited for death together one summer's night ten years before. The king had gone before him, died under the knife and chisel of Ivar and his blood-eagle. He had come to Shef as he too lay in pain from his half-blinding, imagining then that he hung from Hlithskjalf with a spike through his eye, as he hung now in reality spiked through wrists and ankles. But where had the king gone? He had fought and died for his Christian faith, refused to abjure it under torture. If the White Christ could save anyone, surely it would have been him?
The king no longer held his backbone in his hand. He seemed to be looking down from far away, far further than Hlithskjalf, where the Asgarth gods watched the affairs of men with keen interest. Edmund King and Martyr had no such interest, no longer. He had gone elsewhere.
“In the beginning was the Word,” he said, his voice drifting down like ash-seeds on a breeze. “And the Word was with God.” His voice changed. “But the Word was not God. The Word was made by men. Bible, Testament, Talmud, Torah, hadith, Koran, commentary. They are the works of men. It is men who made the works of men into the words of God.”
“Greater is work than the naked word,” replied Shef in his mind, quoting the English proverb.
“That is true. And so you may be forgiven. What you have done may make the words pass away, lose their authority, the authority no-one would grant their authors, mere men as they were. The authority that comes from faith—that may remain. Those who wish to believe in the salvation of the Christians, in the shari'a of Islam, in the Law of the Jews—that is still open to them. But they may not tell people that their words are holy, not to be challenged. Every interpretation may be challenged. You showed your friend Thorvin that. Your friend Svandis showed you that. There is truth in the Word, but not a single truth.”
“Can I believe in your word?” Shef tried to say to the fading figure. “Is there truth in my visions?”
“Ask Farman,” said the king's voice in a shrill receding pipe. “Ask Farman.”
He's by the ships, Shef thought. By the water. Is there any water here? The sun is on the side of my face now. He tried to call to the knights guarding him, for water or for death, but his voice came out only as a rusty croak like a crow's.
The knights were talking, they did not hear him.
“If he does not break them this time, they will break him.”
“He will break them.”
“The Italians are gathering to defend their anti-Pope.”
A bark of laughter. “The Italians!”
“They say an Arab fleet has been sighted…”
“The Greeks will sink it. Where is your faith?”
A silence. The doubtful voice said, “I wish we could fight with the Emperor.”
“We are here to guard the Grail. And this heretic here.”
“Who from?” muttered the doubter.
Shef knew he was near death now, and thirst had ceased to bother him. What did he wish? That he could see Godive again? No, she would live and die happily, as far away from him as King Edmund. That he might see the child he and Svandis would have? If the child was born, with such a mother it needed no father to protect it. He wished he had not struck Cwicca. He wished he could see the Wisdom House again, and what Udd had made in another peaceful summer.
He could not see the Wisdom House, but he could see the Head of it, Farman Frey's priest. Strange. He had seen other men he knew before in visions, but only one man had ever seen him, responded to him as if he had been there, and that had been Farman in the smithy of the gods. Now he was there again, talking urgently.
“Where are you?”
“I don't know. In a garden somewhere.”
“Rome is to the east of you,” said Farman. “The aqueduct is to the south. Look at the
