King and Emperor

He bent down over the body, pulled the Rig-pendant from round its neck. “I will leave this to be found somewhere. Then men will think he is dead.”

“But they won't know,” said Svandis.

“So they will tell tales instead. Of how his faithful friends took him away from the battlefield and were never seen again. Went to Asgarth, to Valhalla, to Thruthvangar. Were taken by the gods, for him to be a god. Not a god who became a man, but a man who became a god. That will be a good belief for men to have, in time to come.”

Farman turned and faded without more words into the gloom. Not far away shouts could be heard, torches were flaring. The Waymen, with Cwicca and Thorvin at their head, searching for their lost leader.

“We must go,” said Solomon.

“How shall we carry him?”

“Use the graduale again. It can perform one last service, and then we will burn it tonight for firewood, before it kills more men.”

As the two men strapped the still-unmoving Shef on the old ladder, the body stirred, spoke.

“What did he say?” asked Svandis.

“I couldn't hear,” said Solomon.

“I could,” said Hund. “His mind is wandering in far places.”

“What did he say, then?”

“He said, ‘Up the ladder and into the light.’ But I do not know from what prison he thinks he is escaping.”

The two men and the woman carried their burden away from the searching torches and into the dark.

Envoi

The slow wheel of the seasons turned. Five winters passed; now hard frost gave way to slow thaw. An early spring. The plowmen were drawing their furrows across the green fields of an English spring: white hawthorn blossom bloomed from every hedge.

The King of the West Saxons, Alfred esteadig, walked with his wife in their private garden, their children playing under the eye of nursemaids not far off. “The Embassy today,” he said abruptly. “It was from the Pope. Finally.”

“The Pope?” said Godive, surprised and a little anxious. “Which one?”

“The real one. John VIII, I think he is. The one they tried to depose in favor of the Englishman. Restored at last, the eternal squabbling of the eternal city finally over, at least for now. The last pretender Pope banned—or murdered. It is hard to tell. The new Pope's first official act was to offer to repeal the interdict England has lain under. To bring us back into community with the Church.”

“Will you refuse?”

“I will tell him we will pay no taxes, we will restore no Church property, the Way will still have the right to preach here and make conversions. If after that he chooses to say we are once more in communion, it will make no difference to us. I think it is a good sign. The Church has learnt humility. I think it will learn more yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think power has shifted for good, now. All the reports for the past years say that there is no Empire left, or even the thought of one. Christendom is breaking up into smaller states, under local rulers. No more threat in the south from the followers of the Prophet. The Greeks are no danger. There is no need for great empires, armies of conquest.”

“But our Empire too, such as it was, it is breaking up. Since we lost…”

“Since we lost the One King,” Alfred agreed. “It is true, the old agreement he and I made, it cannot stand. Guthmund and the others would not submit to me, nor I to them. Yet we have learned to work together these last few years. I think that that will endure. There will be no war, or the Vikings back on our shores again. We know each other's strength too well. Besides, the veterans of the One King's army, they would not fight each other. They speak the same language now, no-one else understands them. They will keep the peace, and make others keep it too. In loyalty to their master.”

A long pause, while Godive considered the name they had not spoken.

“Do you think he is dead?” she asked. “They never found the body.”

“I think so. So many were never found. The kite fell to earth, he was dragged away and killed defenseless, in a field somewhere. They found his pendant, with the chain broken. You have asked these questions far too often,” he added gently. “Now let the dead lie in peace.”

She did not hear him—or perhaps did not want to hear what he said. She still worried at her memories like a tongue worrying a sore tooth. “Hund never came back either,” said Godive. She, more than anyone else, knew the bond between the two men.

“We have talked of this too often before. They say that he fled over the wall, perhaps from remorse. I expect some straggler killed him too. They looked hard for him, you know, Brand and Cwicca and the others, for they felt remorse as well. When Cwicca refused the reeveship I offered him, he said he would never serve another master. He has gone back to his farm, like so many of the others.”

“And Brand holds York for you as jarl of Northumbria.”

“Better him than the descendant of one of their old kings. It will take a while for the northern parts to accept rule from me. I like this new capital of London. It is nearer the center of England than Winchester was. But Stamford was Shef's city and like Cwicca will take no other king. It will always be the town for the Way. The Way that grows ever stronger. No wonder the Pope feels he needs to make an alliance!”

Godive did not answer. She was thinking of Cwicca, refusing to take another master. An old saying came to her mind, “First love is last love.” It was true of Cwicca. Would it be true of her?

“I hope he is dead,” she said barely audibly. “Not poor and lost, wandering alone somewhere or begging his bread.”

Spring. A spring morning far more gentle than the cold bluster of an English one. The night's storm had almost died away, and the storm-raised waves breaking against the cliff below were already losing their strength in this shallow sea. The tall man, wrapped in a cloak against the last warm showers of rain, sat on the base of a broken stone column looking out to sea. His left leg was stretched out before him to ease the pressure of the wooden stake against his flesh; the leg ended just below the knee. The shower died away and sunlight burnt through. An arching rainbow cut across the bay, seemingly ending near the summit of the smoking volcano. The man pulled the sodden hood from his head, pushed back into place the dislodged patch that covered his empty eye socket.

With a warrior's reactions he turned instantly when he heard the snap of a twig behind him. Smiled when he saw the graceful figure coming towards him through the pines.

“The boy is asleep,” Svandis said. “If he wakes Hund is there.”

“Come, sit beside me,” Shef said. “It was a storm like this that brought our little boat here, almost wrecked us on these cliffs.”

“Five years past. Don't you… think ever of leaving?”

“Yes, in the beginning. Now, very rarely.”

“Every day when I wake I think of the North. Of the sharp frost and the white snow—”

“Do you want to go back?”

“Sometimes. Then I think about how happy we were that first winter, when we sheltered with Solomon. Happier than we had ever been before, once we knew you could be healed.”

“Maybe we should have tried harder to follow Solomon to his homeland.”

“Maybe.” Svandis hesitated. She had not lost her convictions about the gods. Yet she had begun to believe, too, in luck, in some kind of direction from elsewhere. “But I think it was a fortunate wind that blew us to this isle of goats. The people, the peasants, at times I am so angry at them. But it is warm, the wine is good and—you are happy.”