King and Emperor

there a mate there? I can't see.”

Slowly Shef stepped over. He had seen Brand do this. He put an arm round Sumarrfugl's head, said firmly, “Shef here, fraendi. I'm your mate. Speak well of me in Valhalla.” He drew his short knife, set the point behind what had been Sumarrfugl's ear, drove hard into the brain.

As the corpse fell to the floor he heard the woman behind him again. She must have got out from below- deck.

“Men! You men! The evil of the world is from men alone. Not gods. Men!”

Shef looked down at the charred skinless body at his feet, its genitals burned away. Over the side he could hear shouts and screaming as Brand's crew hunted another survivor from bits of wreckage, harpooned him in the water as they would have a seal.

“Men?” he replied, staring at her and through her with his one eye, as if to pierce down through the earth to the underworld. “Men, you think? Can you not feel Loki stirring?”

As the afternoon breeze off the sea strengthened, the Northern fleet picked up speed, the four remaining Viking ships swarming over the waves with their usual supple motion, the two-masters plowing through them, spray leaping up over the tall prows. The Greek galleys had feinted to bar their passage, then fallen back before the threat of the mules. Very soon they had given up their ominous shark-like pursuit and turned away into the haze. Fortunate for them, Shef remarked to Thorvin and Hagbarth. If they had held on longer he would have turned and tried to catch them, sink the entire fleet. Galleys held the advantage in a calm, sailing ships in the wind. Catapults trumped Greek fire in the light, and at distance. The other way round close up, and in the dark.

Well before the sun set Shef had marked a cove with high cliffs to either side and a narrow inlet, taken the whole fleet well inside. By the time the dark came he had taken every precaution he could think of. Brand's Vikings, experienced in the holding of beachheads, had set off immediately inland, reconnoitered the approaches, established a firm block on the one single footpath leading down. Four catapult ships were firmly moored broadside on to the cove entrance, so that any ship entering would face eight mules at a range well outside that of the fire projectors. Shef had sent two parties up to each of the cliffs on either side, with tar-soaked bundles of straw, and orders to light them and hurl them down at the first sign of any ship trying to enter. At the last moment one of the English crewmen detailed for the job had come over, asked uncertainly for some of the kite cloth. What for, Shef had demanded. Slowly the man, a stunted creature with a villainous squint, had fumbled out his idea. Attach some cloth, like a small sail, to each of the bundles. When they threw them over he thought the cloth would hold the air, like, like it did with the kites. Take longer for the bundles to fall. Shef stared, wondering if he had found another Udd. Clapped the man on the back, asked his name, told him to take the cloth and consider himself a kite-handler for the future.

It had all been done efficiently, under the driving force of the king's tongue and every single man's knowledge of what the Greek fire could do. Yet they had been slow, sluggish. Shef himself felt completely drained, exhausted, though he had not struck a blow or swung an oar. It was fear. The sense that he was for once facing a cleverer mind than his own, one that had made a plan and made him dance to it. Without Brand and Sumarrfugl's intervention every single ship and man in the fleet might have been at the sea-bottom, or floating like a charred log on the water for the gulls to peck.

Shef had ordered one of the fleet's last barrels of ale broached, a quart served out to every man. What's that for, someone had asked. “It is to drink the minni-ol, the remembrance ale for the men of the Marsvin,” he replied. “Drink it and think where you would be without them.” Now, guarded, warmed by a fire, his belly full of pork and biscuit, cooked careless of the defeated stragglers who might be wandering the shore, Shef sat brooding over his last pint. After a while he saw the pale eyes of Svandis fixed on him from across the fire. She seemed, for once and unusually—not contrite, but as if she might listen to another voice for a change. Shef crooked a finger, beckoned her over, ignoring the routine flash of anger in her eyes.

“Time you told us,” he said, pointing out a stone for her to sit on. “Why do you think there are no gods, only wicked men? If that's what you think, why this mummery with white robes and rowan-berries like a Way-priest? Don't waste my time being angry. Tell me the answers.”

Weariness and strain gave Shef's voice a chill that brooked no defiance. In the firelight behind Svandis Shef saw Thorvin squatting on the sand, hammer in belt, and the other Way-priests with him, Suleiman the Jew next to his colleague Skaldfinn. “Well. Do you need me to tell you why I think there are wicked men?”

“Don't be silly. I knew your father. I killed him, remember? The kindest thing you could say about him was that he was not of one skin, eigi einhamr, like a werewolf. Only he was a were-worm, I saw him on the other side. If you had to think of him as a man—well, what could you say? He cut women's living bowels out for pleasure, the only way he knew to put bone in his prick. Wicked?” Shef shook his head, without words. “No, tell us why you think there are no wicked gods. You're talking to a man who's seen them.”

“In dreams! Only in dreams!”

Shef shrugged. “My mother saw one on a beach, like this, and felt him too, Thorvin says. Otherwise I wouldn't be here.”

Svandis hesitated. She had explained her views often enough. Never in the face of such solid cast-iron certainty on the other side. Yet the fierce blood of Ragnar ran in her veins, only surging more strongly to opposition.

“Consider the gods that people believe in,” she began. “The gods my father and his brothers sacrificed to, Othin god of the hanged, betrayer of warriors, prepared always for Ragnarok and the battle with Fenris-wolf. What are the words that Othin tells us in the holy Havamal, ‘The Sayings of the High One.’ ” Her voice broke suddenly into the chant of the Way-priest:

“Early shall he rise, who will reft another's

Life or lands or woman.“

“I know the sayings,” said Shef. “What's the point?”

“The point is that the god is like the men who believed in him. He told them only what they wanted to know already. Othin—the High One as you call him—he is just a mouthpiece for the wisdom of a pirate, a murderer like my father.

“Think of another god. Think of the Christ-god—flogged, spat on, nailed to a cross and killed without a weapon in his hand. Who believes in him?”

“Those wicked bastards of monks,” said an anonymous voice in the darkness. “Used to be my masters. They laid on the lash all right, but no one never flogged none of them.”

“But where did the Christians start?” cried Svandis. “Among the slaves of the Rome-folk! They made a god in their own image, one who would rise again and bring them victory in another world, because they had no chance in this one.”

“What about the monks?” said the skeptical voice again.

“Who did they preach their religion to? Their slaves! Did they believe it themselves, maybe, maybe not, but it was useful to them. What good would it have done them if their slaves had believed in Othin?

“And what of the followers of the Prophet here?” she went on, pressing an advantage. “They believe in the one clear way. Anyone can join it by saying a few words. No-one can leave it without facing death. Those who join pay no taxes, but their men-folk must forever fight the unbelievers. Two hundred years ago the Arabs were sand- rats, nobodies, feared by none! What is their religion but a way of gaining strength? They have made themselves a god who gives them power. As my uncles made a god who gave them courage and fearlessness, or the Christians one who gave obedience.”

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's,” said the skeptical voice again, followed by a comprehensive hawk and spit into the fire. “True enough. I heard them say it.”

Shef placed the voice finally. Not Cwicca, but Trimma, one of his mates. Strange that he should speak so freely. It must be the ale.

Another voice breaking in, the quiet one of Suleiman the Jew, by now speaking the fleet's common Anglo- Norse mixed speech with barely a trace of accent.

“An interesting view, young lady. I wonder what you will have to say of the Lord whose name is not spoken.” He added, as ignorance remained complete, “The god of my people. The god of the Jews.”

“The Jews live in a corridor,” said Svandis flatly. “At the far end of this inner sea. All the armies of the world have marched up and down it, Arabs, Greeks, Rome-folk, all of them. The Jews have been toads under the harrow