King and Emperor

“He used to grow his thumb-nail long to gouge men's eyes out with,” replied Shef. “My friend Cuthred tore it out with pliers.”

“So you have seen a snake-pit too,” Svandis went on, “and seen a man die in it. Were you very frightened then? Did you imagine yourself in the pit?”

Shef thought for a while. “What you are trying to tell me,” he said, “is that these visions of mine—I do not call them dreams—do not come from the gods at all. They are made up in my own head out of things I have seen, or been frightened by. They are like a story, a saga. One told by a fool, with no beginning or end and only bits of connections to each other. They do not feel like that. They feel—much bigger than that.”

“Because you are asleep,” said Svandis. “You are not thinking correctly.”

“Anyway, the visions I see—they are visions of the gods! They tell the stories that I have heard from Thorvin, of Volund and Skirnir and Hermoth and Balder.”

“Because you have heard them from Thorvin,” said Svandis. “If you dreamt stories that Thorvin had not told you, that might mean something. Maybe only that you had made them up out of things you yourself have seen and felt. But do you not think that Arabs dream of Allah, Christians of their own stories of saints? Your visions are like the gods themselves. People make both of them up out of their own needs and beliefs. If we stopped believing— then we would be free.”

Shef examined the idea with care and doubt. It seemed to him that sometimes he had seen the vision before he knew the story. Svandis would say that he had forgotten something, got the story backwards. Certainly he had no way of proving different. And she might be correct. Everyone knew that sometimes dreams were caused by the events of the day, or even by sounds that men heard in their sleep and turned into a story. The stoutest Viking had dreams of fear, often he had heard men muttering in their sleep.

“So there may be no Ragnarok,” he wondered. “No Loki loose. I have been deceiving myself all along. If I could believe that, things would be much easier for me. And there would be no truth in visions.”

“There is no truth in visions,” Svandis said forcefully, determined to carry her point and make a convert. “Gods and visions are nothing but illusions, which we create to make ourselves slaves.” She pressed closer in the cool night, leant forward to look up into Shef's one eye, her breast nudging against his arm.

Far to the north, at the Wisdom-House of Stamford in the English midlands, night had not yet fallen. Instead the stone tower with its many outbuildings lay in the long gray twilight of an English early summer. From the hedged fields nearby the heavy scent of flowering hawthorn drifted. Faint laughter came from the outskirts of the town where farm-churls and craftsmen, milking and ditching and trading done for the day, sat for the last hour before full dark with pint pots in their hands. Children played around their fathers in the dusk, and younger folk, men and women, exchanged glances and faded sometimes into the dark of the comforting fields.

At the Wisdom-House itself, the forges had fallen silent, though red light came still from banked fires. A priest strode across the central courtyard, intending to call on his friends, draw them out to drink mulled ale and discuss their experiments and their discoveries. As he turned the corner by the stone tower he stopped short.

On a bench in front of him sat Farman priest of Frey, most famous of the priests in England for the number of his god-visions, rivaled in the world only by Vigleik the Norwegian. Farman sat easily. His eyes were open, but he seemed unseeing. Cautiously the priest who had come upon him moved closer, saw that Farman's eyes did not move from their fixed unblinking stare. He stepped back quietly, went to the corner again, waved urgently for others to join him. After a while a score of Way-priests stood in a semi-circle round their un-moving colleague, apprentices and laymen chased away. They waited unspeaking for him to move.

His eyes blinked, he stirred on the bench, became aware of those around him.

“What did you see, brother?” asked one of them.

“At the end—at the end I saw a tree, and a serpent in it. Before the tree there stood a woman, one of great beauty. She was holding out an apple to a man, and he—he was stretching his hand out to it. And all the while the serpent watched, and its forked tongue flickered out and in.”

No reaction from the Way-priests. None of them had read the Christian books, they knew nothing of Satan, of Adam and Eve and the Fall of Man.

“But before that, before that I saw something of more mark. Something the king must hear of.”

“The One King is not here, brother,” a priest reminded gently, knowing that those coming out of the vision needed time to recover themselves.

“His deputy. His partner.”

“King Alfred is his partner. He presides over the council of aldermen. There is no deputy.”

Farman rubbed his eyes. “I must write down what I saw before it fades, and then the news must go to the king.”

“Can you tell us anything of what you saw?”

“Danger and destruction. Fire and venom—and the bane of Balder loose.”

The priests stiffened, knowing who it was that Farman would not name, the god they remembered by the bale-fire in their holy circle.

“If the bane of Balder is loose,” one of them asked slowly, “what is it that the English king Alfred can do? Council of aldermen or no?”

“He can turn out the fleet,” replied Farman. “Send every man and every ship to the place of danger. And that is not the mouth of the Elbe now, no, nor the Dannevirke. The bane of Balder is loose everywhere, but he will show himself first in the south, where the sons of Muspell ride on the day of Ragnarok.”

He stood up, like a man unutterably weary from an immense journey. “I did wrong, brothers. I should have gone with the One King when he went to seek his destiny. For his destiny affects us all.”

Chapter Twelve

From the hitherto barely-known rock of Puigpunyent the riders spurred in all directions. Some at the best speed their horses could make: they had little distance to travel, were under orders to go directly to every baron's hold and rock-based tower in the borderlands, to demand every man that could ride to join their Emperor. They would not get them, for in the complex local politics of the mountain marches, where Frank faced Spaniard and Christian faced heretic, where the Moors raided continually and Jewish levies watched the passes and the toll- roads, no baron, not even those whom Bruno's informants had selected for loyalty to Holy Church, would think of leaving himself defenseless. Nor would Bruno trust them if they did. But they would provide the first ring, till they were replaced by better men, at this moment when the Empire and the Emperor needed above all numbers.

Other messengers paced themselves more carefully, riding in small groups with a tail of spare horses behind them. They had further to go: some many hundreds of miles further, but all of them knowing that it would be days of riding before they reached the secure parts of the Empire, where remounts were to be had at the display of the Emperor's tokens. Those who had furthest to go were the ones selected to ride for the strongholds of the Lanzenorden, all of them in the German-speaking realms far to the east and north, through the mountains or across the Rhine: Freiburg and Worms, Trier and Zurich and even Bern high in the Alps. From there would come the men in whom Bruno had most trust, every last warrior-monk of the Order, the men he needed to fight his war and pursue his quest to the finish. There would be no hesitation or calculation there. But they could not come immediately, would never come in the numbers he needed.

In between were the riders heading for every bishop's seat in the marches of Southern France and Italy: Massilia and Vercelli, Lyons and Turin and Carcassonne and Dax. Their message was the simplest. Every man you can spare. No need for knights, no need for the heavy-armed and aristocratic, though they must come too, to officer the rest. Send every man who has a pair of eyes and a hunting bow. Send the poachers and the huntsmen, the falconeers and the charcoal-burners. The confessors of every village must know who are the men who can find their way in the dark, who can chase the deer across the hills and into the maquis. Offer forgiveness and remission of sins to all who will take service now, for Church and Cross and Empire. Above all, Bruno had pointed out, I must have your bacheliers: the men who in proper Latin, if the Latin of the degenerating Empire, would have been vaccalarii, the men of the