they were savages, worse than the deepest heathens among the Swedes, cold and heartless. She had heard tales of them from the women in Cordova, she said—and that at least must be true. That in the mountains lived the sect where the men hated all women and the women all men. Where every joy and delight in the world was rejected. “And that is how they are,” Svandis said again and again. “You can see it when they look at you! I stood there when they set me free with my legs bare and my body displayed like a dancing girl. And they looked at me. And then they looked away, all of them, even the mule-drivers. I would rather have heard your men shouting the things they do at women they see. They rape women, and hurt them, but that is because they need them, at least. Here you can see the hate in their eyes.”
Fear talking, Shef reflected as he sat at ease looking out over the mountains and the passes beneath. Yet there might be something in it. It had a kind of relation to what Solomon had said, after he had consoled Svandis and she had gone to sleep under guard and in the sun. After he had told Solomon what they had said about the test. Solomon had thought for a long time and then approached him, keeping his distance even from his colleague Skaldfinn.
“Something you should understand,” he said. “Something few know. You may have thought these people are Christians.”
Shef had nodded. He could see a crucifix on the wall of what seemed a rude church. Folk who walked past it knelt, crossed their breasts.
“They are not. Or if they are it is of a kind that has no dealings with others. Few even with my people. You see—the followers of Mohammed, the followers of Christ, my people the Jews. They fight each other, they may persecute each other, but they share many things. To Islam, Christ was one of the prophets, to the Christians, their God is also our God, only they have given him a Son. The Mohammedans believe in one Allah as we believe in one Jehovah, like us they will not eat pork or meat which has not been bled. You see? We are—we began—on the same side.
“These people here are different. They do not believe in our God at all. Or if they do, they reject him.”
“How can you reject God and reverence the crucifix?”
“I do not know. But they say—they say that to these people the God of Abraham is the devil, and that they make images of him only to defile them. And they say also”—Solomon's voice dropped even more—“that since to them God is the devil, that they have made the devil himself their God. They are devil-worshipers. That is the talk of the hills. I do not know how they worship him or with what rites.” Solomon could not be relied on, either, Shef reflected. It was the People of the Book again. At bottom the three great religions that had come out of the East were all religions of the Book. Different books, or the same book with different additions. They despised anyone who did not hold to their book. Called them devil-worshipers. They despised him for a start, he had seen the look in the eyes of the geonim, the scholars of the Law. If they despised him, and the Way, and they despised also this strange sect of the hills—then maybe he and they had something in common. Women- haters, said Svandis. Did he hate women? They had brought him no luck, and he had brought none to them.
His eye sweeping over far distances, as the haze cleared in the sun, and the far-seer let him probe out to the horizon, Shef saw again and again flashes of bright metal down on the roads, the roads through mountain passes. He remembered what Tolman had said of what he could see at the top of his flight. Metal moving, and on the edge of sight, Tolman said, a great pyre burning.
His mind emptied, his eye reaching far into space, Shef felt the strange blankness of the waking dream come over him: a better feeling than the last he had had, the dream of the shrouded corpse. This time his father was there.
“He's loose, you know.” There was still the tone of mirth in his father's voice, of secret knowledge, of cleverness which he knew had no match. With it there was a new tone, of uncertainty, even of fear, as if the god Rig were realizing that he had set something in motion which even he with all his cleverness might not control.
Shef spoke back to his father, silently, in his mind alone. “I know. I saw you loose him. I saw him climbing the stair. He is mad. Thorvin says he is both father and mother of the monster-brood.” In his new mood of disbelief and defiance, he did not bother to add the question, “Why did you do it?”
An image began to form before him, not with the usual fierce clarity, but blurred, as if through the poor glass and uneven lens of a far-seer. As it formed, his father's voice talked over it.
“The gods, you see, long long ago, in the time of your namesake, the first King Sheaf. That was when Balder was still in Asgarth. Balder the beautiful. So beautiful that all things on earth, except one, had taken the vow not to harm him. So what did the gods, my father and my brothers, what did they do to amuse themselves?”
Shef could see the answer. The god at the center, so bright-faced that it was impossible to look at him, a blaze of beauty. Tied to a stake. And around him, fierce shapes, mighty arms, hurling weapons at him with all their strength. An axe span away from the side of the god's head, a lance with deadly triangular point rebounded from his heart. And the gods laughed! Shef could see the familiar red-bearded face of Thor turned up to the sky, mouth open in an ecstasy of mirth, as he hurled his deadly hammer again and again at his brother's skull.
“Yes,” said Rig. “Till Loki showed them.”
Another god being brought forward to the throwing line, a blind god, Loki at his elbow. A different Loki, Shef noted. Same face, but without the marks of poison and of rage. Without the look of bitter injustice. Clever and shifty, still, even amused. The brother of Rig, there was no doubt.
Loki put a spear in the blind god's hand, the spear of mistletoe, the plant so weak and so young that the strong gods had not bothered to ask it for its vow not to harm Balder their brother. The gods laughed even louder at the sight of the blind man with the feeble twig lining up to throw, Shef could see Heimdall, Frey, even the grim one-eyed Othin, calling to each other and slapping their thighs in merriment.
Till the dart struck. The god fell. The light of the world dimmed.
“You know what happened then,” said Rig. “You saw Hermoth ride to try to bring Balder back from Hel. You saw what they did to Loki in revenge. They forgot something. They forgot to ask why. But I remembered. I remembered Utgarthar-Loki.”
Utgarthar-Loki? Shef wondered. He was used, now, to the vagaries of English and Norse, still so similar. That means “outyard-Loki.” Where there is an outyard-Loki there should be an inyard- Loki.
“Utgarthar-Loki was the giant who challenged the gods to a contest. And they lost. Thor lost the wrestle against Old Age, failed to drink the ocean, failed to lift the Mithgarth-Serpent. His boy Thjalfi lost the race with Thought. Loki lost the eating-match with Fire.”
In the background, as if through the far-seer again, Shef could see an immense hall, one greater even than Othin's Valhalla, and in it a table piled high with joints of beef and bear, man-meat and walrus: a table stocked from the smokehouse of Echegorgun. At one side of it a god sat gobbling, thrusting the food into his mouth with sweeping movements of the arms, not chewing but snapping like a wild wolf. Down the other side raced fire. Fast and deadly as the fire of the Greeks.
“Which Loki lost?” asked Shef.
“The god Loki. Not the giant Loki. You see, Loki was on our side once. Or at least half of him was. That was what I remembered and the gods forgot. But if you forget… he becomes the other Loki. The Loki outside the home-garth. The monster in the darkness.”
I don't understand, thought Shef. If this all comes from my mind, as Svandis says, then it is some part I do not know. In-Loki and out-Loki? And Loki contesting with Fire? The word for “fire” is logi, though Rig did not say it. Loki against Loki against Logi? In-Logi and out-Logi too? And who is this first King Sheaf?
He shook his head in a kind of exasperation, and as he did so the vision cleared, he saw the far-off mountains beginning to thrust their peaks through the tatters of his dream, of the scene in the giants' hall, devouring god and devouring flame. A hand on his shoulder, pulling him back from the near-precipitous drop in front of him.
“Are you all right?” Svandis's copper hair and bright eyes looking into his own. Shef blinked once and again.
