King and Emperor

true. That Loki is loose and Ragnarok is upon us. His father, Rig, cannot speak to him because he has been— imprisoned? silenced? whatever happens to gods who are defeated. There is war in the sky. And our side has lost already.”

A long silence, while the priests and their observers considered the options. Thorvin pulled his hammer from his belt, began to thump it gently and rhythmically into the palm of his left hand while he considered. At the center of his feeling was a deep belief that his considered opinion was right. The One King, Shef, whom he had first met as a runaway English thrall-boy, was the destined one: the One who would come from the North, in the deep belief of the Way. The peace-king who would replace the war-kings of old, who would set the world on its true path and away from the horrors of the Skuld-world of the Christians. Thorvin had not wanted to believe it in the beginning, had shared the prejudice of his people and his religion against the English, against all those who did not speak Norse. Slowly he had been brought round. The visions. The evidence of Farman. The old tale of King Sheaf. The overthrow of kings. He remembered the testimony of Olaf the Norwegian king, himself a seer and a prophet, who had accepted the death and displacement of his own bloodline as the will of the gods. He remembered the death of Valgrim the Wise, who had not been wise enough to cease his resistance to the truth, even when tests had proved it.

The thing that made Thorvin believe most strongly, in the end, was the unpredictable nature of it. The boy Shef, even when grown to a man, had not behaved like one sent by the gods. He had almost no interest in the will of the gods at all, had taken a pendant only with reluctance, and seemed most of the time on bad terms even with his own father and patron. He had no love for Othin, and little patience with sacred story. His interests were fixed on machines and devices. It was not what any wise priest of the Way would have expected. And yet again and again, it seemed to Thorvin, what the gods sent was what no man expected, and no woman either, for all that Svandis might say. What they sent, what they did, had about it a peculiar feeling—a taste, almost. It could not be missed once you were familiar with it. Thorvin had heard Solomon the Jew discourse on the peculiar quality of the Christians' gospels, how even in disagreement they seemed to bear witness to some real event. That was how he felt about Shef and his visions. They were awkward, often unhelpful, even unwanted. That was what proved them true.

Finally Thorvin summed up. “It is like this. If the visions are not true, then we have no witness for the existence of our gods. We might as well get rid of our clothes, our pendants, our holy emblems, and go back to working at our trades—as we do anyway. Either the visions are from inside, mere dreams, disorders of the brain and the belly. Or they are from outside, from a world where our gods exist, independent of us. But I see no way to test this.”

A fourth voice came from inside the circle, a thin and tired one: the voice of Hund the leech. For weeks now, ever since the first joining of his friend Shef and his supposed-pupil Svandis, the little man had been withdrawn, sullen, even angry. Jealous, they all supposed, of the taking of the woman he loved by the one man who seemed least likely to. Now he spoke decisively.

“I can test it for you.”

“How?” asked Hagbarth.

“I have known for a long time—since Shef and I drank the potion of the Finns—that I can create visions, with a potion. I think it likely that all his visions spring from the same root. Not a root, a fungus. You all know that if the rye gets wet when it is harvested, a kind of black spur grows on it. You Norsemen call it the rugulfr, the wolf in the rye. We all know to scrape it off, dry it out, not eat it. But it is hard to get rid of completely. It brings visions, brings madness in large doses. I think our friend is especially subject to it, as some are. His visions come on after eating rye-bread or rye-porridge. What have we been eating since we have been here, since we finished our own stores? Wheat-bread, from well-dried grain. But I have decoction of the ergot-fungus in my stores. I can bring on his visions at any time.”

“But if you say that,” said Hagbarth, “you are agreeing with Skaldfinn, and Svandis. The visions are just a disorder of the belly. Not a message from the gods. So there are no gods.”

Hund looked round bleakly, without excitement or urge to make a point. “No. I have considered all this. You are all victims of a kind of thinking I know. Either this or that. Either inside or outside. Either truth or falsehood. It works with simple things. Not with the gods.

“I am a leech. I have learned to look at the whole of my patients before I decide what may be wrong with them. Sometimes it is not just one thing. So I look at the whole of our beliefs about the gods. If we—we priests of the Way—were to put our beliefs into words, we would say that the gods are somewhere outside us, somewhere in the sky, it may be, and that they were there before us. They made us. As for the gods of other people, like the Christians who brought me up, or the Jews we have met here, they are just mistakes, they do not exist at all. But they say the same of ours! Why should we be right and they wrong? Or they right and we wrong? Maybe we are all right.

“And all wrong. Right to think the gods exist. Wrong to think they made us. Maybe we made them. What I think is that our minds are strange, beyond our understanding. They work in ways we do not know and cannot reach. Maybe they work in places we cannot reach, places that are beyond our space and our time—for the visions of Vigleik, and Shef too, they reach where their bodies could not go. In those strange places I think the gods are made. From mind-stuff. From belief. They grow strong on belief. Wither on disbelief, or oblivion. So you see, Thorvin, Skaldfinn, Shef's visions could be a true guide to the gods. But sprung from rye-wolf, or from my potions, just the same. They need not be either/or.”

Hagbarth licked his lips, spoke hesitantly, in face of the little man's certainty and composure. “Hund, I do not see how that can be true. If it were true that the gods spring from belief, think: how many Way-folk are there, how many Christians are there? If the Christ-god draws on the belief of thousands of thousands, our gods only on the belief of a tenth that number—surely our gods would be crushed like a nut under a war-hammer.”

Hund laughed, mirthlessly. “I was a Christian once. How much do you think I believed? I believed that if I did not pay tithes to the Church my father's hut would be burned down. There are Christians in the world, I know. King Alfred is one of them. Shef told me once of the old woman he and Alfred met, grieving for her man. She was another. But Church-folk are not Christians. Nor do all those who say the shahada believe in Allah. They believe in nothing, or they believe in the shari'a, as your people, Solomon, believe in their books. I do not think that kind of belief will do. For if the gods are our creation, then they cannot be deceived, as we deceive ourselves.”

“And if the One King has ceased to believe in his gods?” asked Thorvin, “That need not mean they have ceased to believe in him. For they come from other minds besides his. Let me try my potion. But one thing first. The woman—keep her out of the way. It comes to me that she too has power on the other side, like her father, the boneless one, the were-dragon.”

The priests looked at each other, looked at the dying fire, nodded in wordless agreement.

Shef took the cup that Hund handed to him, looked not at its contents but into the eyes of his friend—his childhood friend, now perhaps his rival or his enemy.

“This will make me dream of my father?”

“It will make you dream the way you used to.”

“What if my father has no message for me?”

“Then you will know that, at least!”

Shef hesitated, drained the cup. It tasted musty, old. “Now I am not sure I want to sleep.”

“Stay awake then. The visions will come either way.” Hund took the cup, walked away without another word. Shef felt deserted, alone. Svandis had vanished, no-one knew where. Brand and the others were avoiding him. He sat in a small room by the dockside, hearing dim whoops and cheering as the catapult crews celebrated their victory over the Greeks and over the “War-Wolf.” He wished he could join them.

After a while the room faded from his eyes, began to be overlaid with strange sweeps and spirals of color. He found himself examining them with manic attention: as if, by doing so, he could prevent himself from being pulled on to what he knew was waiting.

As if his eyes had cleared, Shef found himself staring into an enormous face. The nose alone was bigger than he was, the eyes were like black pools, the lips curled back to reveal monstrous teeth. The face was laughing at him. With a crash sound came to his ears, and he staggered beneath the gale of laughter that blew