Always he took as his text the words of Saint Mark, “I will send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves.” He reminded his hearers how Jesus had forbidden Saint Peter to resist the soldiers when they came for him in the garden of Gethsemane, how he had urged his disciples to turn the other cheek, and if a man compelled them to go with him one mile, to go with him voluntarily for two. He would pursue the theme till he saw the looks of doubt, or disgust, on the faces of his warlike listeners.
And then he would say to them that what Jesus said was no doubt true. But what if a man compelled you to carry his pack for a mile, and you carried it from good will for two—and then instead of thanking you, he cursed you and told you to carry it another two, another ten, another twenty? What if you turned the other cheek and your enemy struck it again, and again, using his heaviest dogwhip? As his listeners stirred and muttered angrily, he would ask them why they felt anger. For were these things that he put to them not far less, not a hundred times less, than the insults and injuries they had had to endure from the pagans of the North? And then he talked to them of what he, Rimbert, had seen in his many years as the apostle to the North: daughters and wives ravished, men taken away and left to die in slavery, Christians on their knees in the snow, wailing as they waited to be sacrificed to the heathen gods at Odense or Kaupang or, worst of all, Swedish Uppsala. Wherever he could, he would tell each particular audience of what had happened to men or women from that town or that district—he seemed to have an inexhaustible stock of heart-rending stories, as who would not, Erkenbert reflected, if he had spent thirty years on the pointless and hopeless task of preaching to the heathen.
And when his audience’s anger was at its height, when the serf-knights among them scowled and wrung their hands and swept off their leather caps in passion, then Rimbert would tell them his text: “I will send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves. Yes,” he would say, “the good priests of my missions, not one in ten of whom ever returns to his home, they have been sheep—and sheep they will remain. But from now on”—and as he said this, his voice would rise to an iron clangor—”when I send out my sheep, I will see that with each sheep there goes, not another sheep, not a wolf, no. But a great dog, a great mastiff of the German breed, with a good spiked collar round his neck, and twenty other wolfhounds running with him. Then we will see how the wolves of the North listen to the sheep’s preaching! Maybe they will listen closely to his bleat in the future.”
And Rimbert would condescend to joke and play with words, sometimes even imitating the noise of a sheep to set his audience laughing uproariously in the relief of its tension and anger. And then Rimbert would tell them, slowly and quietly, of his plan. To send mission after mission into the North, through the friendlier of the chiefs and kings of the heathen, each mission centered on a learned and pious priest, as had always been the custom, but each mission containing also a new and strong bodyguard for that priest: men of noble birth and knightly station, men without wives or children or ties, men expert with sword and lance and mace, men who could ride a war-stallion with shield on one arm and lance in the other, controlling it with knees and fingertips alone—men whom even the pirates of the North would walk carefully around, fearing to antagonize them.
And then, when he had their full attention, Rimbert would tell them of the Holy Lance, and of how, when it came back to the Empire, the spirit of Charlemagne would come again and lead Christendom once more to triumph over all its enemies. And he would invite suitable applicants to present themselves to his servants, to see if they were worthy of a place in the Lanzenorden. Which was why Erkenbert now had the thick piles of parchment in his hand, covered with row after row of names: the applicants’ names, their claims to noble birth—for no peasants or peasants’ sons would be admitted under any circumstances—the lists of the worldly wealth they could bring to the order, and the details of their personal arms and equipment. In due course some names would be crossed out, some would be accepted. Most would be crossed out. And most of those not for failure in wealth or nobility, but because they could not pass the tests devised for them by the archbishop’s Waffenmeister, his master-at-arms. Which, as Erkenbert ceased his writing, were going on in this place or that all over the wide exercise field outside the wooden stockade of much-sacked Hamburg. Men cutting at each other with blunted sword and shield. Men riding horses along a complex course of jumps and figures to strike down with a lance. Men grappling with each other, hand to hand, in the ring. And everywhere the grizzled Waffenmeister or the sergeants of his staff, noting, comparing, repeating names.