“Udd’s only five feet tall,” snarled Brand. “People don’t think he’s a danger because they don’t even know he’s there.”
“That’s a real danger for you, then,” answered Shef. Musingly he added words he had learnt from Thorvin:
“All gates, ere you go through,
Look round you, peer round you.
Not evident to any, where un-friends sit
In every hall.”
Far up the mountain-side, a man sat amid the dark, who had forfeited the family luck, had felt it go out of his possession. Some men said they could see the luck, the hamingja, of a family or a land or a kingdom: usually a giant woman, fully-armed. Olaf had not seen that. But he had felt the luck flow out of him all the same. It was the loss of luck that had been the death of his son, Rognvald the Magnificent. His father had killed him.
Now the same father had to decide whether the sacrifice he had made had been pointless. It was the new one, the one-eye. Olaf had watched him come ashore, to be greeted by the Way and his dangerous bitch of a sister-in-law. Even from a distance, Olaf had felt the luck flowing from him. So great it was that it had overpowered the luck of the Othin-born kings of Wessex. It could easily now overpower even the destiny that Olaf had foreseen for his half-brother’s family. For the future, as Olaf well knew, was not fixed. It was a matter of potentials. Sometimes the potentials could be changed.
Should he intervene? Olaf had brought the Way to Westfold many years before, respecting both its material power through new knowledge and the spiritual power of its visionaries and dreamers. With material power he had had little to do. With the mystical power, much. If he had not been a king, he could have rivaled Vigleik in visions. Except that Vigleik saw what had happened, what was happening. Olaf saw what would happen. If he could blot out the desire to do so.
Olaf reflected wordlessly on what part he would play in the morning, when the Way formed its circle, and called on him, as it would, to sit outside it, to listen and advise. If he chose to put down the one-eye, he knew, he would gain a majority and reestablish the plan to which he had sacrificed his own life and his son’s. But if he did that, he would be sacrificing another future. From very far away, Olaf felt the faint tingle of a thought searching for his own, searching for what he knew and trying to pick a path out of the same tangled indications as his own. There were Christian priests as sensitive in their inquiries as himself. Yet they were too late: he already knew what they were looking for, he was closer to the balance point.
As the sun left the sky entirely, the man in the grove found his skis, walked to where the snow began out of the protecting trees, and began to snake his way down the hill. Behind him, wolf-howls rose. As his skis hissed past the outlying farms, the bonders caught sight of him and muttered to their wives. “There is the elf-king. He has been again to the stone ring, to Geirstath, to take counsel from the gods.”
Chapter Eleven
Inside the great boat-shaped hall, the priests of the Way had formed their holy circle. White cords marked it off from the outside world, with the sacred rowan-berries hanging from them—berries faded now, with the spring coming on, from their autumn scarlet. Inside the circle, more than forty priests sat together, the largest conclave any of them had ever known, drawn for the most part from Norway, where the Way was strong, but also from Denmark, from Sweden, with a few scattered converts or missionaries even from the isles of the Atlantic, from Ireland, or from Frisia where the Way had been born almost two centuries before. One even, Hund the leech, from England, accepted formally at the sponsorship of his master Ingulf the week before.
At one end of the circle stood the silver spear of Othin, at the other the burning bale-fire of Loki. By tradition, this fire, once the conclave had begun, could not be refueled: nor could conclave continue once the fire was so far dimmed that no spark could be seen in the ash.