Not for a while, Shef thought. And even then they may decide to keep outside the line of the skerries, as they do when they’re not hot on the trail of the grind. But Cuthred had already slipped away, sword and shield now ready in his hands. What made this path anyway, Shef reflected. Goats? What else could live up here but mountain goats? Strange that they had worn such a clear track.
Suddenly aware again of his own hunger and thirst, he unslung the provision box, pulled out the milk crock, took a long slow draught of it. As he set it down again, he felt depression and despair settle round his shoulders like a heavy blanket.
The view in front of him was unutterably bleak: gray sea far below, tossing restlessly on gray stone. Above it, just rock and jumbled scree rising all the way to a ridge far above the level where Shef sat. And above that, another higher ridge, and another, rising up to the snow that never melted. White snow and gray stone merged into a sky from which every hint of color had been washed. No hint of green grass, no hint of blue sky, only the everlasting paleness of the high latitudes. Shef felt as if he were at the end of the world, and about to fall off it. The sweat of toil and pain was drying on him, turning him cold and clammy in the little bitter wind that whispered along the mountain-side.
If he died here, who would know? The gulls and the carnivorous skuas would eat his flesh, and then his bones would bleach for ever in the wind. Brand would wonder what had happened for a while. He might never bother to pass word to the south, to Godive and Alfred. They would forget him in a few seasons. His whole life seemed to Shef, in those moments, to be a remorseless pursuit from one disaster to another. The death of Ragnar and the beating he had got from his stepfather. The rescue of Godive, and his blinding. The battles he had fought, and the price he had paid for them. Then the stranding on the sandbank, the march to Hedeby, the way Hrorik had sold him to the Way in Kaupang, the disaster on the ice, his betrayal by Ragnhild, and the killing of little Harald. It all seemed of a piece: momentary success, bought by pain and loss. And now here, stranded beyond hope of rescue, in a place where no human foot had trod since the beginning of time. Maybe it would be better to let go now, fall down the hillside, and vanish from sight for ever.
Shef slumped back, shoulders against the stone, the provision box still open by his side. He felt the sight coming on him, taking over his mind and body in his exhausted, waking swoon.
I told you before, something told him. Remember the wolves in the sky and the serpents in the sea. That is what the pagans see when they look at the world. Now see another picture.
Shef found himself in the body of another man, like himself, exhausted, in pain, close to despair and even closer to death. The man was stumbling along a rocky slope, not as steep as the one Shef had just climbed. But the man was in worse shape. There was something heavy on his shoulder, grinding into it, but he could not put it down or move it to the other. It was rubbing grimly into his back too, and the back was afire—Shef’s own back twinged with remembered sympathy, from the pain of a fresh flogging, the sort that tore open the skin and slashed deep into the flesh and bone beneath.
Yet in some way the man welcomed the pain and the exhaustion. Why? He knew, Shef felt, that the more exhausted he became, the shorter his sufferings would soon become.
They were there. Wherever there was. The man dropped the burden he had been carrying, a great wooden beam. Others took it, men in a strange kind of armor, not mail but metal strips. They fitted it to a still larger beam. Why, Shef realized, this is a cross. I am seeing the crucifixion. Of the White Christ? Why would my patron-god show that to me? We are not Christians. We are their enemies.