They had stretched him out and were driving home the nails, one through each wrist, not the palms where flesh would tear through as soon as full weight came on them, but between the bones of the forearm. Another through the feet, a tricky job to line them both up. Mercifully, by this stage the pain was not coming through to the Shef-mind observing. Instead, it looked hard at the men doing the grim task.
They were working quickly as if they had done this many times before, talking to each other in a language Shef did not understand. Yet as the moments went by he found he could catch a word or two: hamar, they said, nagal. But for “cross” they said, not rood as he expected, but something that sounded like crouchem. Roman soldiers, so Shef had always been told, but talking some kind of German dialect, with a garbled kitchen-Latin thrown in.
The man on the cross fainted as they hauled him up. Then his eyes opened again, and he was looking out, as Shef was doing now, as Shef had done years before after his blinding. Then he had seen the vision of Edmund, the martyred Christian king, coming to him with his backbone in his hand, and then passing on—elsewhere. So there was a place for Christians to go, as well as the Valhalla of the pagans.
The sun was already beginning to sink over Calvary. For a few brief seconds, Shef saw it as the dying man, or man-god, saw it. Not the chariot drawn by terrified horses and pursued by ravening wolves of pagan belief just as the earth and sea below were not the haunt of giant serpents seeking only to destroy mankind. Instead the man looking up saw, not chariot nor disk of gold, but a glowing bearded face looking down, full of both sternness and compassion. It looked down on a world of creatures that threw up their arms to him and begged for help, for forgiveness, for mercy.
Eloi, eloi, cried the dying man, lama sabachthani. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.
The glowing face shook in denial. Not a forsaking, a cure. A bitter potion for the sins of the world, an answer to the beseeching arms. And now a final mercy.
A man stepped forward from the ranks drawn up at the foot of the cross, red cloak above his armor, red hackle cresting his iron helmet. Inoh, he said in the same half-German gabble that his soldiers had used. Giba me thin lancea. “Enough, give me your lance.”
The dying man found a sponge at his lips, sucked at it feverishly, tasting the thin sour wine that the soldiers had as a daily ration to mix into their water. As the blessed relief flowed down his parched throat, tasting better than anything he had drunk in the world before, the centurion below freed the lance from the sponge he had held up, dropped it two feet, poised it carefully, and then thrust home under the ribs to split the convict’s heart.
Blood and water ran over his hand, and he gazed at the mixture with surprise. At the same moment he felt the world shift around him, as if something had forever altered. He looked up, and instead of the grim burning sun of this parched and desert land, he saw what seemed to be his own dead father’s face smiling down at him. Around him a thrill of exultation seemed to rise from the sand, and beneath his feet a cry of relief came from the rocks, from under the rocks, from Hell itself where the prisoners saw their promised salvation.
The centurion swayed, caught himself, looked down again at the ordinary issue lance dripping blood and water down his hand and arm.
Now that is what the Christians see, said the voice of his guardian to Shef. They see a rescue from outside where the pagans see only a fight they cannot win and dare not lose. All well and good—if there is a rescuer.
The vision faded, left Shef sitting on the barren rock. He blinked, thinking about what he had seen. The trouble is, he saw in a moment of contrast, that the Christians put their trust in rescue, and so do not struggle for themselves, just put their faith in their Church. The pagans struggle for victory, but they have no hope. So they bury girls alive and roll men under their longships, for they feel there is no good in the world. The Way must be between these two. Something that offers hope, which the pagans do not have: even Othin could not bring back his son Balder from the dead. Something that depends on your own efforts, which the Christian Church rejects: to them salvation is a gift, a grace, not something mere humanity can earn.