“Get in one of the boats!” Sharkko squalled. “They’ll grab them, and we won’t have any!”
Davis thought that that was good advice, but he did not intend to take the fellow with him. He resumed helping the Frenchman push the canoe. It slid into the water. But Sharkko had splashed to it, thrown his grail and bags into it, and started to climb in. Davis grabbed the bags and threw them into the water. Sharkko screamed with fury. His fist struck Davis’s chin. Stunned, Davis staggered back and fell into the water. When he rose, sputtering, he saw that Sharkko was going after the bags. He got to the
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boat and threw Sharkko’s grail after him. That made the man scream more loudly. Without the grail, Sharkko would either starve to death or have to live from the food he could beg or the fish he could catch.
Faustroll, still standing in the water, was doubled over with laughter.
Davis’s anger ebbed and was replaced by a disgust he felt for himself. He hated Sharkko, yet despised himself for hating him and for losing his temper. It was hard to act like a Christian when dealing with such a “sleazebag” (a word he had learned from a late-twentieth-centurian).
But he now had no time to dwell on his own failings. The running men had stopped near him. They seemed out of breath, though that was not the only reason they had halted. They were Ivar and about fifty of his Norse and Prankish warriors and a dozen women. Ann Pullen was one of them. Ivar was bloody though not badly wounded, and the bronze war-ax he waved about dripped red. He seemed to be in favor of making a stand of it against the pursuers. Some of his men were arguing against it. Davis did not know what had happened at first. By listening to them while he was getting into the canoe, he pieced out their situation.
Apparently, the rear attack had caught Ivar by surprise. But he had rallied his men, and Arpad’s had been routed. No sooner was this done than Arpad, leading his fleet, had stormed the shore. In the melee, Ivar had killed Arpad.
“I hewed off his sword arm!” Ivar shouted. “And hifr-forces lost heart and fled. We slaughtered them!”
54 Philip Jose Farmer
8
But Thorfinn the Skull-Splitter had his own plans. He had sent a part of his army to overrun the west bank. While they were doing that, he had attacked the rear of Arpad’s fleet. That was partly responsible for the panic among Arpad’s men on the east bank.
Thorfinn had decided then, or perhaps he had long ago decided, to betray Ivar. Thus, he would become master not only of his own kingdom but of Arpad’s and Ivar’s.
Ivar and his soldiers had not expected betrayal, but they had rallied quickly and had fought furiously. But they had been forced to run, and Thorfinn’s hounds were baying close to their heels.
Ivar yelled in Norse, “The traitor! The traitor! No faith, no faith! Thorfinn swore by Odin on the oath-ring that we would be as brothers!”
Davis, even in the midst of his anxiety, could not help smiling. From what he knew about Norse kings and their brothers, he was sure that there was nothing unusual about their trying to kill each other. That, in fact, had been typical of most medieval royal kin, whatever their nationality.
Oh, he was among barbarians, and he had been just about to be free of them when the Norns decreed that they should catch up with him. No, he thought, it’s not the Noms, the three female Fates of the ancient Scandinavian religion. It’s God who’s destined this. I’ve been among the Vikings so long, I’m beginning to think like them.
By now, Ivar had quit raving. In one of the sudden
r
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switches of mood that distinguished him, he was laughing at himself.
“After all, Thorfinn only did what I might have done, given the circumstances. Seize the chance turn of events! Get the power! The power!”
Faustroll, now sitting in the canoe, called out, “Your Majesty, true descendant of the great King Ubu! We believe that Power is what motivates almost all of humanity, and Power is responsible for more rationalizations and false justifyings than Religion is, though the two are by no means unconnected! You are a true son of Adam, not to mention of Eve, and perhaps of a fallen angel who saw that the daughters of men were fair and went unto them and lay with them! Go, go, go, our son! Consider Power, worship it, obey its ten thousand commandments! But we are a voice crying in the Wilderness! Crying in the jungle fertilized by the never-ending flow of desire for Power in its ten thousand manifestations, the true shit of the true universe!
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