The scene vanished and Shef found himself once more looking into the eyes of his patron. Clever, foxy eyes.
“I don’t do that kind of thing,” remarked Rig. “If you want to shirk your duty, go ahead. I will not deceive you into obedience, or beat you into it. I just want you to see what shirking will mean.”
“So show me. You’re going to anyway.”
Shef was braced for immediate horror, but it did not come. He saw his own city, his own foundation of Stamford. There was the Wisdom House, there its accumulation of workshops and forges and storehouses. Bigger than he remembered them, older, lichen encrusted on the grey stones. Silently, without explanation, the Wisdom House sprang apart. A flash, a crack that he knew would have been ear-splitting if there had not been some barrier between him and the substance of the dream, a cloud of smoke rising and in the smoke stones arcing up into the sky.
As they came down Shef saw what was going on in the ruins. Soldiers everywhere, wearing white surcoat and red cross: Crusaders, such as King Charles and Pope Nicholas had once brought against him. But these soldiers were not wearing the heavy mail and horsemen’s boots of the Frankish knights, or the Emperor’s Lanzenritter. They were lightly dressed, moved quickly, carried only long tubes in their hands.
“Freedom for Loki as well as for Thor,” said Rig. “Well and good. But whose side will Loki be on? Or stay on? Naphtha and phosphor, sulphur and saltpeter, alcohol and charcoal. Others besides Steffi can put two and two together. Or one and one and one. In the end Church and Empire united will win. Not in your time. But you will live your life knowing it will happen—and that you could have averted it. I will see to that.”
Shef lay dumb and defiant. “Let me show you some more,” the clever voice continued. “Here is the new city.”
A marvel slowly opened before Shef’s closed eyes. A white city, with shining walls, and in the heart of it a cluster of spires reaching towards heaven. On every spire a banner, on every banner a device of holiness: Crossed Keys, Closed Book, Saint Sebastian and his arrows, Saint Lawrence and his gridiron. Beneath the spires, Shef knew, lay a multitude of men whose duty it was to praise the Lord and study the Bible. It was not his Bible, but the yearning for such a life, of contemplation and study, of peace and tranquility, swept over him like hunger. Tears began to spill from his shut eyelids, at what he did not have.
“Look closer,” said the voice.
In the lecture-rooms stood men reading from their books. The students listened. They wrote nothing. Their duty was to remember. As the lectures finished the lecturers went to a central room, handed over their books. They were counted, checked against a list, placed in an iron chest, the key turned. Safely stored, till next time. In the whole city no man owned a book for himself alone. No man wrote a new word, or thought a new thought. The smiths beat out what they were told to, as their ancestors had done before them. The itch Shef so often felt, to hold a hammer, to beat out an answer for a question in his brain: that itch would remain unappeased for ever.
“It is the Skuld-world,” said Rig. “Where Loki is freed at last to serve the Church, and then cast into ever stricter bonds, till he too withers away from starvation. And the world remains the same, from one eon to the next. Ever-holy, never-changing. Every book become a Bible. Your monument, your legacy.
“And if I fight?” asked Shef. “Will Loki be with me instead? Will he weep for Balder and release his brother from Hel? What will that look like?”
In an instant the limited sight of a single city faded, expanded to become an image of the Nine Worlds of which Middle-earth is only one. Shef could see the dark-elves below the earth and the light-elves above it, could see Bifrost bridge that leads to Asgarth and the Giallar-bridge that takes the souls down to Hel. All was—not dark, but weathered, stained somehow, as if all seen through a dusty glass. Somewhere deep down Shef could hear a massive creaking, a noise of rusty machinery forced open, forced into life.