And in a room, not so very far away, an earthly king, with a golden coronet on his long fair plaited hair, listening to a crew of men, richly dressed but carrying strange things, rattles and dried horse penises and polished skulls.
“…no respect for the gods,” they were shouting. “Bad luck for the country. Christians wandering free and never put down. The herring gone and a poor harvest and now the snow earlier than any man has ever known. Act or go the way of foolish King Orm!”
The king raised a hand. “What must I do?”
“Make the great sacrifice. The true sacrifice at Uppsala. Not nine oxen and nine horses and nine dogs, but all the worst of your realm. All the poison. Ninety men and ninety women you must hang on the sacred tree, and more to bleed on the plain outside. And not old broken slaves bought cheap, but the evildoers. Christians, and witches, and warlocks, and Finns, and the cheating priests of the Asgarth Way! Hang them high and earn the gods’ favor. Leave them, and we will look again along the Eiriksgata.” The Way of the One King, Shef remembered from Hagbarth. The road every would-be king of the Swedes had to travel, to expose himself to challenge. This one must have traveled it.
“Very well,” the king’s voice rumbled. “Now here is what I will do…”
Outside his palace again, Shef saw the bulk of the great heathen temple at Uppsala, rising in jagged layer above layer, dragon-heads at every corner, fantastic carvings from the age of the mythic kings on its door. And outside that, the holy oak tree where the Swedes had come to sacrifice for a thousand years. Things swayed creaking on the branches. Men, women, dogs, even horses. They hung there till they rotted and dropped, eye-sockets empty, bared teeth grinning. Over the whole place lay the holy stench.
And Shef was back in the tent, eye clearing. This time he did not jump up, for the weariness and horror on him. “What you saw?” asked Piruusi. He too looked drawn, as if he had seen something he did not want to, but he was intent as well.
“Death and danger. To me, to you. From the Swedes.”
Piruusi spat on Pehto’s floor. “Always danger from the Swedes. If they find us. Maybe you see that too?”
“If I see it close, I will tell you.”
“You need piss again?”
“Not again.”
“Yes again. You great—great spamathr. Drink what went through our spamathr.”
What was that in English, Shef wondered vaguely. A man would be a wicca, a woman a wicce. A cunning one. It rhymed with pitch and flitch, a flitch of bacon. Like a halved human hanging in a smokehouse.
He struggled to his feet again, stood over the bowl.
The last two things he had seen had been “now,” he knew. Not “here” in the sense of by the Finnish wizard’s tent, but “here” in the world. His spirit had traveled only in place.
Where he was this time was neither “here” nor “now,” not in the same way. He was in a different world. It felt as if he was underground in some lightless place, but there was glimmering light from somewhere. He seemed to be walking over an immense arching bridge, with a noisy river running below. Walking down the arch now, to something blocking the way. Not a wall. A lattice, really. It was the Grind-wall that blocked the road to Hel. Strange, that “grind” should mean that and also the death of the whales.
There were faces pushed up against the lattice, watching him, faces he did not wish to see. He walked on. As he had feared, the first one was Ragnhild’s, twisted and hating, spitting out bitter words at him, shaking the lattice as if to get at him. That lattice would not be moved by any human hand, of dead person or alive. Her breast dripped thick blood.
Beside her was the little boy, eyes wondering. He did not seem to hate or to recognize Shef. He twisted away suddenly from a third figure, reaching out to grasp him, hold him to a skinny bosom. The old queen Asa, a rope round her neck.