And yet the Lance was not his. So much was clear. It belonged to the Christians. What they would do with it, only their God knew. But they had the right to follow their vision, as he and the Way, he and Thorvin and Vigleik and all the others had the right to follow theirs. Remembering his own vision of the dying Christ, remembering King Edmund of the East Angles and the old woman he and Alfred had met lamenting in the forest-clearing, he felt there was something yet to come from the Cross. If not from the Church. Yet Bruno was no Churchman.
“If the Lance is to make a German Empire,” said Shef stiffly, “it had better be a German who holds it, then. You will find the lance-head by my companion’s body there, where Sigurth cut it from its shaft. Only the head is ancient work. The shaft has been many times renewed.”
Bruno seemed, for a moment, nonplused. “You are prepared to give it up? I would not do so, even with a point at my throat.” He thought a moment longer, ignoring the men now running up the hill towards them. “It is true. Your emblem is not the spear, whether of Othin or of the centurion Longinus. What you wear round your neck, as I have told you, is the graduale. It is your destiny to pursue that, as mine was to retrieve the Lance.”
He twitched his blade back, raised it in salute. “I ought to kill you just the same,” he said. “I fear you are a dangerous man, though no swordsman. But it would not be knightly, in cold blood. Farewell, then, King of the North. Remember I was the first to hail you so.”
He ran down the slope, picked something from the bloody grass, kissed it, and sped away towards a line of horses being led towards him from the Braethraborg corrals.
Shef took a crossbow from one of the lightly-armed skogarmenn who came panting up the hill, cocked it, dropped in a quarrel, looked at the broad back running away sixty, eighty, a hundred yards off.
I ought to kill you too, he reflected. But it would not be knightly, in cold blood, to return ill for good. Farewell, then, Emperor-to-be. Or as you say, auf wiedersehen.