“Why have you fared so widely?” asked King Olaf. “What have you sought?”
“What I never found,” Gest answered. “Peace.”
No, that was not wholly right, he thought. Over and over had he been at peace, in the nearness of beauty or wisdom, the arms of a woman, the laughter of children. But how short the whiles! His latest time as a husbandman, in the Uplands of Norway, seemed already the dream of a single night: Ingridh’s youthful gladness, its rebirths in the cradle he had carved, her heart that stayed high while she grew more gray than he, but then the shriveling years, and afterward the burials, the burials. Where now wandered Ingridh? He could not follow, not her nor any of those who glimmered on the rim of memory, not that first and sweetest of all, garlanded with ivy and in her hand a blade of flint…
“In God is peace,” said the priest.
It could be, it could be. Today church bells rang in Norway, as they had done for a lifetime or more in Denmark, yes, above that halidom of the Mother where he and the garland girl had offered flowers … He bad seen the charioteers and their storm gods come into the land, he had seen bronze and iron, the wagon trains bound south for Rome and the viking ships bound west for England, sickness and famine, drought and war, and life patiently beginning anew; each year went down into death and awaited the homecoming of the sun that would bring it to rebirth; be too could let go if he would, and drift away on the wind with the leaves.
King Olaf’s priest thought that soon every quest would end and the dead arise. How good if that was true. Ever more folk believed so. Why should not he?
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Days later, Gest said, “Yes, I will take your baptism.” The priest wept for joy. Olaf whooped.
But when it was done, that evening in the hall Gest took forth a candle and lighted it at a torch. He lay down on a bench where he could see it. “Now I may die,” he told them.
Now I have yielded.
He let the candleflame fill his vision, his being. He made himself one with it. The light waxed for him until he almost thought it shone on those lost faces, brought them back out of the dark, nearer and nearer. His heartbeat heeded him, slowing toward quietness.
Olaf and the young warriors stood dumb with awe. The priest knelt in shadow and prayed without uttering the words aloud.
The candleflame flickered to naught. Nornagest lay still. Through the hall sounded a wind of the oncoming winter.
VI Encounter
FROM AFAR the gold shone like a daylight evenstar. Sometimes trees hid it, a woodlot or a remnant of forest, but always as the travelers moved west they saw it again, brilliant in a vastness of sky where a few clouds wandered, above a plain where villages and freshly greening croplands lay tiny beneath the wind.
Hours wore on, sunbeams now tangled themselves in Svoboda Volodarovna’s brows, and the hills ahead loomed clear, the city upon the highest of them. Behind its walls and watchtowers lifted domes, spires, the smoke from a thousand hearths; and over all soared the brightness. Presently she heard chimes, not the single voice of a countryside chapel but several, which must be great ones to sound across this distance, ringing together in music such as surely sang among the angels or in the abode of Yarilo.
Gleb Ilyev pointed. “The bell tower, the gilt cupola, belongs to the cathedral of Sviataya Sophia,” he said. “That’s not any saint’s name but means ‘Holy Wisdom.’ It comes from the Greeks, who brought the word of Christ to the Rusi.” A short, somewhat tubby man with a pug nose and a scraggly beard turning gray, he was given to self-importance. Yet leathery skin bespoke many years of faring, often through danger, and goodly garb told of success won by it.
“Then all this is new?” asked Svoboda in amazement.