“Hold still,” he muttered in English, as the men kicked Shef’s legs from beneath him and thrust his head back. Dimly, Shef realized that the brawny arms holding his head in a grip like a clamp were Thorvin’s. He tried to struggle, to call out, to accuse them of treachery. A cloth thrust into his mouth, pushing the tongue back from his teeth. The white-hot needle coming closer, closer, a thumb pushing his eyelid back while he tried to scream, to twist his head, to clench his eyes tight shut.
Inexorable pressure. Only the searing point coming closer and closer to his right eye. Pain, agony, the white fire running from the eyeball into every corner of his brain, tears and blood streaming down his face. Through it all, dimly, the sound of sizzling, of steel being tempered in the tub.
He was hanging in the air. There was a spike through his eye, a continuous burning pain that made him twist his face and clench the muscles in his neck to try to reduce it. But the pain never went away or grew less; it was there all the time. Yet it did not seem to matter. His mind was unaffected, continuing to think and to ponder without distraction from the screaming pain.
Nor was his other eye affected. It remained open all the time, never even blinking. Through it, and from wherever in all the worlds he was, he could see out across a vast panorama. He was high up, very high up. Below him he could see mountains, plains, rivers, and here and there on the seas little collections of colored sails that were Viking fleets: On the plains scattered dust clouds that were giant armies marching, the Christian kings of Europe and the pagan nomads of the steppe permanently mustering for war. He felt that if he narrowed his eyes—his eye—a certain way, just so, he could focus in on anything he wanted to: read the lips of the commanders and the cavalrymen, see the words of the emperor of the Greeks or the khakhan of the Tartars even as they formed them.
Between himself and the world below, he realized, birds were floating—giant ones keeping station with never a flap or a flutter, just the little tremor along the trailing feathers of the wings. Close to him two passed by, staring at him with brilliant and intelligent yellow dots of eyes. Their feathers were glossy black, their beaks threatening, stained: ravens. The ravens that came to peck out the eyes of hanged men. He stared at them as unblinkingly as they at him; they slanted their wings hastily and swooped away.
The spike through his eye. Was that all that was holding him? So it seemed. But then he must be dead, no one could survive a spike through the brain and the skull, into the wood behind. Through the feel of the bark he could sense a bursting of sap, a steady pumping of fluid, up from roots unimaginably deep to branches far above him, so high that no man could ever climb them.
His eye stabbed him again and he twisted, his hands still hanging loose below him like a dead man’s. There were the ravens again—curious, greedy, cowardly, clever, alert for any sign of weakness. They drifted in toward him, flapped their wings, came suddenly closer, landed heavily on his shoulders. Yet this time, he knew, he need not fear their beaks. They clung to him for reassurance. A king was coming.
The figure appeared in front of him, moving upward from a spot on Earth from which he had averted his eye. It was a terrible shape, naked, blood running from it down its ruined loins, an expression of ghastly pain on its face. Its back lifted up behind its shoulders in a parody of the ravens ‘ wings; its chest was shrunken and twisted in; gobbets of spongy matter hung over its nipples. It carried its own backbone in its hand.
For a moment the two figures hung there, eye to eye. The creature recognized him, the hanged one thought. It pitied him. But it was going beyond the nine worlds now, to some other destiny where few if any would follow. Its blackened mouth twisted.