“What the gods do is never what we expected,” replied Thorvin.
Shef watched the gloomy procession of disarmed Frankish warriors filing after their king aboard the ships that would take them home. With them Alfred had insisted on sending not only the papal legate and the Franks’ own Churchmen, but also the archbishop of York, and his own Bishop Daniel of Winchester, Erkenbert the deacon and all the English clerics who had failed to oppose the invaders. Daniel had screamed threats of eternal damnation for the excommunicate at him, but Alfred had remained unmoved. “If you cast me out of your flock,” he had remarked, “I shall begin my own. One with better shepherds. And dogs with sharper teeth.”
“They will hate you forever for that,” Shef had said to him.
“That is another thing we must share,” Alfred had replied.
And so they had done their deal.
Both men single, without heirs. They would be co-kings, Alfred south of the Thames, Shef north of it, at least as far as the Humber, beyond which there still lurked the Snakeeye and his ambitions. Each named the other as his heir. Each agreed that within his dominion, belief in the gods should be free, for Christians, for Way-folk, and for any other that should appear. But no priest of any religion should be allowed to take payment, in goods or in land, except for a service agreed upon beforehand. And Church-land should revert to the crown. It would make them the richest kings in Europe, before long.
“We must use the money well,” Shef had added.
“In charity?”
“In other ways too. It is often said that no new thing can come before its time, and I believe it. But I believe also that there can be a time for a new thing, and then men can stifle it. Or churches can stifle it. Look at our machines and our crossbows. Who could say they could not have been made a hundred years ago, or five hundred, in the time of the Rome-folk? Yet no one made them. I want us to get back all the old knowledge, even the numbercrafts of the arithmetici. And use it to make new knowledge. New things.” His hand had clenched as if on the haft of a hammer.
Now, still watching the files of captives embarking, Alfred turned to his co-king and said, “I am surprised you still refuse to wear the hammer of our banner. After all, I still wear the cross.”
“The Hammer is for the Way, united. And Thorvin says he has a new sign for me. I will have to see if I approve of it, for the choice is a difficult one. He is here.”
Thorvin approached them, flanked by all the priests of the Way, behind them, Guthmund and a cluster of senior skippers.
“We have your sign,” said Thorvin. He held out a pendant on a silver chain. Shef looked at it curiously: a shaft, with five rungs sticking out from it on alternate sides.
“What is it?”
“It is a kraki,” replied Thorvin. “A pole-ladder. It is the sign of Rig.”
“I have never heard the name of that god. What can you tell me about him that should make me wear his sign?”
“He is the god of climbers. Of wanderers. He is mighty not through himself but through his children. He is the father of Thrall, of Carl, of Jarl. And of others.”
Shef looked round at the many watching faces: Alfred. Thorvin. Ingulf. Hund. There were some not there. Brand, of whose recovery he still had no news. His mother Thryth. He did not know if she would ever wish to see him again.
Most of all, Godive. After the battle a group of his catapulteers had brought him the body of his half brother—his mother’s son, Godive’s husband. Both he and she had looked for a long time at the purple face, the twisted neck, trying to find in it some memory of childhood, some clue to the hatred in the brain. Shef had thought of lines from one of Thorvin’s old poems, said by a hero over the brother he had killed: