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CHAPTER IV

She couldn't lie in holy ground, of course, all unchristened as she was. But the bishop had a heart. He put her just outside the churchyard wall at Agvaldsness. It's a king's church. I think it'll grow. Someday they'll have to move the wall out.

It was back to Sola for us then, with a fair wind, and far from the worst seasickness I've known.

Then followed a busy time, as we set the thralls to the spring spading (both in Erling's fields and the parcels he'd assigned most of them, to earn their freedom on).

I was sleeping raggedly. I missed the slight weight of Enda's crucifix, and it offended my soul that Heaven had permitted Eyvind to destroy it without a fight.

Stripped of my soul's anchor, I was beginning to doubt my eyes and my ears, and the very earth under my feet. Nothing seemed fully real to me. I kept wondering, What's truly here? Are my senses making game of me?

Gradually the world faded, as it were, before my eyes. Things that had seemed sharp and solid—houses for instance, and the mountains to the east—began to blanch, and the mountains disappeared altogether. I was too frightened to tell anyone about it, until I overheard people talking about the fog that had rolled in and wouldn't go away. I noticed then that the air was uncommonly calm—Jaeder is usually a windy place. The fog had come and there'd been nothing to blow it away.

I walked the path down to the church one night for mass, and found myself inside without a memory of using the door. I had a panicked moment, afraid I'd passed through a wall unawares. I said the mass with a mind uncentered, and I thought some of the household looked at me strangely.

Afterwards, when all were gone and I was snuffing the candles, a voice called from without. I went to the door. I unlatched it. I didn't remember putting the latch on.

"Father, can you help me?" The voice was Asa's.

"What's the matter?" I asked, shaking my head to clear it. "Come inside."

"I won't enter your holy place," she said. "I fear your God."

"Why?"

"Your Jesus is a fearsome god. Thor asks us to sacrifice, and to be just to one another. Beyond that he lets us alone. There's no guessing what your Jesus will ask for."

"You should really convert," I said, looking at her through the doorway. "You have a future as a theologian."

Her mouth opened. "I don't understand," she said. I apologized for making a joke over her head and went out where she was.

"Ulf is gone," she said. "I've looked everywhere I can think of except down on the strand, and I'm frightened to go all that way alone in this murk."

I told her I'd be glad to go down to the shore with her. I lit a fish-oil lamp to give us some light. Little chance of it being blown out with the air as still as a casket of lead.

We took the path together, side by side, talking idly of how the fog had strangled all shipping and fishing. I enjoyed being with her—I hadn't felt so at ease with a woman since . . .

Halla.

Ye saints and holy prophets, have pity on me. I'd as soon not go through that again. 

We found Ulf at the water's edge, paddling happily in the surf like a child and singing a tune over and over—I recognized it presently as a snatch of the mass, badly garbled. He smiled up at us, took our hands and came along. Back at their house Asa took his wet clothes off him and put him in bed wrapped in a wadmal blanket (that's Iceland wool—gray and shaggy and quite soft).

We stood side by side, watching him sleep on the bench.

"He looks like a baby," she said.

"A remarkably ugly baby," said I.

I don't know how it happened, I swear, but I found my hand had snaked its way around her waist. Before I had time to be shocked and pull it away, she'd turned to me and brought her face up to be kissed. I didn't disappoint her.

"I'll convert," she said when we were done.

"You'd do that for me?" I asked.

"Everything's less frightening when you've a husband."

I pulled away. "It cannot be. I shouldn't have kissed you."

"Why?"

"I'm a priest."

"What of it? Priests marry."

"They shouldn't."

"I don't understand. Thangbrand had a woman. The bishop has none that I know of, but he says nothing against those who do."

"Bishop Sigurd is an Englishman. Thangbrand is a Saxon. They've a faulty view of a priest's duties. We order things differently in Ireland."

"But you're not in Ireland."

" 'Tis the same God."

She shivered. "Your god—everywhere, always watching, keeping a tally of wrongs—"

"Is that worse than believing in a world packed with gods and spirits whom you might offend by mischance at any moment? The High King of Heaven at least has His commandments out in the open. He doesn't ambush us with unexpected trespasses."

"Do you really think that?" she asked, looking in my eyes. "Have you found him so just and easy to please?"

I was spared answering by the sound of shouting without, and a horn blowing, a noise I didn't recognize at first, until Asa said, "Wolves!"

Why does that word strike such terror in our souls? No doubt you've seen plenty of wolves in your time, as I have, but have you actually seen one attack a man (other than one dying on a battlefield)? They're cowards when it comes to it, but all those stories we heard from our grandmothers to keep us in bed at night stay with us, in our bones, roused the moment we hear that wasteland howling.

"We must bar the door," I said, but even as I spoke I heard a pounding outside, and a human voice crying, "Let me in! For love of the gods!"

I opened to the wretch, but what bolted at me was no man. It was a great, gray, hunch-shouldered, slavering wolf, tall as a man's chest, with eyes of yellow fire.

I jerked to close the door, but he got his head inside, twisting it and snapping at me as I beat at his ears (keeping my hand as well as might be away from the fangs) to drive him back out. Asa screamed and grabbed an iron ladle, using it also on the wolf.

He was as strong as three men, this wolf—it came to me that this was no natural beast. Gradually, in spite of our blows, he was working his shoulders inside. I drew my eating knife and began stabbing at him, but although I drew blood it seemed only to anger him.

We'd not have made it, I think, without help. Of a sudden the wolf stiffened and his eyes went wide, then he slumped and the light went out of them. I took my weight from the door to let him drop, and looking out through the open space I saw Erling Skjalgsson with sword and shield, torchlight dancing on his helmet and brynje. Men of the bodyguard were circling him, faced outward, as a shield.

"Werewolves!" he said to me, and his eyes glowed like the beast's. He reached down and took it by the scruff of its neck and jerked upward. The whole skin came off in a piece, and there on my threshold lay a skinny, naked man, hairy and filthy. "They wear these shape-changers' cloaks, and they die harder than rats. This is sorcery, Father, and I've come to bring you to the hall to lead our prayers. I smell more than this filthy shape-changer here. I smell Eyvind Kellda."

I took Asa by the hand and we went—we ran—toward the hall, the bullyboys still keeping their shield wall around us. But we'd gone no farther than a few yards before the main force was on us, and the men had to stand and fight.

Erling joined his men in the shield wall then, leaving only Asa and me, all unarmed, in the center. They were seasoned warriors all, able to split a man to the groin with a single blow, or drop a swallow in flight with a spear-cast, but there were too many wolves. It was hack and fend with weapon and shield, but the wolves were hard to drop, and when one did drop, three more came. Even when they didn't drop, three more came. I've never seen so many wolves, or so large. The noise of their howling and our screaming would have given Azazel nightmares.

One of the bullyboys fell at last, with a wolf bigger than himself at his throat, and then the wall fell apart. I took Asa's hand and ran in no particular direction. Amazingly we got free. We came to the wall that separated the steading from the meadow. Since the wolves we'd seen were within the walls I thought it could do no harm to be on the other side, so I lifted Asa over. We ran and we ran, in the dark, then I fetched up hard against something I could not see.

"The god-tree!" cried Asa. "This is Big Melhaug and my god-tree!"

Even in my fear I shivered to know I had stepped on the mound and touched the unholy tree.

"Come! Let's go up!" cried Asa.

"What?"

"We can climb the tree! We'll be safe from the wolves!"

"Never!" I said, but then I heard a howling, and saw seven great gray shapes with yellow eyes loping up at me, and before I could think about the thing I was clambering up a tree I could not see.

I found the limbs by feeling alone, climbing blind. Then suddenly, as if the fog had cleared, I saw branches around me. I looked down, and something strange in what I saw fuddled me and took my balance away. I fell with a cry, and landed on grass as soft as an eider cushion. I blinked and looked around. The world was wrong.

This was not Sola, and it was not night, and there was no fog. This was no part of Norway I'd seen before. The only familiar object was Asa, standing nearby and looking away.

You must have seen a day when a storm is looming up, and the skies go all over gray, like iron, but the sun still shines from some clear patch of sky so that everything green or bright glows bravely against all that threat of heaven. I've never seen a day like that but I felt bolder and yeastier and nearer to God, and I'll never see one again without thinking of the land we came to that night, Asa and I.

We stood at the foot of a mighty, wide-branching ash tree, on a broad plain, ringed all round by mountains. The mountains glowed gold and orange and pink in the light of the widest, brightest rainbow I'd ever seen. It spanned the sky above us and served this place, as far as I could tell, as its only source of light. Have you ever seen a rainbow that cast shadows? This one did. The only sounds were a kind of chittering in the grass, like insects or frogs, and a ringing in the sky, like the echo of brass, hammer-struck.

I looked up at Asa, who yet stood staring into the distance. "Where are we?" I asked. "What are you looking at?"

"'Tis Thorstein," she said quietly. "My husband."

I wanted to say, "Your husband is dead," but I looked and there he was. Actually I took her word that it was he. I'd seen his corpse, but it's easier to know a dead man from seeing him alive than a living one from seeing him dead. That's been my experience anyway, and I think few will gainsay me.

He'd been a handsome enough man, this Thorstein, somehow managing to look kin to his brother Ulf without sharing his ugliness. He was tall and brown haired. He carried full arms, helmet and shield and brynje, and a sword at his hip.

They flew into each other's arms, the departed and his widow, like doomed lovers in a song. They sighed and whispered endearments and covered one another with kisses, while I, uneasy, moved behind the tree and, to divert my mind, looked in the grass for the source of that chirping I kept hearing.

At first I thought I'd judged it rightly for the squeak of insects, for I soon saw that the grass at foot level was alive with tiny creatures that bounced to and fro in constant activity. Fleas! I thought for a moment. We'll be infested with fleas here! 

But they weren't fleas. A closer look proved them to be wondrous small animals of peculiar shape. In color they were all green or brown, to blend in, and it seemed to me they sometimes changed, or exchanged, colors among themselves. Some were long in the body, with small heads from which tendrils sprouted, and short arms and legs; others had small, roundish bodies. But they all had grabby little hands on all their limbs, and they were forever reaching and catching one another, and wriggling about in chains until one or another beast got himself loose, at which point he would straightway reach out to grab another beast, forming a new chain or connecting one chain to another. It was a constant chaos, a flux that shaped and unshaped itself moment by moment. The creatures seemed to live for nothing but this grasping. I saw no eating or mating among them, and they certainly never tried to bite me. There's not much more to tell of them, but after watching awhile I grew fascinated with the ever-changing combinations, as a man can lose himself watching a hearthfire, or ants at their harvesting.

They seemed oddly familiar, and then I knew them. I'd seen them often, carved on a hundred objects in Norway—bowls and house pillars and axe handles and ships' prows, and cast into sword hilts and cauldrons and the furniture of drinking horns. Where we Irish love to carve sweet, Christian knotwork, the Norse carve these lawless, greedy little beasties wherever they can find a plain space. Now I knew where they'd come from, if only I could learn where I was.

I was so taken with the beasties that I did not hear Thorstein and Asa approach me until he stood over me. They formed a strange picture, both towering over me where I sat in the grass, him with his sword drawn and she with a hand on his arm.

" 'Tis not what you think, Thorstein!" she said.

"And is it this fool you've been keeping company with since I've been underground, and hardly cold yet?" he cried.

In no position to defend myself, and all unarmed, I blathered at him, fumbling for words.

"He's a Christian priest!" she said. "He touches no woman!"

"Then he's a strange kind of Christian priest," said Thorstein. "Where I've been the priests marry, and those who don't are worse than those who do, keeping the women around them as a stallion keeps his mares, and giving each her turn!"

"He's a good man! He rescued us from Olaf's law, and he's done me no insult!"

A strong hand reached down to grasp my shirtfront and pull me to my feet one-handed. Looking me in the face, he cried, "Aye, a fair ruse to get a woman in your bed! Gain her trust first; make her think your spout is but for draining your bladder, take advantage of her innocence—"

"You're dead, Thorstein," said I. "If all this were true, it would count for nothing. Asa's a lawful widow."

(Why do I say these things? Am I mad?)

He set me loose and leaped back to give himself sword-room, holding his shield in the guard position. "No man calls me dead and lives! Defend yourself, god-man!"

"Oh for Heaven's sake," I replied. "I'm unarmed. You can murder me if you like—I can't offer you better sport."

And God help me, he did. Or rather, he swung his sword, and I lifted my arm to protect my head, but I felt no blow—

The next thing I knew, we all sat on the ground, and I vaguely remembered noise and light, and there was a hot smell that said to me "lightning."

And towering above us we saw a looming, mountainous figure whom I recognized from a dozen images I'd seen in heathen shrines or blazing on Olaf's pyres. There was no mistaking him. This was Thor himself.

Thor, the lightning wielder. Thor, dispenser of justice. I'll tell you this freely—I am a Christian, and would lay down my life for Christ the Beloved, but I was tempted that moment to worship Thor.

He was a giant all aglow, shining and sparking from every part. His hair and beard were red as steel out of the forge, and seemed to curl and twine of their own volitions. His eyes blazed white-hot under spiky red brows. His bare arms and face seemed as hard and smooth as wood rubbed with oil, and on his right hand he wore an iron glove, and with the glove he grasped his great hammer, larger than his head, with the handle somewhat short for its size. The hammer glowed yellow and shot sparks of its own.

He stood in a fiery brazen chariot pulled by two great black goats with ivory horns and glowing, gold demon eyes.

"WHAT GOES ON HERE?" the god roared, and the earth shook, and the tree shed leaves in a whirlwind.

We all stood mute as scolded children a moment, but Thorstein, who was still angry despite the uproar, squeaked (it seemed a squeak after Thor's voice), "This Christian priest has been groping my wife, and I drew steel to defend what's mine!"

"Sword and shield against a man unarmed?" cried Thor. "Is this how you act in my land?"

Thorstein bowed his head.

"And what do you mean by `Christian priest'? How did a Christian priest come here?" Thor glared at me with eyes like red-hot skewers. "No, more than a Christian priest! A living man! And a living woman! How came you here, outlanders?"

Asa and I exchanged a glance. I felt guilty, like a boy caught in his neighbor's orchard.

"We climbed the tree," said I. "We'd no inkling where it would lead." I tried to meet his eyes, slid my gaze away and found his image burned into them.

"You need not trouble over that," said Thor. "This is my country, where justice is done. No one is punished here for sins unintended. Mine is not like the world your god made. Here all is just. No evil falls on the innocent. All wrong is forestalled, or if not forestalled, undone."

"You've made your own world?" I asked.

"This is Thrudheim, land of might, the home of Thor. Here come my worshipers when they die, to live with me and enjoy my bounty till the day of Ragnarok, the end of the world."

"Then all men and gods will stand before the great God Jehovah," said I. (There I went again.)

"Yes!" cried Thor. "So we will! And when that day comes I will tell your Jehovah to His face that I have made a better world than his, and so should be judging him!

"Your Jehovah made a world a good man can't even live in. Your Christ admitted as much. He said that anyone who wanted to follow him must go with him to the gallows-place.

"I'll say to your Jehovah, `I have made a good world for my followers, a decent world where there is no pain undeserved.' And let him do what he will to me, he'll know I spoke truth!"

"Then judge for us, great Thor!" cried Thorstein. "This Christian priest has trifled with my wife while I've been underground. Has not a husband the right to take vengeance for his wife's honor?"

Asa said, "You mistake us, Thorstein." She addressed herself to the god. "My husband takes offense that Father Aillil has shown me kindness since his death. I mean no disrespect to Thorstein, but he's dead and I yet live, and he will not see the distinction. He tried to kill Father Aillil."

"You need not fear for that," rumbled Thor. "No violence is done in my land without my consent. Did Thorstein strike the priest?"

"Yes, he did."

"But the priest took no injury?"

Asa looked at me and I said, "No—none that I can tell."

"Nor will he," said Thor. "In my land there is no undeserved harm. Fall on a rock, or let the rock fall on you, and it becomes soft as a mushroom. Strike with a sword, and the sword does no more harm than a sausage would. In this way I show myself greater than Jehovah, who left all his creatures in danger from the world itself, and from each other."

"But this priest richly deserves keen steel!" cried Thorstein. "Surely you see that, mighty Thor!"

"That's the thing I must consider," said Thor. "Perfect justice must be meted out, and I make justice for all my children. Now let me think." He furrowed his sloped brow and set his chin on his fist.

"AILLIL THE PRIEST!" cried a voice, and I turned to see, looking hale as ever in life, Soti the smith, my great enemy. Broad of shoulder, naked of skull, small of eyes, with even the burn scar still running down one side of his face where lightning had struck him. He carried an axe and a shield.

"Aillil the priest!" cried Soti. "Great Thor, I cry your judgment on this Christian monster whom the Norns have placed in my power once again! This man schemed to put away your worship at Sola, and connived with Erling Skjalgsson to cheat me of my rights in the iron-ordeal, and helped to torture me, a thing unlawful under our laws, and paid a thrall to burn me to death! Never was such an evildoer seen in the northland from old times to today, and I must have my rights of him!"

"Wait your turn, man," cried Thorstein. "I've a case of my own against this priest, and Thor ponders it now."

"And who are you—a small bonder of little wealth or honor—to tell a man such as me to wait?" cried Soti.

"And who are you? A devil-smith with Lapp blood, little better than a thrall! Give place to your betters, man!"

"I'll give place to one when I see him!" cried Soti, raising his axe and shield, and then they went at it hammer and tongs. Only their weapons bit not at all, and made no more sound than if they'd been slapping one another with wet washing.

"I needs must let them do this," said Thor, sighing. "I blunt their weapons, so they do each other no harm, but that just makes them angrier, so they usually go at it until they're both winded. It drains off their energy at least. But it's so distracting while I'm trying to judge a matter. And things have piled up so—so many cases in the backlog, from this world and yours."

"You're trying to give justice for every evil ever done?" I asked.

"Those brought to me, yes," said Thor.

"How many have you settled?"

"Well, not any, actually. It's all so complicated—the more you learn the more you understand, and the more tangled it gets—I've been trying to make peace between the Volsungs and the Niblungs for hundreds of years now for instance, but I can't find a settlement that'll satisfy them—they keep demanding burning for burning and blood-eagles and all that nonsense, but for the life of me I can't figure out who deserves to kill and who deserves to be killed, and I can't decide until I'm sure—absolutely sure, you see—and I never get to the end of the evidence. Because if I'm not absolutely sure I can't throw it in Jehovah's face at the last judgment.

"I mean—you take a simple case, like murdering a child. Cut and dried, you'd say. But then the murderer comes up and says, `Wait, I only did the deed because somebody did some evil to me when I was a child, and I got my soul all twisted and scarred before I had any real choice,' so you have to go back and look at his childhood, and the ones who hurt him have hurts of their own, and pretty soon you're doing a genealogy, and you know how genealogies are. They branch like Yggrdrasil, and never end.

"The further back you go, the more you see that all the crimes are connected—it's all one great crime, and each of you humans shares in it more or less. You're all accomplices. How do you judge between a thousand thousands of accomplices?

"But I'll do it! I am Thor, the trusty god, and I will make justice, and I'll rub your god's face in it when the day comes. . . ."

"Justice!" cried Thorstein, and he turned away from his fight with Soti. Soti bounced his axe off his head when he did it, but so what?

"Justice!" Thorstein cried. "You call this justice? Cases backed up a thousand years, no killing allowed—we can fight each other all we want, but we can't do any damage—I'm going mad in this place!"

"What do you want?" roared Thor. "Your old world, where the innocent suffer and no one can get his rights?"

"At least we could try in the old world! In this world all there is is rage and more rage, until we just go mad and you—"

Thor roared so the whole world shook. "I AM SO SICK OF YOU PEOPLE! I give you a world without pain, and you still won't bridle your anger!"

"That's because you don't give us the one thing we really want!"

"And what is it you really want?"

"Our way, of course!"

Thor swung his hammer in a wide arc and made red fire in the air. "YOU CAN'T ALL HAVE YOUR WAY! SOMEONE MUST YIELD PLACE!"

"In a world without pain, why should we ever yield place?"

Thor roared again, and Thorstein disappeared, and Soti with him.

"What happened to them?" Asa asked.

"I changed them into grippers," said Thor.

"Grippers? Those little beasties on the ground?" I asked.

"Yes. After they've bounced about as grippers for a time, they calm down at last."

"There's a lot of grippers about," said I.

"Well, there's a lot of anger at this stage of my plan," said Thor. "But once I get my caseload under control, it will be better, I'm certain."

"You're trying to change the world without changing men's hearts," said I (Aillil, counselor to the gods). "It won't do, you know."

"WHO ARE YOU TO SAY WHAT WILL DO IN MY LAND?" came the predictable answer. And the grass suddenly grew to the height of my ears, only it wasn't the grass that had grown, it was me who'd fallen on my back, and the earth was shaking like a merry glutton's belly. "DO NOT THINK THAT I CANNOT KILL IN MY OWN LAND! YOU ARE NOT DEAD, YOU LIVE—THEREFORE YOU CAN DIE!"

And I saw him swing that great glowing hammer, and I saw him cast the thing, and I thought, Now I'm finished for certain, and do you suppose there's a road to Heaven from this place? 

But the hammer flew over our heads, and I turned to see where he'd flung it, and there in the distance was the greatest bear I'd ever seen, big and white and blue as an iceberg, with glowing blue eyes.

And the bear gaped his mouth, showing teeth the size of trees, and he spoke in a voice like the crashing of waves, and he said, "LIVING MAN AND WOMAN, COME TO ME IF YOU WOULD LIVE ON!"

I hesitated for one moment, glanced back at Thor, who was catching his hammer again (as I understand it, the weapon always returns to his hand when thrown), and I grabbed Asa's hand and started to run.

She resisted. I looked and saw in her eyes that she feared Thor less than the bear.

"Trust me," said I. "I've learned that the only safety lies in running toward what you fear most."

Her eyes widened, but she came with me.

We ran together. We ran toward blazing blue eyes and a cavelike red mouth and razor-sharp fangs and a mountain of white fur blazing like snow blindness.

Then the mountain of fur became a mountain pure and simple, and before it stood a man I knew—the dark Wanderer I'd met on the road to Klepp.

"Are you ready to go home?" he asked.

"I think so," said I. I looked at Asa. "Will you go or stay?" I asked her.

"This place is no good," she said. "I'm not ready to join the dead."

"This you should know," said the Wanderer. "Thor spoke truth in saying this is no place for living men and women. To come here once by mischance may be forgiven. But if you ever return it will be by your choice, and then you must stay here till Judgment."

"I'll come here someday, I hope," said Asa. "But in the usual way."

"Take us home then," I said to the Wanderer.

He smiled. "Would you go back to the very time and place you left?"

I rubbed my chin. "Things were rather lively at Sola then. Can you help? That bear would be useful."

The traveler said, "Your trouble at Sola is only that the light can't shine in. You can change that with a word."

"A word? What word?"

"Go back to the beginning."

"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked, and then we were at Sola, in the fog, and all around were shouts and howlings.

We could just make out Erling and his men. They'd reformed their ring, and the werewolves (who didn't seem very well organized) had moved off for a moment. We rushed toward them and they opened a gap to admit us.

"Where'd you get to, Father?" Erling cried. "I thought we'd lost you this time."

"You'd not believe me," said I.

Then the wolves found us again, and Asa and I crouched to avoid being struck by the backswings of the men's weapons. The warriors yelled and the wolves howled, and it was like feeding time in Hell.

Asa shouted to me over the din, "Why don't you stop it?"

"How?"

"With what that man told you!"

" 'Twas a riddle! I'll probably figure it out after the danger's over, if we live so long."

"He said we needed to let the light shine in!"

"It's nighttime."

"He said you could change it with a word—he said to go back to the beginning."

"The beginning of what?"

"What were the first words spoken?"

"Spoken when?"

"Ever!"

"How would I know? I know the first words God spoke over the world, but He was around long before then."

"Well what did He say then?"

"He said `Fiat lux.'"

"What?"

"Fiat lux. It's Latin."

"What does it mean in human speech?"

" `Let there be light.' "

All the men turned to look at me.

That was when I noticed that things had grown quieter. They wouldn't have heard me a short time earlier. But the wolves had hushed and begun to slink back. I could see this because the fog was clearing. A breeze had blown in out of the north and shreds of mist were flying before it, peeling great rents in the gloom. As the sky uncovered, you could see that the moon was full and large as a cathedral, and the stars, as if they'd been hoarding their strength, blazed on us like long lightning.

And with the fog went the wolves. As we watched them flee, they became skinny men in fur cloaks, jogging on two feet.

"Hunt them down and kill them, all you can find," said Erling. "No, wait—bring one back to me. I want to know who sent them, though I have a guess."

They brought one back at last, when we'd withdrawn to the hall to look to our wounds and restore ourselves with ale. He looked like a man who'd been through a famine, and he quivered in every limb. I remember he was quite bald, and he had a birthmark on one cheek.

"Who sent you, shape-changer?" Erling asked.

The wretch flung himself at Erling's feet. "I cannot say—he'd fry the brain in my skull with a thought. He's a mighty magician."

"My priest blew your master's spell away with a word. I'd have a care if I were you. There's magic and magic."

The man shivered yet more violently (werewolves as a class, I've noticed, are not very brave), and darted his eyes back and forth between Erling and me. At last he crumpled onto the floor, curled up with his knees in his face, and whispered, "Eyvind Kellda."

"For that word, I give you your life," said Erling.

The man leaped to grasp Erling's knees. "No!" he cried. "If Eyvind learns I betrayed him, he'll put a serpent in my belly. If you have mercy, slay me now!"

Erling said the word and the bullyboys dragged him out. I followed, thinking to offer him baptism this side of the River, but Erling's men did not linger over their work.

 

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Framed


Title: The Year of the Warrior
Author: Lars Walker
ISBN: 0-671-57861-8
Copyright: © 2000 by Lars Walker
Publisher: Baen Books