Kveldulf said, “I would not see brother spill brother’s blood. Stand aside; I told Skatval I would not flee him. Phaos will receive me into his palace; the world to come is finer than the one in which we live now. If your chief would send me to it, I will go.”
“But, holy sir—” Kalmar protested. Kveldulf shook his head. The son of Sverre muttered a word that ran round the ring of converts. Skatval heard it, too: “Fey. He is fey.” Kalmar looked back to Kveldulf once more. Again Kveldulf shook his head. Tears brightening his eyes, Kalmar lowered the knife to his side and stepped away. One by one, the other converts moved to right or left, until no one stood between Kveldulf and Skatval.
The chief spoke to the men behind him. “We’ll take him to the trees over there and tie him.”
“No need for that,” Kveldulf said. He had gone pale, but his voice stayed steady. “I said I would not flee, and meant it. Do as you deem you must, and have done.”
“’Twere easier the other way, priest,” Skatval said doubtfully.
“No. I need not be bound to show I would gladly lay down my life for the lord with the great and good mind; I act by my own will.” Kveldulf paused for one long breath. “A favor once I am dead, though, if you would.”
“If I may, without hurt to my own,” Skatval said.
“Pack my head in salt, as if it were a mackerel set by for the winter, and give it into the hands of the next Videssian shipmaster who enters Lygra Fjord. Tell him the tale and bid him take it—and me—back to the temples, that the prelates there might learn of my labors for the good god’s sake.”
Skatval stroked his beard as he pondered. Stavrakios might shape the return of such a relic into a pretext for war, but then Stavrakios was a man who seldom needed pretext if he aimed to fight. The chief nodded. “It shall be as you say—my word on it.”
“Strike, then.” Kveldulf raised hands and eyes to the sky. “We bless thee, Phaos, lord with the great and good mind, watchful beforehand that—”
Skatval struck with all the strength that was in him, to give Kveldulf as quick an end as he might. The spearhead tore out through the back of the blue robe. The priest prayed on as he crumpled. Skatval’s followers shoved spears into him as he lay on the green grass. Blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth. He writhed, jerked, was still.
Wearily, Skatval turned to the converts who had watched the killing. “It is over,” he said. “Go to your homes; go to your work. You see whose gods are stronger. Would you worship one who lets those who love him die like a slaughtered sow? This Phaos is all very well for Videssians, who serve nobles and Avtokrator like slaves. Give me a god who girds his own to go down fighting, as a Haloga should.” He locked eyes with Kalmar Sverre’s son. “Or say you otherwise?”
Kalmar met his gaze without flinching, as Kveldulf had before him. In his own good time, he looked away to Kveldulf’s corpse. He sighed. “No, Skatval; it is so.”
Skatval sighed too, somber still but satisfied. A low murmur rose from the rest of the converts when they heard Kalmar acknowledge the might of the old Haloga gods. They too took a long look at Kveldulf, lying in a pool of his own blood. A couple of women hesitantly signed themselves with the sun-circle. Most, though, began to drift out of the field where they had worshiped. Skatval did not smile, not outside where it showed. By this time next year, his folk’s brief fling with Phaos would be as forgotten as a new song sung for a summer but afterwards set aside.
Pleased with the way the event had turned, he said to a couple of his followers, “Vasa, Hoel, take him by the heels and haul him to the hole he dug. But hack off his head before you throw him in; a promise is a promise.”
“Aye, Skatval,” they said together, as respectfully as they had ever spoken to him: almost as respectfully as if he were Stavrakios ofVidessos, sole Avtokrator of a mighty empire, not Skatval the Brisk of Halogaland, one among threescore squabbling chiefs. The feeling of power, strong and sweet as wine from the south, puffed out his chest and put pride in his step as he strode up the path to his longhouse.
But when Skjaldvor spied the bright blood that reddened his spearshaft, she ran weeping through the garden and into the woods. He stared after her, scratching his head. Then he plunged the iron point of the spear into the ground several times to clean it, wiped it dry with a scrap of cloth so it would not rust.
“Try and understand women,” he grumbled. He leaned the spear against the turf wall of his longhouse, opened the door, nodded to Ulvhild his wife. “Well, I’m back,” he said.
Nine Threads of Gold
Andre Norton
The way along the upper sea cliff had always been the secondary road into the Hold. Erosion had left only a narrow thread of a trail, laced with ice from the touch of storm-driven waves.
It was midafternoon but there was no sun, the sullen greyness of the sky all of a piece with the cracked rock underfoot. The wayfarer leaned under the leash of a frost wind, digging the point of a staff into such crevices as would give her strength to hold when the full blasts struck.
The traveler paused, to face inland and stare at a tall pillar of rock ending in a jagged fragment pointing skyward like a broken talon. Then the staff swung up and, for a second, there was a play of bluish glimmer about that spear of rock, which vanished in a breath as if the next gust of wind had blown out a taper.
Now the path turned abruptly away from the sea. Here the footing was smoother, the way wider, as if the land had preserved more than the wave-beaten cliffs allowed. It followed for a space the edge of a valley, narrow as an arrow-point at the sea tip, widening inland. The stream that bisected the valley ran toward the sea, but where it narrowed abruptly stood a building, towered, narrow of window, twined with a second structure, a bridge connecting them, allowing the stream full passage between.
In contrast to the grey stone of the cliffs the blocks that formed the walls of those two structures were a dull green, as if painted by moss growth undisturbed by a long flow of years.
The traveler paused at the head of a steep-set stairway descending from the cliff trail, for a searching survey of what lay below. There were no signs of life. Those slits of windows were lightless, blind black eyes. The fields beyond lay fallow and now thick with tough grass.
“Sooo—” The wayfarer considered the scene. In her mind one picture fitted over another. The land she surveyed was spread with an overcoating of another season, another time. And life in many forms was there.
She gathered her cloak closer at her throat and started to pick a careful way down the stair. The clouds at last broke, as they had threatened to do all that day. Rain began as a sullen drizzle, coating those narrow steps dangerously.
However, she did not halt again until she reached what had once been a wider and better-traveled way leading inward from the sea. In spite of the rain she stopped again, peering very intently at the building. Holding her staff a little free from the pavement, she swung it back and forth. No, she had not mistaken that tug. But a warning was as good as a coat of armor might be—sometimes.
Such a long time—Seasons sped into each other in her thoughts, and she did not draw on any one memory.
The road had been well set long ago but now its pavement was akilter from the push of thick-stemmed shrubs, grey and leafless at this season. It still led straight to an arch giving on the nearer end of the bridge that united the two buildings. Down below, the stream gurgled sullenly, but the birds who had haunted the cliffs had been left behind, and there was no other sound—save now and then a roll of distant thunder. She stepped out on the bridge, her staff still held free of the pavement, the lower end pointed a little forward. If only a small portion of what she suspected was the truth, there was that which must be warded against.