Finally Haraldr saw the golden Dragon of Wessex, just beyond the cobbled ford a hundred ells south of Stamford Bridge; he could almost distinguish the separate threads of the embroidery. The King beyond the creek . . . and destiny’s conundrum. Would he die this time, to serve the fate he had cheated once, or had he always been fated to conquer this way? The King beyond the creek. Odin chose for him. With a scream that literally brought the rank of English infantry before him to their knees, the Norse King charged forward, leaving even the precarious sanctuary at the snout of the boar behind.
The mounted guard of the English King fell back from the single scything axe of Haraldr Sigurdarson, transfixed by the inevitability of his blade. Haraldr charged them, mindless of the corpses he stepped over, and felt the water cold in his boots. For an instant he met the eyes of Harold Godwinnson, before the English King was crowded back by his retreating guard. Destiny’s merchant began to ford the shallow Derwent to victory.
After three steps Haraldr focused on another fragmented epiphany across the river. The thick, rough fingers whitened against the bowstring, and Haraldr glanced up at the English archer’s eyes and saw the red-black gleam of the raven. The arrow was still for a moment, and he could see the trueness of the shaft and the black steel barb at its head. Then the arrow blurred and flew across the river. Haraldr heard the instant, thrumming skirl just before the barb struck him in the neck. The contact felt like nothing more than a hard blow from the hand in a wrestling match. Haraldr braced himself, awaiting the adversaries who even now would not come against him. His house-karls closed behind him. Then he felt the warmth over his collarbone and was surprised to find that he had fallen to his knees. His guard swept past him, and now every sound of the battle came to him: the music of steel, the shattering of wood and the cracking of bones, the curses and grunts of men, and the high-pitched terror of horses.
He could no longer stay on his knees and fell back, but something caught his head and held him up. He did not recognize the face looming above him until the skald Thjodolf spoke; he could not make sense of the words but somehow knew the voice over the shouts of his house-karls. He was conscious; he knew that Thjodolf and some of his house-karls had pulled him to the east bank of the narrow river. He thought he would live until he tried to breathe and felt the blood in his windpipe.
Tostig was beside him. ‘Accept . . . your brother’s . . . terms,’ gasped Haraldr, ‘as . . . I have. Save yourself . . . and my men.’
‘They will not accept that, nor will I. I will drink with you tonight, Haraldr Hardraada.’ Haraldr could not answer, and he closed his eyes and accepted the beauty of his death, in the arms of a skald and a brave man, his house-karls still fierce around him. The gods loved him still. He saw the beautiful, vivid images of the life that lingered in death’s shadow: eight years old, in a dark cool forest, his fingers against the grainy surface of a rune stone. Olaf bringing him a toy ship. Elisevett as a girl, her downy cheek. Maria, her eyes like blue lanterns in the night. Daughter Maria, making a face at him as he sat in counsel on his high seat. Even his father, Sygurd Syr, more clearly than he had ever seen him. So much beauty, the deaths forgotten, only life. And then the cold hands closed around his neck and the shadows deepened and the rustle of the huge wings announced the darkening sky. Fear ran cold through his dying limbs. He girded his will to face the final test of being, to meet the last dragon. He could not even draw a final, desperate breath as he fell away from life into the dark well of oblivion.
There was no dragon, he realized at the end, nor had there ever been one. In reality, the last dragon had no shape or form but was merely a blackness so complete and devastating that to give it any shape, however terrifying, was to endow it with a mercy that did not exist in the last endless night of the world. Here at last was the cold, dark core of being and creation, and here at last was true fear, the fear that only the dead could know. From this horrifying vastness Haraldr cried out in unspeakable, craven agony, unheard in the emptiness, crying out for himself and those he had loved, for all mankind who would some day know this terrible loneliness. Had he known death as the living never can, he would have cursed the day he was born to serve fate. Darkness would always win the final victory.
In the unforgiving pall a light flickered, a pinpoint in the limitless void. He watched in wonder as the single star grew suddenly, expanding like a golden dome beneath an obsidian sky. The dome came over him and she came towards him out of the light, a creature of light, and he knew at once the liquid gold of her walk and the blue gold of her eyes. For a moment he was surprised that she was his other Maria as well, but then he understood. She reached out and took him in her weightless arms of pure light, as she had promised so long ago on the Bosporus. And in the last moment before his reason became infinite, Haraldr knew the truth of all she had told him. In the end, beyond the dragon, there is only light, and only love.
Afterword
The English King Harold Godwinnson did extend Haraldr Sigurdarson a certain posthumous mercy; he permitted Haraldr’s son Olaf to bring his father’s body back to Norway. King Haraldr was laid to rest in the royal cathedral that he had built in Nidaros, the Maria Kirke. But the King’s beloved daughter Maria was not waiting among the mourners; history has recorded that she died, suddenly and inexplicably, on the exact day and hour of her father’s death. King Olaf Haraldrson ruled Norway for several decades of such unprecedented peace and stability that the son of the world’s greatest warrior became known as Olaf the Quiet. So it was that Stamford Bridge marked the end of the era of Norse conquest in Europe. The Viking Age was over.
But even in death, Haraldr Sigurdarson served as destiny’s instrument. Immediately following the dearly purchased victory over the unarmoured Norsemen, King Harold Godwinnson of England was forced to march his severely mauled army south to meet the Norman invasion force under Duke William the Bastard. On 14 October 1066, near the town of Hastings, the two forces met to determine the fate of England. Despite their reduced strength, the English were on the verge of victory when a premature pursuit of the beaten foe brought them the same fate the Norsemen had suffered at Stamford Bridge. Duke William, by far the least of the three men who contested for England in the autumn of 1066, became, almost by default, William the Conqueror. The Normans were able to exploit the wealth of England to dominate Europe for the next century and a half, as well as lead the Crusades to the Holy Land; by the time this ‘Norman century’ had ended, the shape of the modern world had begun to evolve. If Haraldr Sigurdarson had not removed his mail coat on the morning of 25 September 1066, the politics and culture of that world, even the language we speak, would most likely be very different today.
Fate reckoned with the Byzantine Empire just five years after the death of Haraldr Sigurdarson. On 26 August 1071, at Manzikert in eastern Asia Minor, the poorly maintained armies of Imperial Rome were routed by the Seljuk Turks, and the Emperor Romanus IV was taken prisoner. The loss of the Empire’s breadbasket was a mortal blow followed by an extended, agonizing death. The city of Constantinople fell to Venetian treachery in 1204, but a pathetic vestige of the Empire was restored in 1261. Finally, in 1453, with the city virtually depopulated and most of its glories fallen into ruin, the Ottoman Turks succeeded in breaching the walls and deposing the last Roman Emperor. Today the towering walls have crumbled and there are but scattered fragments of the Imperial Palace. Only the fragile magnificence of the Hagia Sophia, stripped of the symbols of the Pantocrator who once anointed the Rulers of the Entire World beneath its golden dome, remains as testament to the enduring glory and invincible might of Byzantium.