Our natures do, Gest thought. And: How easily I could kill you. How open you stand to a hundred martial tricks I know.
“Instead, I shall have to go on as erstwhile,” said Starkadh, “alone.”
Let it be so, thought Gest.
With the fingers of his right hand he searched below his torn shirt and pushed together the lips of his wound. Pain he made into something apart from himself, like the mists that broke under the strengthening light. He gave his mind to the blood flow.
Starkadh kicked the shelter aside, fetched his mail, drew it over the underpadding in which he had spent the night. He donned coif and helmet, belted on sword, picked up shield. When he was ready to leave, he stared in astonishment at the other man. “What, are you still on your feet?” he said. “Shall I make an end of you?”
Had he tried that, it would have been the end of him. But he stopped, shivered, turned away. “No,” he mumbled. “This is all too spooky. I’m off to my own doom, Nornagest.”
He lumbered up the trail, into the woods and beyond sight.
Then Gest could sit down and bring a whole heed to the steering of his body. He had stopped the bleeding before he suffered overmuch loss, though he would be weak for a few days. No matter. He could stay here until he was fit to travel; the earth would provide for him. He began to hasten the knitting of the flesh.
He dared not wish he were able to heal the wound inside.
3
“However, we only met fleetingly, Starkadh and I,” Gest went on. “Afterward hearsay about him reached me now and then, until I went abroad again; and when I came back he was long dead, slain as he had wanted.”
“Why have you fared so widely?” asked King Olaf. “What have you sought?”
“What I never found,” Gest answered. “Peace.”
No, that was not wholly right, he thought. Over and over had he been at peace, in the nearness of beauty or wisdom, the arms of a woman, the laughter of children. But how short the whiles! His latest time as a husbandman, in the Uplands of Norway, seemed already the dream of a single night: Ingridh’s youthful gladness, its rebirths in the cradle he had carved, her heart that stayed high while she grew more gray than he, but then the shriveling years, and afterward the burials, the burials. Where now wandered Ingridh? He could not follow, not her nor any of those who glimmered on the rim of memory, not that first and sweetest of all, garlanded with ivy and in her hand a blade of flint...
“In God is peace,” said the priest.
It could be, it could be. Today church bells rang in Norway, as they had done for a lifetime or more in Denmark, yes, above that halidom of the Mother where he and the garland girl had offered flowers ... He bad seen the charioteers and their storm gods come into the land, he had seen bronze and iron, the wagon trains bound south for Rome and the viking ships bound west for England, sickness and famine, drought and war, and life patiently beginning anew; each year went down into death and awaited the homecoming of the sun that would bring it to rebirth; be too could let go if he would, and drift away on the wind with the leaves.
King Olaf’s priest thought that soon every quest would end and the dead arise. How good if that was true. Ever more folk believed so. Why should not he?
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Days later, Gest said, “Yes, I will take your baptism.” The priest wept for joy. Olaf whooped.
But when it was done, that evening in the hall Gest took forth a candle and lighted it at a torch. He lay down on a bench where he could see it. “Now I may die,” he told them.
Now I have yielded.
He let the candleflame fill his vision, his being. He made himself one with it. The light waxed for him until he almost thought it shone on those lost faces, brought them back out of the dark, nearer and nearer. His heartbeat heeded him, slowing toward quietness.
Olaf and the young warriors stood dumb with awe. The priest knelt in shadow and prayed without uttering the words aloud.
The candleflame flickered to naught. Nornagest lay still. Through the hall sounded a wind of the oncoming winter.
VI. Encounter
From afar the gold shone like a daylight evenstar. Sometimes trees hid it, a woodlot or a remnant of forest, but always as the travelers moved west they saw it again, brilliant in a vastness of sky where a few clouds wandered, above a plain where villages and freshly greening croplands lay tiny beneath the wind.
Hours wore on, sunbeams now tangled themselves in Svoboda Volodarovna’s brows, and the hills ahead loomed clear, the city upon the highest of them. Behind its walls and watchtowers lifted domes, spires, the smoke from a thousand hearths; and over all soared the brightness. Presently she heard chimes, not the single voice of a countryside chapel but several, which must be great ones to sound across this distance, ringing together in music such as surely sang among the angels or in the abode of Yarilo.
Gleb Ilyev pointed. “The bell tower, the gilt cupola, belongs to the cathedral of Sviataya Sophia,” he said. “That’s not any saint’s name but means ‘Holy Wisdom.’ It comes from the Greeks, who brought the word of Christ to the Rusi.” A short, somewhat tubby man with a pug nose and a scraggly beard turning gray, he was given to self-importance. Yet leathery skin bespoke many years of faring, often through danger, and goodly garb told of success won by it.
“Then all this is new?” asked Svoboda in amazement.
“Well, that church and certain other things,” Gleb replied. “Grand Prince Yaroslav Vladimirovitch has built them since these lands fell to him and he moved his seat here from Novgorod. But of course Kiyiv was already great. It was founded in Rurik’s time—two centuries ago, I believe.”
And to me this was only a dream, Svoboda thought. It would have been less real than the old gods that we suppose still haunt the wilderness, did not merchants like Gleb pass through our little settlement once in a while, bringing their goods that few of us can afford but also their tales that everyone is eager to hear.
She clucked to her horse and nudged it with her heels. These lowlands near the river were still wet after the spring floods, and the mire of the road had wearied the horse. Behind her and her guide trailed his company, hah0 a dozen hirelings and two apprentices leading the pack animals or driving a pair of laden wagons. Here, safe from bandits or Pecheneg raiders, they had laid weapons aside and wore merely tunics, trousers, tall hats. Gleb had put on good clothes this morning, to make a proper show when he arrived; a fur-trimmed cloak was draped over a brocaded coat.
Svoboda was well-clad too, in a gown of gray wool bordered with embroideries. Hiked up across the saddle, her skirts revealed finely stitched boots. A headcloth covered flaxen braids. Weather had only tinged her with bronze, work had built strength without stooping the back or coarsening the hands. Well-figured enough that the big bones did hot stand forth, she looked at the world out of blue eyes set widely hi a face of blunt nose, full mouth, square chin. Lineage and fortune showed; her father had been headman of the village in his day, and each of her husbands had been better off than most men—blacksmith, hunter-trapper, horse breeder and dealer. Nonetheless she must keep herself reined in if she would appear calm, and the heart in her breast kept breaking free of that grip.
When she came in clear sight of the Dniepr, she could not help catching her breath. Brown and mighty rolled the river: easily five hundred paces across, she guessed. To her right a low, grassy island divided it. Lesser streams flowed in from either side. The far shore was surprisingly much forested, though houses and other buildings led up from the water to the city and clustered around its ramparts, while orchards or small farmsteads and pastures nestled elsewhere in the hills.