Sitting in the ship’s stern, by the steering oar, Rickard Bugge pulled his weary gaze from the Vienna crowd when his lieutenant edged his way aft between the rowing benches and knelt in front of him.
“Well,” Bugge said impatiently, “what?”
“Gunnar says we’re caught fast, captain, in the canal-weed. He thinks we’d better wade in with swords and cut our hull free.”
Bugge spat disgustedly over the rail. “Does he know where we are? This isn’t the Danube, I believe.”
“He is of the opinion that this is Vienna, captain. We apparently turned into this canal last night without realizing we were leaving the river.”
“Vienna? We overshot Tulln, then. It’s those damned west winds this past month.” He shook his head. “If only Gunnar could navigate. He’s lucky a river is all he’s got to contend with—what if we were at sea?”
“Listen,” the lieutenant said, a little reproachfully, “Gunnar’s got problems.”
“So I should smile when he pilots us into a smelly ditch, to be laughed at by beggars and children?” He pointed expressively at the crowd. “Well, go on, then. Get them over the side and chopping the water lilies.”
Bugge slumped back, trying to scratch his stomach under the sun-heated mail. But it’s no good, he thought. We may as well go home. We’ll never find Sigmund or the barrow now, even if they do, as Gardvord swore, exist.
The grizzled captain cast his mind back, nostalgically now, to the low-roofed, candle-lit room in which he and thirty other retired soldiers of the Hundested parish had sat at a table and cursed in astonishment and outrage at the tale told to them by old Gardvord, while the bitter wind whooped at them from the darkness outside and fumbled at the shutter-latches.
“I know many of you heard the untraceable voice from the Ise fjord yesterday,” Gardvord had hissed in that meeting five and a half weeks ago, “a voice that called, over and over for a full hour yesterday morning, ‘The hour is come, but not the man.’” The old wizard had spread his wrinkled hands. “It troubled me. I therefore spent most of last night laboriously questioning the senile and reclusive huldre-folk about that prodigy—and it’s grim news I got for my trouble.”
“What was it?” Bugge had asked, impatient with the old hedge-magician’s narrative style.
With a have-it-then glare, Gardvord turned to him. “Surter, the king of Muspelheim in the distant south, is leading an army north to capture and destroy the funeral barrow of the god Balder.”
Several of the assembled men had actually gasped at that, for the old legends agreed that when Surter of Muspelheim marched north, Ragnarok, the end of the world, was not far off; a couple of the men had spasmodically blessed themselves, scared by their old pagan heritage into taking cover under the newer Christianity; and one old fellow, gibbering the beginning of a Pater Noster, had even attempted to crawl under the table.
“Odin look away,” Gardvord had sneered. “The men of the north aren’t all they used to be.”
Ashamed by the timorousness of his fellows, Bugge had pounded the table with his fist. “We will, of course, organize an army to repel Surter.” This statement put a little heart back into the other old soldiers, and they had nodded with a tardy show of determination.
“Unless,” one nervously grinning man had quavered, “this is all a fantasy, like the graveyard stories children invent to scare themselves, and wind up half-believing.”
“Idiot!” Gardvord had shouted. “You heard the fjord voice yesterday! And the misty huldre-folk were more lucid last night than I’ve ever known them.” The old man frowned around the table. “This is no mere guess-work, my stout warriors.”
Bugge had leaned forward then. “Who’s the man?” he asked. “The one who hasn’t come, though the hour has?”
“It is the man who will lead you. Listen to me now, you complacent fathers and householders, and don’t make up your twopenny minds that what I’m saying is necessarily a fable. Do you recall the stories of Sigmund, who drew out Odin’s sword easily from the Branstock Oak when no other man in the Volsung’s hall could budge it with his best efforts?”
“Certainly,” Bugge had nodded. “And I also recall what became of that sword when the one-eyed god inexplicably turned on him. Odin shattered it in battle, and Sigmund, left unarmed, was killed by Lyngi’s spearmen.”
The magician had nodded. “That’s true. Now listen. Odin has allowed—ordered, rather—Sigmund himself to return to the flesh, to lead you in pushing back Muspelheim’s hordes.”
The men around the table had been skeptical, but afraid to let Gardvord see it. “How will we meet him?” piped up one of them.
“You must sail up the Elbe, through various tributaries and overland crossings, and finally down the Danube. When you have reached the city that is built around Balder’s barrow, you’ll know it, because,” he paused impressively, “Sigmund will actually rise from the water to greet you. I suspect the barrow is near the city of Tulln, but I can’t be sure. You’ll know the spot, in any case, by Sigmund’s watery resurrection.”
It proved impossible to raise an army, and so Bugge and twenty comrades, all unmarried or notably restless, had set off by themselves on the difficult land and sea journey. And here, he thought sadly now, our ill-considered quest ingloriously ends. Run aground on a clump of sewer weed in a Viennese canal, hailed by the citizens, who seem to think we’re a company of jugglers or clowns. So much for our bid to thwart Surter and Muspelheim, and postpone doomsday.
Bugge shook his head disgustedly as he watched several of his men lower themselves into the canal, gasping and hooting at the chill of the water. We were mad to listen to the old fool, he told himself. It’s obvious to me now that the whole tale was just a third-rate wizard’s beery dream.
Duffy’s scabbarded rapier knocked awkwardly against the back of his right thigh as he sprinted past St. Ruprecht’s Church. He had to slow then, for the street below the north wall was packed with a collection of festive citizens. Housemaids called lewd speculations to each other, young men crouched and flexed their sword arms with a just-in-case air, and children and dogs scampered about in a frenzy of unspecific excitement. The wall-top was just as crowded, and Duffy wondered how many people would fall off it before the day was over. A little fearful of seeing the moonlit lake again, he was consciously making himself pay exclusive attention to this Viking spectacle.
And how am I to see what’s going on? he asked himself, annoyed by the density of spectators.
He saw Bluto among the mob on the battlements, trying to keep children from uncovering the cannons. “Bluto!” the Irishman called in his most booming voice. “Damn it, Bluto!” The hunchback turned and frowned at the throng below, then saw Duffy and waved. “Throw me a rope!” Duffy shouted. Bluto looked exasperated, but nodded and disappeared behind the rim. The Irishman shoved, slipped and apologized his way to the base of the wall. I hope I can climb a rope these days, he thought. It would never do to reach the halfway point and come sliding clumsily back down, in front of what must be just about the entire population of Vienna.
After several minutes a rope came tumbling down the wall, and Duffy seized it before two other view-seekers could. Then, bracing his legs from time to time on the old stones of the wall, he began wrenching himself upward. Below him, in spite of the gasping breaths that roared in his head, he could hear people remarking on him. “Who’s the old beggar climbing the rope?” “Watch him drop dead after ten feet.”