Behind him the pagan army waited, innumerable, and terrible, and deplorably ill-mannered. These shouted now:
“We cry a holmgang. Who will fight with Red Palnatoki, that is overlord of the Swan’s bath, and that slew the giants in Noenhir?”
Then from the opposed ranks came clanking, and shining in full armor, Donander of Evre. And he said:
“I, howsoever unworthy, messire, am the person who will withstand you. I also have fought before this morning. Under Count Manuel’s banner of the Silver Stallion I have done what I might. That much I will again do here to-day, and upon every day between this day and the holy Morrow of Judgment.”
After that the Christian army shouted: “There is none mightier .than Donander! Also, he is very gratifyingly modest.”
But Palnatoki cried out scornfully: “Your utmost will not avail this morning! Behind me musters all the might of the AEnseis, that are the most high of gods above Lserath, and their strength shall be shown here through me.”
“Behind the endeavors of every loyal son of the Church,” Donander said, “are the blessed saints and the bright archangels.”
“Indeed, Donander, that may very well be the truth,” replied Red Palnatoki. “The old gods and the gods of Rome have met to-day; and we are their swords.”
“Your gods confess their weakness, Messire Palnatoki, by picking the better weapon,” Donander answered him, courteously.
With these amenities discharged, they fought. Nowhere upon Earth could have been found a pair of more stalwart warriors: each had no equal anywhere existent between seas and mountains save in his adversary: so neatly were they matched indeed that, after a half-hour of incredible battling, it was natural enough they should kill each other simultaneously. And then the unfortunate error occurred, just as each naked soul escaped from the dying body.
For now out of the north came Kjalar, the fair guide of pagan warriors to eternal delights in the Hall of the Chosen; and from the zenith sped, like a shining plummet, Ithuriel to fetch the soul of the brave champion of Christendom to the felicities of the golden city walled about with jasper of the Lord God of Sabaoth. Both emissaries had been attending the combat until the arrival of their part therein; both, as seasoned virtuosi of warfare, had been delighted by this uncommonly fine fight: and in their pleased excitement they somehow made the error of retrieving each the other’s appointed prey. It happened thus that the soul of Donander of Evre fared northward, asleep in the palm of Kjalar’s hand, while Ithuriel conveyed the soul of Red Palnatoki to the heaven of Jahveh.
Chapter LIX. The Conversion of Palnatoki
Ithuriel’s blunder, it is gratifying to record, did not in the outcome really matter. For Christendom just then was at heated odds over points of theology not very clearly understood in Jahveh’s heaven, where in consequence no decisions were hazarded upon the merits of the controversy; and the daily invoices of Christian champions and martyrs of all sects were being admitted to blessedness as fast as they murdered one another.
Moreover, Red Palnatoki was, by the articles of his stern Nordic creed, a fatalist. When he discovered what had happened, and the strange salvation which had been put upon him, his religion therefore assured him that this too had been predestined by the wayward Norns, and he piously made no complaining. The eternal life which he had inherited, with no fighting in it for the present, and no stronger drink than milk, was not up to human expectation, but the tall sea-rover had long ago found out that few things are. Meanwhile he could, at any rate, look forward to that promised last great battle, when those praiseworthy captains Gog and Magog (with, as Palnatoki understood it, a considerable company of fine fighting-men), would attack the four-square city, and when Palnatoki would have again a chance really to enjoy himself in defending the camp of the saints.
And meanwhile too, he was interested in those girls. It seemed at best to anyone with his religious rearing quite unaccountable to find women in heaven, and this especial pair appeared to Palnatoki a remarkably quaint choice for exceptional favoritism. He could only deduce they had got in through some error similar to that which had procured his own admission, particularly as he saw no other women anywhere about.
And Palnatoki reflected that the enceinte lady, with eagle’s wings and the crown of little stars, whom the presumably pet dragon followed everywhere with touching devotion, could not for as yet some months repay cultivating. But that very pretty brunette, with the golden cup and all those splendid clothes and with the placard on her forehead, who had just ridden by upon that seven-headed scarlet monster, rather took Palnatoki’s fancy. That girl was not, you could see, a prude; she had come very near winking at him, if she, indeed, had not actually winked, in the moment she glanced back: so that the Great Whore of Babylon (which, as they told him, was this second lady’s name) gave him, upon the whole, something else to look forward to.
Without any sulking under his halo, Palnatoki bent resolutely to his first harp-lesson; and, in place of protests, civilly voiced alleluias.
For, with two fine to-morrows to look forward to, Palnatoki was content enough. And in Jahveh’s heaven, therefore, all went agreeably, and as smoothly as Red Palnatoki at just this point goes out of this story.
Chapter LX. In The Hall of the Chosen
When Donander of Evre awoke in the Northern paradise, he also was content enough. It was a strange and not what you would call a cozy place, this gold-roofed hall with its five hundred and forty mile-wide doors: and the monsters, in the likeness of a stag and of a she-goat, which straddled above the building, perpetually feeding upon the lower leaves of the great tree called Laerath, seemed to Donander preeminently outlandish creatures, animals under whose bellies no really considerate persons would have erected a residence. Yet, like Palnatoki, Donander of Evre was an old campaigner, who could be tolerably comfortable anywhere. Nor was to discover himself among pagans a novel experience, since in his mortal life Donander had ridden at adventure in most corners of the world, and rather more than half of his finest enemies and of his opponents in many delightful encounters had been infidels.
“Excepting always their unfortunate religious heresies,” he was used to concede, “I have no fault to pick with heathen persons, whom in the daily and nocturnal affairs of life I have found quite as friendly and companionable as properly baptized ladies.”
In fine, he got on well enough with the flaxen-haired spirits of these Northern kings and skalds and jarls and vikingar. They stared, and some guffawed, when he fitted out a little shrine, in which Donander prayed decorously, every day at the correct hours, for the second coming of Manuel and for the welfare of Donander’s soul upon the holy Morrow of Judgment. Yet, after all, these boreal ghosts conceded, in paradise if anywhere a man should be permitted utterly to follow his own tastes, even in imaginative eschatology. And when they talked their really pathetic nonsense about being the guests of Sidvrar the Weaver and Constrainer, and about living forever through his bounty thus happily in the Hall of the Chosen, it was Donander’s turn to shrug. Even had there been no other discrepancies, everybody knew that heaven had, not five hundred and forty golden gates, but only twelve entrances, each carved from a single pearl and engraved with the name of a tribe of Israel.
“Besides,” Donander asked, “who is this Weaver and Constrainer? Certainly, I never heard of him before.”