After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien

The Decoy Duck Harry Turtledove

The Videssian dromon centipede-walked its oared way into Lygra Fjord. Something about it struck Skatval the Brisk as wrong, wrong. Wondering what, the Haloga chief used the palm of a horn-hard hand to shield eyes against morning sun as he stared out to sea.

He reluctantly decided it was not the imperial banner itself, gold sunburst on blue, that fluttered from the top of the dromon’s mast. He had seen that banner before, had clashed with those who bore it, too often to suit him.

Nor was it the twin suns the Videssians drew to help the warship see its proper path, though his own folk would have painted eyes instead. Coming from the far south, the Videssians naturally had more confidence in the sun than Halogai could give it. Hereabouts, in the ice and dark and hunger of winter, the sun seemed sometimes but a distant, fading memory. Not for the first time, Skatval wondered why the Empire of Videssos, which had so much, sought to swallow Halogaland and its unending dearth.

But that thought led him away from the mark he had set for himself. He peered further, sought once more for strangeness, something small, something subtle …

“By the gods,” he said softly, “it’s the very shadows.” The northern men, who had to contend with the wild seas and savage storms of the Bay of Haloga, always built their boats clinker-style, each plank overlapping the one below and pegs driven through both for surer strength. The planks on the dromon were set edge to edge, so its sides seemed indecently smooth—rather like the Videssians themselves, Skatval thought with a thin smile.

The men he led could fill half a dozen war galleys. The arrogant dromon had already sailed past the inlets where four of them rested. Let the fightfire be kindled—and torches lay always to hand—and that brash captain would never hie back to his hot homeland. Skatval had but to say the word.

The word went unsaid. For one thing, in the bow of the dromon stood a white-painted shield hung on a spearshaft, the Videssian sign of truce. For another, the dromon was alone. If he sank it and slew its sailors, a swarm would sally forth for vengeance. Stavrakios, the man who sat on the Empire’s throne, was very like a Haloga in that.

The dromon halted perhaps a furlong from the end of the fjord. Skatval watched the loincloth-clad sailors (his lips twisted in a scornful smile as he imagined how they would fare in such garb here, more than a month either way from high summer) lower a boat into the gray-blue water. Four men scrambled down a rope into that boat. The ragged way they worked the oars told him at once they were no sailors. Now the corners of his mouth turned down. What were they, then?

As they moved out of the dromon’s shadow, the sun shone off their shaven pates. For a moment, Skatval simply accepted what he saw. Then he cursed, loud, long, and fierce. So the Videssians were sending another pack of priests to Halogaland, were they? Had they not yet learned the northern folk cared nothing for their god? Or was it that their Phaos sometimes demanded blood sacrifice?

Skatval chewed on the new thought some little while, for it made the Videssian god more like those he venerated. But in the end he spat it out. He had seen imperials at worship. They gave their effete god hymns, not gore.

With the boat gone, the dromon turned almost in its own length (there was oarwork worth respect) and made for the outlet of the fjord. Skatval frowned again. Not even the bloodless Videssians were in the habit of leaving priests behind to perish.

Instead of beaching, the boat paused half a bowshot from shore. The blue-robed priests began to chant. One stood, looked up at the sun, and sketched a circle above his left breast. Skatval knew that was a gesture of respect. The other priests raised their hands to the heavens. The chant went on. The standing blue-robe sketched the sun-circle again, then made a quick pass, and another, and another.

A broad bridge of sunlight suddenly sprang from boat to beach. The priests swung knapsacks over their shoulders and strode across it as confidently as if they walked on dry land. When the last of them had crossed, the bridge vanished. The boat bobbed in the fjord, lonely and forgotten.

So, Skatval thought, they are sorcerers. The magic, which likely awed any watching crofters, impressed him as well, but only so far: he would have thought more of it had it brought the boat in, too. Still, the Halogai also boasted wizards, though their craft was earthier, often bloodier, than this play with light itself. Skatval refused to be awed. He had no doubt that was what the blue-robes sought, else they simply would have rowed ashore.

“Like to brag of themselves, do they?” he muttered. “I’ll choke their brags in their throats, by the gods.”

He set hand on swordhilt and strode shorewards. Should he slay the blue-robes now, he wondered, or was that Stavrakios’ purpose, to seek to incite him and give the Empire excuse to turn loose its ships and soldiers? Videssos played a slipperier game of statecraft than most. Perhaps it were wiser to let the priests first commit some outrage, as they surely would, to justify their slaughter.

The unwelcome newcomers saw him tramping down the track from the longhouse. As one, they turned his way. As one indeed, he thought. Videssian priests were like as so many peas in a pod. Before he drew near enough to make out faces, he was sure what he would find. Some would be older, some younger, but all small and slight and swarthy by his standards.

Three of the four priests fit the expected pattern. Even their ages were hard to judge, save by the grayness of their untrimmed beards: as much as their matching robes, their naked, gleaming skulls made them seem all the same.

Perhaps because he foresaw uniformity, Skatval needed longer than he should have to note that the fourth man out of the boat broke the mold. Robed he was like his companions, and shaven, but the beard that burgeoned on cheeks and chin was neither black nor gray, but rather a golden tangle that reached halfway down his chest. His face was square; his nose short; his eyes not dark, heavy-lidded, and clever but open, friendly, and the exact color of the waters of Lygra Fjord.

Skatval’s firm step faltered. He tugged at his own beard, more neatly kept than that of the fourth priest but of the same shade. Here was something unlooked for. How had Videssos made a Haloga into a priest of Phaos? More to the point, what sort of weapon was he?

All the priests had been praying since they left Merciless for the boat that had brought them to this inhospitable shore. But now Antilas, Nephon, and Tzoumas stood silent, watching the barbarian approach. They knew martyrdom might lie only moments away, knew their fate rested in Phaos’ hands alone, knew the good god would do with them as he willed.

Kveldulf knew all those things, knew them as well as his brethren. Nevertheless, he recited the creed yet again: “We bless thee, Phaos, lord with the great and good mind, watchful beforehand that the great test of life may be decided in our favor.”

“Your piety, as always, does you credit, Kveldulf,” Tzoumas said. Like all imperials, the old priest pronounced Kveldulf’s name as if it were a proper Videssian appellation: Kveldoulphios. He had grown so used to hearing it thus that it was nearly as if he’d borne it that way since birth. Nearly.

Not wishing to contradict his superior, he modestly lowered his eyes. He’d spoken Phaos’ creed not so much to beg favor from the good god as to anchor himself, to recall what he’d willed himself to become, in a world where he needed such anchor as much as a shipwrecked sailor needed a spar to support himself in a sea suddenly turned all topsy-turvy.

Though he’d not set foot in Halogaland for twenty years and more, everything here smote him with a familiarity the stronger for being so unexpected: the way the land sloped sharply up from the sea; the grim gray of bare rock; the air’s cool salt tang; the dark cloaks of arrow-straight fir and pine that covered the shoulders of the hills; the turf walls of the chief’s longhouse and the way those walls turned in toward each other to accommodate the shape of the roof, which was not in fact a roof by original intention, but rather an upside-down boat outworn for any other use. He’d passed his boyhood in just such a longhouse.

But he was boy no more. Taken back to the Empire as prize of war, he’d grown to manhood—grown to priesthood—in its great cities, in golden Skopentzana and in the mighty imperial capital, Videssos the city itself. Now he saw through the eyes of a man who better knew a different world what he had taken for granted as a child.

“They’re so poor,” he whispered. The green fields were brave with growing barley and beans, but pitifully narrow. And the crops, by Videssian standards, could not help being small. Under the smiling southern sun, some favored provinces brought in two harvests a year. Here in the north, getting one was by no means guaranteed. The kine were small, the pigs scrawny; only the sheep seemed as fine and woolly as he remembered. They had need for fine wool here, wool to ward against winter.

Even the longhouse was at the same time a match for his memories and less than he had looked for it to be. This chief was richer than Kveldulf’s father had dreamed of being; his home was bigger and stronger than that from which Kveldulf had fled, nose running and throat raw from smoke, as the imperials set it ablaze. Yet beside a score of homes, palaces, temples in Skopentzana, beside a score of scores in Videssos the city, it was but a hovel, and a filthy hovel at that.

The chief himself still stumped toward the priests. He was a big, broad-shouldered man with the same pale hair, fair skin, and light eyes as Kveldulf’s. The massive gold brooch that closed his cloak also declared his rank. But his baggy wool trousers had dirt-stained knees, perhaps from stooping in the fields but as likely from the earthen floor of the longhouse. Recalling his father’s holding burning over his head made Kveldulf notice the chief’s red-tracked eyes, the soot forever ground into the lines of his forehead: the Halogai knew of chimneys, but in winter they often chose not to let heat flee through them.

The chief paused about ten feet in front of the priests, spent a full minute surveying them. Then he said, “Why came you here, where you know your kind are not welcome?” His deep, slow voice, the sonorous, mouth-filling words he spoke, made Kveldulf shiver. Not since boyhood had he heard anyone save himself speak the pure Haloga tongue; he had taught it to his comrades here, but they gave it back with a staccato Videssian intonation.

Just the sound of the chief’s voice set Kveldulf’s heart crying to reply, but that was not his proper place. Modestly, he cast his eyes to the ground as Tzoumas, senior and most holy of the four, answered in the northern speech: “We come to tell you of the good god Phaos, the lord with the great and good mind, whom you must worship for the sake of your souls.”

“Here is a new thing,” the chief said, raising straw-colored eyebrows. Suddenly, he shifted into Videssian: “Not a few of us know your language, but few southern men have bothered learning ours.”

Behind Kveldulf, Nephon nudged Antilas, whispered, “Few of Videssos would waste their time on this barbarous jargon.” Antilas grunted agreement. The Haloga chief could not have heard him. Kveldulf frowned anyhow, though Nephon was far from wrong; only a direct order from the patriarch had produced even three to learn the northern tongue and the ways of the Halogai. Most Videssians assumed anyone unwilling to take on their own ways was not worth saving.

The chief went on, still in Videssian, “I dare say this decoy duck taught it to you.” His gaze swung to Kveldulf and he returned to his birthspeech as he asked, “Who are you, and how came you among the southrons?”

“By your leave, holy sir?” Kveldulf murmured to Tzoumas, who dipped his head in assent. Only then did Kveldulf speak directly to the Haloga: “I am Kveldulf, a priest of Phaos like any other.”

“Not like any other, by the gods,” the chief said. “And Kveldulf what? Are you a slave or a woman, that you have neither ekename nor father’s name to set beside your own?” He thumped his chest with a big fist. “Me, I am Skatval the Brisk, otherwise Skatval Raud’s son.”

“Honor to you and yours, Brisk Skatval,” Kveldulf said, giving the chief proper greeting. “I am—Kveldulf. It is enough. If you like, I am a slave, but a willing slave to the good god, as are all his priests. We have no other titles, and need none.”

“You—own yourself a slave?” Skatval’s sword slid from its sheath. “And you would fain enslave the free folk of Halogaland?”

“To the good god, yes.” Kveldulf knew death walked close. Among themselves, the Halogai kept no slaves. Videssos did. Kveldulf had been a slave of the most ordinary sort, until his fervent love for the god of whom he learned within the Empire persuaded his master, a pious man himself, to free him to serve Phaos. He unflinchingly met Skatval’s glare. “Slay me if you must, sir. I shall not flee, nor fight. But while I live, I shall preach.”

The Haloga chief began to bring up his bright blade. Then, all at once, he stopped, threw back his head, and roared laughter till it echoed from the hills. “Preach as you will, where you will, nithing of a priest. Let us see how many northern men would willingly shackle themselves forever to anything, even a god.”

Kveldulf felt angry heat rise from his throat to the top of his head. With his pale, almost transparent skin, he knew how visible his rage had to be. He did not care. Of themselves, his hands curled into clumsy, unpracticed fists. He took a step toward Skatval. “Hold!” Tzoumas said sharply.

Skatval laughed still, threw aside his sword. “Let him come, Videssian. Perhaps I can pound sense into his shaven head, if it will enter there in no other way.”

“Hold, holy sir,” Tzoumas told Kveldulf again, and waited for him to obey before turning back to Skatval. To the chief, he said, “Pick up your weapon, sir, for in the battle about to be joined, you will find Kveldulf well armed.”

“Well armed? With what?” Skatval jeered.

“With words,” Tzoumas answered. Skatval suddenly stopped smiling.

Kveldulf preached in a pasture, a clump of cow dung close by his sandals. From everything Skatval knew of Videssians, that in itself would have been plenty to put them off stride. But Kveldulf noticed no more than any of the chief’s smallholders might have. And too many of those smallholders to suit Skatval stood in the field to listen.

Skatval watched from the edge of the woods that lay by the pasture. He had called Kveldulf a woman for bearing an unadorned name. Now, as if in revenge for that taunt, women flocked to hear the Haloga unaccountably turned Videssian priest. When he thought to be so, Skatval was just enough. Much as he despised Kveldulf, he could not deny the blue-robe made a fine figure of a man, save for his naked skull. And even that, repulsive as it still seemed on the Videssian clerics, might be reckoned but an exotic novelty on a man who was in every other way a perfect northerner. By the sighs from the womenfolk, they reckoned it so, which only annoyed Skatval the more.

Among those womenfolk was his own daughter Skjaldvor; he saw her bright gold hair in the second row of the crowd around Kveldulf. He rumbled something discontented, down deep in his throat. If Skjaldvor took this southron nonsense seriously, how could he hope to rid himself of Kveldulf when the time came for that? He rumbled again. His daughter should have been wed two years ago, maybe three or four, but he’d indulged, indeed been flattered by, her wish to stay in his own longhouse. Now he wondered what sort of price he would have to pay for that indulgence.

He could all but hear his own stern, bloodthirsty gods laughing at him. They knew one always paid for being soft. He scowled. Would they willingly let themselves be supplanted, just for the sake of teaching him a lesson he already knew by heart? They might. Halogai who went after vengeance pursued it for its own sake, without counting coins to see if it was worth the cost.

The summer breeze, so mild as to befool a man who did not know better into thinking such fine days would last forever, blew Kveldulf’s words to Skatval’s ears. The priest had a fine, mellow voice, a man’s voice, and was no mean speaker: to northern directness he married a more sophisticated Videssian style, as if he were holding up ideas in his hands and examining them from all sides.

He paused. His listeners, who should have been making the most of the short summer season instead of standing around listening to sweet-tasting nonsense, broke into applause. Skatval saw Skjaldvor’s hands meet each other, saw in profile her bright eyes aimed straight at Kveldulf, her mouth wide and smiling.

He began to worry in earnest.

After some days’ preaching, Kveldulf began to worry in earnest. The Halogai, once his people—still his people if blood counted as well as dwelling, as it surely did—flocked to hear him. They listened to him with greater, more serious attention than a crowd of Videssians would have granted; every imperial fancied himself a theologian, and wanted to argue every shade of meaning in Phaos’ holy scriptures. The Halogai listened respectfully; they nodded soberly; they declined to convert.

It was not that they had no questions for him; they had many. But those questions did not spring from the holy scriptures; they did not assume those scriptures were true, and argue from or about their premises. To the Halogai, everything pertaining to Phaos, even his existence, was open to debate. Kveldulf had been warned of that before he sailed for his birthland. Only now, though, was he discovering what it meant.

No Videssian, for instance, would have asked, as did a herder whose rawhide boots were stained with sheepshit, “Well, just how d’you ken this Phaos o’yours is what you say he is?”

“Things act for good in this world, and others for evil,” Kveldulf answered. “Phaos is the architect of all that is good, while Skotos works without pause to pull down all he does.” He spat between his feet in rejection of the dark god.

The shepherd spat, too. “So you say. Who said so to you?”

“So say the good god’s own holy words, written down in ancient days.” Kveldulf nodded to Tzoumas, who held up a copy of the scriptures. The words within meant nothing to the watching Halogai; they did not write their own language, let alone Videssian. But the cover, of brass polished till it gleamed like gold and decorated with precious stones and an enamelwork portrait of Phaos’ stern, majestic countenance, promised that what lay within was worthy of consideration. As the Videssian proverb put it, a robe is revealed in advance by its border.

But the stubborn shepherd said, “Did your god speak these words straight to you?” Kveldulf had to shake his head. The shepherd went on, “Then why put faith in ’em? When I hear the thunder, or see the grain spring green from the ground, or futter my woman, these are things whose truth I know for myself; I feel no shame to worship the gods that shaped them. But a god who spoke long ago, if he spoke at all? Pah!” He spat again.

Behind Kveldulf, one of his Videssian colleagues—he thought it was Nephon—softly said, “Blasphemy!” Kveldulf himself felt brief heat run through his body, heat warmer than that which the watery sunshine of Halogaland could engender. Along with their hair, Videssian priests gave up carnal congress as a mark of their devotion to the good god. Kveldulf had worn his celibacy a long time now; it rarely chafed him. But imperials did not talk about futtering as casually as the shepherd had, either. The naked word made Kveldulf feel for a moment what he had given up.

He said, “If the good god’s holy words will not inspire you, think on the deeds of those who follow him. They hold sway from the borders of Makuran far in the southwest, round the lands which touch the Videssian Sea and the Sailors’ Sea, and sweep up along the edge of the Northern Sea till their lands march with yours as well. And all this under the rule of one man, the mighty Emperor Stavrakios, Avtokrator of the Videssians, where small Halogaland is split among countless chiefs. Does this not speak for the strength of Phaos?”

Behind him, Nephon said, “This argument is unscriptural. The barbarians must come to Phaos’ faith because of the glory of the good god, not that of those who follow him.”

“Don’t call them barbarians,” Antilas said quietly. “He’s one of them, remember?”

Nephon grunted. Tzoumas said, “How worshipers find Phaos matters little; that they find him matters much. Let Kveldulf go on, if he will.”

The byplay had been in Videssian. The Halogai to whom Kveldulf preached took no notice of it. And now, for the first time since he’d come to Halogaland, he had hearers who listened seriously. He wondered why, for Nephon was right: an argument from results was weaker than one from doctrine. But the men of the north respected strength; perhaps reminding them of the power of Videssos had not hurt.

“Cast forth the evil from your own lives!” he called. “Accept Phaos into your hearts, into your spirits. Turn toward the good which rests in each of you. Who will show me now that he is ready to cleave to the lord with the great and good mind, and reject evil forevermore?”

He’d asked that before at the close of every sermon, and been answered with stony silence or with jeers. The Halogai were happy enough to listen to him; it gave them something unusual and interesting to do with their time. But hearing and hearkening were two different things, and for all his passionate exhortation, he’d not convinced anyone, not until today. Now a woman raised her hand, then another, and then a man.

Kveldulf sketched the sun-sign over his heart. As he looked up to the heavens to thank Phaos for allowing him to be persuasive, his eyes filled with grateful tears. At last the good god had given a sign he would not forsake the folk of the north.

Skatval slashed the horse’s throat. As the sacrificial beast staggered, he held the laut-bowl under its neck to gather the gushing blood. The horse fell. From the laut-bowl he filled laut-sprinklers and stained the wooden walls of the temple with shining red. He also daubed his own cheeks and hands, and those of the clansfolk who had gathered with him for the offerings.

As he moistened men and women with the holy blood, his priest, Grimke Grankel’s son, declared, “May goodness flow down from the god as the gore goes out of the offering.”

“So may it be,” Skatval echoed. So did his warriors and their women—those that were here. He did his best to hide his unease as he began to butcher the horse, but it was not easy. Sacrifice should have brought together the whole of the clan, to receive the gods’ blessing and to feast on horseflesh and ale afterwards. Most of his people had come, but far too many were missing.

Among the missing was Skjaldvor. Skatval’s eyebrows came together above his long, thin nose. Of all the people who might listen to this southron twaddle about Phaos, he’d expected his daughter to be one of the last.

He glanced over at Ulvhild, his wife. After they’d lived together in that longhouse the whole of their grown lives, she picked thoughts from his head as if he’d shouted them aloud. Now she shrugged, slowly and deliberately, telling him there was nothing she could do about Skjaldvor: his daughter was a woman now. He snorted. No one could do anything with a girl, once she turned into a woman. Ulvhild heard the snort and glared at him—she’d stolen that thought, too.

Hastily, he turned back to roasting horseflesh. The first pieces were done enough to eat. Someone held out a birchwood platter. He stabbed a gobbet, plopped it onto the plate. Beside him, Grimkel plied a dipper, filled a mug with ale. “The gods bless us with their bounty,” he intoned.

Some time later, his belly full of meat and his head spinning slightly from many mugs of ale, Skatval strode out of the temple. He was one of the last folk to leave: not least of his chiefly requirements was being able to outeat and outdrink those he outranked. The rich taste of hot marrow still filled his mouth.

He thumped his middle with the flat of his hand. Life was not so bad. The fields bore as well as they ever did; no murrain had smote the flocks, nor sickness his people. No raiders threatened. Winter would be long, but winter was always long. The gods willing, almost all the clan would see the next spring. He had been through too many years where dearth and death displayed themselves long months in advance.

Then satisfaction leaked from him as if he were a cracked pot. There at the edge of a hayfield walked Skjaldvor and Kveldulf, not arm in arm but side by side, their heads close together. Kveldulf explained something with extravagant gestures he must have learned from the Videssians; no man of Halogaland would have been so unconstrained. Skjaldvor laughed, clapped her hands, nodded eagerly. Whatever point he’d made, she approved of it.

Or more likely, she just approves of Kveldulf, Skatval thought with bleak mirth. The chief wondered if she drew a distinction between the blue-robe’s doctrines and himself. He had his doubts. But what could he do? What could anyone do with a girl, once she turned into a woman?

He’d answered that question for himself back inside the temple. He did not like the conclusion he’d reached there, but found none better now.

“Tell me, Kveldulf,” Skjaldvor said, “how came you to reverence the Videssian god?” She stopped walking, cocked her head, and waited for his reply.

The light that filtered through the forest canopy overhead was clear, pale, almost colorless, like the gray-white trunks of the birch trees all around. The air tasted of moss and dew. When he paused too, Kveldulf felt quiet fold round him like a cloak. Somewhere far in the distance, he heard the low, purring trill of a crested tit. Otherwise, all was still. He could hear his own breath move in and out, and after a moment Skjaldvor’s as well.

As she looked at him, so he studied her. She was tall for a woman, the crown of her head reaching higher than his chin. Flowing gilt hair framed her face, a strong-chinned, proud-cheekboned visage which, along with the unshrinking gaze of her wide-set eyes, spoke volumes about the legendary stubbornness of the Halogai. She had, in fact, a close copy of her father’s features, though in her his harshness somehow grew fresh and lovely. But Kveldulf, unpracticed with either families or women, could not quite catch that.

He did know she made him nervous, and also knew he spent more time with her than he should. All of Skatval’s clansfolk had souls that wanted saving. Still, Kveldulf told himself, winning the chief’s daughter to the worship of the good god would greatly strengthen Phaos here. And she could have chosen nothing apter to ask him.

The years blew away as he looked back inside himself. “I was a lad yet, my beard not sprouted, sold as a house slave: Videssian spoil of war. I learned the Empire’s tongue fast enough to suit my master. He was far from the worst of men; he worked me hard, but he fed me well, and beat me no worse than I deserved.” The hairs of his mustache tickled his lips as they quirked into a wry smile. Remembering some of his pranks, he reckoned Zoïlos merciful now, though he hadn’t thought so at the time.

“How could you live—a slave?” Skjaldvor shuddered. “You come of free folk. Would you not liefer have lost your life than live in chains?”

“I wore no chains,” Kveldulf said.

“That may be worse,” she told him, scorn in her voice. “You stayed in slavery when you could have—should have—fled?” She turned her back on him. Her long wool skirt swirled around her, showing him for a moment her slim white ankles.

“How was I to flee?” he asked, doing his best to inform his voice with reason rather than wrath. “Skopentzana is far from Halogaland, and I was but a boy. And before long, I came to see my capture as a blessing, not the sorrow I had held it to be.”

Skjaldvor looked at him again, but with hands on her hips. “A blessing? Are you witstruck? To have to walk at the whim of another man’s will—I would die before I endured it.”

“As may be,” Kveldulf said soberly. A slave as lovely as Skjaldvor was all too likely to have to lie down at the whim of another man’s will. Zoïlos, fortunately, had not bought Kveldulf for that. He shook his head to dislodge the distracting carnal thought, went on: “But you asked of me how I found Phaos. Had I not been Zoilos’ slave, I doubt I should have. He often went out of morning, and one day I asked where. He told me he prayed at the chief temple in Skopentzana, and asked in turn if I cared to go there with him.”

“And you said aye?”

“I said aye.” Kveldulf laughed at his younger self. “It seemed easier than my usual morning drudgery. So he let me bathe, and gave me a shirt less shabby than most, and I walked behind him to the temple. We went inside. I had never smelt incense before. Then I looked up into the dome …”

His voice trailed away. Across a quarter of a century, he could still call up the awe he’d known, looking up into the golden dome and seeing Phaos stern in judgment, staring down at him—seemingly at him alone, though the temple was crowded—and weighing his worth. Then the priestly choir behind the altar lifted up its many-voiced voice in exaltation and praise of the lord with the great and good mind, and then—

Kveldulf remembered to speak: “I knew not whether I was still on earth or up in the heavens. I saw the holy men in the blue robes who lived with the good god every moment of every day of every year of their lives, and I knew I had to be of their number. Next morning, I asked Zoilos if I might go with him, not he me, and the morning after that, and the one after that. At first, when I was but shirking, he’d hoped me pious. Now, when I truly touched piety, he reckoned me a shirker. But I kept on; I was drunk with the good god. Once I found Phaos, I wished for nothing else. Well, not nothing; I wished for but one thing more.”

“What is that?” Skjaldvor leaned toward him. The silver chains that linked the two large brooches she wore on her breast clinked softly (the shape of those brooches reminded Kveldulf of nothing so much as twin tortoise shells). All at once he was conscious of how close she stood.

Nonetheless, he answered as he had intended: “I wished the good god might grant me the boon of leading my birthfolk out of Skotos’ darkness and into the light of Phaos. For those who die without knowing the lord with the great and good mind shall surely spend all eternity in the icepits of Skotos, a fate I wish on no man or woman, Videssian or Haloga, slave or free.”

“Oh.” Skjaldvor straightened. Where before her voice had been low and breathy, now it went oddly flat. She studied him again, as if wondering whether to go on. At last she did: “I thought perhaps you meant you wished you might enjoy all the pleasures of other men.”

Kveldulf felt himself grow hot, and knew his fair skin only made embarrassment more obvious. He looked to see if Skjaldvor also blushed. Though fairer even than he, she did not. She knew herself free to say what she would, act as she would. He stammered a little as he answered, “I may not, not without turning oathbreaker, and that I shall never do.”

“The more fool you, and the worse waste, for you are no mean man,” she said. “The other blue-robes are less stupid.”

“What do you mean?” he demanded.

“Do you not know? Can you not know, without being deaf and blind? Your fellows are far from passing all their nights alone and lonely in their tents.”

“Is it so?” Kveldulf said, but by her malicious satisfaction he knew it surely was. Sorrow pressed upon him but left him unsurprised. He bent his head, sketched the sun-circle over his heart. “All men may sin. I shall pray for them.”

She stared at him. “Is that all?”

“What else would you have me do?” he asked, honestly curious.

“Were it not for your beard, I should guess the southrons made you a eunuch when they set the blue robe upon you.” Skjaldvor took a deep breath, let it hiss out through flaring nostrils. “What else would I have you do? This, to start.” As she stepped into his arms, her expression might have been that of a warrior measuring a foe over sword and shield.

The gold of her brooches pressed against him through his robe, then the softer, yielding firmness that was herself. His arms still hung by his sides, but that mattered little, for she held him to her. From the sweat that prickled on his forehead and shaven pate, the cool wood might suddenly have become a tropic swamp. Then she kissed him. Not even a man of stone, a statue like one of those in Skopentzana’s central square, could have remained unroused.

She stepped back and eyed not his red face but his groin to gauge her effect on him. That effect was all too visible, which only made his face grow redder. But when she reached out to open his robe, he slapped her hand aside. “No, by the good god,” he said harshly.

Now she reddened too, with anger. “Why ever not? The Videssians do not stint themselves; why should you, when you are not of their kindred nor born to their faith?”

“That they do wrong is no reason for me to follow them. Were they murdering instead of fornicating, would you bid me do likewise?”

“How can anything so full of joy be wrong?” Skjaldvor tossed her shining hair in scorn at the very idea.

“It is forbidden to Phaos’ priests, thus wrong for them,” Kveldulf declared. “And though I was not born to faith in Phaos, in it I am a son fostered to a fine father. Whatever I was by birth, Phaos’ is the house wherein I would dwell evermore.”

All he said was true, yet he knew it was incomplete. As a foster son in Phaos’ household, he was held to closer scrutiny than the Videssians who entered it by right of birth: they might be forgiven sins that would condemn him, the outsider who presumed to ape their ways. Another man might have grown resentful, struggling against that double standard. But it spurred Kveldulf. If extra devotion was required of him, extra devotion he would give.

“You will not?” Skjaldvor said.

“I will not,” Kveldulf answered firmly. Never since donning the blue robe had he known such temptation; the memory of her body printed against him, he knew, would remain with him till his last breath. He still throbbed from wanting her. But priests were taught to rule their flesh. Over and over he repeated Phaos’ creed to himself, focusing on the good god rather than his fleshly lust, and at length that lust began to lessen.

Skjaldvor drew near him again. This time, he thought, he would be proof against her embraces. But she did not embrace him. Serpent-swift, she slapped his left cheek, then, on the backhand, his right. He cherished the sudden pain, which seared the last of his desire from him.

“May the lord with the great and good mind keep you in his heart until you place him in yours,” he said. “I shall pray that that time be soon, as you have seemed better disposed than most of your fellows to learning of his faith.”

She tossed her head again and laughed, an ugly sound despite the sweetness of her voice. Then she spat full in his face. “This for your Phaos and his faith.” She spat again. “And this for you!” She spun on her heel and stormed away.

Kveldulf stood and watched her go while her warm spittle slid down into his beard. Very deliberately, he bent his head and spat himself, down between his feet in the age-old Videssian gesture that rejected Skotos. He recited Phaos’ creed once more. When he was through, he walked slowly back toward the tents by the shore.

Skatval watched the small crowd of crofters and herders raise hands to the heavens. The sound of their prayers to Phaos reached him faintly. Save for the name of the Videssian god, the words were in the Haloga tongue. Skatval had heard worse poetry from bards who lived by traveling from chief to chief with their songs. Kveldulf’s work, no doubt, he thought; the blond-bearded priest was proving a man of more parts than he had looked for.

Absent from the converts’ conclave was Skjaldvor. For that Skatval sent up his own prayers of thanks to his gods. He had not asked what passed between her and Kveldulf, but where before she had gone to his services, looked on him with mooncalf eyes, now all at once the sight of him made her face go hard and hateful, hearing his name brought curses from her lips. She was in no danger of coming to follow Phaos, not any more.

But the priests from the Empire had won more folk to their faith than Skatval expected (truth to tell, he’d thought his people would laugh Kveldulf and the rest away in disgrace, else he would have slain them as soon as they set foot on his soil). That worried him. Followers of Videssos’ faith would mean Videssian priests on his land henceforward, and that would mean … Skatval growled wordlessly. He stalked toward the prayer meeting. He would show his people what that meant.

Kveldulf bowed courteously as he drew nigh. “The good god grant you peace, Skatval the Brisk. May I hope you have come to join us?”

“No,” he said, biting off the word. “I would ask a couple of questions of you.”

Kveldulf bowed again. “Ask what you will. Knowledge is a road to faith.”

“Knowledge is a road around the snare you have set for my people,” Skatval retorted. “Suppose some of us take on your faith and then fall out over how to follow it. Who decides which of us is in the right?”

“Priests are brought up from boyhood in Phaos’ way,” Kveldulf said. “Can newcomers to that way hope to match them in knowledge?”

Skatval grimaced. The Haloga priest—no, the blond Videssian, that was the better way to think of him—was not making matters easy. But the chief bulled ahead regardless: “Suppose the blue-robes disagree, as they may, men being what they are? Who then says which walks the proper path?”

“The prelates set over them,” Kveldulf said, cautious now. Skatval had probed at him before, but in private, not in front of the people.

“And the priest against whom judgment falls?” the chief said. “If he will not yield, is he then an outlaw?”

“A heretic, we name one who chooses his own false doctrine over that ordained by his elders.” Kveldulf considered the question, then added, “But no, he is not to be outlawed—excommunicated is the word the temples use—yet, for he has right of appeal to the patriarch, the most holy and chiefest priest, the head of all the faith.”

“Ah, the patriarch!” Skatval exclaimed, as if hearing of the existence of a supreme prelate for the first time. “And where dwells this prince of piety?”

“In Videssos the city, by the High Temple there,” Kveldulf answered.

“In Videssos the city? Under the Avtokrator’s thumb, you mean.” Skatval showed teeth in something more akin to a lynx’s hunting snarl than to a smile. “So you would have us put to Stavrakios’judgment aught upon which we may disagree, is that what you say?” He turned to the converts, lashed them with wounding words: “I reckoned you freemen, not slaves to Videssos through the Empire’s god. Your holy Kveldulf here is but the thin edge of the wedge, I warn you.”

“The patriarch rules the church, not the Avtokrator,” Kveldulf insisted. Behind him, his Videssian colleagues nodded vigorously.

Skatval ignored them; without Kveldulf, they were nothing here. At Kveldulf, he snapped, “And if your precious patriarch dies, what then?”

“Then the prelates come together in conclave to choose his successor,” Kveldulf answered.

Skatval quite admired him; without lying, he had twisted truth to his purposes. Against many Halogai, even chiefs, his words would have wrought what he intended. But Skatval, mistrusting the Empire more than most, had learned more of it than most. “By the truth you hold in your god, Kveldulf, who names the three men from whom the prelates pick the patriarch?”

Just for a moment, he saw hatred in those blue eyes so like his own. Just for a moment—and when it cleared, it cleared completely. Skatval also saw the Videssian priests visibly willing Kveldulf to lie. But when he answered at last, his voice was firm, if low: “The Avtokrator names those candidates.”

“There, you see?” Skatval turned to the converts who had heard him argue with Kveldulf. “You see? Aye, follow Phaos, if you fancy the Avtokrator telling you how to go about it. Videssos has not the strength to vanquish us by the sword, so she seeks to strangle us with the spider’s silk spun by her god. And you—you seek to aid the Empire!”

He had hoped forcing Kveldulf to concede that Phaos’ faith was dominated by the Emperor would of itself make his people turn away from the Videssian god. And indeed, a couple of men and women left the gathering, shaking their heads at their own foolishness. To the Halogai, Videssos’ autocracy seemed like a whole great land living in chains.

But more folk than he expected stayed where they were, waiting to hear how Kveldulf would answer him. The priest, too canny by half to suit Skatval, saw that as well, and grew stronger for it. He said boldly, “No matter whence the faith comes, friends, its truth remains. You have heard that truth in Phaos’ holy scriptures, heard it in my own poor words, and accepted it of your free will. Apart from the cost to your souls in the life to come, turning aside from it now at your chief’s urging is surely as slavish as his imagined claim that you somehow serve the Empire by accepting the good god.”

Skatval ground his teeth when he saw several men soberly nodding. People stopped leaving the field in which the returned Haloga was holding his service. Kveldulf did not display the triumph he must have felt. A Videssian would have done so, and lost the people whose respect he’d regained. Kveldulf merely continued the service as if nothing had happened: he was a Haloga at heart, and knew the quiet gesture was the quicker killer.

Skatval stormed away. Forcing the fight further now would but cost him face. As he tramped into the woods, he almost ran over Grimke Grankel’s son. “Are you coming to cast your lot with Phaos, too?” he snarled.

“A man may watch a foe without wishing to join him,” the servant of the Haloga gods replied.

“At least you see he is a foe: more than those cheeseheads back there care to notice,” Skatval said. “A deadly dangerous foe.” His eyes narrowed as he looked back toward Kveldulf, who was leading his converts in yet another translated hymn. “Why, then, does he not deserve some deadly danger?”

Grimke glanced at the sword he wore on his belt. “You could have given it to him.”

“I wanted to, but feared it would set his followers forever in his path. If you, however, were to slay the southrons—and Kveldulf, their stalking horse—by sorcery, all would see our gods are stronger than the one for whom he prates.”

Grimke Grankel’s son stared, then slowly smiled. “This could be done, my chief.”

“Then do it. Too long I tolerated the traitor among us, long enough for his treachery to take root. Now, as I say, simply to slay Kveldulf and his Videssian cronies would stir more strife than it stopped. But you would not simply slay him, eh?”

“No, not simply.” Grimke’s face mirrored anticipation and calculation. “Hmm … ’twere best to wait till midnight, when the power of his god is at its lowest ebb.”

“As you reckon best. In matters magical, you know—” Skatval broke off, stared at his sorcerer. “Do you say that even you acknowledge Phaos a true god?”

“This for Phaos.” Grimke spat between his feet, as a Videssian would in rejecting Skotos. “But any god is true to one who truly believes, and may ward against wizardry. Given a choice between sorceries, I would choose the simpler when I may. Thus, midnight serves me best.”

“Let it be as you wish, then,” Skatval said. “But let it be tonight.”

Even at midnight, the sky was not wholly dark. Sullen red marked the northern sky, tracing the track of the sun not far below the ground. Seeing that glow, Skatval thought of blood. Only a few of the brightest stars pierced the endless summer twilight.

A small fire crackled. Bit by bit, Grimke Grankel’s son fed it with chips of wood and other, less readily identifiable, substances. The fickle breeze flicked smoke into Skatval’s face. He coughed and nearly choked; it had not the savor of honest flames. Almost, he told Grimke to stamp it out and set sorcery aside.

Grimke set a silver laut-bowl in the fire, which licked around it until the gods and savage beasts worked in relief on its outside seemed to writhe with a life of their own. Skatval rubbed his eyes. Heat-shimmers he knew, but none like these. The bowl held a thick jelly. When it began to bubble and seethe, Grimke nodded as if satisfied.

Above the bowl he held two cups of similar work, one filled with blood (some was his own, some Skatval’s), the other with bitter ale. Slowly, slowly, he poured the twin thin streams down into the laut-bowl. “Drive the intruders from our land, drive them to fear, drive them to death,” he intoned. “As our blood is burnt, find for them fates bitter as this beer. May they know sorrow, may they know shame, may they forget their god and gain only graves.”

Filled with assonance and alliteration, the chant rolled on. Hair rose on Skatval’s forearms and at the back of his neck; though the magic was not aimed at him, he felt its force, felt it and was filled with fear. The gods of the Halogai were grim and cold, like the land they ruled. As Grimke prodded them to put forth their power, Skatval wondered for a moment if Phaos would not make a better, safer master for his folk. He fought the thought down, hoping his gods had not seen it.

Too late for second thoughts anyhow. Grimke’s voice rose, almost to a scream. And other screams, more distant, rose in answer from the tents in which the priests dwelt. Hearing the horror in them, Skatval wondered again if he should have chosen Phaos. He shook his head. Phaos might make his folk a fine master, but the Avtokrator Stavrakios would not, and he could not have the one without the other.

Grimke Grankel’s son set down the silver cups. The flickering flames showed sweat slithering down his face, harsh lines carved from nose to mouth corners. Voice slow and rough with weariness, he said, “What magic may wreak, magic has wrought.”

Kveldulf woke from dreams filled with dread. The sun shining through the side of his tent made him sigh with relief, as if he had no right to see it. He shook his head, feeling foolish. Dreams were but dreams, no matter how frightening: when the sun rose, they were gone. But these refused to go.

He had slept in his robe. Now he belted it on again, went outside to offer morning prayers to the sun, the symbol of his god. Tzoumas, Nephon, and Antilas remained in their tents. Slugabeds, he thought, and lifted hands to the heavens. “We bless thee, Phaos, lord with the great and good mind—” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Skatval bearing down on him, but took no true notice of the chief until he had finished the creed.

“You live!” Skatval shouted, as if it were crime past forgiving.

“Well, aye,” Kveldulf said, smiling. “The good god brought me safe through another night. Am I such an ancient, though, that the thought fills you with surprise?”

“Look to your fellows,” Skatval said, staring at him still.

“I would not disturb them at their rest,” Kveldulf said. Tzoumas in particular could be a bear with a sore paw unless he got in a full night.

“Look to them!” Skatval said, so fiercely Kveldulf had to obey. He went over to Nephon’s tent, pulled back the flaps that closed it, stuck his head inside. A moment later, he drew back, face pale, stomach heaving. Of themselves, his fingers shaped Phaos’ sun-circle. He went to Antilas’ tent, and Tzoumas’, hoping for something better, but in each he found only twisted death, with terror carved irremovably onto all the priests’ features.

He turned back to Skatval. “Why did you spare me? I would sooner have died with my fellows.” He knew the chief did not favor his faith, but had not imagined he held such hatred as to do … what he had done to the Videssians. By his own standards, Skatval seemed a reasonable man. But where was the reason in this?

Skatval supplied it: “The gods know I hoped Grimke’s wizardry would overfall you too, you more than any of the others. They without you were nothing; you without them remain deadly foe to all I hold dear: deadlier now, for having survived. Your god I could perhaps live with, or suffer my folk to do so. But with Phaos you bring Stavrakios, and that I will not have. Flee now, Kveldulf, while life remains in you, if you would save yourself.”

Slowly, Kveldulf shook his head. He knew Skatval spoke some truth; half-overheard whispers from Videssian hierarchs said as much. In one of its aspects, the faith of Phaos was the glove within which moved the hand of imperial statecraft. If the Halogai served Phaos, they might one day come to serve Stavrakios or his successors as well.

But that was not the portion of the faith to which Kveldulf had been drawn. He believed with all his soul in the lord with the great and good mind, believed others needed to believe for the sake of their souls, believed most of all his native people had been blind in spirit far too long, that too many of them suffered forever in Skotos’ ice because they knew not Phaos. That the good god might have singled him out to lead the Halogai to the light filled him with holy joy he had not known since the day when he first set eyes on Phaos stern in judgment in the temple in Skopentzana.

And so he shook his head once more, and said, “I shall not flee, Skatval. I told you as much when first I came here. You may slay me, but while I draw breath I shall go on glorifying Phaos to your folk. The good god demands no less of me. He is my shield, my protector, against all evil; if I die here, he shall receive my soul.”

To his amazement, Skatval bellowed laughter. “You may follow the southrons’ god, but you have a Haloga’s soul. We are stubborn, not slippery or subtle like the Videssians. Those three priests dead in their tents, they would have given me all manner of lies, then tried to squirm around them. That way has served Videssos for centuries.”

“It is not mine,” Kveldulf said simply.

“So I have seen.” Skatval’s eyes narrowed, sharpened, until they pierced Kveldulf like blued blades. “And so, likely, you still live. Oh, I’ll not deny those Videssians served their god—”

“My god,” Kveldulf broke in.

“However you would have it. They served him, in their fashion, but they served Stavrakios as well. You, though, you’re so cursed full of Phaos, you have no room in you for anything else. Thus your faith warded you, where theirs, thinner, went for naught.”

“It may well be so.” Kveldulf remembered how Skjaldvor had jeered, saying the three Videssian priests ignored their vows of celibacy. Remembering Skjaldvor, he remembered also her body pressed against his, remembered his manhood rising in desire. He said, “Yet I am no great holy man, to be revered by the generations yet to come. I am as full of sin as anyone, fight it though I may.”

“To what man is it given to know in his lifetime how the generations yet to come will look on him?” Skatval said. “We do what we will and what we may with the time we have. Among men, that must be enough; the gods alone see how our purposes intertwine.”

“There, for once, but for your choice of words, we agree.” To his surprise, Kveldulf found himself bowing to Skatval, as he might have before an ecclesiastical superior. More clearly than ever before, he saw the Haloga chief was also fighting for a way of life he reckoned right. That saddened Kveldulf, for he had always believed those who failed to follow Phaos were without any sort of honor. Yet he remained convinced his own way was best, was true. He said, “But for our choice of creeds, we might have been friends, you and I.”

“So we might, though your unbending honesty makes you a dangerous man to keep by one’s side: you are a sharp sword without sheath.” Skatval stroked his chin, considering. “It might still come to pass. How’s this? Instead of bidding us throw down our gods, give over your Phaos, grow out your hair, and live the rest of your days as a Haloga—as you were born to live.”

Kveldulf shook his head, though startled at the sadness that surged in him. “Tell my heart to give over beating before you bid me abandon the lord with the great and good mind.”

“If you do not, your heart will give over beating.” Skatval touched his swordhilt.

Kveldulf bowed again. “If it be so, it shall be so. I will not flee, I will not cease. Do what you will with me on that account. My fate lies in Phaos’ hands.”

“I would not slay a man I admire, but if I must, I will.” Skatval sighed. “As I say, by blood you belong to us. Many are the bold warriors sung of in our lays who chose death over yielding.”

“I remember the songs from my boyhood,” Kveldulf said, nodding. “But Phaos’ faith has its martyrs, too, Videssians who gave all for the good god, and gladly would I be reckoned among their number. Will you give me a shovel, Skatval, that I may bury my friends?”

“I will,” Skatval said. “And Kveldulf—”

“Aye?”

“Dig a fourth grave, as well.”

Wearing helm and hauberk, ash-hafted spear at the ready, Skatval stalked toward the meeting in the field. Half a dozen chosen men, likewise armed and armored, tramped behind him. One also carried a length of rope. Kveldulf must have seen them, but preached on. By his demeanor, he might have thought they were coming to join his converts.

Before long, perhaps warned by clanking byrnies, some of the converts turned away from Kveldulf. None of them wore mail, nor were they armed for war. Nonetheless, they moved to ring the priest with their bodies; those who bore belt knives drew them. Skatval’s jaw tightened. Slaughtering the priest was one thing, fighting his own folk quite another.

“Stand aside,” he said. Neither men nor women moved. “Are you so many sparrows, serving to save the cuckoo’s spawn Stavrakios has set among you?”

“He is a holy man, a good man,” said Kalmar Sverre’s son, a fine crofter and not the worst of men himself.

“I do not deny it,” Skatval said, which caused more than one of Kveldulf’s guards to stare at him in surprise. He went on, “That makes him the greater danger to all that is ours. Ask him yourself, if you believe it not of me.” His voice roughened. “Go on, ask him.”

Though none of the converts gave way, they did look back to Kveldulf. The blue-robe stared past them to Skatval. Unafraid, he sketched the sun-sign, then set right fist over heart in formal Videssian military salute. He said, “Skatval speaks the truth. Having taken the lord with the great and good mind into your hearts, you cannot remain what you once were. His truth will melt the falsehoods in your spirit as the summer sun slays the snows of Halogaland.”

“By his own words he brands himself our foe,” Skatval said. “Would you let him make you into milksop southrons?”

“Kveldulf is no milksop,” Kalmar said stoutly. He held his knife low, ready to stab up in the way of those who knew how to fight with short blades. But a few people left the converts’ circle and stood apart from it, watching to see what would happen next.

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.