The Fire in His Hands Read online

  Radetic smiled sardonically. The sentence amounted to political and religious excommunication — with an out. All El Murid had to do was recant.

  Had there been any genuine crime the sentence would have been scorned for its mildness. This was a land where they lopped off hands, feet, testicles, ears, and, more often than anything, heads. But the sentence fulfilled the Royal goal. Executed immediately, it would keep El Murid from preaching during Disharhun, to the vast gatherings this year’s High Holy Week had drawn.

  Radetic chuckled softly. Someone was scared to death of the boy.

  Fuad gouged him again.

  “My lords! Why hast thou done this to me?” El Murid asked softly, his head bowed.

  He does it well, Radetic thought. The pathos in him. He’ll win converts with that line.

  Suddenly, proudly, El Murid stared the chief magistrate in the eye. “Thy servant hears and obeys, O Law. For does not the Lord say, ‘Obey the law, for I am the Law’? At Disharhun’s end El Murid shall disappear into the wilderness.”

  Sighs came from the crowd. It looked like the old order had won its victory.

  Nassef shot El Murid a look of pure venom.

  And why, Radetic asked himself, hadn’t Nassef said a word in their defense? What game was he playing? For that matter, what game was El Murid playing now? He did not seem at all distressed as he laid himself open for further humiliation.

  “The Court of Nine orders that the sentence be executed immediately.”

  That surprised no one. How else to keep El Murid from speaking?

  “One hour from now the King’s sheriffs will receive orders to seize any of the proscribed, or their families, found within any of the restricted domains.”

  “That,” Megelin murmured, “is too much.” Fuad jabbed him again.

  Seldom was it that a pivoting point of history could be identified at the precise instant of turning. Radetic recognized one here. A band of frightened men had compounded an action of self-defense with one of spite.

  They were trying to rob El Murid of a father’s precious opportunity and inalienable right to have his child baptized before the Most Holy Mrazkim Shrines, during Disharhun. El Murid had already announced that he would dedicate his daughter to God on Mashad, the last and most important of the High Holy Days.

  Radetic need be no necromancer to predict the long-term results. The meekest of the desert-born would have felt compelled to respond.

  In later days El Murid’s followers would say that this was the moment when the grim truth of reality finally burst through the curtain of ideals blinding the youth to the hypocrisies of his world.

  Radetic suspected that that revelation had come a lot earlier. The youth seemed secretly satisfied with the pronouncement.

  Nevertheless, he reddened. The muscles in his neck stood out. “It must be God’s will. May the Lord grant his Disciple an opportunity to return to grace.”

  He spoke softly, but his words were a threat, a promise and a declaration of schism. Henceforth the Kingdom of Peace would make war on heretics and the enemies of its future.

  Radetic could smell the stink of blood and smoke drifting back across the years. He could not understand how El Murid’s enemies could fail to see what they had done. Old cynic that he was, he studied El Murid intently. Behind the very real anger there was evidence that the youth had expected this.

  He did detect a barely restrained glee in Nassef.

  El Murid departed Al Rhemish meekly. But Meryem left word that her daughter would bear no name till she received it before the Mrazkim Shrines themselves. Fuad laughed when he heard. “Women making threats?” he demanded. “Camels will fly before she sees Al Rhemish again.”

  Yousif was not as sure. Megelin’s naggings were forcing him to think. He did not like the thoughts that came to him.

  The rioting started before the dust had settled on El Murid’s backtrail. More than a hundred pilgrims died. Before the end of Disharhun, El Murid’s partisans had defaced the Shrines themselves.

  Yousif and Fuad were amazed.

  “It’s begun,” Megelin told his employer. “You should have murdered them. Then it would’ve been over this week, and in a year he would have been forgotten.”

  Despite his earlier speech about the emotions involved, Yousif seemed stunned by the reaction of the Disciple’s followers. He could not comprehend being so hated by people who did not know him. So the human tragedy goes, men hating without trying to understand, and unable to understand why they are hated.

  Later in the week, Radetic cautioned his employer. “There was planning behind this. They anticipated you. Did you happen to notice that neither one of them really tried to defend himself? Especially Nassef? He never said a word through the whole trial. I think you’ve created a couple of martyrs, and I think you did exactly what they wanted you to do.”

  “Are you listening, Haroun?” the Wahlig asked. He was keeping the boy close. There were people in the streets who wanted to lay hands on him. “Nassef. He’s the dangerous one.”

  “This rioting will spread,” Radetic predicted. “It’ll begin to show elements of class struggle, too. Common folk, artisans and merchants against priests and nobles.”

  Yousif looked at him oddly.

  “I may not understand faith, Yousif. But I understand politics, vested interests and promises for tomorrow.”

  “What can they do?” Fuad demanded. “A handful of outlaws? The Little Devil’s scattered converts? We can hunt them down like wounded jackals.”

  “I’m afraid Megelin might be right, Fuad. I think Aboud overdid it. He took away their pride. You can’t do that to a man. He has to save face somehow. We sent them out like whipped dogs. They have to hit back. At least, Nassef does. He’s the one with the ego. Think. What would you do if we’d done the same to you?”

  Fuad did not think long. He replied, “I see.”

  Radetic added, “Messiahs tend to take what comes, I think. They see the abuse as part of their witnessing. I’ve begun to think the jihad El Murid preaches is a metaphoric concept, that he doesn’t really see it in terms of blood and death. Not the way Nassef would look at it.”

  “Still,” said Fuad, “all we have to do is go kill them if they try something.”

  Yousif replied, “I think I can guarantee that Nassef will. We’ll just have to judge his strength and try to anticipate him. And, of course, try to kill him. But I have a gut feeling that he won’t let us. I have an audience with Aboud tonight. I’d better light a fire under him.”

  The King, unfortunately, shared Fuad’s thinking. For him the El Murid matter was closed.

  Yousif and Radetic fussed and worried and, even so, were no less stunned when the blow finally fell.

  Even they had grossly underestimated Nassef.

  Chapter Three

  A Minor Squabble in Another Land and Time

  Twenty-three warriors stalked through falling snow, their shoulders downed with white. Ice stiffened the mustaches of those who had them. Towering pines loomed ahead, but here ancient oaks surrounded them like a convocation of gnarled, antlered frost giants squatting, dreaming of blood and fire. Snow masked the altar stone where the priests of the Old Gods had ripped the hearts from screaming virgins. Two boys, Bragi and Haaken, turtled their heads against their shoulders and hurried past.

  The trailbreakers fought the deep, soft new snow in iron silence. An arctic wind drove frozen daggers through the heaviest clothing.

  Bragi and Haaken had just begun to sport scraggly beards. Some of their companions had winter-white hair. Harald the Half had no shield arm. Yet each man wore the horn helm. Old and young, they were warriors.

  They had a cause.

  The wind moaned, winging the sad call of a wolf. Bragi shuddered. Some of his companions would be wolf meat soon.

  His father Ragnar raised a hand. They stopped. “Smoke,” said the man known across Trolledyngja as the Wolf of Draukenbring.

  The odor drifted thinly from among
the pines. They were near Thane Hjarlma’s longhouse. As one, they sat on their hams to rest.

  Minutes sped.

  “Time,” Ragnar said. He was also called Mad Ragnar, a crazy killer known for a thousand miles.

  Men checked shields and weapons. Ragnar chose groups to go right and left.

  Ragnar’s son Bragi, his foster son Haaken and his friend Bjorn conferred with him briefly. The boys bore clay pots containing carefully nurtured coals. And within them the boys nursed grudges. Their father had ordered them to stay out of the fighting.

  Ragnar muttered words of caution and encouragement. “Haaken, you go with Bjorn and Sven. Bragi, stay with me.”

  The last half mile was the slowest. Bragi kept remembering friendlier visits. And, last summer, spirited, clandestine tumbles with the Thane’s daughter Inger. But now the old King was dead. The succession was in contest.

  Hjarlma had declared for the Pretender. His strength had overawed most of his neighbors. Only Ragnar, Mad Ragnar, had remained visibly loyal to the Old House.

  The civil war was shredding the tapestry of Trolledyngjan society. Friend slew friend. Ragnar’s own father served the Pretender. Families that had been at each other’s throats for generations now stood shoulder to shoulder in the battle line.

  Every spring in Bragi’s memory his father had gone reeving with Hjarlma. Sailing gunwale to gunwale, their dragonships had scourged the southern coasts. They had saved one another’s lives. They had celebrated shared wealth. And, in the same chains, they had shared the despair of imprisonment by the Itaskian King.

  Now they sought to murder one another, driven by the bitter blood-thirst only politics can generate.

  The news had come south on rumor’s lightning wings: the Pretender had taken Tonderhofn. The Old House was collapsing.

  Hjarlma’s men would be celebrating. But the raiders moved carefully. Hjarlma’s men had wives, children, and slaves who would be sober.

  They penetrated the trenches and stockades. They passed the outbuildings. Fifty feet from the longhouse itself Bragi turned his back into the wind. He dropped dried moss and tree bark into his jar, blew gently. His father and several warriors held out their torches. Others quietly splashed the longhouse with oil.

  A man would be stationed at each window. The best fighters would hold the doorway. They would slaughter the drunken rebels as they tried to escape. The Old House’s cause, here beneath the brooding, glacier-clawed northern slopes of the Kratchnodian Mountains, would revive at the eleventh hour.

  That was Mad Ragnar’s plan. It was as bold and ferocious a stroke as ever plotted by the Wolf.

  It should have worked.

  But Hjarlma was expecting them.

  It was a great slaughter anyway. Hjarlma had gotten his warning only seconds before the blow fell. His people were still confused, still trying to shake the mead and find their weapons.

  Fire whipped through axed-in windows.

  “Stay put!” Ragnar growled at Bragi. “To me!” he thundered at the others.

  “Yai! It’s Ragnar!” one of Hjarlma’s men wailed.

  The blond giant attacked with sword in one hand, axe in the other. Not for nothing was he called Mad Ragnar. He went into insane killing rages, became an unstoppable killing machine. It was whispered that his wife, the witch Helga, had spelled him invincible.

  Three, four, five of the drunkards fell for each of Ragnar’s men. And still he could not win. The odds were too terrible.

  The fire had become a liability. Without it driving them to save their families, Hjarlma’s men might have surrendered.

  Bragi went looking for Haaken.

  Haaken’s thoughts paralleled his own. He had secured a sword already. They had not been allowed to bring their own. Ragnar had not wanted them getting dangerous ideas.

  “What now?” Haaken asked.

  “Father won’t run. Not yet.”

  “How did they know?”

  “A traitor. Hjarlma must have bought somebody from Draukenbring. Here!”

  A rebel, nearly disemboweled, crawled toward them. “Cover me while I get his sword.”

  They did what had to be done. And felt ghastly afterward.

  “Who sold out?”

  “I don’t know. Or how. But we’ll find out.”

  Then they became too busy to speculate. Several rebels, who had crawled out a window no longer held against them, stumbled their way.

  The longhouse burned briskly. Women, children and slaves screamed inside. Ragnar’s men fell back before the weight of their panic.

  In a brief exchange, from ambush, Bragi and Haaken slew three men and sent a fourth fleeing into the pines. They received their own first man-wounds.

  “Half of us are down,” Bragi observed, after studying the main action. “Bors. Rafnir. Tor. Tryggva. Both Haralds. Where’s Bjorn?”

  Ragnar, roaring and laughing, stood out of the fray like a cave bear beset by hounds. Bodies lay heaped around him.

  “We’ve got to help.”

  “How?” Haaken was no thinker. He was a follower and doer. A strong-backed, stolid, steadfast lad.

  Bragi had all of his mother’s intellect and a little of his father’s crazy courage. But the situation had rattled him. He did not know what to do. He wanted to run. He did not. With a bellow imitative of Ragnar’s, he charged. Fate had made his decision for him.

  He had discovered what had become of Bjorn. Ragnar’s lieutenant was charging him from behind.

  No warning could reach Ragnar’s blood-drugged brain. All Bragi could do was race Bjorn to his prey.

  He lost the footrace, but prevented the traitor’s blow from being fatal. Bjorn’s deflected blade entered Ragnar’s back kidney high. Ragnar howled and whirled. A wild blow from the haft of his axe bowled Bjorn into a snowdrift.

  Then the Wolf’s knees buckled.

  The rebels whooped, attacking with renewed ferocity. Bragi and Haaken became too busy to avenge their father.

  Then twenty rebels wailed.

  Ragnar surged to his feet. He roared like one of the great trolls of the high Kratchnodians.

  There was a lull as the combatants eyed one another.

  The pain had opened the veil across Ragnar’s sanity. “A crown has been lost here tonight,” he muttered. “Treason always begets more treason. There’s nothing more we can do. Gather the wounded.”

  For a while the rebels licked their wounds and fought the fire. But the raiders, burdened with wounded, gained only a few miles head start.

  Nils Stromberg went down and could not get up again. His sons, Thorkel and Olaf, refused to leave him behind. Ragnar bellowed at all three, and lost the argument. They stayed, their faces turned toward the glow of the burning longhouse. No man could deny another his choice of deaths.

  Lank Lars Greyhame went next. Then Thake One Hand. Six miles south of Hjarlma’s stead, Anders Miklasson slipped down an icy bank into the creek they were following. He went under the ice and drowned before the others could chop through.

  He would have frozen anyway. It was that cold, and the others dared not pause to light a fire.

  “One by one,” Ragnar growled as they piled stones in a crude cairn. “Soon there won’t be enough of us left to drive off the wolves.”

  He did not mean Hjarlma’s men. A pack was trailing them. The leader already had made a sally at Jarl Kinson, who kept lagging.

  Bragi was exhausted. His wounds, though minor, nagged him like the agonies of a flensing knife in the hand of a master executioner. But he kept silent. He could do no less than his father, whose injury was much greater.

  Bragi, Haaken, Ragnar and five more lived to see the dawn. They evaded Hjarlma and drove the wolves off. Ragnar went to ground in a cave. He sent Bragi and Haaken to scout the nearby forest. The searchers passed near the boys, but without slowing.

  Bragi watched them go, Bjorn, the Thane and fifteen healthy, angry warriors. They were not searching. They were talking about waiting for Ragnar at Draukenbrin
g.

  “Hjarlma’s not stupid,” Ragnar said when he received the news. “Why chase the Wolf all over the woods when you know he has to return to his lair?”

  “Mother —”

  “She’ll be all right. Hjarlma’s scared to death of her.”

  Bragi tried reading behind his father’s beard. The man spoke softly, tautly, as if he were in great pain.

  “The war is over now,” Ragnar told him. “Understand that. The Pretender has won. The Old House is in eclipse. There’s no more reason to fight. Only a fool would.”

  Bragi got the message. He wasn’t to waste his life pursuing a lost cause.

  He had had fifteen years of practice reading the wisdom behind Ragnar’s terse observations.

  “They’ll abandon him as quickly as they flocked to him. Eventually. They say...” A shudder wracked his massive frame. “They say there’s a demand for Trolledyngjans in the south. Over the mountains. Beyond the lands of the bowmen. Past the reeving kingdoms. There’s war a-brewing. Bold lads, bright lads, might do well while awaiting a restoration.”

  Itaskia was the lands of the bowmen. The reeving kingdoms were the necklace of city states hugging the coast down to Simballawein. For half a dozen generations the Trolledyngjan dragonships had gone out when the ice broke at Tonderhofn and Torshofn, to run the gauntlet of the Tongues of Fire and plunder the eastern littoral.

  “Under the shingle pine, beside the upper spring. The northwest side. An old, broken hearthstone marks it. You’ll find the things you’ll need. Take the copper amulet to a man called Yalmar at the Red Hart Inn in Itaskia the City.”

  “Mother —”

  “Can take care of herself, I said. She won’t be happy, but she’ll manage. I only regret that I won’t be able to send her home.”

  Bragi finally understood. His father was dying. Ragnar had known for a long time.