The Long Ships (33 page)

Orm asked who Satan might be, and Brother Willibald told him all about him.

“It would appear, then,” said Orm, “that I have involuntarily angered this Satan by ceasing to worship Allah and His Prophet, and that all my misfortunes have resulted from this.”

“Exactly,” said the little priest, “and it is lucky for you that you have come at last to realize the error of your ways. Your present state is as disastrous as could be imagined, for you have incurred the wrath of Satan without having the protection of God. As long as you worshipped Mohammed, accursed be his name, Satan was your ally and so, to a certain extent, you prospered.”

“It is as I feared,” said Orm. “Few men are in such a desperate plight as I. It is too much for any man to be on evil terms with both God and Satan.”

He sat for a while buried in reflection.

At length he said: “Take me to the envoys. I wish to speak with men who have influence with God.”

    The Bishops had returned from the battlefield, where they had been blessing the dead, and were intending to start on their homeward journey on the following day. The elder of them was exhausted with walking round from corpse to corpse and had gone to rest, but the Bishop of London had invited Gudmund to join him in his lodgings and was sitting drinking with him in a last effort to persuade him to allow himself to become converted to Christianity.

Ever since they had first arrived at Maldon, the Bishops had striven their utmost to win the Viking chieftains over to their religion. King Ethelred and his Archbishop had commanded them to do so, for if they should succeed in this, the King’s honor would be greatly enhanced in the sight of God and his countrymen. They had not succeeded in making much headway with Thorkel, for he had replied that his weapon-luck was good enough already and was, in any case, considerably superior to that of the Christians. Accordingly, he said, there seemed no point in his looking round for new gods. Nor had they prevailed upon Jostein. He had listened mutely to their arguments, sitting with his hands crossed upon the handle of the great battleax that he always carried with him, which he called Widow’s-Grief, regarding them from beneath wrinkled brows as they explained to him the mysteries of Christ and of the kingdom of God. Then he gave a great roar of laughter, flung his hat upon the floor, and asked the Bishops if they thought that he was a simpleton.

“These twenty-seven winters,” he said, “I have served as priest at the great Uppsala sacrifice; and you do me little honor in filling my ears with such prattle as this, fit only for children and gammers. With this ax which you see here I have hewn off the heads of the harvest sacrifices, and hung their bodies on the sacred trees that front the temple; and there were Christians among them, ay, and priests too, naked on their knees in the snow, wailing. Tell me what profit they gained from worshipping this God you speak of.”

The Bishops shuddered and crossed themselves and understood that there was no sense in trying to reason with such a man.

But they cherished greater hopes of Gudmund, for he was amiable and good-humored toward them and seemed interested in what they had to say; and sometimes, when he had drunk well, he had even thanked them warmly for their beautiful talk and solicitous regard for his spiritual well-being. He had not as yet, however, committed himself definitely; so the Bishop of London had now invited him to a grand dinner, with food and drink of a very special nature, in the hope of being able to push him to a positive decision.

Gudmund helped himself greedily to everything that was put before him; and when he had eaten and drunk his fill, the Bishop’s musicians played for him, so beautifully that tears began to appear in his beard. Then the Bishop set to work on him, speaking in his most persuasive tones and choosing his words with care. Gudmund listened and nodded and at length admitted that there was much that appealed to him in this Christianity.

“You are a good fellow,” he said to the Bishop. “You are open-handed and wise, and you drink like a warrior, and your talk is agreeable to listen to. I should like to accede to your request; but you must know that this is no small favor that you are asking of me. For it will be an ill thing if I return home to find myself the laughing-stock of my house-folk and neighbors for having allowed myself to be deceived by the prattle of priests. Still, it is my belief that a man like you must doubtless wield considerable power and be the possessor of many secrets; and I have here an object I have recently found which I should like you to read one of your prayers over.”

He drew from his shirt the little gold cross and held it in front of the Bishop’s nose.

“I found this in a rich man’s house,” he said. “It cost me two men’s lives, and a prettier plaything I never set eyes on. I intend to give this to my small son when I return home. His name is Folke, and women call him Filbyter. He is a sturdy little ruffian, with a particular fondness for silver and gold, and once he has got his hands on a thing, it is no easy matter to get it away from him. He will hardly be able to contain himself when he sees this cross. It would be a fine thing if you could bless it and make it lucky, for I want him to become rich and powerful, so that he will be able to sit at home in his house and be honored by men, and see his crops flourish and his cattle wax fat, and have no need to rove the sea for his livelihood, faring ill among foreigners and their arms.”

The Bishop smiled and took the cross and mumbled over it. Gudmund, greatly delighted, stuffed it back into his shirt.

“You shall return to your home a wealthy man,” said the Bishop, “thanks to good King Ethelred’s openhandedness and meek love of peace. But you must believe me when I tell you that your luck would be even greater if you were to come over to Christ.”

“A man can never have too much luck,” said Gudmund, pulling thoughtfully at his beard. “I have already decided which neighbor’s land I shall purchase when I return home, and what manner of house I shall build on it. It shall be large, with many rooms, built of the finest oak. To have it the way I want it to be is going to cost a lot of silver. But if I have a good hoard of silver left in my coffers after I have built it, I do not think anyone will feel much inclined to laugh at me, howsoever I may have conducted myself while abroad. So it shall be as you wish. You may baptize me, and I will follow Christ faithfully for the rest of my days, if you increase my share of King Ethelred’s silver by a hundred marks.”

“That,” replied the Bishop mildly, “is not the right attitude of mind for one wishing to be admitted into the brotherhood of Christ. I shall not blame you too heavily, however, since you are doubtless unfamiliar with the text which says: ‘Blessed are the poor’; and I fear it would take some time to explain the truth of that to you. But you should bethink yourself that you are already about to receive much silver from King Ethelred, more than any other living man could offer you; and, though he is a great and powerful King, still, even his coffers are not bottomless. It is not within his power to grant this demand of yours, even if he were agreeable to doing so. I think I can promise you a baptismal gift of twenty marks, seeing that you are a chieftain, but that is the maximum that I can offer, and he may regard even that as excessive. But now I beg that you will sample a drink that I have specially ordered to be prepared for us and which is, I think, not known in your country. It consists of hot wine blended with honey and with rare spices from the Eastland called cinnamon and cardamom. Men well versed in the subject of drink assert that no beverage is so pleasing to the palate or so effective at dispersing heavy humors and morbid cogitations.”

Gudmund found the drink good and wholesome; nevertheless, the Bishop’s offer still appeared to him to be inadequate. He would not, he explained, be prepared to risk his good name at home in East Guteland for as little as that.

“However, for the sake of the friendship I bear toward you,” he said, “I will do it for sixty marks. I cannot offer myself more cheaply than that.”

“The friendship I bear toward you could not be greater,” replied the Bishop, “and such is my desire to lead you into the brotherhood of Christ, so that you may partake of the wealth that Heaven has to offer, that I will even plunge into my own poor coffers to satisfy your demand. But I own, alas, little in the way of worldly goods, and ten marks is the most that I can add to my original offer.”

Gudmund shook his head at this and closed his eyes sleepily. At this stage in the bargaining a commotion was suddenly heard outside the door, and Orm burst in with Brother Willibald struggling under one arm and two porters hanging on to his clothing and clamoring that the Bishop was not to be disturbed.

“Holy Bishop!” he said. “I am Orm, Toste’s son, from the Mound in Skania, a captain of Thorkel the Tall. I wish to be baptized and to accompany you to London.”

The Bishop stared at him in amazement and some alarm. But when he saw that Orm was neither drunk nor out of his wits, he asked him the meaning of his request; for he was not accustomed to Northmen forcing themselves into his presence on errands of this nature.

“I wish to place myself under the protection of God,” said Orm, “for my plight is worse than that of other men. This priest can explain it all to you better than I can.”

Brother Willibald then begged the Bishop to forgive him for taking part in this intrusion. He had, he explained, not come voluntarily, but had been compelled to do so by the brute force of this heathen berserk, who had dragged him past vigilant porters, despite his desperate struggles and protests; for he himself had realized that the Bishop was engaged upon important business.

The Bishop replied amiably that he need give no more thought to the matter. He pointed a finger at Gudmund, who, with the assistance of a last cupful of spiced wine, had fallen asleep in his chair.

“I have labored long to persuade him to become a Christian,” he said, “and yet I have failed, for his soul is wholly occupied with earthly considerations. But now God has sent me another heathen in his place, and one, moreover, who is not called but comes of his own free will. Welcome, unbeliever! Are you fully prepared to join our brotherhood?”

“I am,” replied Orm, “for I have already served the prophet Mohammed and his God, and I gather that nothing can be more dangerous than that.”

The Bishop’s eyes grew round, and he struck the cross on his breast three times and called for holy water.

“Mohammed and his God?” he inquired of Brother Willibald. “What is the meaning of this?”

Between them Orm and Brother Willibald explained to the Bishop how the matter stood. The Bishop then announced that he had, in his time, seen much of sin and darkness, but that never before had he set eyes upon a man who had actually served Mohammed. When the holy water arrived, he took a small branch, dipped it in the water, and shook it over Orm, intoning prayers the while to drive the evil spirits out of the latter’s body. Orm turned pale as the Bishop did this, and he afterwards said that this sprinkling was a hard thing to endure, for it made his whole body shiver as though the hairs on his neck were trying to stand on end. The Bishop continued to sprinkle him vigorously for some time, but at length desisted and said that that would suffice.

“You are not rolling about in fits,” he informed Orm, “and I can see no froth on your lips, nor can detect any unpleasant smell emanating from your body. All this signifies that the evil spirit has departed from you. Praise God for it!”

Then he sprinkled a little on Gudmund, who immediately leaped to his feet, roaring at them to reef sail, but then fell back on his bench and began to snore resonantly.

Orm dried the water from his face and asked whether this would have the same effect upon him as baptism.

The Bishop replied that there was a considerable difference between baptism and this rite, and that it was by no means so easy for a man to be permitted to undergo baptism, least of all one who had served Mohammed.

“First you must forswear your false gods,” he said, “and avow your belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. In addition to this, you must also be schooled in Christian doctrine.”

“I have no gods to forswear,” said Orm, “and am ready to bind myself to God and his son and this ghost of theirs. As for schooling in Christian doctrine, I have already had plenty of that, first from the monks in Ireland, and afterwards at King Harald’s court, and from my old mother at home, as well as she was able. And now I have heard more about it from this little priest, who is my friend and has taught me a great deal about Satan. So that I think I am as learned on the subject as most men.”

The Bishop nodded approvingly and said that this was good to hear, and that it was not often that one met heathens who were willing to listen to so much instruction about holy matters. Then he rubbed his nose and stole a thoughtful glance at Gudmund, who was sound asleep. He turned again to Orm.

“There is one other point,” he said slowly and with great solemnity. “You have been dyed more deeply in sin than any man I have ever come across, in that you have served the false prophet, who is the blackest of all the chieftains of Satan. Now if, after partaking in such abominable practices, you wish to place yourself under the wing of the living God, it is meet that you should bring with you a gift for Him and for His Church, to show that your repentance is genuine and that you have truly abandoned your evil ways.”

Orm replied that was no more than was reasonable, that he should give something to improve his luck and buy the protection of God. He asked the Bishop what would be regarded as a suitable gift.

“That depends,” said the Bishop, “upon a man’s blood and wealth, and upon the magnitude of his sins. Once I baptized a Danish chieftain who had come to this land to claim his inheritance. He gave five oxen, an anker of ale and twenty pounds of beeswax to the Church of God. In the ancient Scriptures we read of men of noble birth who gave as much as ten marks of silver, or even twelve, and built a church besides. But they had brought all their household with them to be baptized.”