A silence closed in that made Lockridge’s breath more loud in his ears than the wind and thickening rain outside.
“Mikkel, my good man,” said Jesper Fledelius, “you must have somewhere a length of rope. With that we may bind these excellent fellows, rather than cut them down like Turks. Of course, it is a Turkish fate to lie in a tavern and have no means of drawing beer. But someone will happen along tomorrow. Men are always thirsty. A symbol of the Evangelicum, think you not?—beer laving the throat as salvation laves the sin-parched soul.” He beamed at Auri. “Scripture speaks truly of wisdom in innocence, little maiden. Words might not have moved this cowardly old carcass of mine, for words are cheap and crafty. But you showed me Her token, which does not lie. I thank you.”
The landlord began to sob. A woman and a couple of children stuck terrified faces out from the back entrance. “Be of good cheer, Mikkel,” the outlaw said. “Plainly, you and yours must leave this town with us. A pity, to let this fine hostel fall into the oafish hands of Junker bailiffs. But the Coven will feed and shelter you.” The gross face flashed momentarily with utter love. “And when She returns, you shall be rewarded.”
He gestured with his chin at Lockridge. “Herr, be so kind as to remove the weapons from these—” the expression was shocking in that cool tone—“and get them secured. We must be off as fast as God allows. Our Lady’s business does not wait.”
11
Rain roared on the hut. It was a shepherd’s huddling place, alone on the heath, deserted in this season: a thing of peat where a man might rest, so crude and poor that the Tenil Orugaray would have disdained it. But Auri slept, curled on the ground, head pillowed in Lockridge’s lap.
Mikkel Mortensen crouched outside with his wife and brood. The American felt humiliated by that, still more so by their unresentfulness of him, whom they took for an Adelsmand, resting somewhat dry. Fledelius had insisted. “We’ve secret matters to talk of, you and I, and these creaky bones will not let me do more than wheeze along when we go afoot tomorrow.”
There had been no way to get horses through the smugglers’ tunnel that went under the walls of Viborg. The fugitives were not far from the town. But outside reigned an emptiness and a blackness broken only by an occasional lightning flare. Then every twig of heather, every hurtling drop of rain and runnel of water across soaked earth stood forth briefly and blindingly white.
Fireless, the inside of the hut was thick with night and cold. Lockridge’s drenched garments were worse than useless, he had stripped to his hose like Fledelius, hugged his ribs and tried to keep the teeth quiet in his head. Auri lay naked and unbothered. He ought to have taken in one of the tavern keeper’s children, rather than her; but she needed his presence, in this world of iron and cruelty, more than they needed the roof.
Another bolt clove the sky. Thunder crashed in its wake. For an instant, Jesper Fledelius’ battered countenance made a gargoyle in the doorway. Sightlessness returned. The wind yammered.
“Understand,” the Dane said earnestly, “I am a good Christian man. I’ll have naught to do with that Lutheran heresy the Junkers and their toy king are foisting on the realm, and surely not with the heathendom of the witches. Yet there is white magic as well as black. Is there not? And it was ever old custom to leave offerings for the unseen ones. They do not really invoke Satan, those poor ignorant peasants who gather on May Eve and tomorrow. Nor yet the false gods you may read of in the chronicles of Saxo Grammaticus. Viborg was once Vebjörg, Holy Mount. Where the cathedral now stands was a sanctuary ancient before Odin led his folk in from the East. Spirits of earth and water—may not a man appeal to them without grave sin? These days, the peasant has often none else to turn to.” He shifted on the damp dirt. “However, I myself am only in touch with the Coven, I do not belong to it.”
“I understand,” Lockridge said.
He believed he spoke truth, and saw more than he uttered. Dim and enormous, the pattern had begun to grow before him.
Man’s history was the history of religion.
What Auri had, who slept so peacefully here among thunders, and Auri’s people, and the Indians he had seen in Yucatan, and every primitive race he knew of whose culture had not taken a completely perverted turn—was wholeness of spirit. It was purely a question of taste whether that made up for all they lacked. The fact remained, they were one with earth and sky and sea in a way that those who set the gods apart from themselves, or who denied any gods, could never be. When the Indo-Europeans brought their patriarchal pantheon to a land, they brought much that was good; but they created a new and lonely kind of man.
There was no sharp dichotomy. The old ones endured. After a time, they blended with the aliens, transfigured them, until ageless forms stood clear again and only names had changed. Dyaush Pitar, with his sun chariot and battle axe, became Thor, whose car was drawn by honest earthy goats and whose hammer brought the rain which was life. No blood was offered the Redbeard; he was himself a yeoman. And when Odin, one-eyed wolf god to whom the warlords gave men, fell before Christ and lived in memory as no more than a troll—Thor called himself St. Olaf, Frey was St. Erik whose wagon was drawn out each spring to bless the fields, and She took on the blue mantle of the Virgin Mary. And always and forever there were the little gods, sprites, hobgoblins, leprechauns, mermaids, so much in the world that they were not even called gods, whom men made into signs of help and harm, love and fear, every wonderful mystery and fickleness which was life.
Lockridge was agnostic himself (child of a sad, brain-heavy and gut-light time which he now saw must not have long to live) and passed no opinions on the objective truths involved. As far as he knew, Mary might be the actual Queen of Heaven, the Triple Goddess only an early intuition of her. A sensible man like Jesper Fledelius could believe that. Or both might be shadows cast by some ultimate reality; or both might be myth. What mattered in history was not what men thought but what they felt.
And into this great slow conflict and interweaving of two world-views the time war had entered. Rangers engineered the march of the war making tribes and their militant gods; Wardens found secret ways to keep what was old and make the invaders over into its image. Rangers urged on the tomahawk people, who obliterated the cult of the passage grave; but Neolithic herdsmen became Bronze Age farmers and seafarers, and the sun was no longer a fire spirit but earth’s guardian and fructifying husband. Christendom entered, with books and logic and the first god who ever punished incorrect beliefs about his own nature—and erelong the people’s hearts belonged to Mary. The Reformation brought back Jehovah, armed with a terrible weapon against instinct—the printing press—but religion itself was subtly divided, discredited, emasculated, until the world five or six hundred years hence felt its-own barrenness and yearned for a faith which went deeper than words. Lockridge looked into the century after his own and did not see science triumphant; he saw men gathered on hills in the name of a new god or of an ancient one reborn.