Orm nodded, and admitted that there might be something in what Brother Willibald said, since he had himself been a witness to all this.
“Now I begin to understand,” he said, “why my plan to smoke you out of the tower went astray. Doubtless this God, or whoever you cried to, ordered the wind to arise and blow away the smoke.”
Brother Willibald replied that this was exactly what had happened; the finger of God had countered their evil machinations and set them at naught.
Orm sat pondering in silence, tugging his beard uncertainly.
“My mother has become a Christian in her old age,” he said at length. “She has learned two prayers, which she repeats often, holding them to be most potent. She says it is these prayers that saved me from death and brought me home to her again, after undergoing so many perils; though it may be that Blue-Tongue and I did our share in overcoming them, and you, too, little priest. Now I am beginning to feel that I, too, might ask this God to help me, since He seems to be such a helpful god. But I do not know what He will ask of me in return, nor how I should address Him.”
“You cannot ask God to help you,” said Brother Willibald decisively, “until you have become a Christian. And you cannot become a Christian until you have been baptized. And you cannot be baptized until you have renounced your false gods and professed yourself a convinced believer in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
“Those are a great many conditions,” said Orm. “More than Allah and His Prophet require of a man.”
“Allah and His Prophet?” exclaimed the little priest in surprise. “What do you know of them?”
“I have traveled more widely in the world than you,” replied Orm. “And when I served Almansur in Andalusia, we had to pray to Allah and His Prophet twice a day, and sometimes even thrice. I still remember the prayers, if you would care to hear them.”
Brother Willibald threw up his hands in horror. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!” he cried. “Save us from the machinations of Satan and the devices of Allah the abominable! Your state is as parlous as a man’s could be, for to worship Allah is the worst heresy of all. Are you still a follower of His?”
“I worshipped Him while I was Almansur’s servant,” said Orm, “because my master commanded me to do so, and he was a man whom it was folly to disobey. Since I left him, I have not worshipped any god. Perhaps that is why things have gone less well for me recently.”
“I am surprised that Bishop Poppo did not come to hear of this while you were at King Harald’s court,” said Brother Willibald. “If he had known that you had embraced the black impostor he would have baptized you straightway, so full of zeal and piety is he, even if it had needed twelve of King Harald’s berserks to hold you in the water. It is a good and blessed thing to rescue a plain soul from darkness and blindness; and it may be that even the souls of Northmen should be regarded as deserving of charity, though I confess I can hardly bring myself to believe it after all I have suffered at their hands. But all good men are agreed that it is seven times more glorious to save the soul of one who has been seduced by Mohammed. For Satan himself has not caused more mischief than that man.”
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.”