Barbidal lay exhausted on the matted animal furs that constituted a sleeping place inside one of the lodges. His enervated eyes fastened on Liana until that desultory vision slowly disengaged; he had become rendered unconscious from a state of sheer exhaustion. He slept, in an undisturbed slumber that was deep and mindless. For nearly ten days he had rested only in standing position at the steering paddle to the long ship. Now, in the comfort of his own shelter, Thorvald slumbered in completely oblivious dormancy.
Princess Torymorton stood compellably studying the immense shelter's ornamentation, its tributes to the Viking gods: Odin, Thor and Freyr. Marmalock, along with the man whose fingers had become severed in battle, explained to her the principles behind certain outpourings of belief in the Norse gods. Marmalock's knowledge of magic had overcome the fear and pain of the man beside him. The man, missing his fingers, thanked a number of deities for his safety and the crew's return to Midgard.
"Then your followers have yet to be swayed by the ideologies behind Christianity," reflected Liana to the recalcitrant Wizard.
Marmalock posed with the magical scepter just long enough to evaluate Liana's question then answered her in a directly blunt reply. "The men in these lodges have no great wish to adhere to the yielding compassion caused by its new ideas," Marmalock advised her. "I know of its understanding; I know those beliefs are a mighty shield which men sometimes hide behind. It did you pitifully little good, however, against the evil lord of Dormanquest Castle, to shrink behind principles of self sacrifice and brotherhood. It cost your country dearly."
"My father's nation was in a process of incorporating new idioms concerning one God, his son and the Holy Spirit when Volki's army set upon them. Most of our nation held some compassion in the new faith. I am sorry that feeling of sharing did not save my father's life. I should have been more dubious of the priests when they advised us to have faith in God. We should not have wasted time practicing religion; we should have spent all our supplementary hours preparing for an unexpected invasion by the kingdom to our south."
"You know Liana," continued Marmalock, "faith is not something that can be killed with a sword. Beliefs that have sustained people for a thousand years can not become wiped out in a single generation. As older beliefs die out, new ones emerge slowly to replace them. Ideas, you see, outlive people when they become based on sound reason. The people we are among now know battle and conflict as a persistent way of life. It has been their method of survival for many centuries. Ways of some other forms of animal life, Gods and their magic, have survived longer than people. I put my credence in arts of magic, learning and understanding, as well as in faith. This includes all beliefs and not any single religion."
Liana assessed Marmalock with a serious sign of doubt as they continued their discussion. The wizard seemed, somehow, ageless. His gleaming blue eyes shown as beacons that invited her questions. A radiance seemed to glow about him as they spoke; Liana slowly began to accept him as being genuine in his ability to effect the supernatural. "Do you repudiate the notion of a creator," asked Liana? "How did heaven and earth come to be?"
"Midgard, our home," explained the wounded sailor, "was created through conflict between giants. Thor, rides across our sky in his chariot, drawn by forces of those ancient creators. In his hands are the iron gauntlets and hammer which control the weather and strike at his foes."
"There are consistent forces in the universe," said Marmalock without ignoring the sailor. He eyed the princess as she determinably went about arguing with the wounded rower over her points of variance with the many gods of his religion. Liana expertly countered each of the man's determined explanations with artful and eloquent confirmation of her faith in Christianity.
"Forms of checks and balances have existed throughout eternity," explained the wizard. "Survival, however, requires balanced surveying of, both, the good and the rotten. Any one who proceeds with a single determination, of being either good or evil, will eventually lose domination over this earthly domain. The dualism of reality forces me only to lean, ever so slightly, toward the power of light, while continuously paying cautious attention to those of darkness and evil. Midgard is only a temporary environment to the Norsemen; it floats delicately on a force of creative energy that constructed it, endangered by a dark void of non-existence that lurks to its south behind the walls of Dormanquest Castle."
Marmalock moved to impress his powerful conviction on the two people he spoke to. He waved his staff, the Emperor Torymorton's scepter, ever so slightly and a puff of smoke filled the room.
"To make the gods in heaven respond with thunder, but of saltpeter, take seven parts," he thought laconically to himself, reflecting on Lardock Trappler's book on magic, "four of charcoal, two of sulfur and one of potassium or sodium nitrate, as grows in a white crystalline compound on the cured leaves of a tobacco plant."
Much to Liana and the sailor's astonishment, from an inanimate pile of fire kindling, a small pliable hazel twig seemed to spring to life. It moved, revoltingly, from spindling and dead branches on the floor. In the center of the commune the figure stood before Liana and the sailor. Momentarily, with thorny arms and legs, it moved painfully in a hazardous warning.
As though influenced by a dreadfully sickening narcotic, Liana and the finger-less Viking watched Marmalock's hypnotizing spell as it induced pallid animation into a lifeless object. From a pile of motionless wood, with power from the wizard's standard, the wraith of thistles twisted angrily before them. It had become brought into being, reluctantly, by Marmalock's supernatural divination. The debilitated stick-man's scrawny arms and legs danced about the floor of the chamber, moving painfully----with a motion that evoked, to those watching the horrible apparition, entranced belief in the wizard's efficacious magic. The paroxysm lasted only for a few brief seconds.
Asphyxiated impairment choked Princesses Liana's respiration. Engrossed in the unbelievable work of sorcery, she fainted on the floor of the shelter and lay quietly still. Liana became revived, some minutes later, with cold water from a bucket by one of the walls. Marmalock offered her his apology. "You have seen that what I said about the forces of creative energy are true," he warned. "I control forces, with your father's scepter, that only the combined understandings of all knowledge direct. Does it not arise in you a skepticism over being singular in your faith?"
"Why must your demonstrations be so frightening?" Liana asked the magician as she feebly recovered from the slightly terrifying exhibition of his fearful wonder working. Liana stood intrepidly. She faced the sorcerer with resolute firmness. "I am sorry if my sorcery unnerved a constancy in your faith princess; that is what it was intended to do."
Marmalock further demonstrated his ability of an arcane faculty for eerie and sublime powers of transcendent enchantment; he pulled a withered blossom from the same pile of wood and held the dead flower in is hand. Marmalock focused power of the emperor's compelling staff on the shriveled bloom. With his memory of spells, recorded in the book on magic now held by Landregal in Aboregale, Marmalock Arabolis's long tight fingers rapped serenely about the brown, wrinkled, seed-bearing plant. As though effected by an absorption of incident radiation in the persisting atmosphere, the stale flower began to glow and return to life. He gave a bright red blossom, now vibrant with life, to Liana.
"You see my exhibitions are not always that menacing," he laughed amiably. Marmalock was stern but good-hearted in his intention to warn Liana of the force of the danger that faced her from inside the walls of Dormanquest Castle in Trome. In truth, Lord Volki's magic had the same potency as Marmalock's. Volki's power, however, would become accompanied by none of the good will associated with the perceptively admirable wizard in Glassel.
The people of Midgard were a self-controlled, ferociously militant, army of a few thousand belligerent antagonists. Where tempers rose, conflict often occurred between the Viking clans and families in the country of Glassel. Midgard became built as a base and fortress to launch ships with raiding parties for attacking and plundering unprotected coastlines within a wide radius of Thorvald's home. State of life within confines of domiciles Liana and Marmalock now inhabited with Barbidal's people, however, had become controlled and comfortable. Cooking sometimes became prepared in a separate lodge then distributed in the central gathering areas of the large communal buildings. After a long sleep, Thorvald woke with a gnawing hunger and walked to the center of his lodge. Marmalock and Liana greeted him as he stood in the center of the large shelter.
"Thorvald, it is good to see you have recovered from the long journey," hailed the vigorous princess. There was stew and bread in a large cauldron in the center of the refuge. Leadership among Thorvald's people became ruled more on the principles of admiration than appointment. Men who were most skilled at sailing and fighting had become respected and followed through the regulation of self-esteem; necessity put them in positions of authority only when their leadership was necessary. There was no supreme ruler of the country or community. Might of the clans, experience at navigation, and skill of the individuals become much to do with who lead the missions of pillage and plunder. Expert builders existed in every clan. The ability to clear land, build houses, fortresses and their masterfully crafted long ships, constituted an important aspect of Glassel's menacing society.
In an irregular thrumming of vigilant thought as he rose from sleep, what Thorvald felt was a preponderance of remorse and sorrow. His brawny limbs felt as though they were heavily leaded weights. They hung at his sides in discordant recompense, subsided from weary days and nights at sea. Like so much useless ballast, his arms and body, for a time, were drained of their strength. He looked about the lodge with familiarity, recognizing other members of the clan with which he had journeyed to Aboregale. Those men were not in the highest of spirits. His daunted crewmen malingered in the ilk of a frozen consciousness, reflected in their defeat. They had experienced, during the campaign, a heightened thrill from their conflict; it now dissolved in them, with disappointment, from lack of reward for their venture. To aid in the defense of Emperor Torymorton and his country, they became promised silver.
"To what resolve do the Gods find your most gracious spirits, now that I have returned from my sleep?" Thorvald asked Princess Liana.
"My temperament is well restrained Thorvald," she replied. "Sinking our pursuers at least guaranteed we will not be discovered by the preponderance of Volki's army."
"The Lord of Dormanquest Castle's capabilities of massing large forces across the opened sea are limited Liana," Thorvald continued. "We can still defeat Volki if we manipulate our ability to navigate the opened ocean to his disadvantage."
Liana Torymorton was morosely crestfallen from the humiliating defeat of her country and the reprehensible death of, Nicholas, her father. Had they successfully vanquished the hordes of marauders from Trome, the men of Glassel would have become well rewarded. As it stood they had suffered substantial casualties and escaped only with their own lives. They were ungenerous, therefore, in siding with Liana as she attempted to sway them in her favor.
Thorvald stood on stout legs with the stalwart look of a man who had experienced unrestrained brutality in achievement of many legations: missions of an emissary that had become questionably accomplished in the minds of ordinary men. To say that his soldiers acted with diplomacy and adroit skill, in fulfillment of their mission as personal guards to the emperor, was a lie. They were devious, his illustrious warriors, and acted with only one motivation: the reward of precious silver. The quality and virtue of self-respect had played very sparsely in the protection of Liana's father. Among vulgarity and his men's bad temper, Thorvald attempted to console the diminished pride of his barbarous sailors. As