“Valhalla is the abode of the blest,” I asserted. “For look you, who cares for flowers where flowers always are? In my country, after the iron winter breaks and the sun drives away the long night, the first blossoms twinkling on the melting ice-edge are things of joy, and we look, and look again.
“And fire!” I cried out. “Great glorious fire! A fine heaven yours where a man cannot properly esteem a roaring fire under a tight roof with wind and snow a-drive outside.”
“A simple folk, you,” she was back at me. “You build a roof and a fire in a snowbank and call it heaven. In my heaven we do not have to escape the wind and snow.”
“No,” I objected. “We build roof and fire to go forth from into the frost and storm and to return to from the frost and storm. Man’s life is fashioned for battle with frost and storm. His very fire and roof he makes by his battling. I know. For three years, once, I knew never roof nor fire. I was sixteen, and a man, ere ever I wore woven cloth on my body. I was birthed in storm, after battle, and my swaddling cloth was a wolfskin. Look at me and see what manner of man lives in Valhalla.”
And look she did, all a-glamour, and cried out:
“You great, yellow giant-thing of a man!” Then she added pensively, “Almost it saddens me that there may not be such men in my heaven.”
“It is a good world,” I consoled her. “Good is the plan and wide. There is room for many heavens. It would seem that to each is given the heaven that is his heart’s desire. A good country, truly, there beyond the grave. I doubt not I shall leave our feast halls and raid your coasts of sun and flowers, and steal you away. My mother was so stolen.”
And in the pause I looked at her, and she looked at me, and dared to look. And my blood ran fire. By Odin, this was a woman!
What might have happened I know not, for Pilate, who had ceased from his talk with Ambivius and for some time had sat grinning, broke the pause.
“A rabbi, a Teutoberg rabbi!” he gibed. “A new preacher and a new doctrine come to Jerusalem. Now will there be more dissensions, and riotings, and stonings of prophets. The gods save us, it is a mad-house. Lodbrog, I little thought it of you. Yet here you are, spouting and fuming as wildly as any madman from the desert about what shall happen to you when you are dead. One life at a time, Lodbrog. It saves trouble. It saves trouble.”