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The merchant told another story that raised the ire of Olaf even further. Earl Hakon had accepted Christianity under threat from the German emperor, Otto, but then had reverted to heathenism when he was safely home (see page 33, "Power Evangelism Checked"). He had been busy restoring many heathen temples to their honored place in the provinces. When the earl fought a terrible battle whose outcome was in doubt, he prayed to his personal heathen goddess, offering her his best horses as a sacrifice. But she seemed angry, for she did not respond. The earl offered more valuable things without any supernatural deliverance until he offered his youngest son, a handsome and promising 17-year-old, as a sacrifice. The boy was given to a slave, who broke the boy's back on the sacrifice rock in the usual manner. Afterward, the tide of the battle turned in Hakon's favor, and the court propagandist wrote his encomium, for the earl "restores Odin's temples to Norway's shores."

"To tell the truth," the merchant told Olaf, "many brave men would rather see a king of Harald Fairhair's race come to the kingdom. But we know of no one suited for this, especially now when criticism of Earl Hakon is so pointless."

The time was ripe, this great-grandson of Harald Fairhair decided, for his triumphal return to his homeland. He outfitted five ships and closed the English chapter of his life.

As Olaf sailed across the North Sea toward home, he must have felt the nobility and the grandeur of his holy mission. He was a hybrid of Odysseus and Michael the archangel, avenger, exile, and zealot all in one. He was coming, in justice and in glory, as the royal scion of Harald Fairhair, as the king of whom great deeds were predicted in the name of Norway and in the name of Christ.

He was returning to avenge the death of his father, the exile of his mother, the slavery of his youth— all the doings, directly and indirectly, of Earl Hakon. His passion was to convert his heathen homeland, and he was prepared for holy war. By his athletic stature, by his superior skill in the martial art, by his campaigns across the Baltic and through England, and by his zealot's faith, he was the Viking warrior non pareil: bold, cruel, and skilled.

When Olaf finally approached the nose of Norway, he touched land offshore on Moster Island, pitched a tent, and held a great mass, and moved quietly to the mouth of the Trondheim fjord. On its southern point, he sent a few spies inland, and they came back with excellent news. Earl Hakon was indeed in the area, and he was up to his old escapades. He had just tried to seize the wife of a respectable farmer and had been turned back by a rabble of the farmer's friends.

He then sent his slaves to seize the beautiful wife of another freeholder named Orm. But Orm was no more compliant. He delayed the earl's messengers with food and drink while he sent a call to arms, and the farmers were gathering in great anger, ready to kill Earl Hakon. Olaf could scarcely have wished for better intelligence.

But word reached Hakon that Olaf was on his way, so he escaped to the home of one of his mistresses, who dug a pit beneath her pigsty. Logs were placed over the hole, and manure on top of the logs. With his slave named Kark, the earl crawled into the poke, hoping to wait out the trouble, if he could stand the smell.

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