He kicked his feet from the stirrups and heaved himself from the saddle. Just as Asgardians were stronger than the folk of Midgard, so too were they more agile, but, even so, the gray’s bucking made it difficult to leap off gracefully. He staggered a step and fell to one knee. As he looked up, Sif landed on her feet, seemingly with no more trouble than a cat springing off a chair. The entranced horses galloped toward the hunters riding down the hillside. Amora was now astride a steed someone had presumably led for her to mount when she was ready. Or maybe she’d simply snapped her fingers and it appeared out of thin air. Heimdall had no real idea of her limits and capabilities.
He did know that a person could outrun a horse, for a little while at least, or anyway, someone had once told him so. He grimly supposed he and Sif were about to put that bit of supposed knowledge to the test. They fled before their pursuers, farther along the heath with its mottling of white clover and yellow meadow buttercups.
When Heimdall glanced back, to his dismay, the hunters were closer. They’d reached the bottom of the slope. He felt a fresh surge of desperation at the thought of what it would mean to be caught. Death, either on the spot or after being condemned by a tribunal, for him and his sister both.
He and Sif dashed onward. He was exerting himself to the utmost, heart pounding, sweat periodically stinging his eyes until he swiped it away. He wasn’t slowing down yet, and racing along beside him his sister wasn’t either, but as they kept fleeing across the open moorland the chase could end in only one way. He cast about and felt a surge of hope upon spying a place where a forest of pine, spruce, and a scattering of other trees met the heath. Reaching it meant running uphill, but still it was a potential haven, the only one within reach.
He turned, Sif followed, and they dashed up the rise. They were still a bowshot away from the tree line when a second group of horsemen appeared on their flank. Amora had either called them with magic or the new hunters had simply showed up at an especially inopportune moment. Their arrival was horrifying, infuriating, just when it had begun to seem plausible that he and his sister might actually get away.
As Heimdall had previously exhorted the gray stallion to press beyond his limits and give him a final burst of speed, he now strained to do the same himself. Javelins rained down around Sif and him, thrown by the oncoming riders.
The fugitives passed among the first trees but weren’t safe yet. They needed to penetrate deeper into the forest, where the pine and spruce grew more thickly, where there were thickets and deep shadows, where horsemen would have difficulty following and two people on foot could throw them off their trail. Heimdall glanced to the side and saw that he and Sif weren’t going to make it there without another confrontation. Possessed of the fastest horses, each with a sword in hand, three of the hunters were about to catch up to them.
After the sentry’s disastrous death, Heimdall dreaded another confrontation with men who by rights should be his comrades-in-arms. Unwilling to draw his sword, he looked around and found a fist-sized chunk of stone at his feet. He threw it and struck one rider in the chest. The warrior’s mail clanked, and the impact knocked him from the saddle.
Sif hadn’t drawn her blade either. Even so, she stood beneath a gray alder in the poised manner of a foot soldier waiting to receive a rider’s attack. Leering at the expectation of an easy kill, the hunter rode in with his blade raised to cut her down.
Sif leaped into the air, caught hold of one of the alder’s lower branches, and swung. Her legs straight, she booted the grinning hunter in the face, and he too flew from the saddle. Pounding on by, his mount whinnied in surprise.
The remaining horseman’s eyes widened to see his two comrades abruptly lying stunned on the ground, but after a moment’s hesitation he kicked his steed toward Heimdall. Heimdall looked for a second stone and, to his dismay, couldn’t find one.
Sif dropped to the ground and rushed the remaining rider on his off-hand side. He saw her coming and hacked at her, whereupon she dodged the somewhat awkward cross-body cut and grabbed his wrist before he could lift the blade for another try. She yanked him out of the saddle and kicked him in the head. Heimdall was glad she’d once again neutralized a pursuer without resorting to lethal force, but the two of them weren’t out of danger yet.
Brother and sister dashed on into a patch of forest where the tree trunks made a maze, and the morning sun barely pierced the thick mesh of branches overhead. Roots tripped them, and branches swiped and scratched at them. They forced their way into a thicket, and the thorns on the briers snagged their clothing and bloodied their skin.
The important thing, however, was that – much to Heimdall’s relief – the cries and curses of the hunters grew faint behind them. When they deemed them faint enough, brother and sister stopped charging along in favor of a stealthy, wary advance, treading lightly and peering in all directions as they made their way. Eventually they came upon a cloudberry bush bearing ripe pink fruit, and Heimdall raised his hand for a halt.
“We could use a chance to catch our breath,” he said, keeping his voice low.
“Agreed,” said Sif, “and while we’re here, we should eat and pick more berries to carry with us. Since we lost what meager provisions we had with our saddlebags.”
“At least we still have our lives and our freedom.” He picked a cloudberry and bit into the tart fruit.
“Yes,” Sif said, “there’s that. But are you all right? I don’t mean physically. I saw the look on your face when the riders were coming at us. You really didn’t want to fight them.”
“I wasn’t afraid,” he said. Not afraid in the way that kept a warrior from fighting, anyway.
“I know,” she said. “It wasn’t that.” She sighed. “Fighting them felt wrong to me too. But we didn’t kill them, and they didn’t kill us either. Things worked out as well as they could. Now we have to figure out how to keep away from them and continue the mission.”
As it had before, her commonsense attitude and focus on practicalities helped him feel somewhat better. “Do you have any thoughts on the subject?”
Sif frowned, considering. “Our situation could be better. Hunters skilled at woodcraft will track us. On foot, they can go wherever we can, and apparently Lady Amora’s magic can summon reinforcements to enter the forest from all sides.”
“Like a noose drawing tight,” he said.
“More or less.” Sif paused to eat a cloudberry and wipe juice from her mouth with the back of a red-gloved hand. “I assume that if she takes a mind to, Amora can also turn into a bird again, fly high, and spot us if we do slip through the circle and leave the forest.”
“I know you better than to think you’re giving up.”
Sif snorted. “Of course not. But you fancy yourself the clever sibling. If you are, it’s time to finally come up with a good idea. Something to see us safely out of the wood and along our merry way to Jotunheim.”
As Heimdall picked cloudberries and put them in his belt pouch – still watching out for pursuers – he turned his mind to the problem. Specifically, he sought to remember details of maps he’d seen Captain Ivar consulting of the lands surrounding the city of Asgard. There must be some path out of the forest where the hunters wouldn’t think to intercept the hunted.
Eventually he hit on something, and some change in his expression must have alerted Sif that he had. “Tell me,” she said.
“It’s risky,” he replied.
“This has all been risky,” she said. “We might as well go on as we began.”
He supposed she had a point. “All right then. You said the hunters can go wherever we can. But what if we go somewhere they won’t go? The Realm Below.”
The Realm Below was an enormous and labyrinthine network of caverns underlying much of Asgard. Few Aesir or Vanir had ventured far inside and fewer had returned. The caves contained the Domain of the Trolls and were home to their even more fer
ocious cousins, the wild trolls, creatures famously inimical to all those who dwelled aboveground.
Sif undoubtedly knew as much, but if it fazed her she didn’t let on. “I take it you know of a way in somewhere here in the forest.”
“Yes,” he said. “We simply have to get there.”
“How hard will it be to get out again?”
“Hard. I know where there are other exit points scattered across Asgard, but what I don’t know are the tunnel routes connecting one to the next. No one has ever mapped them.” He pushed his misgivings away. “But we’ll have to figure it out once we’re inside.”
“We will, and at least Amora and her friends won’t be able to guess which one we’re going to pop out of.” Sif squared her shoulders and drew her broadsword a finger-length before sliding it back, making sure it was loose in the scabbard. “Lead on.”
They skulked in what Heimdall reckoned to be the proper direction. At one point, they heard voices and crouched motionless in a stand of pines. Heimdall’s heart pounded with anxiety until the hunters passed by.
The outcome might well have been different if the searchers had hounds to sniff them out, and he assumed someone would fetch packs of bear dogs soon enough. He and Sif had better be belowground before the animals arrived.
They crept on, and after what seemed too long and nerve-wracking a time, Sif touched his arm and pointed. “That looks like the way in to someplace no one with sense would want to go.”
Just barely visible through the ranks of trees that still stood between them and it, the cave mouth yawning in a rise in the ground did indeed have a forbidding aspect. Even in daylight, or the dusk-like gloom that passed for it here in the deep forest, it looked as ominous as the entry to a haunted barrow where wights and draugr held sway. Some creature had heaped human skulls on the ground outside, perhaps to warn that intruders would be slaughtered.
Still, forbidding as the cave entrance appeared, what Heimdall primarily felt was relief, relief that he’d found the way this far before the Asgardian pursuers found Sif and him. Surviving the caves of the Realm Below was the next problem. He and his sister would address it when the current one was through. They pushed forward, but Amora’s sweet soprano singing sounded once again.
“Curse it, not now!” Sif snarled. She drew her blade and quickened her pace. Heimdall did the same while grimly wondering what creatures the melody was intended to control. There were no horses in view, no animals of any type big enough to pose a threat to anyone, let alone an armed warrior.
The trees in the fugitives’ immediate vicinity lashed their branches like whips. Limbs snapped loose and showered down. Some were big and heavy enough to strike Heimdall and Sif with bruising force. Others, large and small, littered the approach to the cave mouth to make the footing treacherous.
Amora’s song became more strident. Its substance creaking and groaning, a birch swatted one of its branches at Heimdall. Aghast but determined to defend himself, he sidestepped and hacked the limb off short, but that didn’t deter the birch. It struck with other limbs, and he evaded and cut at those as well. When the tree gave him an opening, he stepped in and swung the great sword at its trunk with the full measure of his Asgardian strength.
The heavy blade pierced the bark and drove deep into heartwood, but, to his dismay, even that didn’t stop or even slow the birch. Another branch struck at his head, and he jerked the sword free and dodged just in time to slip the blow.
Fighting a birch of her own, Sif was faring no better, her broadsword an even less adequate weapon than his own two-handed sword. Even dwarf-forged blades were made for cutting flesh, not hewing wood, and where did a tree keep its vital organs anyway?
Meanwhile, the creaking and groaning of tortured wood came from all around, and the smell of disturbed soil mingled with that of forest verdure, as other trees uprooted themselves. Swaying, their gnarled roots alternately reaching, clutching, and releasing the ground to drag themselves along, some converged on the embattled Heimdall and Sif. Others crept with the evident intention of combining into an impenetrable wall in front of the cave mouth.
Brother and sister tried to escape before it became inaccessible, but trees bunched together and bashed with their branches to bar the way. Attacks came from all directions now, and the two warriors turned and hacked to keep from being pummeled. A pair of limbs belonging to two different trees caught Heimdall by the forearms – immobilizing the two-handed sword – lifted him, and started to pull in opposite directions. Enraged, terrified, he bellowed a war cry, jerked his arms down, and broke free before the branches could tear him apart.
But, he wondered grimly, in the long run, would it matter? The blows he and Sif were striking weren’t stopping the trees, and even if they figured out how to kill one, there was no reason to doubt Amora’s song could wake as many as required.
It occurred to him, however, that maybe she needed to be close to direct the attack. After all, the cursed trees didn’t even have eyes. And maybe if he silenced her song, they’d stop moving.
Still turning, dodging, and chopping branches off short, he looked for a blonde figure in green peering out from the more distant and still rooted and slumbering trees. There was no one. Dividing his attention simply resulted in a savage blow across the back. If not for his mail and Asgardian hardiness, it likely would have broken his spine. As it was, it stunned him and knocked him to his knees. Sif stood over him, slashing, defending them both until he took a deep breath and drew himself to his feet.
As he desperately resumed swinging the great sword, it occurred to him that Amora didn’t have to be present in human form, if she was indeed present at all. Chopping apart a gnarled tree limb that was reaching for Sif’s head from behind, he looked for a bird perched on a branch above. He didn’t find one of those, either.
Sif cried out. Alarmed, he spun around. Her winged helmet was gone, she had a bloody scrape on her brow, and her black hair was swinging loose and free. “I’m fine!” she gasped, making another sword cut.
If Amora could turn into a bird, could she change into other animals too? Heimdall looked for one, whilst a tree limb that divided into several smaller ones like fingers on a hand grabbed his knee and yanked his leg out from underneath him. He slammed to the ground, and the tree dragged him toward other branches poised to hammer down.
He frantically heaved himself into a sitting position, swung the great sword, and cleaved the branch that had hold of his leg. At the same instant, now that his sight line was lower, he spied a fox peering from the shadow under a pine. It looked just like a normal fox, but wouldn’t any natural animal run away from the unnatural commotion close at hand?
He scrambled up and looked for a path to the fox. The animated trees weren’t quite as thick in that direction. Thinking she would go undetected, Amora – if it was Amora – had apparently been more concerned with blocking the way into the caverns.
“Follow!” Heimdall shouted. Winding his way through the obstacles, no longer hacking with the great sword, depending on his armor and agility to keep him alive, he charged the fox. Branches battered him and knocked him staggering.
After a moment, he realized his sister wasn’t with him, hadn’t succeeded in breaking free of the innermost circle of trees. Fighting alone, she was in even greater danger, and his every instinct cried out for him to turn around and help her. Still, he resisted the impulse. Rushing the fox was the only real hope for either of them.
He brushed past a tree trunk, and one of its roots writhed across the ground and tripped him. As he stumbled, he suffered another hard blow across the back. He stayed on his feet, though, and then the last of the attacking trees were behind him, and the fox was only a few more strides away.
With a sweep of its bushy tail, the animal whirled, bounded away, and disappeared into the forest. At the same instant, the singing stopped.
Deprived of the sorceress’s
magic, the uprooted trees stopped attacking and toppled, crashing into one another and then to the ground. Some ended up leaning against trees the spell hadn’t animated, the branches of the two tangled together.
Sif had been fighting in the very middle of the falling trees, and, with them on the ground Heimdall couldn’t see any trace of her. Terrified that one had crushed her beneath its bulk, he called her name.
For an awful moment, nothing happened. Then she climbed and squirmed through the branches of a fallen birch.
“Why didn’t you answer?” he asked, nearly as annoyed as he was relieved.
“I had to catch my breath and find my helm,” she said. “I’m standing in front of you now, aren’t I? That’s your answer.”
Heimdall smiled a grudging smile. “I suppose.”
“Don’t think I’m complaining, but what did you do to stop the trees?”
He told her about the fox.
Sif said, “You’re lucky Amora didn’t turn you to stone or something.”
Heimdall felt a reflexive pang of dismay even though the danger was, for the moment, past. “Maybe she could have. Frantic as I was, I didn’t even think of that at the time, and perhaps, with me charging to cut her to pieces, she didn’t either.”
“Mages are all alike,” Sif said. “No stomach for close combat.”
“Odin and Frigga are mages. Among other things.”
“Don’t nitpick.”
Heimdall grinned. “Sorry. We should get belowground beyond the hunters’ reach before something else happens.”
The jumble of fallen trees was especially dense in front of the cave mouth, but not quite impassable. Brother and sister clambered through it and eventually dropped to the other side, where the opening yawned before them. They kindled the glow from the medallions dangling over their mail and crept inside.
Nine
The Head of Mimir Page 6