by Scott Oden
He saw Halla’s eyebrows arch, apprehending that she’d seen him in return. With subtlety to spare, she glanced from him to the girl. Dísa stood with her back to the door, her attention riveted on the post in front of her. On it, Halla had hung three iron rings from nails. The tallest stood at the height of a tall man’s face, a good twelve inches above the crown of Dísa’s own head; the second was at heart level, while the third was gut or groin level.
The girl was clad now in a haubergeon of good mail over a gambeson of padded leather that reached to mid-thigh; an apron of leather and bronze scale protected her hips, and she had wrapped her lower legs, between knee and boot, in old leather belts with plaques of hammered copper and bronze decorating them. She wore her hair pulled back and tied beneath a thick wool arming cap. Dísa held a shield in her left hand, while in her right she balanced a blunt-headed spear—its shaft cut down to where it was barely longer than Grimnir was tall.
As he watched, Dísa dropped to a crouch and shuffled into range of the iron rings. She feinted at the middle ring with her shield rim—striking the wooden pole with a dull crack—and thrust over-hand at the uppermost ring. Thock. She backed up, stood upright, rolled a kink from her shoulder, and then repeated the movement. Thock.
Grimnir grunted and tossed the deer carcass off to one side. Turning, he stepped back into the chilly night and stripped off his filthy boots, his war-belt, his armor, and his kilt; soon he was naked but for a loincloth. Grimnir shattered the thin skin of ice covering the surface of a butt of rainwater and used a leather bucket to draw and sluice the grime and blood from his limbs, from his face, and from his stringy hair.
Thock.
He heard Halla rise and rummage among the drifts of coin and gear. A few minutes later, the troll-woman brought him a fresh tunic, trousers, thick-soled boots, and a sleeveless leather coat that buckled across the chest—a brigandine, heavily embroidered and reinforced with rings of bronze and iron. Grimnir dried himself off with the tunic before tossing it aside, heedless of Halla’s disdainful snort. The rest he donned quickly. He left the coat open, securing it with his war-belt and hitching the hilt of his seax around until it rested in easy reach.
Thock.
Halla hoisted the deer’s carcass as effortlessly as he had. She would skin it, joint it, and cut it from the bone before salting it and hanging it in the smoke shed at the rear of the longhouse. Grimnir’s stomach growled as he thought of the savory stew the troll-woman would make from the deer’s marrow-rich bones.
“What’s that one about?” Grimnir gestured with his sharp chin, indicating Dísa.
“She’s seen the light.”
Grimnir snorted. “Guess that crack on the head did the little wretch some good, then.”
Halla remained silent. She fixed Grimnir with a withering stare before turning and stumping off to the rear of the longhouse. Still chuckling, he followed the troll-woman inside.
Dísa barely glanced in his direction as he passed her and took up his accustomed seat. She had donned the helmet Halla had been repairing, cinched the chinstrap tight, and turned her head from side to side, looking up and down and rolling her neck around to test the fit. Satisfied, she dropped back into a fighting crouch. Dísa feinted low with her spear then cracked her shield rim across the highest ring.
Grimnir eyed her with grim amusement as she repeated the movement. Finally, she straightened and looked at him with an exasperated sigh.
“What?”
“You fight like one of them.” Grimnir jerked his head in the direction of Hrafnhaugr.
Dísa frowned. “I am one of them.”
“No, little fool!” He jabbed one black-nailed finger at her. “Forget what that hag of a grandmother taught you! You’re too slight for it. A shield wall? Bah! Those louts would roll right over you and not look back. Be like the wolf that prowls at the edges of the battlefield, or be dead.” Grimnir shrugged and sat back. “The choice is yours.”
Dísa stood for a moment, head bowed as she measured the weight of Grimnir’s words. Finally, she glanced up. “Show me.”
The son of Bálegyr’s lips peeled back in a jagged yellow smile.
* * *
EVEN BEFORE SUNRISE THE NEXT morning, Grimnir drove Dísa from her bed with kicks and curses. Her complaints fell on deaf ears as he led her through a series of stretches, loosening muscle and sinew in preparation for the day’s exertions. “You’re going to run, little bird,” he growled. “Up into the hills, around the valley, and back again. And I’ll be at your heels with a whip, if that’s what it takes. Run until your sweat turns to blood! Until your lungs burn and your leg bones crack!”
But as she nodded in stoic silence and made to set out, Grimnir jabbed one finger into her sternum.
“Do we fight in naught but our skins, wretch?”
Dísa stammered. “I thought … we’re just running, aren’t we?”
“You want to learn the war-art of the kaunar? Here is the first lesson: we live as we fight. We are hated, and we hate in return, so every wretched breath we draw is drawn under a promise of death. Old Gífr taught us to make that death as hard as nails. We live in this, in our war garb!” Grimnir slapped his brigandine-covered breast. “It is the iron blanket that keeps us warm at night, and the iron shroud that will cover our axe-hewn corpses. If you take a piss, little bird, you take it in your war rags! Fetch them—and your weapons!—and stop your dawdling!”
Dísa did. And they ran. Grimnir pushed her at a punishing pace, through the woods to the edge of his territory, then along the ridgelines to the promontory overlooking the dark waters of the Skærvík, then down the steep, rock-strewn incline to the lake shore. From there, they followed the shore until they reached the small creek that drained the bog. Scrambling up rocks and through tight clefts, over islands of peat and through shallow meres of black water, they came once more to the longhouse.
At the end, Dísa could barely breathe. She lay on her back for a time, gasping like a fish; her chest burned. Every joint in her body ached, and the spasms twisting her guts forced her to roll over and dry heave. She tried to spit, to clear her throat, but her tongue felt like a strip of dried-out leather.
But Grimnir did not give her much respite. Using the same tactics as before—nudges from a booted foot peppered with curses—he chivvied her inside where Halla waited with a flask of water and the morning repast.
“Not hungry,” Dísa muttered around mouthfuls of water. The troll-woman was adamant, however, and soon she had the girl gnawing smoked venison slices and slabs of a dense bread baked with seeds, nuts, and dried fruit. Finally, Halla poured her a measure of Mjöð, that harsh herb-infused liquor that gagged her going down but soon turned to a hot fierce glow that lent new vigor to her limbs.
And she would need it, for the rest of the day Grimnir—in his own inimitable style—taught her the intricacies of the long-seax, of the Frankish axe, of the short thrusting spear, and of the shield. Nor did he spare any wisdom. “Slice that sticker of yours across some whoreson’s thigh, right up by his bollocks, and if you get it just right he won’t last a dozen heartbeats.”
“And if I miss?”
“Ha! Go after some bastard’s jewels and he’ll go after your damn fool head if you miss! So make sure you don’t, little bird!”
Before sunset, they returned to the longhouse where Halla had a bite of sup prepared—meat pies spiced with cumin and garlic, or stew made from pork or venison with carrots, mushrooms, onions, and cabbage; even simpler fare was Grimnir’s favorite, such as skewers of roasted meat, a bowl of beans and hard barley bread, or baggi, a thick porridge of barley and organ meats mixed with parsnip and onion. After they ate, Grimnir would break out the ale and regale Dísa and Halla with tales as they mended armor or repaired weapons.
This became their daily routine: run and fight. When meat ran low they hunted, using the same skills to kill a deer as to kill a man; Grimnir taught her the art of the ambush—the hard, fast strike designed to cripple a
n enemy and leave him ripe for the picking. She learned the rudiments of Sarmatian archery, a skill Grimnir himself learned during his sojourn in the East with Gífr, his mother’s brother. She was no crack shot, but her aim was steady enough to at least nick the target. “You’ll make the wretches duck, at least,” Grimnir snarled as one of her arrows whizzed past the target’s head. And by night, she stared into the fire and listened as Grimnir related threads from the long tapestry of his life. She heard the tale of how he came to be at the Battle of Chluain Tarbh outside Dubhlinn, some two hundred years ago; how he’d hunted Bjarki Half-Dane from the grinding ice of the far north to the pleasant valleys and vineyards of the Franks. “I chased that wretched maggot for nigh upon five hundred years! Faugh! Always a step behind him. Then, I lost all reckoning of him for fifty years or so, until a blasted Christ-Dane and his little foundling put me back on his scent.” Grimnir continued on, telling Dísa how he’d snagged himself a Christian hostage in a cave on Sjælland in the Danemark, walked the perilous branches of Yggðrasil to reach England, and bartered with the lord of the landvættir to break the walls of Badon after they’d stolen his hostage. He paused, then, to drain a horn of ale.
“So, you found this hymn-singer in a cave,” Dísa said. “What was her name?”
“Étaín,” Halla murmured. There was a mischievous twinkle in the troll-woman’s milky eyes.
“Aye, you found this Étaín in a cave, snatched her up, and dragged her along … you say because she knew the lay of the land and could speak the tongue of the English?”
Grimnir lowered the empty horn and wiped foam from his lips. His nostrils flared. “What’s your point, little bird?”
Dísa motioned with her hand, hoping to stave off Grimnir’s ire. “Don’t be cross. I’m just trying to understand, is all.”
“She knew their wretched land!” Grimnir punctuated each syllable with a short, fierce rap of his knuckles against the wooden armrest of his seat. “She spoke their wretched tongue! Which of these is too much for that empty space between your ears?”
Dísa risked a sidelong glance at Halla, seeking support. The troll-woman, though, gave her nothing; her seamed and wrinkled face remained impassive as she worked her embroidery needle through the hem of a tunic. “Well.” Dísa licked her lips and swallowed hard. “Both, to be honest. You say you needed this Étaín, but you also spoke the language well enough, in a pinch. You knew enough to find your way around, and you’d have twisted the head off any Norse swine that crossed your path to get the information you needed. And yet, on a lark you snatch some kneeler from a cave and drag her across the branches of Yggðrasil for … for no good reason?”
Hearing this, Grimnir’s single eye blazed with wrathful fire. “No good reason, eh? You’re a precious sort of fool, little bird. No good reason, is it? It’s the same reason I plucked a wretch like you out of the muck! Why I decided—against my gut, mind you—to show you the war-art of the kaunar!”
“What reason?”
Grimnir leaned forward. The shadow and light rising from the embers lent his sharp, wolflike face a decidedly sinister cast. He slowly enunciated each word of his reply, fangs bared in a jagged yellow snarl. “Because I can!”
In that moment, the tension in the air felt murderous, like a strangler’s cord looped around Dísa’s throat. It would have made good sense to simply keep her mouth shut, to accept Grimnir’s answer with a silent nod and let it be. But she could not deny the unspoken taunt in his harsh voice—he was daring her to speak her mind. Dísa licked her lips. Good sense be damned! But even as she rose to meet his taunting, Halla interrupted.
“And that,” said the troll-woman, “is the lesson for this eve. Rejoice, child, for you have learned a truth few mortals are privy to.”
Suddenly, Dísa felt a slackening of the tension; its knots loosened, and she found her breath. She watched Grimnir sit back in his seat, lips thinning with barely suppressed derision. He snorted. Dísa frowned as she turned to Halla. “What truth is that?”
“There are three words inscribed on the grave stone of every kaunar. Three words that sum up the breadth of their existence. Three words passed down from the lips of the Tangled God, himself, Father Loki. Question a kaunr’s motives, child, peel back the layers and you will see these three words burned upon their black hearts: because I can!”
At this, Grimnir only nodded. He remained silent for the rest of the night. And as Dísa fell asleep, her last waking image was of Grimnir’s silhouette—hunched and immobile, brooding over a landscape of ash and embers like a defeated king over the remnants of his domain.
10
By the second week, Dísa’s endurance had improved enough that Grimnir began to change up their routine. He named landmarks along the path to give her a sense of awareness—the trail began at an outcropping he called Two-Goat Rock, then through the woods to where an ancient, moss-bearded ash called the Jötunn Tree stood sentinel over the naked ridges; the promontory, more or less the halfway mark, Grimnir called the Tooth, while the rocky and precipitous path down to the lake’s shore he named Hel’s Stairway. The creek mouth he called the Pisser, and the narrow clefts that led to the bog were the Ball Breakers. “Make it to the Jötunn Tree without being seen,” Grimnir would tell her. Or “Try and stop me from reaching the Tooth.”
Their runs became running brawls, ending only when Dísa stumbled back to the longhouse, winded and bleeding. She came to Halla with lacerations and bruises, broken fingers and pulled muscles, blisters and abrasions; once with broken ribs and another time with a dislocated shoulder. These Halla stitched or set, slathered with herb-laced unguents or covered with poultices. The troll-woman also treated the sores and rashes that erupted on Dísa’s shoulders and flanks from wearing her armor for too long. And as she worked, Dísa—like a skald reciting the deeds of the mighty—would tell her the tale of the day’s struggle.
Then, one evening near the end of the fourth week she came to Halla strangely quiet. She remained pensive as the troll-woman washed the blood away from a cut across her left cheek; then, with deft fingers, she drew together the ragged edges of the wound. “No blade did this,” Halla said. She eyed the girl, the ghost of a frown crinkling her forehead. “A pommel?”
“A branch,” Dísa replied. The young woman flinched as Halla undertook the careful stitching of the cut; the sensation of pain seemed to rouse her from her lassitude. “He was lying in ambush between the Jötunn Tree and the Tooth, ready to put an arrow in me if I showed myself on the ridgeline. So I stayed low, kept to the trees … one of them did not much like my intrusion, it seems. Thought it was trying to gouge my eye out.”
A ghost of a smile touched Halla’s lips. “You must be wary, child. Some landvættir remain in this world. They sleep and dream of the Elder Days and are dangerous when woken.”
“Like you,” Dísa said. She paused a moment, then: “Halla, is it true you cannot leave this place?”
Halla’s gaze flickered from her flesh-knitting to meet Dísa’s frank stare. “Grimnir told you this?”
“He said your blood keeps you prisoner here.”
“Prisoner?” The troll-woman sniffed. “More the fool is he if he thinks I am anyone’s prisoner. But he is right on one count: the blood of Járnviðja, who was my mother’s mother, runs through my veins—and for the daughters of Járnviðja, Sól’s hateful light will return us to the cold stone from whence Ymir fashioned us. So if I journey, I must do so at night and seek shelter by day. I simply choose not to.”
“Why?”
Halla said nothing for a moment. Her fingers wielded the thin golden needle lightly—pierce and draw, pierce and draw. Then, quietly, she spoke: “There is nothing for me out there. Not anymore. Gone are the days when the great forest of Myrkviðr spread across the world—the mighty Dark-wood, my home. You should have seen it, child! Trees like moss-bearded titans, towering over glades and vales where no man had ever set foot. There were only spirits in those days—spirits of wood and water, sky
and stone. My troll-sisters and I could journey from sunset to sunset for nights on end and never see the edges of Myrkviðr. Nor did we worry overmuch about seeking shelter. For as we walked, we sang the songs of ancient spirits, who were as gods upon the earth. In payment, the landvættir opened their arms to us. We shared their hollows under root and rock, or were hidden from venomous Sól in the trunks of those mighty trees.” She finished stitching Dísa’s cheek, tied off and cut the thread, and wiped away the remaining blood. The troll-woman reached for a jar of cobwebs and from its contents made a poultice that would stop the girl’s cheek from bleeding. “Alas, as I said those days are long past. I could fare forth from here—one night, perhaps two—but to what end? To meet the vanguard of our destroyers?”
“The Nailed God’s folk?” A frown creased Dísa’s brow.
“Yes. But they cannot bear all the blame, alas,” Halla said. “They were not the first to take axe and fire to our precious Myrkviðr. All manner of men hacked at the edges of the forest, or struck into its heart. The trees that offered us succor in the Elder Days went to make the keels of great ships, or the spines of mighty longhouses, but the men who did this offered the landvættir recompense: the first fruits of the harvest, the first wool of the shearing season, the first blood of the hunt. But when the Cross-men came among them, preaching their hate for the Old Ways, the hearts of men hardened against the spirits of Myrkviðr. No longer did they offer fair payment. They set their rapine axes against oak, linden, and sacred ash because their god told them that was their right.”
Halla rose and shuffled back through the longhouse to the front doors, Dísa in her wake. Outside, night had fallen. A cold breeze blew through the open door, its breath setting the flames in the fire pit to flickering. The main room was empty; Grimnir was gone on one of his sleepless wanderings that took him beyond the edges of his land. Halla sat in her accustomed spot. Shadows streaked the troll-woman’s face as she took up the thread of her tale. “The landvættir could have survived the loss of their haunts, like Myrkviðr; they were in water and stone, in the soil underfoot and the air we drew into our lungs. What threat could another god pose, even one that drives men to madness?” Halla tsked. “The men of the North have many gods, after all. What is one more? But the Cross-men would have none of that. Their Nailed God was a jealous god who demanded sole dominion over the lands of Miðgarðr. They preached that there was only one world, not nine, with a heaven above and a hell below. They taught the Dane and the Swede and those among the Norse who would listen that they are born in sin and imperfect, made to suffer. And if they suffer enough, their Nailed God will allow them into his hall to serve him—but only if they keep his law: Thou shalt not have strange gods before me.” Halla shivered; her milky eyes sought the heart of the fire, as though the bright flames could burn away the last vestiges of that hateful commandment.