Twilight of the Gods

by Scott Oden

  “Your longhouse,” Dísa replied. She refilled his goblet from a clay jug of wine.

  A curse stood poised on Grimnir’s lips. He glared at her in silence; after a moment, he merely shrugged. “Aye,” he said. “Safe a place as any. All this was your doing?”

  It was Dísa’s turn to shrug. She saw Bryngerðr struggling with a bale of supplies she’d gathered from the larders of Gautheimr. Dísa helped the girl hoist it onto her shoulders, and then watched as she staggered out the door under her burden. Grimnir gnawed the last strings of meat from the goat haunch. Finally, Dísa said: “We who fight are eager to die, or at least we’ve made peace with it. It’s not fair to judge others by our standard. Those who wish to stay are welcome, but why force the women and children to die alongside their fathers, sons, and brothers? If we can get them somewhere safe, then that is our duty.”

  Grimnir tossed the naked bone into the fire; he licked grease from his fingers. “You surprise me, little bird.” He hitched at his weapons’ belt. “Come, then, let’s see these louts to safety.”

  It took the better part of an hour to wrangle the women, children, elderly, and wounded out the postern gate and down to the dock, to where Old Hygge waited. There were tearful farewells partially glimpsed in the mist, between wives and husbands, mothers and sons; fathers embraced their daughters for the last time, while trembling-lipped sons tried to present a brave face. Dísa envied them. If she died, who would mourn her?

  She turned away and saw Berkano embracing Laufeya. The Otter-Geat sisters had rarely been apart since arriving at Hrafnhaugr. When Dísa had told them one of the sisters needed to go with the boats, to tend the wounded, she’d expected a fiery standoff. But with infinite patience, Berkano—eldest by ten years, at least—took her sister by the hands and ordered her away.

  “I can’t leave you alone,” Laufeya had said, wiping away tears. But Berkano was resolute.

  “I won’t be alone,” she’d said. “I will have my family—my brothers and my uncles, my sisters of the Raven. The Hooded One will watch over me, just as he has these past three years. But our mothers and daughters need you, Feya. They need you to help soothe their hurts, just as you’ve soothed mine.” Berkano fought back tears. She smiled at her younger sister, who seemed to crumple in on herself, broken and grief-stricken. Berkano caught her up by the shoulders. “Here, now. We’re Otter-Geats, sister. The last of our people. What did Mama always say? We’re always to help a neighbor in need, for one day that neighbor might be us. Well, our neighbors need help, Feya. We needed them, three years gone. Now they need us.”

  There, in the mist, Laufeya bit back a sob as she broke their embrace. She squared her thin shoulders and nodded; Dísa saw her take something from inside her tunic and press it into Berkano’s hand. The older Otter-Geat’s face lit up. It was a scalp—the chestnut-colored scalp of Örm of the Axe. “For luck,” Laufeya said, then turned and clambered aboard the nearest boat.

  Berkano held the scalp like an eerie pet as Old Hygge shoved off. He waved to Dísa. Men blinded by splinters of wood or boiling pine resin, their women beside them, did the rowing while Old Hygge grasped the tiller. Once he wrapped his gnarled hands around the worn spruce, the decades sloughed away. He was young again. And as the boats slowly disappeared in the lake mist, Dísa decided that was how she wanted to remember him.

  Dísa’s reverie was broken when Grimnir clapped her on the shoulder; he gave her a light shove back up the trail.

  “Let’s go, little bird.”

  Úlfrún met them halfway back to the postern gate. “That was a canny trick, last night,” she said. “What other sorceries do you have up your sleeve?”

  Grimnir grunted, looking sour. “A bit of luck, was what that was. And it took every scrap of it, at that. From here out, we’re on our own. Tally up who’s left, and what we have as far as food. Figure we might as well have a feast while those hymn-singers are busy praying and licking their wounds.”

  “We should hit them again. In force, this time,” said Úlfrún. She wanted blood, especially the Norseman who’d killed Forne. “Kill the lot of them while they’re praying.”

  “No time left,” Grimnir replied as they came abreast of the postern gate. “You felt that, last night? The roots of Miðgarðr are starting to crack. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow, the barrow will rise from Vänern’s embrace, yonder.” He inclined his head back the way they’d come, toward the still waters of Skærvík.

  Úlfrún followed his gaze. For a moment, she looked weary—an old woman stretched nigh to breaking by the weight of her geas. “A last day of rest, then…”

  “What’s that noise?” Dísa said. Frowning, she cocked her head to one side. Úlfrún bawled up to the guard walking the parapet above the postern.

  “On the gate! Do you see anything?”

  “Mist’s too thick, still,” the Raven-Geat answered.

  “Sounds like … ropes creaking,” Dísa said. Faintly, she heard the voices of men, calling in unison as though they were pulling the oars of a longship. “Ymir! Did that white-skinned bastard send for his fleet?”

  Grimnir scowled. “Those aren’t ships, little bird,” he said. “Get inside.” He led them into the village through the postern. “Close it up! Drop the bar and call the dogs to war, damn your hides!”

  “What is it? What does the noise mean?”

  Úlfrún chuckled. “It means there will be no rest.”

  “And it means they didn’t pass the night praying and singing their cursed hymns,” Grimnir added. “They’re raising the bridge. Or got it raised, more like. Hel take this blasted mist! Sound the alarm, I said!”

  And as the low spring sun broke over the eastern rim of the world, the Crusaders began their assault …

  * * *

  NO DEFENDING FORCE MET THE Crusaders as they streamed over the dangerously creaking bridge. For a moment, it seemed like Grimnir might lead the berserkir out himself, but he finally thought better of it. Úlfrún was loath to commit the backbone of her war-band merely to refuse the allied bank of the ravine. “Let them have it,” she said. “One way or another, it’s time we came to grips with this rabble.”

  Grimnir agreed. Instead, he ordered the gates shut and barred. Dísa and a mixed band of wolf-brothers and Raven-Geats would defend the postern. “They’ll be coming for it, little bird,” Grimnir told her. “They’ll be looking to avenge that wretched Dane you killed, there.”

  “Let them come,” she snarled.

  Grimnir himself, with Úlfrún and her skin-clad berserkir, would defend the main gate. The two Bjorns, Hvítr and Svarti, with Sigrún and the remnants of the Daughters of the Raven, would range the parapets between the two, defending against any attempt the Crusaders might make to force their way onto the walls.

  Nor did Grimnir make any grand speech as they dispersed to their positions. He merely looked each man and woman in the eye and growled, “Kill those whoreson dogs ere they kill you, and you might live to see the sun set! But if it’s your lot to die, then take as many of those wretches with you as you can! Go!”

  As the defenders broke ranks and made for their stations, Dísa motioned Grimnir aside. “What about the prophecy?”

  “What about it?” His eyes narrowed.

  “When the barrow rises … what part will I play?”

  “How the devil should I know?”

  Dísa frowned. “I am the Day that gives way to Night—”

  Grimnir cut her off with a sharp motion. “Who knows what that doggerel means,” he said. “I doubt even that one-eyed fool who first spake it knew what he was yammering on about! All that matters to me is getting into the barrow and cutting that wretched wyrm’s head off. Everything else? The maunderings of a madman, for all I know.”

  “So, what do I do?”

  At this, Grimnir shrugged and walked away, but over his shoulder, he said: “Stay alive and keep those blasted hymn-singers busy until the deed is done.”

  By the time he reached the main gate, th
e mist had thinned enough to reveal the extent of the enemy. His sharp eyes picked out Danes, Norsemen, and Swedes, all united by the black cross sewn to the front of their surcoats, or carried as battle standards; they streamed across the bridge, forming serried ranks in anticipation of being given the order to take the gates.

  Grimnir saw no sign of the albino lord of Skara.

  “That red-haired bastard?” Úlfrún said, joining him as he surveyed the faces of the enemy. He picked out the man she spoke of—a tall Norseman with a plaited beard, directing troops with a war-spear as though he were some tin-pot Allfather. “That’s the one who killed Forne.”

  Grimnir spat over the parapet. “So that’s Thorwald, eh.”

  “Aye.” Úlfrún glanced to one side. “Herroðr…”

  * * *

  THORWALD MOVED LIKE A MAN in his element. War was in his blood; the son of a chief of the Trøndelag, as a lad he’d joined a band of vikingr who hired themselves out as mercenaries in the wars of their neighbors. He’d killed his first man at ten, earned his first oath-ring at thirteen; by the time he’d reached his twenties, Thorwald had won wars for half a dozen kings, from Dubhlinn to Miklagarðr. This pigsty? He’d have the gate by the afternoon and the village itself by nightfall.

  “Pride is a sin,” Father Nikulas had warned him as he boasted of his prowess, reciting the litany of his many victories. “Pride in killing and rapine doubly so. Tread carefully, friend Thorwald.”

  But Thorwald the Red was not a careful man. He was loud, a braggart who could shore up his boasts with iron fists and a jaw like carved granite. And if his foes took umbrage, they could face Hrænðr, his Corpse-adder.

  Above the din, Thorwald heard his name. Someone bellowed it from the enemy walls. A smile split his grim visage as he recognized the wolf-bitch’s voice.

  “Thorwald the Red!”

  He stepped out from the ranks of his Norsemen and raised Hrænðr aloft. “I am here, bitch of the North!” he roared. Men around him laughed. “There is still the small matter of an oath between us! Did you not swear by your heathen gods that you’d kill me?”

  “I did,” he heard Úlfrún reply.

  The Norseman laughed. “Come out from behind your walls, then! I am right he—”

  With sudden fury, Thorwald the Red’s head snapped back. His body went rigid, and as his men watched, the giant chief of the Norse toppled backward to crash full length upon the earth.

  A crossbow bolt stood out from his eye socket.

  * * *

  ATOP THE WALL, ÚLFRÚN STRAIGHTENED and handed her crossbow, Skaðmaðr, back to Herroðr. She caught Grimnir glaring at her from the corner of her eye; across the field, a sudden clamor arose from the close-ranked Norse—it was the tumult of vengeance.

  Úlfrún shrugged. “What? I never said how I planned to kill him!”

  “Well, that stirred them up,” Grimnir said. “Here they come.”

  And across the Scar, the lone mangonel bucked and thumped, lifting a smoking incendiary into the bright morning sky and over the heads of the charging line of Crusaders …

  * * *

  FATHER NIKULAS OF LUND WAS no battle priest, not like the Archbishop, Anders Sunesen; he did his best work behind the lines, tending to the wounded and raising a litany of prayer to stiffen the spines of the men toiling in the blood and dust of the front. He was a strategist, not a tactician. And while he was no coward, neither was he possessed of some vast reserve of martial courage. Seeing the wounded—their skulls crushed, bones snapped, faces lacerated, and blood-leaking bodies riven—only confirmed a truth he long suspected: while he could goad a man to war, he wanted no part of it, himself.

  He stepped from the tent where a lone surgeon worked to save the injured and poured a bowl of blood into the grass. His cassock was damp with the myriad fluids that spurted from bodies torn by steel and stone. The fighting was fierce; word had trickled back of poor Thorwald, taken by a crossbow bolt even before coming to grips with the pagans. Horsten led the assault on the main gate; Starkad, as the priest understood it, had fired the docks and was even now trying to force the postern gate.

  And the mangonel to his left thumped out a slow and steady tocsin—its last crew spirited in the manner by which they worked the ropes. Stones flew like a devilish hail over the palisade, the words “For Pétr” scrawled on each one. Nikulas blessed the stones, and prayed they reaped a red harvest among the wretched heathens.

  “You look a bit worse for wear, priest,” Konraðr said, emerging from the tent where the injured awaited succor. Mailed and girded for war, the lord of Skara, himself, looked … rested, Nikulas thought.

  “I am flush with health and good humor, my lord,” the priest replied. “The hour is near.”

  Konraðr inclined his head to where the other priests tended the injured. “Your brothers tell me you brought Thorwald to heel and cleaved to my plan.”

  “It was a good plan, my lord,” Nikulas said, shrugging. “And poor Thorwald ultimately paid the price for his sins, overweening pride not the least of them. Though, I fear we will miss his prowess once we take the gates.” The priest turned and studied Konraðr with a healer’s eye. “How do you feel, my lord? That was the worst fit you’ve suffered since I’ve known you.”

  “And the last.”

  Nikulas raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

  Konraðr laid a hand on the priest’s shoulder, oblivious to the reek of blood and bowel coming from his black cassock. “They are gone, priest. Where once a multitude of voices thronged inside my skull, now I hear only one—and it is my own. This was the skrælingr’s doing. It sent something against me, yestereve. Something…”

  “A devil?”

  “Yes,” Konraðr replied, a frown knitting his pale brows. “And no. I think it was a thing of the Elder World, some sending from an age when men knew not the light of Christ. It did something to me, Nikulas. Something for its own ends, to be sure, but now … the wind is merely the wind, and—for good or ill—I hear no secrets in the clamor of insects.”

  “Give praise to God, then, for the mystery of His ways.”

  Konraðr said nothing. The frown etching his brow deepened as he remembered the blood staining the walls of the Hagia Sophia. “I want the skrælingr taken alive.”

  Nikulas nodded. “That blasphemous thing will be in our grasp by nightfall,” he said. Konraðr knelt.

  “Then bless me, Father, for I have sinned—and I will sin a thousand times more ere the sun sets. I am bound for the gate.”

  On the albino’s brow, the grim-faced priest drew the sign of the Cross in blood. “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” Nikulas said. “Fetch the sword of Saint Teodor and end this, my son.”

  “If God wills it,” Konraðr said, rising and drawing his sword, “I will see it done.”

  And the earth trembled as the Ghost-Wolf of Skara set upon the path to war.

  * * *

  BY MIDDAY, A CRACK APPEARED in the wood of the postern gate. It was a small thing, a warping of planks between iron reinforcements, caused by the incessant thudding of a makeshift ram. Outside, Crusaders with shields held high protected a four-man crew armed with a pine trunk as thick as a man. From lack of space, they could not come at the gate at a full run. They could only shuffle forward, grunting as they smashed the now-splintered end of the trunk against the aged oak planks of the gate.

  Dísa had a handful of archers, wolf-brothers armed with crossbows for the most part. These kept up a suppressing barrage, but it wasn’t enough to discourage the Crusaders. Others hurled rocks from the parapet, though their archers made this a risky prospect.

  Three times, the Crusaders came at the gate, ramming it till their men collapsed from exhaustion. Men with axes and hammers, too, tried their hand. The seasoned oak and thick iron resisted them; Dísa’s boys broke skulls and sent pierced bodies back to the enemy lines. But by early afternoon, the crack had widened enough to alarm even the most optimistic of the defenders. Dísa sent for Her
roðr, who brought a roof beam scavenged from a destroyed home on the first terrace, oak planks, and the last of their nails.

  “How’s the main gate holding?” Dísa asked him.

  Herroðr shrugged and waggled his hand. “It’s touch-and-go. Bastards have no lack of fire in their bellies.” With a muttered curse, he gestured at the gate. Dísa turned. A Crusader had wedged his arm up to the shoulder in the crack. She could hear the hymns he sang as he clawed for the bar.

  Dísa sprang at him. Her seax smashed point-first through his wrist, nailing him to the boards of the gate. The man writhed, howling like a wasp-stung dog. Her mouth set in a grim slash, Dísa drew her Frankish axe. She hacked at the bastard’s arm at the shoulder, bone crunching with each blow. Blood sprayed over her face and hands. A spear tried to weasel past the dying man, who hung from the crack in the door by shreds of gristle and bloodied mail. Dísa caught the spear by the shaft and hauled it forward. She could hear men shouting: “Clear the gate!”

  And she smelled pine resin.

  “Back!” she hollered, barely snatching her seax and stumbling away before a gout of hot pitch splashed through the crack. From the parapet, she heard one of the wolf-brothers yell a warning: “That one! Kill that one!”

  Crossbows bucked and sang; she heard a Crusader grunt …

  … And a heartbeat later, a thrown torch ignited the pine resin. The sticky semi-liquid exploded, a wave of heat and flame driving before it. Black smoke guttered from the burning gate. Women with buckets of dirt rushed forward. They could extinguish the interior, but the outer face of the door would continue to burn. Given enough time, it would eat through the rock-hard oak planks and warp the iron fittings. The postern would be lost, then the wall, then the second terrace, and finally, Hrafnhaugr itself. Dísa cursed.