by Angus Donald
Tor made a scoffing noise.
‘Take a last look yourself, Torfinna, and save your scorn. Siegfried is a wise ruler and favours peace. But not peace at any price. This channel will prove a fine passageway for his ships but it is also the Mark’s best defence, its moat and ramparts in one, which may one day save us from our enemies.’
Chapter Four
A forest of bones
They walked for seven days without sheltering under another roof. For the first two days they passed through low-lying farms, pastures and patches of pretty woodland that to Bjarki’s eyes very much resembled his homeland.
He had half expected – now that he was in Saxony – that everything would look different. This part of Theodoric’s realm, just south of the Dane-Work, was the home of the Nordalbians, one of the four main Saxon tribes, Valtyr explained to him over supper that first night. Westphalians were the most powerful tribe who occupied the lands south of Frisia; the Angrians were horse-rearing folk from the Weser Valley in the very centre of Saxony; and the Eastphalians hailed from the wild borderlands along the River Elbe.
‘And Theodoric is king of all these different tribes?’ asked Bjarki.
‘He’s no king,’ replied Valtyr. ‘But all four tribes acknowledge him as their war leader. They submit to him because they share a common enemy.’
‘That Christian apostle?’
‘Very good, Bjarki, I see you have been paying attention. Yes, the Christians are our enemies but it’s not a few wandering apostles peddling their stupid religion that the Saxons fear. It is the Franks. The Franks are devout Christians but they also have armies. Powerful armies. Thousands of warriors. The Franks encroach on Saxon lands in the south and west. They seize territory, slay the people and construct their accursed churches.’
‘What is a church?’ asked Bjarki, who was scraping out the last remnants of supper from the porridge pot, eating the curls of dried-on oats. Marching made him permanently hungry and there was never enough to eat; something that both Tor and Valtyr seemed to find endlessly amusing.
‘It is a large building in which the Christians pray to their absurd god,’ said Valtyr. ‘They also pray to their god’s son who was nailed up on a tree.’
‘They pray to their gods inside a building?’ Bjarki was intrigued. ‘Do they not fear that their gods will not be able to hear them through the walls?’
‘None of it makes any sense, lad. Don’t even try to understand it.’
‘If Theodoric doesn’t like it, why doesn’t he just burn their churches?’
‘Because they don’t just build a church. They build a fortress around it, with high walls, and they fill it with hundreds of their soldiers. That’s why.’
Bjarki put down the empty pot. His belly gave a hollow gurgle. Valtyr was still talking about these dreaded Franks. He seemed to have a bee in his bonnet, but at least the talk might take Bjarki’s mind off his half empty stomach.
The Franks, Valtyr was saying, had a vigorous new leader, a young fellow named Karolus who, it was whispered, had murdered his own brother in order to rule alone. This new Frankish monarch, a fanatical Christian with many warriors, had vowed to spread his religion and make all the people in the lands of the North believe in his god. That’s stupid, Bjarki thought. How could you force a whole people to believe something, if they did not want to?
* * *
The march south was monotonous, more than anything else. They would arise at dawn, eat a few scraps of bread or the remains of last night’s supper, if Bjarki had left any, and then march till midday when they would stop for an hour, eat bread, drink from their flasks, rest, tend to their blisters and the sores from the chafing packs, then, grudgingly, get up and march till dusk.
The food ran out after three days and Tor produced a short bow from her pack, strung it and carried it always in her right hand as they walked. She took pride in effortlessly demonstrating her skills as a hunter again and again. She could raise the bow, nock an arrow and loose in less than a single heartbeat. And it was seldom that she failed to skewer even a swift-running hare or high-scampering squirrel. She could even hit a pigeon or waterfowl on the wing three times out of four. Valtyr too demonstrated his knowledge of foraging in the many marshlands and rivers they crossed – catching eels, fish and frogs with a surprisingly youthful agility; he also had a fine instinct for where to dig for edible roots, or find banks of wild garlic to flavour soup.
Bjarki was allocated the unpleasant task of skinning or plucking and cleaning the creatures Tor and Valtyr killed, and threading them on nodding hazel sticks to roast over the campfire. But he was not unhappy with this role. And while he was usually hungry, never quite full, they rarely slept without something in their bellies. Which had not been the case in Bago.
The countryside changed as they travelled. The sleepy villages they sometimes saw in the distance – Valtyr did not allow them to stop and investigate them, not even to beg a little fresh bread – petered out, the land began to rise and they began to enter wilder, less populated areas.
Ahead of them was a thick band of green, the sad remains of the once vast First Forest, Valtyr said, yet it seemed to Bjarki as big as an ocean when viewed from the top of a rise, with the occasional mountain or range of hills poking through the mossy blanket.
At night they heard the music of wolves. Their path took them south, always south, and the handful of people they did meet on the road began to speak in a different way. The language was very similar to the northern tongue all three used – whenever they did talk – and while the speech was comprehensible, the Saxon dialect seemed heavier, more brutal in the mouth.
On the morning of the sixth day, they came at last to the edge of the First Forest, and Valtyr stopped them. He leaned on his walking staff, unlaced and took off one of his shoes to rid himself of an irritating pebble.
‘From now on, we must be completely silent,’ he said. ‘We should not attract the slightest attention. And any folk or… or other creatures… we encounter we must regard as very dangerous unless they prove otherwise.’
Bjarki looked at the forbidding wall of the woodland, thick ancient trunks, oak and ash, alder and birch, all gnarled, twisted and knitted together, armoured with moss and lichen, the undergrowth in places as thick as a hedgerow. There did not seem to be a road or path leading into the forest at all. And there appeared to be strange patterns of branches growing over the surface of many of the trunks of the ancient trees. Tiny branches, twigs even, arranged in parallel patterns, almost like ribs, like little skeletons…
‘Bones,’ he said. ‘Animal bones.’
‘Not just animal,’ said Tor, and she pointed at an oak as wide in girth as a wagon’s wheel. And Bjarki saw the complete outline of a man’s inner framework, picked clean of flesh and somehow fastened to the huge trunk.
‘A forest of bones,’ he said, wonderingly.
‘Sacrifices,’ said Valtyr. ‘People in these parts nail up living flesh here as an offering to the spirits, to keep them all safely inside the woods.’
‘And we’re going in there?’ Bjarki was suddenly appalled.
‘This is what is left of the First Forest, which once covered the whole wide world,’ said Valtyr. ‘The Groves of Eresburg are its beating heart, once the core of the Middle-Realm, so naturally they nestle in its bosom.’
‘And the Fyr Skola?’ said Bjarki.
‘Yes, yes, the Skola is in the groves. Now, shall we get on?’
* * *
The First Forest was strangely noisy. Once the travellers had penetrated the outer wall of trees, following a path so faint it might have been made by a particularly light-footed mouse, it was noticeably gloomier, with only a few reed-slender shafts of sunlight breaking through the canopy above.
Yet Bjarki was surprised at how much life appeared to be all around him, all the time: the ancient trees had many birds clattering and quarrelling through the branches, magpies and pigeons, cawing rooks. A plump red squirrel squeaked and chitter
ed its outrage at them from a low moss-covered bough. A black scuttling grouse hurried away from their approaching feet through the thick banks of rustling leaves, giving out sharp cries of distress. There were rabbits, too, in a few of the grassy clearings that they saw from time to time, and on three occasions that first day they saw two elegant spotted deer looking at them from behind trees less than a dozen paces away with their lovely liquid eyes. Tor had raised her bow but, swifter than she, Valtyr seized her wrist and snapped that she was not to kill any creature – not one – without his permission.
Neither, apparently, were they allowed to make a fire, even a small one. They stopped in late afternoon, when it was already nearly too dark to see five paces ahead. Bjarki was not sure if they had been following a path at all in the past two hours; they might just have been blundering aimlessly in the half-light, pushing through shoulder-high ferns and low snagging branches.
So, no comforting fire when they stopped for the night, and precious little to eat, too. The remains of a roasted hare from the day before, now cold and greasy, and a handful each of raw, half-dried mushrooms, gritty from the bottom of Valtyr’s pack. The three of them sat with their backs against a fallen log, already wrapped in all their bedding but still damp and chilly, chewing on the leathery mushrooms and staring out into the early darkness.
‘How far must we travel before we reach the Fyr Skola?’ asked Bjarki.
He was only slightly cheered by the answer. ‘Not far. Tomorrow… or the next day.’ Valtyr seemed strangely uncertain.
‘If we don’t starve to death before then,’ muttered Tor.
Hours later, swathed in his new woollen blanket, tired from the march but unable to sleep, Bjarki listened to the sounds of the First Forest all about him: the creaking of an old tree; the rustle of some small creature fossicking through dead leaves. He tried not to think about the ancient spirits of the forest who surely still lived there, those beings who were so fearsome that they needed to be placated with living offerings nailed up on the tree wall.
He remembered something Valtyr had said to him on the first night after leaving Bago – that the First Forest itself was alive. He now believed it.
The moon rose, a glossy fresh cheese just visible above the highest branches of the treetops, and the pure darkness below was slightly alleviated.
Bjarki found he could now make out the individual tree trunks around him. In a way, it was far worse than the impenetrable black. There were shapes out there that he could not imagine were natural in any way. He was almost sure that the thing over there was a bush or a young alder tree, but its twisted black shape against a dark grey background looked exactly like a bent old man, wearing a floppy travelling hat and leaning on a gnarled staff.
He half-expected it to speak. He shifted his position and now the bush, or whatever it was, looked like a rearing horse, a fine stallion, frozen in time.
He even imagined he could hear it breathing. Heavy, snuffling breaths.
Something was breathing out there. Something very large.
And it was not the bush-stallion.
A stick cracked. A sharp report. There was no way of explaining it away. It was not his imagination; his night fears. Something heavy, much heavier than a man, had trodden on a substantial dead branch and snapped it.
Bjarki rolled out of his blanket and stood up. He felt for the cheap iron knife at his belt. But he had removed it to sleep more comfortably. It was somewhere in the leaf litter by his pack. He would not find it until morning.
The thing – whatever it was – was moving closer. Bjarki could smell it now, a musky, earthy, animal smell overlaid with a scent like old rotting meat. He could make out a shape in the darkness to his left, a vast creature on all fours, broad as a door, flat-headed, two red-glinting eyes…
‘Do not make any sudden movements,’ Valtyr’s whisper was only just audible. Bjarki could feel the old man’s presence, a warmth behind him. He could hear the rustle and crunch of leaves as Tor emerged from her bedding.
‘When I say run – we all go and in different directions. To confuse it.’
There was a rattle of stick on stick, then: ‘Put your little bow down, Tor,’ Valtyr hissed in the darkness. ‘You will only irritate this noble beast.’
Bjarki felt light-headed, cold and then hot, he heard a rushing sound of water in his ears. He felt an urge to approach the monster, to reach out and touch its fur. He took a faltering step. And another. He stretched out a hand.
‘We mean you no harm,’ he said quietly. A massive coughing grunt was the answer, like an explosion. It seemed to shake the heart in his chest.
‘We do not wish to hurt you.’ His words were much louder this time.
The creature suddenly reared up on its hind legs, it was twice as tall as a grown man. It roared. A meaty blast of sound, like a hundred trumpets. Bjarki felt the storm of it blowing on his face and hair; it almost forced his body back, like walking on the shore in a wild sea gale. Instead, gritting his teeth, he took another nervous step towards the huge animal.
‘Brother Bear,’ he said, and he knew not where the words came from, ‘we greet you as a comrade; Brother Bear, we respect your strength and wisdom. Have mercy on us, Brother Bear, we weak creatures, we foolish children of men. Grant us safe passage through your wood, your kingdom.’
The huge animal roared again, another hurricane of noise, and Bjarki braced himself for the lumbering charge, which he knew would come next.
But, instead, astoundingly, the animal suddenly dropped on to all fours again and, making a low moaning noise that sounded almost like a weird singing, it turned around and shambled away. Bjarki could clearly hear it blundering through the crunching undergrowth, loudly grunting to itself from time to time, growing quieter until there was no sound from it at all.
He turned around and looked at his two companions, just able to make them out in the grey shafts of moonlight.
‘I do not think he truly meant to hurt us,’ he said, in a tone that was almost apologetic. ‘He was just a little taken aback to find folk in his wood.’
‘We should have brought some heavy hunting spears,’ said Tor.
Valtyr laughed in relief. ‘And a dozen warriors to wield them!’
They settled down again, wrapped once more in their blankets. Bjarki found his knife-sheath in the leaf litter and threaded it once more on his belt. But he did not feel afraid. He had not felt any fear since the huge animal had gone. ‘I think he has granted us his permission to be in his forest,’ he said.
‘Or maybe he has gone to find some of his friends, to invite them all back here for a nice feast of man-flesh,’ said Tor, laughing far too heartily.
They all sat against the log for a while in silence. Yet not one of them was in the mood to sleep.
‘The words you spoke to the bear, Bjarki,’ said Valtyr, ‘who taught them to you? Who taught you to say those exact words?’
‘I was not taught them. I have never spoken them before in my life.’
‘Is that so?’ said the old man. ‘Interesting.’
* * *
They did not sleep again that night. They sat in a row, backs against the log, and talked quietly of bearish things. Valtyr spoke of the great white bears he had encountered in the frozen north, who would, if they were desperate, hunt and kill people for food. They would wait outside the remote Sami cabins and pounce when the folk emerged to relieve themselves, as if the people were unwary seals coming up from a hole in the ice-bound seas. Tor spoke of a cousin of her mother’s neighbour in Svearland who claimed to have known a hunter who found a motherless black bear cub and raised it to its full strength with great patience, love and tenderness.
‘Then, during a hard winter, the bear killed the man who cared for it, and ate him up, down to his boots,’ she said with a wholly false chuckle.
Bjarki said little. He was still savouring his brief encounter with the magnificent beast. He truly believed that a kind of communication had taken place betwee
n him and the wild animal. He hugged that idea to his chest.
The next day, after several hours of struggle through the thick forest, up steep mountainsides and down vertiginous slopes into deep valleys, during which on at least two occasions Bjarki was convinced they were utterly lost, the three travellers emerged from the green gloom into bright sunlight on a high, narrow ridge overlooking a long valley that ran roughly northeast to southwest. There was a wide, sparkling river wending down the middle of the marshy, treeless glen, and a sort of island, a huge oval outcropping of earthy rock, bursting out of the ground on the far side of the silvery waters.
The rock outcropping, which was five hundred paces wide and a little more in length, thrust out from the valley floor, rising more than a hundred paces straight up in the air above the south bank of the river, and its wide flat summit seemed to be completely covered with dense green foliage. Trees.
It looked like a round, inch-thick griddle cake placed on a table top. Bjarki could see buildings, too, on this strange valley-island. Through the green smudge of leaves, he could make out thatched and timber-built houses and even the tiny figures of people walking about outside them. There was a village of sorts on top of this strange geological formation but one the like of which he had never seen before. A man-high palisade of sharpened logs had been constructed around the whole outcropping, pierced by only one gate that Bjarki could see, with a rutted track that led up to it from the valley floor. But strangest of all, to his eyes, were the trees, the ancient oak, ash and beech trees, which were inside the palisade on top of the valley-island.