The Ice King

by Hume, M. K.

  ‘Perhaps a suitable maid might be closer at hand than you think, brother.’

  Arthur briefly looked struck by an unexpected pang. Then he strode away towards the prow of his vessel where he could watch the heaving flow of water passing under the hull in an unending, blue-grey reel.

  Limfjord loomed as grim and as forbidding as Arthur remembered it. In light rain, the crew huddled in their oilskins and rowed through the narrow entrance to the safe mooring that lay between the soaring walls of the fjord. This time, no ram’s horn trumpeted out a warning to Heorot that vessels were approaching.

  ‘If all goes to plan, the bulk of my fleet will meet me at the entrance to Limfjord in a week or so. This allows time aplenty to gauge the situation in Heorot when we make landfall. I can still override you, Maeve, and I will send you home if conditions in Heorot and its village are too dangerous.’

  Maeve began to protest but Arthur cut her short. ‘I’ll insist that you comply with my wishes. If Heorot should prove to be unsafe and violence imminent, you’ll never set foot on its soil. I’ve given my promise to Valdar, and I keep my word. Risking your life by pitting your limited knowledge against a deadly disease is one thing, but attempting to fight a crazed populace is a totally different proposition.’

  ‘But I’ll have Father Lorcan to protect me in Heorot,’ Maeve began, but her brother shook his head vigorously.

  ‘Four or five years ago, I would have left you with Lorcan without any hesitation, but he’s not as fast or as strong as he once was. I’m sorry to be blunt, Father, but I’m speaking the truth.’

  The old man rubbed his whiskery chin and grunted his agreement. ‘I’d like to say I could protect you in any situation, Lady Maeve, but Arthur’s right – damn him! Sword play is beyond me.’

  Arthur knew that this admission was made at some cost to the elderly man, so he honoured Lorcan for his courage.

  ‘A man’s worth isn’t measured by the strength of his arms, Lorcan, as you know. Courage is worth much more than the ability to lift a sword.’

  ‘I know, lad, but growing old is a fair bitch.’

  ‘Germanus and I will explore the village and the hall. If we haven’t returned by nightfall, I’ve told Gareth to abandon us and take the canoe out to Sea Wife from his position on the shore. Once there, he will prepare for a quick departure if necessary. However, he can remain at the mooring for some days in case we are simply delayed. Don’t come after us, Maeve, I beg you. After all, the only reason I won’t return is because I have contracted the disease.’

  Maeve reluctantly agreed. Meanwhile, Germanus and Gareth had assembled an odd contraption of willow wands, light pine and pliant leather to form a long, narrow canoe. Three sets of paddles were laid out on the bench seats.

  ‘Stay here until we return, Maeve,’ Arthur repeated.

  The canoe was carefully lowered into the water and held close to the longboat by two crewmen as Arthur, Gareth and Germanus seated themselves inside. Arthur dipped his paddle into the waters and the canoe began to scoot over the waves.

  Ahead of them, the village was silent and empty. Arthur knew that small boats and coracles would normally have been thick on the sheltered waters closer to the shore; instead, the various craft were drawn up neatly on the shingled beach. Dry nets hung tidily from frames, and the usual bustle of the paved area close to the shore was stilled.

  Even the sea seemed to be breathing softly, yet the soft whirl in his skull was warning Arthur that this village was in terrible trouble.

  With a sigh, he shoved his suspicions into the back of his mind. They would know the worst when Heorot’s village was reached.

  The unconventional vessel must have been seen from the village at the foot of the low hill, yet no souls were stirring in the houses that staggered along the slopes of the hill. As the three warriors pulled the canoe above the high-tide mark, they could feel hidden eyes boring into their backs. Silence surrounded them, as if the inhabitants were holding their breath.

  ‘I don’t like it here, Arthur,’ Gareth muttered. ‘If any place can be haunted by wights, then this is it.’

  ‘There’s a stink of burning in the air, but none of the outward signs of a town that’s been attacked by the contagion,’ Germanus observed. Somehow, the normality of the situation was more frightening than if dead bodies had been piled in the streets.

  Arthur opened the door to a simple house that he remembered as belonging to a fisherman. As soon as he did a putrid reek flooded out from the interior, making Germanus and Gareth reel back, coughing and choking. Behind his protective scarf, Arthur paled but forced himself to advance into the room.

  The smell of putrefaction suggested that all persons inside the cottage were dead, but a woman was sitting beside the house’s fire pit while rocking the swollen corpse of an infant. Around her, two more children and a man, all dead and in various stages of decomposition, were neatly tucked into sleeping pallets. Except for the foul odour, the cottage was unnaturally neat and tidy.

  Gagging, Arthur tried to remove the infant from the woman’s arms but she resisted him with determination, so Germanus helped him to break the terrible death-like grip. As he dragged her out of the cottage her eyes were like empty holes of madness within her skull.

  ‘Remove this woman, and set fire to the cottage, Arthur. A cleansing fire is the only answer when a place is as contaminated as this structure,’ Germanus instructed. He, too, was sickened.

  As the flames caught, a few people began to appear in the streets. Arthur recognised a face here and there, especially the battered nose of a smith he had met during the long winter in the first year of Frodhi’s rule.

  ‘Smith? Do you remember me?’

  The man nodded warily, although he glanced nervously towards the longboats in the bay, as if Arthur had brought an invasion fleet with him.

  ‘Aye, you’re the Last Dragon.’ His voice revealed that the young man was terrified.

  ‘You may tell your friends and neighbours that we’ve come in answer to a call from your king. He asked us to bring healers to your people during this time of terrible sickness. Lord Stormbringer couldn’t come in person, but he has sent his wife, Maeve, who is also my sister. You might remember her from our first visit to Heorot. Maeve is very skilled in the art of healing and she is accompanied by Father Lorcan, a priest who is familiar with this disease and understands its onset and symptoms.’

  ‘Was your lady sister the girl with the black hair? We’ve heard word of her brother, the young man who died during your battles with the Geats.’ The smith’s face had cleared slightly at the welcome news.

  ‘No, my sister has red hair. She is the one who insulted Hrolf Kraki’s witch-woman to her face.’

  The villagers nodded, for they remembered the brave and beautiful girl. The smith spat on his hand and offered it to Arthur, who accepted the risk, for the man appeared to be hale and strong.

  ‘My name is Knut Hard-hand and I have served as the king’s smith in recent years. I’ve never known such terrible times as those we have suffered since the murder of the Crow King. Perhaps Hrolf Kraki has cursed his people from the cold halls of Asgaad.’

  ‘How many souls are dead in this village, Knut, as distinct from those who have died in Frodhi’s hall?’

  ‘At least half the villagers are dead, lord. The old folk seemed to catch the illness first, then the children began to sicken. Now . . . well, we wait to see what new horrors come to us with the start of each day. Any help you bring will be welcome, because our herb-woman doesn’t know what to do.’

  ‘Can you find a clean cottage which we can use as a hospice? It must be outside the village boundaries, somewhere the contagion hasn’t visited. The priest and my sister will treat the sick from this building once they have made their preparations. We intend to treat your villagers first, so I’ll send for the healers a
s soon as you find a suitable house for them. They will also require the assistance of your herb-woman, so she must be ordered to follow the instructions of my healers without comment. You can tell her that her own life will be forfeit if she doesn’t obey. Maeve will need a good supply of clean water – and I mean clean water – from a supply uncontaminated by human contact. She will also need all the soporifics that your herb-woman possesses, including poppy and henbane. Can you provide these needful things?’

  ‘Aye! And gladly! I’ll take the herb-woman with me to collect her stores. As for this poor bitch, she is scarcely twenty years and she’s lost everything of value, including her kin. But if she was going to die from this disease, I think she’d have caught it already.’

  The blacksmith took the grieving woman held by Germanus from the Frank’s grasp and pushed her into the welcoming arms of his wife.

  Germanus beckoned the men of the village into a small group.

  ‘Have you been burning your dead? If not, you must do so immediately, along with all bedding and clothing in the infected houses – even if there are survivors living there. When I caught the disease, I was bitten by something, probably a bedbug. I don’t know for certain if these small creatures cause the illness, but I’ve always wondered. You cannot be too careful. The herb-woman must also dispose of her clothing, in case she should contaminate our treatment house. I know winter is coming, but we must wash fire over all suspected objects within the affected areas and leave the houses empty until the snows arrive. Justinian’s Disease hates fire, and it hates cold weather.’

  Knut nodded. ‘We will follow your instructions, my lord. The king has been hiding in Heorot and totally ignores our suffering. Thanks be to God that someone has finally come to relieve us in our time of troubles.’

  ‘I can’t guarantee that my sister and Father Lorcan can stop all of the deaths, but they can help those who are ill. This disease doesn’t care if you’re a king or a whore, it devours you just the same.’ Arthur’s words brought nods of agreement from the crowd.

  ‘Gareth, could you fetch Maeve and Lorcan? Germanus and I are going up to Heorot to speak with Frodhi.’

  Gareth refused to budge until Germanus assured him that Arthur would be safe; finally, he ran off down the hill to the canoe.

  ‘Be careful up there, my lord,’ Knut advised. ‘No one has come out of Heorot for two days and we’ve no intention of going up there to see what’s been happening.’

  Arthur was silent as he started the steep climb to the platform on which the forecourt of Heorot was built. Here, he had fought the Troll King who was now waiting on one of Arthur’s vessels to undertake the long journey to Britannia.

  It was here too, that his friend, Eamonn, had battled Rufus. Arthur recalled the foolish boy he had been, so concerned with duty and honour, but so ignorant of how to lead men and how to make his way in a strange land. He owed everything he had become to Stormbringer, now his kin by marriage.

  He had learned to lead men in the deadly and strategic games of war; he had won a great fortune that would buy him a kingdom, and he had amassed a small army of loyal men who stood at his back but, as yet, called no living man their king. He was their leader because of his fighting prowess; he accepted that the day would soon come when they would kneel before him and call him king.

  Looking out over the village, he could see the scene that had lain before him on the day of his mortal combat with Thorketil. On that day, the landscape had been misty and half-seen. It was clear and silent today, for the trees wore their autumn leaves like a cloak of bronze and gold. The waters of the fjord were still rising, for the occasional skeletal branches of trees could be seen below the surface.

  ‘I have stood here on a previous occasion, dear Lord, but this will be the last time. Please allow me to survive this test so I can return to my kinfolk in Britain,’ he prayed. ‘I’ll try to do what is right, or I won’t deserve your mercy. Protect me, give me strength and allow me to help these people in their time of need.’

  CHAPTER XVI

  GRENDEL’S CURSE

  Natura dat unicuique quod sibi conveniens est.

  (Nature gives to each what is appropriate.)

  Auctoritates Aristotelis

  Only the rising afternoon wind gave the appearance of life in the vicinity of Heorot. In the field behind it, Arthur’s large army had camped when he forced Hrolf Kraki to accept that Aednetta Fridasdottar was a traitor, but their presence had only served to trigger the regicide of the Crow King. The traitor and murderer, Frodhi, ruled over Heorot now, assuming he was still alive.

  ‘We’ll circle around the building first, Germanus. If in doubt, we should go in through the back door,’ Arthur suggested.

  Germanus agreed. Something about the stillness, the early fall of amber leaves that had been left to rot against the hall and a feeling of abandonment warned the old warrior that danger lay around him.

  ‘There’s something about this place that smells very wrong,’ Germanus muttered, while he searched for some sign of a threat.

  Then, at the rear of Heorot, they found the answer to the eerie stillness.

  Someone had used the empty space behind the building as a dumping ground where the bodies of the dead from within the barracks and the hall could be piled. Sun-bleached, swollen, and with split abdomens and empty eye sockets, the naked corpses stared into an unheeding sky. The huge pile contained well over fifty bodies and writhed with life from the insects and larvae that were feeding on them. Larger scavengers – crows, ravens, shrikes, dogs, cats, and especially rats – gave the corpses an obscene parody of movement.

  Both men felt their gorges rise. In days gone by, only the worst of felons were abandoned after such a grisly end to life. Northerners were prepared to pay rings of gold and silver to recover their dead killed in battle so their warriors could be accorded clean and noble passage to Valhalla.

  ‘What animals could have left them like this? At the very least, burning would have given them a decent ending to their lives – but this is an abomination.’

  No worse fate could await a warrior than to have their remains cast away like rubbish. Far worse for those who survived the illness would be the knowledge that their compatriots’ remains had been desecrated by scavengers. The bodies of female slaves had been permitted to lie among the abandoned sprawl of death, a further insult.

  ‘I think we’ll look inside the barracks first, Germanus. For some reason, I’m afraid to enter Heorot itself. Those fucking bones from that fucking Grendel and his fucking mother seem to have poisoned the air around the king’s hall.’ Arthur laughed shakily. ‘Grendel and his bitch of a mother, whoever they damned well were, were accorded more respect than Frodhi’s own men, noble warriors who were loyal to a man. Frodhi has much to answer for.’

  Arthur avoided unpalatable duties so rarely that Germanus was surprised. He was a little chary himself now that he had seen his charge’s reaction. With some reluctance, he padded after Arthur towards the separate barracks, which were built without the usual stone bases designed to elevate the floors above the chilling earth.

  Steeling himself against thoughts of finding a barracks building filled with corpses and dying men, Arthur strode towards the main entry with his shoulders squared manfully. He noticed that moss had been stuffed into the gaps between the building’s timbers to repel draughts. Even so, the wind had been rising as the afternoon advanced, and had begun to whistle through the rafters with a mournful cry that sounded like high-pitched moaning. Fleetingly, Arthur wondered if the barracks was mourning its dead inhabitants.

  The emptiness of the first half of the barracks was an anticlimax. The main room, filled with sleeping pallets that encircled its central fire pit, was otherwise utterly bare. Because of the height of the roof here, the footfalls of the two intruders were unnaturally loud in the emptiness of its bleak spaces. A steep stair
case along one wall indicated that an upper floor had been raised over the back half of the building.

  At the far end of the room, a set of folding walls and doors had been built across its width, leaving a narrow gap in the middle just wide enough for a man to squeeze through.

  ‘I suppose we must enter that room and go to the second floor as well,’ Arthur said, looking at the rough stairs. ‘The barracks are quite sensibly laid out; our officers were billeted here three years ago.’

  He pointed to a series of tables that had been pushed against the half-wall as screens. ‘This was where they ate until the men became sick. Someone has tried to separate the sick warriors from the well.’

  ‘There’s no sense in putting off the inevitable,’ Germanus decided manfully and marched up to the screen which he pushed aside carefully. Feeling like a coward, Arthur joined him.

  They could clearly see evidence that the room had been used for the treatment of deathly ill patients, but no one had chosen to clean up the detritus: bowls of water tinged with blood, soiled bandages tossed into darkened corners. Similarly, pallets had been stained with dried sweat and vomit, while several bowls of congealed stew indicated recent occupation.

  Then both men heard a moaning sound that grew louder and louder until it was suddenly cut off as if a suffering man’s mouth had been clamped shut. As they tried to identify the source of the noise, another, deeper series of cries told them that the rooms above were inhabited.

  ‘Damnation!’ Arthur swore as he raced back into the first room at a run. The stairs were sturdy, but the hand rails were rickety, and would be dangerous if anyone threw their whole weight upon them.

  ‘Keep close to the left,’ Arthur warned his friend and took the steps two at a time.