“My son is going to be a father. You couldn’t give me better news.”
His mother looked so happy that Sweyn regretted not having told her sooner.
“Now you see that you can’t go and die,” he said. “Sigrid is strong and of noble birth, blessed by Freya herself. She is unmatched among women. She is my queen.”
His mother nodded to herself and sewed another stitch before fixing her eyes on him again.
“If this is your will, then I know it will happen.”
Sweyn took a piece of bread from the plate, feeling content. Finally there was someone who understood that he was going to have Sigrid no matter the cost.
“It must be bad sorcery. Only a curse can work this fast,” Solveig said, uneasily eyeing Sigrid, who was lying in her bed in a fever trance, tossing and turning and mumbling senselessly.
Haldis sat on the edge of the bed and nodded grimly before pointing to Virun, who stood in the doorway.
“Go to the priestesses. Take a couple of the men with you.”
The girl nodded and left right away while Haldis anxiously wiped the sweat from Sigrid’s forehead.
“You have to survive. Erik needs his son.”
Emma watched, paralyzed, as Sigrid slipped away toward the afterworld. The room stank of rot and death, and the dark shadows of the corpse eaters moved menacingly around the bed, ready to extinguish her sister’s life. Get thee gone, cursed darkness.
Emma dug her fingernails into her face and whimpered in pain as she dragged them over her skin. This couldn’t happen. Kára was inside her and protecting Sigrid and the baby, and yet she had no idea what to do. Emma had prayed and pleaded for Kára to intercede, but the capricious dís wasn’t responding. Powerless, Emma was forced to watch the glow fading from the protective charms that had been carved into the door frame. The iron under the bed did make the shadows hesitate, and yet they still gathered expectantly around Sigrid’s weak body. Sigrid grew increasingly tired and ever weaker, as if some evil were slowly poisoning her, her beloved sister. The blood trickled from the gashes Emma had dug in her cheeks, and her body trembled. Sigrid was dying before her eyes, and she couldn’t do anything about it.
“You’ve seen enough. Get going,” Haldis yelled at the women who crowded around the bed and the doorway.
The Svea women and Sigrid’s own kinswomen reluctantly left the room. They were anxious, as if they feared both for her life and their own.
“Why don’t you protect her?” Haldis angrily demanded of Emma. “You, who can summon the rain and predict the future, save my grandson.”
Emma had no answer to give. She crawled over to the bed, took Sigrid’s hand, and held it to her bleeding cheek. Beloved sister, come back to me, she prayed. Don’t leave me.
The queen mother scoffed and took off a leather pouch she had been wearing around her neck. She put it on Sigrid’s belly and whispered something into her ear, an ineffective spell. Sigrid tossed her head from side to side. Her face blazed red, and her eyes were glassy, staring vacantly into the hidden world.
“Nothing’s working,” Haldis said in exasperation and turned to Emma. “Save my grandson, or you’ll hang to death in the oak tree at dawn. I swear it.”
Just then Kára percolated back to life inside Emma. She had only a faint intuition, but it was enough.
She took a firmer hold of Sigrid’s hand and sent all her strength into Sigrid. Closing her eyes, she stretched herself deep into her sister and felt the poison that was coursing through her blood. Though Sigrid’s mind was deep in the hidden world, Emma was almost able to reach her with the tips of her fingers, but then the connection was broken, and Emma fell out of the spirit world and back onto the bed beside Sigrid.
“Well, did you succeed?” asked Haldis and snorted in dissatisfaction when Emma shook her head. “Let us hope, then, that the priestesses can save our queen, because otherwise we’re lost.”
The grayish-black fog closed in around Sigrid like a damp embrace, and yet she wasn’t cold, and the pain was gone. All that remained was the blessed emptiness and the foreboding she knew so well from the dreams she’d had. She had never realized before that she was wandering through the afterworld, so different from Freya’s glittering golden Folkvang that she had anticipated. But all that had little meaning now; nothing was important anymore.
Sigrid looked blankly at the pale shadows wandering past in the mist—emaciated children with sunken cheeks, stooped old people, women with babes in arms, old warriors with bent backs—who could be glimpsed and would then disappear. They were all walking east, enticed by the sound of a huge river that drew them toward it. A distant voice, quiet as a whisper, called to her from far off, but she couldn’t turn around. Nothing had any meaning anymore. Without any will of her own, she followed the stream of dead people into the void, toward Hvergelmir’s spring in Niflheim. Her life dissolved away with every step, like fog on a summer morning when a breeze sweeps in off the sea. Sweyn and the baby were the last to leave her. Apathetically, she let them run off and disappear as if they had never been there. Emptiness was reflected in the pale bodies that wandered beside her. Small grains of sand, small seas, small are the minds of men. There was no suffering here, no joy or sorrow. They were all liberated by the vast emptiness.
Sigrid looked up at the gate to Hel’s nine realms, which towered above her. Gigantic and made of bones and human skulls, the gate was wide open so the dead could wander into the afterworld. The voice called to Sigrid, this time even more faintly. The noise from the bubbling cauldron of Hvergelmir, the source of everything, where the rivers had their torrents, drowned everything as it called to her. Sigrid couldn’t do anything but obey the pull. With no will of her own, she kept going and barely thought of the unknown being that was approaching.
Sweyn looked up at the sun, which was covered in its winter garb, concealed in the darkening sky. Something was wrong—he could feel it in every bone in his body. His worry for Sigrid had been aching like a wound in his chest all day, and now, as he watched the sinking sun, his foreboding grew into certainty. The link between them had broken. Her presence—which otherwise was constant, as if she were standing beside him, so close that he could smell her and feel the warmth from her skin—was gone. Something must have happened to her and the baby, otherwise she wouldn’t have vanished.
Sweyn rubbed his fist over his heart to quiet the pain, as real as if he’d been stabbed in the chest. If anyone hurt her, he would flay the skin off him or her, piece by piece. He swore it.
“Vanadís, Thor, I call on you. Protect my Sigrid.”
That moment, the sun went behind a cloud, and darkness fell over Jómsborg. Sweyn shook his head in distress over this bad omen as worry ached throughout his body. Damn it that he wasn’t with her, that he couldn’t protect her. His powerlessness ate at his body.
Just let her still be alive. He looked back up at the sky. Sigrid had to live and give birth to their baby. She was the only pure and precious thing in his life, and without her there was no meaning to anything he did. Everything was for her sake.
He clenched his fists and looked despondently at the mud under the rags he had wrapped around his frostbitten fingers. If only he could be by her side. Then he could protect her and keep her safe from everything and not let anyone hurt her. He should never have let go of her in Lejre. The thought that Erik of Svealand was enjoying her company tortured Sweyn night and day.
Damn it all!
A cry made him look up. Åke came running across the muddy field, waving to him.
“They’re fighting again,” Åke cried, panting. “I think there might be some fatalities this time.”
Sweyn looked up at the sky one last time and then walked over to Åke, his heart heavy. The fully qualified Jómsvíkings who served him were still having a hard time putting up with the less-well-trained men, which was easy to understand, but they were pushing the new recruits too far and beating the worst among them too severely.
“They’r
e not going to improve if they have broken legs,” Sweyn bellowed angrily and started running toward the men’s training grounds.
Sigrid regarded the stranger who was disturbing her journey with apathy. As the dead were walking toward Hel, a young woman, not much older than herself, came walking toward her, away from Hel. She stopped in front of Sigrid, shrouded in gray fog.
Her face was half burned away, like the mistress of the kingdom of the dead, and her clothes hung charred on her frail, thin body. But her eyes were filled with such tender love that they pierced Sigrid’s apathy, all the way to the woman she once was.
“Mama?” Sigrid whispered so quietly that the words were drowned out by the thundering waters of the source of everything, Hvergelmir.
Her dead mother’s smile was just a ripple on the woman’s lips as she reached out her arm, frail and transparent, to stroke Sigrid’s cheek. This gentle caress burned Sigrid’s skin and made her apathy crumble away to dust. She was in her mother’s arms again, safe, being sung to sleep.
The veils that lay over her mother lifted, the burn injuries faded, and her mother stood before her, young and beautiful, with rosy cheeks and wavy blond hair just the way Sigrid remembered her.
“I’ve missed you so much,” Sigrid whispered, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Her mother smiled gently, and her eyes filled with such a loving sorrow that Sigrid could feel her yearning. Then her mother took her hand, and the next moment they were back in Sigrid’s childhood nightmare. The burning wooden hall was filled with the screams of the dying, who lay side by side with the dead. Three women tugged at the locked door. A baby lay next to them, its skull crushed.
Her mother lay lifeless on the floor, bleeding from a gash in her back, and Sigrid lay underneath her. She was three years old. Screaming and crying, she pounded on her mother with her little clenched fists, trying to get out from underneath her heavy body. Sigrid gasped for breath under her mother’s body as fear tore her to pieces. She cried for her mother and pummeled her as the flames came ever closer.
Then her mother lifted her head and looked around at the flames and the smoke. Her face was chalky white and blood was pouring from her back. She forced herself, coughing, to her feet. She took Sigrid by the hand and dragged her over to the wall. She was dying; she shouldn’t have had the strength, but with her face locked in determination, she pulled her toward a narrow window, step-by-step. It was only an opening to let in light, too small for a grown-up, but enough for a child. With a scream of pain, her mother picked Sigrid up in her arms, and the child clung terrified to her neck.
“No, Sigrid, you’re going to live,” her mother said and, sobbing, kissed her hair.
The flames were close now. With a roar they consumed the floorboards, racing toward them.
Her mother yanked Sigrid’s arms away from her neck. Bellowing with pain, she shoved Sigrid through the window opening. She held on to her hand and let her fall softly the last little bit of the way onto the grass. The child Sigrid looked up at her mother, still standing at the narrow opening where the smoke was billowing out.
“Run, Sigrid! You have to hide. Run, now!”
The child Sigrid hesitated, then turned her back on the building and ran toward the woods. Inside the building her mother collapsed to the floor, and with a smile she leaned her head against the wall as the smoke and flames killed her.
The vision disappeared and they were back on the path that led to the kingdom of the dead.
“It was you!” Sigrid said, wiping away the tears that were running down her cheeks.
Her whole life she had wondered who had saved her from the flames. She had never realized that it was her mother who had defied death for a few moments so that she could live. Nor had Sigrid realized that her mother was still watching over her from the realm of the dead.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Her mother smiled and took her hand again. Without a word she started to go, but not toward the rushing waters of Hvergelmir. Instead she was leading Sigrid away from the realm of the dead, through the gate, and back to the borderland.
The voice that had called to her before could be heard more clearly now, and her mother was leading Sigrid toward it. The mists started to ease up, and it grew lighter and lighter. Finally her mother stopped. Sigrid understood. Her mother couldn’t come any farther. She opened her mouth to tell her everything that was on her mind, how she missed her and how grateful she was, but her mother put her finger to her lips and shook her head, smiling. She already knew everything, and Sigrid didn’t need to say a word.
With one last caress of her cheek, Sigrid’s mother sent her on her way into the light, toward life. Sigrid took a wheezing, gasping breath, and she was back in her pregnant body.
“Thank Vanadís, thank all the goddesses in Valhalla,” Emma said.
Emma’s face floated like fog above her. Her mouth was moving, but Sigrid couldn’t hear what she was saying. Sigrid closed her eyes and could feel that the knives of pain were no longer cutting at her belly. She had seen her mother. Memories swept through her body, washing away the poison that had almost killed her. She swallowed and noted the bitter taste of vomit in her mouth. Her mother was watching over her and protecting her in everything.
“I thought you were gone for good,” Emma said.
“The baby?” Sigrid whispered, moving her hand to her belly.
“He’s alive,” Emma said somberly.
Emma helped her lift her head and drink water from a cup. The cool drink washed a little of the taste from her mouth. Sigrid coughed and realized she really needed to pee. She looked around. The room was empty apart from Emma, who sat by the bedside. A pitcher of water and a bowl sat on a stool by the bed, and next to that there were several rags.
“You’ve been unconscious for three days and nights,” Emma said gently. Her eyes were rimmed in red, from exhaustion and tears. Her face was ashen, and her hair hung uncombed on her shoulders.
“Not even Kára could reach you in Hel’s borderland, nor the priestesses, who cast their most powerful spells over you. I thought you were lost, that you were both going to die.”
The baby moved in Sigrid’s belly, as if to let them know he was still alive. Sigrid swallowed with difficulty and drank a little more water.
“I was almost there when my mother made me turn around.” She smiled and knew that she’d never be able to explain what had happened to anyone, not even Emma. Becoming aware of her mother’s love had healed something deep inside her. Her mother had given her her life and then saved it twice. No love was greater.
Aside from yours, All-Mother.
“Did your mother say anything?” Emma asked.
“Not a word,” Sigrid said sadly, shaking her head. Then she trained her eyes on Emma and asked, “Were you the one calling me?”
Emma looked down and nodded.
“I called to you for three days and three nights.”
“I heard you. You made me come home,” Sigrid said. “Do you know why I fell ill?”
Emma made an awful face.
“All I know is that you had poison in you, but I don’t know who gave it to you.”
Sigrid inhaled and felt the weakness creeping through her body. But she had to be strong. They would punish whomever was guilty, so severely that he or she would die screaming in pain.
Only two of the spears hit the stacked straw bales they had set up in the field. An instant later, more archers’ arrows thudded into the straw. Sweyn watched the warriors with pride, shivering in the cold on the snow-covered training ground. Lean and sinewy, like strong wolves, they were all grinning. The long days of training had succeeded in making warriors out of them in spite of all the challenges.
“You have fought long and well, and for this you will be rewarded,” Sweyn yelled, grinning at their hopeful faces. “During Yule you will rest. And now, two pigs will be slaughtered to fill your plates tonight.”
The men cheered at the gift. It was important
to reward hard work, and the extra food was worth the silver it cost.
“Go, and may your gods bless you,” he said.
The line of warriors broke up as they left the field.
“We may make men out of them yet,” Sweyn said, turning to Ax-Wolf, Sigvard, and Åke.
“I’m not so sure about that, but at least they’re not completely incompetent,” Ax-Wolf said, obviously feeling relieved at the work that had been accomplished.
Sigvard raised an eyebrow and said, “A quarter of them are good warriors. They’re the valuable ones. Half of them are eager kids who want to make a name for themselves in battle. They’ll be the first to fall.”
“And what about the last quarter?” Sweyn asked, watching his soldiers wandering across the field, joking and talking.
“They lack the will for battle and stick to the rear of the line. They never do any more than they have to.”
Sweyn nodded somberly and said, “Then they must be tempered so as not to feel fear.”
“Let them do the hoarfrost dance,” said Åke, grinning. “That really drove the fear of death out of us.”
Sweyn couldn’t help but smile at the memory. When they were nine, he and Åke had been put out in the woods in the middle of the freezing winter, each with a knife as his only weapon. For three days and three nights they were not allowed to approach any farm or people. They had to survive on their own in the dark among the giants.
“If you hadn’t managed to make a fire, we’d be wandering around in the afterworld right now,” Sweyn said, laughing.
“Well, that rabbit you snared helped, too,” Åke said.
“It’s decided, then,” said Ax-Wolf, and together they headed toward Jómsborg’s gates. “After Yule, we’ll start putting them out.”
Ragnvald, the boy Sweyn had hired on the beach in Lejre, came walking along with his fellow soldiers, and when he spotted Sweyn he grinned. He looked older and stronger, but he had a terrible limp.
The Unbroken Line of the Moon Page 29