by SM Stirling
They looked blank. He took his own weapon and tossed it to Hrolf. “Draw that, big man, and yourself so strong and hearty.”
The big man did; his eyes widened as he pulled it to full draw, grunting a little.
“Heavier than mine! A good deal heavier!”
Edain nodded; he was thick in the shoulders and arms himself, and deep-chested, but of no more than average inches. Asgerd was tall for a woman, and within a finger-width of his height; their eyes were level with Hrolf’s chin. He took the bow back and held it before him, elbows out, one hand on the grip and one on the string.
“This is outside the bow,” he said, pulling.
Then he shifted to a real stance. “This is inside. Push at it. Like you were in a doorway and pushing on the jambs from the inside. Bend your whole body into it. Feel the curve from left hand through your body to your feet and out your right. The bow stave is a spring; make your body a set of levers and springs to push it. Inside the bow, and sit into the draw.”
He did, twisting and sinking down a little.
“You look like you’re drawing with the weight of your arse,” Ulfhild said, and laughter barked.
Edain grinned himself. “But it works.”
“Maybe with an arse like yours.”
“Ah, well, y’need a heavy hammer to drive a long nail,” Edain said cheerfully, and there was another laugh.
The Mackenzie bow-captain put the snap back into his voice: “Try it! Right hand past your ear, past the hinge of your jaw. Open your chest right out, that uses your back muscles—they’re stronger than your arms.”
They did, and Asgerd’s eyes went wide. “I can hold it! Long enough to shoot . . . but it makes aiming harder.”
“Don’t aim! Aiming’s for beginners. Don’t look at the arrow at all. Look at where you want to hit. Think the shaft home—and once it’s clear of the bow, don’t think of it at all. Shift to your next at once. You only get one try at a deer, and then it runs away. Men are different. They come at you.”
He turned . . . and suddenly a shaft was in the air. Two more followed before the first hit in the driftwood log a hundred and fifty paces down the beach: tock-tock-tock in the hard sea-bleached wood.
His great half-mastiff bitch Garbh looked up at him to see if he wanted her to fetch the arrows. He dropped a hand to her head and she leaned into him, showing her long yellow man-killing fangs as she grinned and lolled her tongue.
“No, girl, not yet. That log will be an unhealthy place for a few hours more.”
Under his determined cheerfulness ants seemed to be crawling under his skin. They were needed at home, and home was a continent away.
KALKSTHORPE, NORRHEIM
(FORMERLY ROBBINSTON, WASHINGTON COUNTY, MAINE)
MARCH 12, CHANGE YEAR 24/2023 AD
“Kalk, how long have we been arguing?” Heidhveig said sharply.
“Off and on, since we met!” the old man said, his seamed face pushing towards her like a snapping turtle’s.
Somehow the resemblance was greater for the fringe of white hair around his bald skull; he’d been bare on top when they’d met, twenty-five years ago.
Aesir witness, he’s older than me.
They were sitting in her loom room—mostly used by her daughters and granddaughters and their apprentices these days, and for seidh. The pale winter sunlight washed over the vertical frame from tall windows on two sides. Also over a scattering of hanks of spun wool, and a stuffed tiger (made of real tiger skin) with one ear chewed off by a great-great-grandchild, a horse on wheels . . . The room smelled of wool, faintly of ash from the fires that had run wild during the corsair attack on the town a few months ago, and strongly of cod-and-onion stew and baking rye bread from the kitchens. Always a little of the sea, out where the Greyflood met the Atlantic. Noises too; someone singing, children’s voices, a dog barking. Her household here had started out large, and grown more by births and weddings and simple accretion than it had lost by youngsters moving away.
“No, when we met, you persuaded me that the Change was about to happen, which is why I moved my family here from California,” she said.
He nodded. “It was good advice.”
“And I took it. I’ve given you good advice since, haven’t I? As a friend and a seidhkona.”
His nod was a little more grudging; her fame as a seeress was nearly as important to Kalksthorpe as its trade and crafts were.
“So believe me when I say Rudi and the others will be back soon. I’ve seen it.” She sighed. “Care to bet? Say, that long table with the carved edge against . . . oh, four bolts of woolen?”
“Done,” Kalk said.
And a child of seven ran into the room, her unbound maiden’s hair swirling like black mist beneath a fur cap with earflaps and the rosy flush of the day’s chill still on her cheeks. A tiny gold horse hung on a linen cord around her neck, the sign of Gná, Frigg’s messenger.
“Sails, Amma!” she said, her voice crackling with excitement. “A ship! A big, big ship!”
“Njord sink me, I should know better by now,” Kalk muttered. “Take the table, take it!”
“Feet!” Heidhveig said sternly to the girl, hiding her smile and pointing.
“Yes, Amma. Sorry, Amma.”
Gundridh Thorvinsdottir was actually a great-granddaughter, but that was what all the youngsters called her; the half of Kalksthorpe under sixteen mostly did, for that matter. The child hopped from one foot to another, taking off the muddy overboots she had forgotten and holding them in one hand; there was mud on the hem of her thick burgundy sumac-dyed wool skirt too. Her eyes still glittered; Kalksthorpe was a fishing town and a port in a not-too-small way by today’s standards, but a strange vessel this early was still a rare break in routine.
“I wonder what ship that could be?” Heidhveig said dryly to her old friend. Then: “Well, fetch me my staff, girl!”
Gundridh did, grinning again. She carried the staff carefully, though: it had a brass knob on the end, with carvings of a raven, cat and bear below, set with amber and garnet and a small compass. Her boots were tucked under one arm—which wouldn’t do her dress any good either. A brindled tabby jumped out of a basket of wool and onto the warm spot on her chair as Heidhveig walked down the hall to the stairwell and descended with a thump and grunt for each tread. She was well for someone with her years; you were well or dead, at her age and in this time and place. But her joints hurt in cold weather nowadays.
Before the Change someone had told her that you started groaning like that when you were past prime breeding age—it let the predators know you were old enough to be safely culled from the herd. She grinned a little at the thought as she came to the big hall that ran the length of the house on the ground floor and gave on the front-door vestibule. There were two hearths blazing, and it had a multitude of uses, from ritual to storytelling. But the family’s arms were also racked on the walls, and now people were bustling about quietly; the menfolk of the house and more than a few of the women were donning nose-guarded helmets and war sarks of metal-studded leather or mail shirts, and handing out spear, shield, sword, bow and ax. Even the dogs caught the mood and waited quietly. Everyone was still of a mind to be cautious after the corsair raid last year—though it was very unlikely they’d be so unlucky again anytime soon.
“Don’t count any man lucky until he’s dead,” she said to her son Thorleif, when he said that. “But this time you’re right.”
He grinned back at her, showing blocky irregular teeth, and lifted his seven-foot spear to demonstrate that he wasn’t taking any chances; he was well into middle age himself now, silver in his receding dark hair but still strong, a bold-featured man with a square jaw and beak nose. Then he thumped the ashwood shaft of the weapon against the boss of a round shield painted with a black raven on a red field. The loud, dull boom caught everyone’s attention.
“Carefully!” he said. “I don’t want anyone stabbing someone in the ass because you’re hurrying needlessly. Chance
s are it’s nobody hostile. Keep good order and keep the points up. Karl, you’re still not fifteen—door-guard for you.”
Heidhveig thumped her staff on the floorboards in turn. “It’s Artos Mikesson and his folk, returned with the Sword of the Lady, as the High One foretold. I felt it when he drew the blade. Everyone on this continent with the Sight did! And a good many others.”
“I didn’t,” Kalk observed sourly.
“You saw the Change coming,” she said. “How often since?”
Kalk grunted wordlessly.
“Right, Mother,” her son said. “We’ll still turn out. Practice never hurts.”
He turned to his wife. “Though if we’re to have guests ...”
“We slaughtered that pig just the day before yesterday,” she murmured, her eyes going distant. “We haven’t started on that. Plenty of potatoes . . . I’ll start some tortiere and sausage thawing, get out some apple pies we froze last fall, and put more dough to rise . . . you get going!”
Heidhveig donned her padded coat and a long, dark blue cloak fastened with a valknut, pulling a knitted cap over her braided white hair. Her household’*s fighters crowded out the door, joining the others of the town; everyone had his assigned place. For the Heidhveigssons that meant down by the docks and boatyards. The alarm bell tolled from the stave-hof, the temple, but paced slow and steady. That meant the others could suit their pace to hers and Kalk’s determined stump rather than dashing; the old asphalt and new cobbles were slippery under a layer of wet slush, and she picked her way cautiously. Falling and breaking a hip was not a good idea these days. Breath misted white in the damp air, and edged metal gave a watery gleam. They passed half a dozen construction sites littered with tools and sawdust and chips, where houses wrecked in the raid were being replaced, solid fieldstone-and-log structures replacing old pre-Change frame for the most part.
The towering roof-upon-roof of the hof was in the center of the town’s only open square, with its gilded carvings and dragonheads snarling from the carved rafters. Folk mostly followed their trades in their own homesteads these days, but past the temple lay the part of town down by the Greyflood and the piers which held businesses smelly, smoky or requiring more space; fish-salting works, renderies that turned whale oil into soap or candles, foundries, worksheds, tan-yards, timber-yards. The half-built ribs of a ship rested on a slipway.
A low palisade with gates marked off the town from the docks proper, much lower than the double log wall that ringed the town elsewhere. Most of the seaward defenses were out in the water, a sunken pattern of great logs set in the harbor bed tipped with steel blades waiting to rip out the belly of any ship that didn’t know their pattern. Blockhouses at either seaward end of the wall held catapults that could smash boats trying to row foemen ashore. The fishing boats were mostly hauled up in long sheds, but the larger salvage craft rested at their moorings, the long slender bowsprits reaching over the cobbled roadway. The savage figureheads below were dismounted and stowed; no sense in risking the landwights’ anger.
Nearly anyone who could walk at all was behind the fighting levy, peering past shoulders and shields and spears. Thick patches of mist lay on the estuary’s ruffled gray water this morning; warmer water was coming in from the south, meeting the still-strong hand of winter. Then the tips of two masts appeared, ghosting slowly forward under the slight onshore breeze.
“Schooner,” Kalk muttered, peering; his sight was still keen for distant things. “Big one . . . Moorish-built . . . no, it’s not that one we captured and Artos took south! Close, but not that one . . . looks like she took some damage somewhere ...”
The crowd tensed, then broke into a hum as a flag appeared at the mainmast; blue, with a green white-topped mountain, overlaid with a longsword whose guard was the crescent moon. Anchors rattled and splashed, and the ship swung steady, pitching slightly with the waves. A tall man sprang to stand on the frame of the bow-catapult, standing easy as a cat on the slippery moving metal. Red-gold hair hung to his armored shoulders, a bright dash in a world of gray and brown and dark green.
Then he drew his sword. A low murmur of awe went through the watchers at the silvery flash of blade and pommel.
“Hail!” someone shouted, and in a moment the crowd had taken it up:
“Hail! Hail!”
Heidhveig shivered a little and drew the cloak closer with her gloved hands. There was a glitter to the steel that was like music—like trumpets and drums, like the silver chime of bells on the bridles of destriers, a song that could seize the hearts of men and transfigure them.
“More potent than Tyrfing, forged for the hand of a King,” she quoted softly: those had been the High One’s words, spoken through her while she was in trance on the seidhjallr, the Chair of Magic.
“What do You plan now, old man? Your daughters will bring you many a hero before this is finished.”
The rhythmic shouting broke apart in cheers, and boats set out to shuttle the crew ashore. Heidhveig waited, leaning on her raven-headed staff until Artos came through. Gundridh was riding on his shoulders, yelling shrilly and waving his flat raven-plumed Scots bonnet in the air, and the same frank grin she remembered was on his face. It died as he swung the child down and faced her, bowing his bright head for an instant.
“Merry met again, Lady Heidhveig,” he said gravely, and put the back of his right fist to his forehead for a moment.
She met his blue-green gaze and then bowed herself, more deeply.
“Come heil, Artos King,” she said, using the formal greeting from the old tongue.
Some buried fragment of her wondered what the young woman she’d been a lifetime and an age ago in Berkeley would have thought if she could have seen this moment. The rest of her was entirely grave.
His mouth quirked a little. “Not King in this land,” he said.
“But King indeed,” she said. “You’ve changed.”
A matter-of-fact nod, and the soft burring lilt went on:
“That I have, Lady. For a man must suit himself to the work fate and the Powers give him. I led a band of friends to find the Sword. Find it I did; and now I must raise a host, win a war, and found a kingdom!”
“Hopefully you won’t need to fight a dragon as well,” she said dryly.
“That too, Lady. That too—though not one with scales or wings, perhaps.”
They bustled him and his folk back to her house; the talk went on through the afternoon and into the early dark. By then the dinner trestles had been set up, and besides her own family others were drifting in to hear the tale, and of course you couldn’t refuse hospitality. She winced slightly at the expense as plate after plate of basted ribs and sizzling pork chops came out, piles of sausage and platters of French fries and round rye loaves and butter.
This wasn’t the mead-hall of a godhi, a ring-giving drighten chief; it was just a big house. A godhi was expected to be openhanded to all comers, but he had his own lands and the scot from his yeoman followers to supply the means. And this had been a hard winter in Kalksthorpe, with their losses from the attack; late winter and spring were the hungry times in Norrheim anyway. Her family’s share of the corsair ship’s cargo would help, but in a country as thinly peopled as theirs it would take time to translate it into things they could eat and use.
Her mouth quirked a little. She’d loved the old stories even before she came to the old Gods, but the people in them had seemed a little crazed for booty at times. It wasn’t until you’d lived in something like their world that you understood how thin the margin could be between comfort and desperation, and how important it was to build up a reserve. Nor would anyone who’d survived the first Change Year ever take food for granted again.
Though most of her neighbors were at least bringing along a dish, fish casseroles, a ham, loaves, butter, cheese. Another thing you learned in these times was how much you depended on other folk, for all that Norrheimers boasted of their independence. Artos-Rudi and his companions tore into the dinner with t
he thoughtless voracity of the young and active who’d also been on short commons for some time.
“The winds were against us much of the time,” Artos finished. “With the ship so crowded we were weary and no mistake, by the time we made the Greyflood! And hungry!”
A hammering came at the front of the house. The buzz of conversation died down. The lanterns and candles guttered in the sudden draught; someone had pushed through the inner vestibule before the outer door closed, spilling heat. Her heart hammered, almost painfully.
She didn’t recognize the man; from the cut of his clothes he came from far inland, in the farmlands where most of the Norrheimers dwelt. He was young, just old enough for a downy show of brown whiskers on his cheeks and chin, the hood of his parka thrown back to show longish hair held by a leather headband. Youngster he might be, but a sword and seax-knife hung at his belt, and a round shield over the pack on his back. His boots had the raised toe of the type you wore on skis.
It was the arrow in his hand that drew everyone’s eyes, and brought shocked silence. It was painted bloodred from tip to fletching. That was shown for one thing only; to call out the full levy of Norrheim against a foe who threatened them all.
“War!” he shouted, shaking it in the air; his voice cracked across, and that made him pause, swallow and continue with a little more calm:
“The Bekwa have come through the north woods and crossed the border, thousands, killing, burning. A trollkjerring leads them, a sorcerer in a red robe, and the terror of him makes brave men run; the troll-men swear they will eat our hearts and lay all Norrheim waste. Godhi Bjarni Eriksson calls the fighting-men of all the tribes to rally to him—in Staghorn Dale, at the Rock of the Twin Horsemen—or we will be overrun piecemeal. Every true man. And he asks you, holy seidhkona, to come as well to battle the red-robe.”