Still, a place where few men went was a good place to go and even Olaf could not deny that, as they found a suitable mooring and made their way towards a farmstead up on a hill which was the only dwelling within sight. For it was better to square things with whoever lived there first than have them running off scared into the fen or telling others that outlanders had come to Tau.
The farmer’s name was Roldar and he did not care for people much, which was probably why he lived out there in a place where men feared to go. Roldar had a wife called Sigyn, two surly sons named Aleif and Alvi, and a big-boned daughter called Hetha, who Svein made great efforts not to look at, which was a sure sign that he liked the look of her very much. For her part Hetha filled Svein’s ale cup to the very brim so that he had to slurp at it or spill it. Then, before the night meal, she made a show of removing the knotted kerchief from her head to re-braid her straw-coloured hair and all for Svein’s benefit, until her mother hissed at her to come and help her serve up the broth to their guests.
‘So have you seen any ghosts out there?’ Loker asked Roldar before he had even put his lips to the fish broth. They were eating outside because there was not the room for them all by Sigyn’s hearth. It was plenty warm enough and though midsummer had passed the days were still pleasant and long. ‘Any haugbui climbing from his grave or draugr wandering the marsh?’
Olaf glowered because they had hardly begun to talk with Roldar yet and this was not how he had planned to start it.
Roldar matched Olaf with a frown of his own but it was Alvi who nodded, thumbing behind him to the sheep pens and the marshland beyond. ‘I’ve seen one,’ the lad said, ‘three winters ago when I was mending fences out there. Blue as death it was, and swollen to the size of an ox, its eyes glowing in the moonlight.’ His brother scoffed but Alvi took no notice. ‘It was sniffing round the sheep and would have carried two of them off, one under each arm, had I not challenged it and thrown my axe.’
‘We are lucky to have such a warrior to protect us,’ Aleif said through tight lips, earning a black look from their mother who had it all over her that she preferred Alvi to his elder brother.
‘And a skald too,’ Olaf muttered under his breath, which got a grin from Aleif.
‘There are old burial mounds close by?’ Asgot asked.
Aslak touched the intricate black soot swirls of Thór’s hammer Mjöllnir, which he had etched into his left forearm just up from the wrist, for he was uncomfortable with all this talk of ghosts and spirits.
‘It would not surprise me,’ Svein rumbled under his breath to Sigurd, ‘for now and then I keep getting a nose full of something foul.’
Though they all knew this had less to do with mound dwellers and more to do with the cesspit that had been dug too close to the house. Why it was so close was anybody’s guess, for it was not as if Roldar had neighbours or a shortage of land. But then if there were draugar nearabouts, who would want to meet one in the black of night while emptying buckets or bowels?
‘Seeing as you seem so keen to talk of such things,’ Roldar said, frowning, ‘there was a man two days’ walk from here who was killed by such a creature.’ This lifted eyebrows, Sigurd noticed. ‘His kin found him with all his bones crushed and his animals dead on the ground around him. Folk said the beasts had been ridden to death.’
Asgot nodded as though he had heard such tales many times. ‘The dead long for the things of life. They envy the living.’
‘I don’t see why they would envy us,’ Sigyn told him, ‘for as you can see we do not have much.’ Sigurd heard an edge of bitterness in that aimed at her husband, but mostly the words were for her guests. For though the couple had given them what hospitality they could, a barn and clean straw, food and ale, they would have been wary of eight strangers even had those men not been carrying more sharp steel than you would find in a dozen smithies. Especially with them having a daughter in the house.
‘We will pay you for your hospitality,’ Sigurd reassured her, glancing at Roldar, ‘and pay well too. But you will tell no one that we are here.’
‘It would be bad if you did,’ Olaf put in, his eyes adding the bad for you part that might have put a cloud over the meal if he’d said it aloud.
‘Who would we tell?’ Roldar asked with a shrug. ‘The only time I leave this place is to sell my wool at the market over there at Rennisøy and sometimes to the folk of Finnøy. I’ve been known to go to Jørpeland too, but they have their own wool and I rarely get a price that’s worth the trip.’ He looked from Olaf to Sigurd. ‘Besides which, I don’t know who you are and neither do I need to know.’ The first sign of a smile appeared in his brown beard then. ‘Although I am asking myself if you have got yourselves on the wrong side of King Gorm.’
‘Never mind which side of what bloody ring-giver we’re on,’ Olaf growled, and the farmer paled, showing his palms.
‘We do not want to know any of it, my lords,’ Sigyn said, which showed that she was not short of sense for all that she might as well have been penned in with the sheep and gained as much worldly experience. ‘But we would hope to see some of the silver you mentioned before we slaughter one of our beasts for your meat,’ she said.
Solveig shot Hendil a look that said She’s got bigger balls than you as Sigurd took a thumb-sized piece of hacksilver from his purse and tossed it to Roldar who was lucky not to choke on the thing, his mouth being agape at the sight of it.
‘We’ll want to be well fed,’ Sigurd said, which got a nod of agreement from Svein although he had one eye on Hetha who was taking Olaf’s and Loker’s bowls back inside to fill them again.
‘And I want you to take us into the fen,’ Asgot said, eyes like rivets on Roldar. Sigurd was surprised the godi had sat on the thing this long. For a long moment Roldar looked as though his thoughts were pulling in opposite directions, even with that hacksilver cold against his palm, then he looked again to his wife for guidance.
Before Sigyn could speak, her younger son did.
‘I’ll take you,’ Alvi said, glancing at his father, who clearly wanted to ask why they wanted to go into the fen but didn’t dare now.
‘And why are we going into the fen, Asgot?’ Olaf asked instead, frowning and licking his spoon while he waited for Hetha to return with more broth.
‘The boy knows why,’ Asgot replied, nodding towards Sigurd, his own thin lips drawing together tighter than Sigurd had sewn Solveig’s chest wound. All eyes turned Sigurd’s way, including both of Svein’s which was the first time since they had got there.
‘Does he now?’ Olaf said, his right eyebrow curving like Bifröst as Hetha returned with his food, looking at them all in turn as if she had walked into the middle of a hólmgang.
Asgot said no more about it and neither would Sigurd. Not yet. Olaf and the others would have to wait despite their fish-hook stares trying to haul it out of him.
And the next day after the morning meal they went into the fen.
It was still more dark than light when they set off east past the animal enclosures and across the close-cropped pasture, dew soaking their shoes. Then on through longer grass thronging with yellow flowers and flecked with cuckoo spit that streaked their breeks, and glistening spider webs that shimmered in the breeze. They passed the burial mounds which Roldar and his kin had spoken of the previous night, making sure to give them a wide berth so as not to risk disturbing the corpses who dwelt in them. Then on into the salt marsh, the air streaked blue and green with dragonflies and thick with clouds of biting insects. Here and there the reed beds were beginning to bustle with wading birds, but where there were no birds the tall plants stood still and silent as time itself.
‘I steer your father’s ships for years, loading and unloading Little-Elk’s ballast with these very hands more times than I can recall and up to my arse in the bilge,’ Solveig moaned at Sigurd, ‘and yet on my second trip out with you I ruin my damn shoes.’ He shook his head, the two grey ropes of his hair swishing. ‘Survive a bloody chest gash
and the worst stitching I’ve ever seen, only to die of foot rot in this hole.’
‘It was your idea to come here, old man,’ Olaf reminded him, wincing as his own foot sank in the brackish water. He had not brought his brynja, for it was not men they were expecting to find, though they had all brought spears, which were useful as staffs if nothing else.
‘Aye, so it was,’ Solveig said, shooting Asgot a glower.
The farmer’s boy Alvi led and Asgot, who had a rope looped over his shoulder in case anyone got stuck in the fen, walked behind him. The godi carried a drum too, strung from the belt over his left shoulder so that it hung in the small of his back beside his nestbaggin. He had made the thing in Rennisøy when Solveig and Hendil had gone to buy food for their journey and it was no bigger than the first shield Sigurd’s father had made him when he was yet learning his words. A thing of reindeer hide and birchwood, Asgot had painted on its face the tree Yggdrasil with the Nine Worlds, and from its sides he had hung various tokens and charms including animal bones and rune stones. On the back, inside the frame, he had hung a strand of seed casings and a raven’s foot, and Asgot said this drum would be useful to appease the fen spirit, which no one thought was a bad thing.
Sigurd, Olaf and the rest followed, trudging their way beside the snake-coils of a stream, one of hundreds that fed sea water deep into the marsh and beyond like the countless roots of some great tree. ‘From here if you keep your eyes open you might see a corpse candle,’ Alvi said, by which he meant the lanterns that guard the barrows of the ancient folk. ‘But I have something even better to show you,’ he said, grinning. ‘Not far now.’
And though their eyes were never still, their tongues for the most part were, as the shallow weed-bristled water deepened, becoming home to woody trees and mosses thick as Olaf’s beard. For men were not generally welcome in fens and not even Olaf would say that he did not believe in the malevolent spirits that lived there. They were places that were neither fully earth nor water and this made them passages between worlds, so that the times you went into such places you did so respectfully and only to leave offerings before leaving just as respectfully. All men knew this and Sigurd, who could not think of such a place without thinking of the tale of Beowulf, could feel the foreboding seiðr as heavy as wet clothes on his back.
‘Fens have ways of guarding themselves from humans,’ his mother had told him as a child. ‘But we can appease the spirits that dwell in them with offerings. Gifts which the marsh will suck into its muddy depths.’
With the rising sun came rising mist, thickening the air that smelt of death and decay, so that Hendil asked Asgot if he thought it could be dragon’s breath that hung around them, tainted by the rotting flesh of the men it had eaten. But Loker pointed out that this could not be so for there were no men hereabouts for any dragon to eat and that the smell was more likely to be coming from Svein’s backside.
The chuckles this stirred were welcome to Sigurd’s ears, for a moment lifting the heavy shroud which seemed to stifle the land here. But soon enough teeth were clamped shut once more and they were simply nine men intruding into a place of silence, stillness and death.
‘Here,’ Alvi hissed eventually, ‘here it is.’ The rasp of his voice was cut with awe and he leant in to Asgot and Sigurd, close enough that Sigurd smelt his ale- and cheese-soured breath. ‘I found him when I came here to dig the peat.’
‘Him?’ Svein said loud enough to earn black looks from Asgot and Alvi both. Alvi had stopped by a gnarled old alder tree and now pointed down into the water a spit away, his eyes as round as a fish’s mouth on a hook. At first Sigurd saw nothing and was about to say as much when suddenly he saw it all.
‘Frigg’s arse,’ Aslak gasped, recoiling as though snake-bitten.
There was a man below the surface, pale as the barkless alder, white lips tight as ship’s caulking to keep out the water, eyes closed so that Sigurd guessed that Alvi had whispered because he feared those eyes might snap open, that the man was merely asleep and might wake any moment.
‘If you look closely you will see there is a rope around his neck,’ Alvi said.
Sigurd could see the rope and he guessed that someone had hauled the man into the fen by it then used it to hang him from the alder. Or perhaps there was a hidden wound beneath his still-bearded chin and they had slit his throat.
‘Is he a kinsman of yours, Svein?’ Hendil murmured through a grin, for the man’s beard and hair, floating around his corpse-white face, was as red as Svein’s.
‘You can ask him when I throw you in there with him,’ Svein said under his breath.
‘Hold your tongues, fools!’ Asgot rasped like a sword from a scabbard. ‘This offering was likely made long before your grandfathers’ grandfathers were hanging from their mother’s tit.’ He pointed a finger at them upon which he wore rings made from human hair. ‘I’d wager the spirits here would welcome two fresh corpses.’
‘There are weapons hereabouts too,’ Alvi said, never taking his eyes from the man beneath the surface, ‘though my mother said I must never touch them. Not even were the blades of hammered silver and the hilts solid gold.’
‘Your mother is a wise woman,’ Olaf said, slapping his neck to squash an insect that was biting him. ‘We’re done here, let’s move on.’ He pulled his foot from the sucking mire with a squelch and pop that released a foul stench. ‘Before this place thinks we’re offering ourselves up.’
Sigurd glanced at Asgot who raised a grey eyebrow before turning to follow Alvi. And Sigurd took one last look at the bog corpse and the braided leather noose around his neck, then touched the Óðin amulet hanging from his own neck for luck and turned east towards the veiled sun to follow the others.
In some places there were ancient planks laid on stakes, walkways through the weed-snarled water and stunted trees, but mostly these had long rotted away and you trusted your weight on one at your peril. But Alvi seemed to know where he was going, which earned him Sigurd’s respect for the young man must have had stones for balls to come into this place alone. Perhaps he really had seen a draugr off with his axe three winters ago. Perhaps it was the lad’s bravery and not his storytelling which his brother was jealous of.
By the time Sigurd’s breeks had wicked water right up to the crotch and Svein had offered to carry old Solveig if it would put an end to his mumbled curses which ground on like a quern stone before a feast, they had come further than Alvi had dared come before. Even with the mist and the gloom that seemed to cling to the fen as thick as the stench raised with every sucking step, they could tell by the hazed sun that it was well past midday.
‘Well that’s it then,’ Alvi said with a shrug, turning back to face the others. Clearly he had never gone further because of the time it would take to get safely home again and only a fool would risk being caught out there when night fell, as Loker reminded them now.
‘What does that make us then?’ Olaf said, wiping sweat from his brow and glaring at Asgot. ‘Is this spot not good enough for whatever spells you’ve got bubbling in that thought pot of yours, godi?’
Asgot glanced around then closed his eyes for a long moment before opening them on Sigurd. ‘This would be a good place to make a modest offering,’ he said. Near by, some creature plopped into the water. Somewhere far above an eagle cried but when Sigurd looked up he could see nothing in the wan sky. He nodded, reached into the purse on his belt and took out a half of a twisted arm ring, the rest of it having been spent by someone long ago.
Asgot’s brow furrowed. ‘Perhaps not quite so modest,’ he said, and Sigurd did not need to look at Olaf to know the look that was on his face. He would be thinking this was silver they could use to buy food and weapons or even spearmen if it came to that. Nevertheless, Sigurd had not come here to show the gods and the spirits what a careful and thrifty man he was. He found another piece of silver, as long as his hand, curved slightly but thinner than his finger. He guessed it had been part of a beautiful stirrup once and he wondered a
fter the man rich enough to own such a thing even as he handed it to Asgot.
‘Better,’ the godi said, weighing both pieces in his hands that were the scales by which he did his business with the gods. ‘Normally we would woo this fen like a chieftain’s favourite daughter,’ he said.
‘With mead then!’ Svein put in.
‘And a good saga tale,’ Aslak suggested.
But Asgot ignored them. ‘We would make several offerings and ask for nothing in return. Over time we would gain the spirit’s favour. We would not rush it.’ He put the silver to his nose as though smelling it, then tossed both pieces into a sinkhole and they vanished without so much as a glint into the blackness. Into the world beyond.
‘If I’m owed silver I prefer not to wait for it,’ Olaf said and no one could argue with that. Though perhaps they were too busy peering into the sinkhole, especially Alvi who had likely never seen so much silver, let alone so much silver thrown into a hole. Sigurd wondered if the young man might find the courage to come back to this place and jump in the hole himself to fish the plunder back out.
‘Now what?’ Solveig asked, clapping his hands before his face and wiping the squashed insect down the front of his breeks.
‘I’ve known Asgot long enough to wager my beard that we did not come all the way out here rotting our bollocks off to appease some fen spirit,’ Olaf said. All eyes turned not to Asgot but to Sigurd. ‘For one thing, that much silver can only mean that we’re staying out here tonight,’ Olaf went on, ‘which if you ask me is not even good enough to be a bad idea.’
Neither Sigurd nor Asgot denied this.
‘We are going to stay out here tonight?’ Loker said, wide-eyed.
‘Aye, and for that much silver this fen spirit ought to lay on meat, mead and women,’ Olaf said, then turned back to Asgot and Sigurd, planting his spear’s butt into the swamp. ‘So now you two have got us out here, far enough from food, ale and comfort to know that we’d likely sink up to our necks if we tried to go back alone, why don’t you put us out of our misery, hey? Poor Solveig here has never been so far from the sea.’ He cupped a hand to his ear. ‘Listen. You will hear Rán sobbing because she misses the old dog.’
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