Asgot has tricked me, his mind screamed. I am his sacrifice. I am the price they are paying to lift the gods’ curse. He struggled and screamed and yet there was no movement and no sound. It was as if the fen were swallowing him and this horrifying truth churned a pool of despair deep in Sigurd’s soul.
And then he knew he was drowning, thought he must have fallen into the fen and that rotten water was pouring into his throat and killing him and he could do nothing about it.
‘Drink, Sigurd.’ The voice was close. ‘Drink, boy. It will help.’
And so Sigurd drank.
The beat of the drum was slow at first, like the ebb and flow of the tide. Sigurd noticed his own heart aligning with its beat and then it got faster, sounding like the hooves of a running reindeer striking the earth and Sigurd was riding that beast, being borne across worlds. The rhythm was hoof-beats and the beating of a bird’s wings. It was sunrise and sunset, rain and wind, sleeping and waking. Life and death. It was the in and out of the act between a man and a woman.
It was the Norns, Urd, Verdandi and Skuld weaving the wyrds of men’s lives, and Sigurd began to see the warp of the threads as what is, what was, and what will be, and the weft as what he would choose to do. But then he saw that the great loom was strung with intestines and weighted with skulls. The three Spinners were weaving with the blood and guts of men’s lives and he felt the horror of this shiver through his own tortured flesh.
Then he saw the yellow eyes set like polished amber in a great head. He heard the deep guttural growl coming from the creature’s throat and saw the hackles raised on its thickly muscled neck.
The fool’s drumming has brought wolves, Sigurd thought. Or else they smelt the cut in my side.
He waited for the beast’s teeth to puncture his flesh. And yet wasn’t Asgot still beating his drum? Surely the godi would not stand by and watch the wolf devour him.
Darkness swallowed him again like a cold ocean wave.
Then he was in an oak forest, crouching behind a thicket because there was a creature near by snuffling and snorting and coming closer. He held his breath and the boar emerged from the undergrowth, a mass of stiff bristling black fur and muscle, those great gut-ripping upper tusks having been ground to sharp edges against the bottom ones.
Moving through the undergrowth, its hide too thick for the biting insects to penetrate, the boar searches for its treats. Even those which are undergound are not safe and will be rooted up. All the world is to be plundered and feasted upon and now the beast sniffed the air and turned its massive head towards Sigurd. Its eyes flamed and it charged, snapping branches, flying across the earth, fearless and fast, and Sigurd knew that nothing could turn it aside. That bristling fury would hit him like a forge hammer, those tusks ripping into the big muscles of his legs. But the boar blurred past him, the wind from it stinging his side below the ribs, and the creature flew into the scrub beside him and was gone.
He let out his breath and looked up and saw through a gap in the canopy a shape soaring against the blue, its barn-door wings from tip to tip longer than a spear, its tail feathers white as snow. He felt the bird’s shadow pass across his face like a cold sea breeze and heard its plaintive call of kli kli kli piercing the sky. Then it too was gone, but Sigurd knew it had been a great sea-eagle, whose talons could snatch fish from the fjord or even a goat or a deer from the hillside.
And then he sank into oblivion again.
He was woken by rain. Cold, fresh, fat drops falling from the leaves and branches above and splashing on his upturned face and into his open mouth. In the distance, far to the east, thunder cracked and rumbled across the sky and seemed to be coming his way.
‘What did you see, Haraldarson?’
Sigurd’s neck was as stiff as a fire iron and he did not try to look down at Asgot. Nor could his mouth form a reply or any shape but the ring which caught the rain that tasted of iron as it mixed with the blood from his cracked lips. For he was bound more by the dreams now than the ropes. They were all over him still, heavy as a brynja and as real as the living tree to which he was lashed. But neither did he want to shrug them off.
‘What did you see, boy?’
He did not want the dreams or visions or whatever they were to dissipate now that he was back with the living again. He wanted them to seep into his bones and marrow, like hearth smoke staining the grain of Eik-hjálmr’s roof beams, because he knew they were important. That they were god-given.
Then the boughs and leaves and the fen were disappearing again, like a boat drifting off into the mist, and Sigurd tried to shout, tried to raise an arm as though he could grasp on to consciousness itself, but his limbs might as well have belonged to the alder for all the mastery he had of them.
His heart was beating fast now. He could feel that well enough. And then there were fingers in his mouth and he thought he was choking but he swallowed what he could and fought for breath. Then came that bitter draught again, scalding his throat, making him retch.
I am going to die, he thought. I will never meet with my father and my brothers and my ancestors in Valhöll. They had good deaths. In the steel-storm. They would have been chosen. I will die here like a fox in a trap and my name will be less than a shadow. To my enemies I will be less than a starling flying through the door of their hall and out through the smoke hole.
The drum again. Beating slowly. It was the stroking of a lover’s hand. It was the pulsing of Sigurd’s blood in his ears. It was his mother stroking his hair when he was a boy and the lullaby she would sing him to sleep.
Mother.
He dreamt of the king of the beasts then, the bear, who the elder folk believed was their older brother because it could stand upright and walk short distances on two legs like a man. Gods but this bear was a proud beast! It had ranged far from its cave on the hunt for honey but when at last it came to the place, the bear saw that the hive was protected by a swarm of raging bees. The noise from them filled the world, the beating of ten thousand little wings making the blood in his veins tremble.
‘Will you endure the swarm for that sweet plunder?’ Sigurd asked the bear. ‘You know that they will sting you terribly. Perhaps they will kill you.’
The bear turned to Sigurd and laughed like a man and it was the sound of thunder.
A breeze against his temple, running between his braids and through his beard to cool his scalp and face. The wind from a great raven beating the air with its wings so close to Sigurd’s head that his eyes were full of its purple, green and black gloss and its thick beak.
I am not dead, corpse-eater, his mind told the bird. If you have come to feast on me you will be disappointed.
But then Óðin Draugadróttin, Lord of the Dead, had two ravens. The raven god would send Hugin and Munin out at daybreak and in the evening they would return to perch on his shoulders and speak into his ears all that they had seen. Perhaps this bird was one of them. It had come not to peck out his eyes but to see for itself this son of a jarl hanging from a tree.
Tell your master what you have seen here then, bird. The All-father loves chaos. Then let him follow me.
Like the tide, awareness came and receded. Sometimes he was in terrible, unbearable pain, his body trembling as though his bones had turned to ice. At other times he felt nothing at all, and now and then he was entirely free, soaring like a bird, flying fast as an arrow, turning on an updraught and seeing the tops of single oaks and deep green pine forests, the thatch of houses blurred by hearth smoke and the glittering fjords specked with fishing boats.
Perhaps he believed he was soaring like a hawk when Olaf climbed the tree and untied the ropes, leaving one round Sigurd’s chest and beneath his arms so that he could slowly lower him to the others waiting below.
‘We have not finished!’ Sigurd heard as though the voice were far away.
‘Yes we bloody have!’ someone roared. And when Sigurd came round again he was lying in Roldar’s barn on a fur upon a bed of straw.
‘Ho
w you’re still alive, lad, I’ll never know.’
Sigurd’s vision was blurred but even then he knew it was Olaf who was sitting on the stool beside him. Olaf put the cup to Sigurd’s lips and he drank deeply, the sweet honey of the mead recalling his vision of the bear. ‘Sigurd the Lucky.’ Olaf shook his head.
Sigurd shifted to get a look at the cut in his side but he could not see it for they had wound linen around his stomach.
‘There’s no rot,’ Olaf said. ‘But we didn’t sew it. It had stopped bleeding and Asgot kept it clean. Least he could bloody do,’ he said, shooting Asgot a dark look as the godi walked into the barn with another man, the two of them dark shapes against the golden light flooding into the place.
‘Crow-Song?’ Sigurd said, sitting up as Hagal the skald came to stand by the oil lamp hanging from the wall beside Sigurd’s head.
Hagal nodded. ‘Sigurd Haraldarson. I am relieved to see you well after your ordeal.’
‘I am as well as I have ever been,’ Sigurd lied. His head was swimming and he thought he would vomit. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I had Hendil and Loker and Roldar’s other boy Aleif out looking for him the day after we strung you up,’ Olaf said. ‘It seemed to me that if you were going to do something that only a god would be mad enough to do, we ought to have a skald around to weave the tale of it.’ He thumbed towards Hagal. ‘Unfortunately I don’t know of any decent skalds so we had to make do with Crow-Song.’
Hagal ignored the insult. He had earned his byname Crow-Song on account of his stories which men said were told bluntly and without polish or eloquence, though Hagal himself insisted the name referred to his knack of finding trinkets and treasures in the world around him and turning them into shining tales.
‘I would not have believed it if I had not seen it with my own eyes,’ the skald said, those eyes bulging like boiled gulls’ eggs.
‘They found him in some hole up in Tysvær, up to his beard in ale and notch and no doubt taking some nithing’s silver in return for weaving him into a saga tale he had nothing to do with.’
‘Would you have me starve, Olaf?’ Crow-Song asked. ‘There are fewer jarls and halls around these days and I make a living where I can.’
‘Watch your tongue, skald,’ Olaf growled and Hagal at least had the decency to flush beneath his beard at that.
‘How long?’ Sigurd asked, looking from Olaf to Asgot.
‘Six days,’ Olaf said. ‘Asgot would have let you hang there for nine but I was thinking that when I meet your father again in the Spear-Lord’s hall I would have no decent explanation for letting you die tied to a tree in some stinking bog.’
‘Is six days long enough?’ Sigurd asked Asgot. He took the cup from Olaf and drank some more, hoping to wash down the bile that was rising like fire in his throat. But his arm was shaking and the ale spilled onto the straw, so Olaf helped guide the cup to his lips.
‘It had better be,’ Olaf said.
‘The Alder Man came on the third night,’ Asgot said, his wolf eyes sparking like steel and flint. ‘He was thin as a switch, dressed in furs with birch-pale skin stretched over the bones of his face.’
‘Sounds to me like you saw your own reflection in the mire,’ Olaf put in. But Hagal was lapping this up like a cat tonguing milk.
Asgot curled his lip. ‘His eyes were red and his face was etched with the valknuter which is old One-Eye’s own sign. He carried a bow and a knife on his back and in his hands a bowl of red paint.’ He nodded at Sigurd, raising a hair-ringed finger towards Sigurd’s face. ‘He marked you.’
Sigurd raised a hand to his own cheek and felt, above the beard line, a gritty coating on the skin. He scratched at it and saw red ochre beneath his fingernails.
‘The Alder Man has three powers, Sigurd,’ Crow-Song took up in his best saga voice. Olaf and Asgot both looked at him and he shrugged. ‘When I am not talking I am listening,’ he said by way of explanation.
‘Crow-Song is right,’ Asgot said to Sigurd. ‘The Alder Man can help you connect with animal spirits, as his red side offers. This is his gift to hunters and trackers. He can help you connect with the spirits of a place, as his green side offers. This is useful if you want to appease the dead.’
‘That could have saved us some silver then,’ Olaf murmured.
‘And he can help you remain hidden. Invisible to your enemies,’ Asgot said, ‘as his brown side offers.’ He held up his finger again. ‘But he will only give you one of these gifts, and then only if he likes you.’
Sigurd’s mind flooded with the visions he had received and he glared at Asgot.
‘That was some boar, hey, Sigurd?’ the godi said, his eyes on Sigurd’s like one ship strake upon another.
‘You saw it too?’ Sigurd asked. How could it be that Asgot had shared the visions? Or some of them at least. But then who knew what was possible where the godi was concerned.
‘When the Alder Man put his mark on you he told you something,’ Asgot said. ‘Do you remember what it was?’
Sigurd shook his head. Then three words dropped into his mind like stones into a pool. ‘Blood and fire,’ he said, as surprised to say them as Olaf looked to hear them.
Asgot’s lips pulled back from his teeth and he laughed. It was a sound to chill the blood and have Hagal touching the iron pommel of his sword. ‘Then the Hangaguð is watching you, Sigurd,’ the godi said, and any other time Óðin’s byname of the Hanged God would have washed over him, but now it made him shiver.
‘Does that mean we can leave this spirit-ridden place and go and break some heads?’ Olaf asked, standing and tucking his thumbs into his belt.
Svein appeared at the door, teeth flashing in his beard at seeing Sigurd alive and sitting up. ‘Are we leaving?’ the giant asked.
‘Aye, the moment your bone-headed friend can stand on his own two feet,’ Olaf replied, half smiling.
‘Let us leave today and I’ll carry him!’ Svein said.
And Sigurd tasted blood on his tongue as his own cracked lips spread in a wide grin. Because the time for hiding was over.
And the gods were watching.
CHAPTER TEN
THE WOMAN CRADLED in her arms weighed less than a child, less even than the brynja Valgerd wore, and this was the last nail driven into Valgerd’s heart, for she knew it meant that the woman did not have long left. Days at most. Probably less.
‘Are you still with me?’ she asked and saw a flicker beneath the closed eyelids that told her that Sygrutha had not given in to death yet, for all that it was over her like a scent. As a völva Sygrutha had the gift of foretelling, could summon spirits to show her the future, and yet she had not foreseen her own death. Or perhaps she had but had chosen not to share that with Valgerd, which was a sharp stick poked into the beehive of Valgerd’s anger then. But the face of the bundle in her arms dissipated the ire. Even now. Like it always did.
‘We are nearly there,’ she said. She had walked this path a thousand times and often in the dark, but now she placed every foot with exquisite care, not because she thought she might fall, but because she feared every little jolt must hurt the völva who was nothing now but skin and bones.
But Sygrutha had been beautiful. She had been dark-haired, dark-eyed and had a quickness for which Valgerd had given her the name Sygrutha ‘Ikorni’, meaning ‘squirrel’, though she never called her that in range of others’ ears for such things were not to be shared. Besides which, Sygrutha had protested at the name, saying that she hoped Valgerd thought her more beautiful than a squirrel. But she had not minded really, Valgerd knew, for there was more in the name than that. It was a squirrel named Ratatosk that ran up and down the World Tree carrying messages between the eagle in the upper branches and the serpent, Nídhögg, which gnaws away at Yggdrasil’s roots.
‘You are a messenger between worlds,’ Valgerd would soothe as Sygrutha feigned umbrage. ‘You can move from ice to fire and everywhere in between. My Ikorni.’
And Sygrutha cou
ld not help but smile or gnash her teeth or ask if Valgerd had any acorns for her to eat.
‘Not far now,’ Valgerd said and this time there was no stirring beneath the eyelids and Valgerd stopped, feeling the blood drain from her own face and vital organs, and stood there on the well-worn track hardly daring to look at Sygrutha’s face for fear of seeing death there at last. But in that moment of stillness she felt the völva’s heartbeat travel through the withered flesh of her thigh. A tremor in the blood no stronger than the beat of a moth’s wing, yet more precious than anything in the world.
‘You cannot have her yet,’ Valgerd murmured, as though Freyja the seiðr mistress stood beside them, as if the goddess held her arms out ready to take Sygrutha from her. ‘Not yet,’ she said, an edge of threat in the words this time. And yet it was too late for all that. Valgerd’s whole life had been given to the protection of the völva, as her mother’s had before her to Svanhvita the last spae-wife of the spring. And the gods knew she had done her best, fought spear warriors and outlaws, and even a bear once, the crazed beast having answered a birthing woman’s cries with tooth and claw. But she had failed to protect Sygrutha from death. Her sword and spear-craft and her hard-won skill had been useless in the end.
She walked on. Faster as the roar of the waterfall, which Sygrutha had taught her was the voices of the forskarlar, the fall spirits, singing and shouting their mirth and fury, grew stronger and the path became slick from where the breeze had carried the mist from the torrent back up over the ridge. They passed between a stand of birch whose leaves flickered silver and green, and then down through the long grass and boggy ground which tried to claim Valgerd with every plunging step. The air this close to the waterfall was cold and crisp like the air after a heavy rainstorm, but scented with earth and moss too, and Valgerd drank it in now because she knew they would never share that draught again.
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