A Gathering of Ravens

by Scott Oden

  And it is sound that catches her. Sound like salt wrack slapping against a hull, like the creak of oarlocks; sound caresses her trembling limbs; horns blare and pipes skirl, their discordant song punctuated by the scrape of iron on bone. Beneath it all, staccato throbs like the beating of an immense heart, matching the rhythm set by the thudding of the distant drum. She listens as the sounds weave into a tale, a ballad of iron …

  Wild was Grimnir | when he arose,

  And when his snake-cunning | foeman he missed;

  He shook his head, | his hair was bristling,

  As the son of Náinn | about him sought.

  The glow in Náli’s eyes | was like forge-gledes,

  As bloody revenge | for his brothers burned deep;

  Under the ash he waited | and gathered his strength,

  His teeth he gnashed | and his breath was venom.

  Náli spake:

  “Give heed, Bálegyr’s son, | for here I am

  No starveling runt;

  False is thy tongue, | and soon shalt thou find

  That it sings thee an evil song.”

  Grimnir spake:

  “Bold in the shadows, | is Náinn’s bastard,

  Náli, adorner of benches!

  Come forth and fight, | if thou would best me,

  And I shall teach thee the dirge of the vanquished!”

  Swift as a storm | they smote together,

  In the murk-wrought tangle | at Miðgarðr’s edge;

  Born of hate was Grimnir, | Nótt’s slayer,

  Who set his corpse-wand | against the flesh of Ymir.

  In the hilt was hatred, | in the haft was treachery,

  In the point was fear, | for the skrælingr’s foe;

  On the blade were carved | blood-flecked runes,

  And a serpent’s tail | round the flat was twisted.

  Ill went the grappling | for the pale son of Náinn,

  Who ran from the fray | on craven’s feet;

  Dreadful and dark-cheeked | came Bálegyr’s get,

  Into the maggot-holes | that wounded Yggr’s steed.

  (Then Grimnir spake, | scorn dripping from the gates of breath:

  “Why dost thou flee, beardling? | Hast thou

  No stomach for Odin’s weather?”)

  In the shadows Náli chanted, | weaving potent charms;

  He sang a song of darkness | and reddening fires,

  And its echo reached | the deeps of Niðafjoll

  To rouse from slumber | Hel’s draugr-serpent.

  Wreathed in corpse-reek, | came the fierce-raging wyrm

  And the Ash-Road groaned | ’neath its evil weight;

  The skrælingr met it, | war-grim and bitter,

  To test night-bringer’s edge | against bone-clad coils.

  (Then Náli spake, | to match scorn with scorn:

  “Where is thy boast, cousin, | now that

  The weather has turned against thee?”)

  With clash of iron, | mighty hammer on anvil,

  The strife-bringer | twisted sore in wrath;

  Away sprang Grimnir, | though not in fear,

  For Fate had spared his foe | till Gjallarhorn’s song.

  Away sprang Bálegyr’s son, | across the Ash-Road

  With shoulders cloaked | in the skin of the wolf-father;

  The serpent gave chase, | goaded by Náli,

  And with him | came the Doom of Odin.

  Sound and darkness fade, leaving her awash in green-tinged light—not the eerie glow of storm wrack like before, but rather the gleam of sunlight through a canopy of leaves. She opens her eyes and dares to try and perceive of her surroundings …

  She is supine upon a branch—the smallest branch of a tree so vast and complex that her mind cannot fully comprehend its enormity; even still, two horse-drawn wagons could traverse this branch abreast and one need never worry the other about slipping over the edge. She stands, her legs unsteady. The branch juts forth from an impossible tangle of limbs, follows a convoluted path, and then plunges back into that leafy mass. Beyond, she discerns an eternal darkness stippled with stars yet brimming with radiance, a universe of contradictions: a windswept emptiness filled with raucous silence; sterile and desiccated but smelling of moist vegetation; dead yet vibrantly alive. Far above, in the mist-wreathed branches at the edge of her vision, three wood-woven spheres catch her eye; from them streams light like that of cold, caged suns—yellow, green, and white, the shades of spring sunlight filtering through leaf and bough. Each a drey that might encompass a world. Each like the one whose edge she stands upon.

  Without warning, a violent tremor snatches her feet out from under her. She lands hard, the rough bark stripping the skin from her palms; blood wells from these abrasions, filling the air with a rich coppery scent.

  Her blood.

  Her scent.

  She can see the stench rising before her; it drifts and coils like scarlet vapor, a beacon to whatever nameless hunters might prowl the spaces between worlds. She clenches her fists, tries to make it dissipate. She mutters a prayer.

  In answer, there comes an earsplitting howl. She clambers to her feet, suddenly fearful, and heads back the way she came. Barely a half-dozen steps does she take before something explodes from the wall of branches. She skids to a stop.

  Through a veil of dust, she spies a wolf loping toward her. It is a dusky beast, thrice the height of a tall man at the shoulders, with hackles bristling and eyes aflame in the shadow of Miðgarðr.

  Familiar eyes, the angry red hue of a blacksmith’s forge.

  A skrælingr’s eyes.

  And on the wolf’s heels comes a writhing horror, a bone-scaled serpent drawn from the abyss of nightmare—a son of Níðhoggr, feral-eyed and pale; she reckons by its ravenous gaze that no amount of flesh can slake its hunger. But it will try. And it will start with her. Giving an inarticulate scream, she turns and runs.

  The wolf is bestride her in a pace, its rank breath hot against her neck; eyes squeezed shut, a prayer on her lips, she braces for the deathblow—glad, on one hand, to die quickly rather than see her flesh dissolved in the serpent’s maw. But it doesn’t rend her limb from limb. Instead, the beast snatches her up in midstep, cradling her in its fierce jaws as a mother would its cub. Then, without breaking stride, the wolf veers right and springs out over the abyss. For a frozen instant they hang over nothingness. Even on the threshold of death, curiosity draws her eye to the deeps beneath Miðgarðr, to the shadowy roots of Yggðrasil, where for half the span of a heartbeat she glimpses the stone-curbed Well of Urðar and the three women who gather by its waters. They return her scrutiny with equal parts amusement, indifference, and naked spite.

  And then … bone-jarring impact. Claws scrabble and tear at the wood as the wolf seeks purchase, pulling itself up onto the dangerously creaking branch. It glances back, allowing her to see the span it had leapt across, leaving the serpent to writhe and hiss in fury. The wolf gives a low growl, almost like gloating laughter—a sound it chokes off as an eerie shadow falls across the branch. A titan’s shadow.

  With a frenetic burst of speed, the wolf—she a limp rag of flesh in its jaws—launches itself at the point where the branch rejoins the tangled lattice of wood and mud, where an unnatural arch of rune-carved stone lurks beneath a gloomy overhang. The wolf makes a wild lunge for that arch even as the branch shatters and breaks apart under its feet, a victim of the titan’s wrath.

  She screams. It is too far; they will not make it …

  Suddenly, perspectives shift. The scale of this reality distorts, as though sure hands weave a new thread into the fabric of this place. In her mind’s eye, she sees the three women gathered around the Well of Urðar: a crone, carved of gristle and whalebone; a noblewoman, clad in silk and gold; and a thin-shanked girl, sickly and cancerous. Amused, indifferent, and spiteful. And what should have been a plummet into the endless abyss between worlds becomes instead a fall of a different kind: into the darkness beneath the arch, back into the world
of Men.

  Wrapped in soul-searing cold, her ears battered by the clash of iron and the screams of the dying, Étaín fell …

  14

  She did not fall from any great height—simply from standing to prone—but Étaín’s senses convinced her she had traveled an immeasurable distance. She landed hard, pain flaring up through her arms as she tried to catch herself. Something crunched under her, a sickening sound like bones snapping. Étaín lay there on her belly, wrapped in the stench of wood dust and crumbled cerecloth, gasping for breath like a fish cast upon the shore. Chills and spasms racked her body. A harrowing light stabbed into her eyes, drawing a blinding wash of tears.

  “C-Christ … Almighty…” she managed.

  Groaning, Étaín rolled onto her back and struggled to sit, old bones snapping under her hips. For one terrifying instant she remembered: a cairn of skulls falling away beneath her, a one-eyed titan, a ravenous serpent. Clutching at the air in panic, she scrabbled back until her shoulders thumped against a rough stone wall. “Wh-What happened?” Étaín gasped; her eyes widened with shock. “Where … Where are…?”

  She heard a chuckle, then. Peering into the gloom, she discerned a shape sitting across from her, a silhouette in a patch of darker shadow. A chill skated down her spine, forming a cold knot in her belly as she recalled again the vile dwarf Náli—with his grasping fingers and lifeless eyes. “Who’s there?” she whispered. “Grimnir?”

  The figure leaned forward; milky light trickling in from above cast Grimnir’s wolfish face in sharp relief. He tossed his head back. Fetishes of ivory and silver clicked in his stringy black hair, and his eyes gleamed coal-red from beneath dusky brows. “Do I look like that wretched beardling?”

  “Where is he?” Étaín said. She glanced around, her eyes slowly adjusting to the murk. Gone were the dwarf-made lamps and the stone basin with its peculiar blue flames; instead, they sat in a stone-flagged chamber with a low ceiling. Tree roots pushed down from above and in through the walls, gnarled tendrils that long ago shattered a stone sarcophagus set into the center of the chamber. “He … He was behind me. Tried to grab me.” She looked at Grimnir. “Where has he gone…?”

  “To rot in Helheimr, if the Norns be fair.” Grimnir grunted. “Nár! I don’t know where the wretch got off to. But he skinned out of there, quick as you please. Should have knifed that maggot right after he opened the way. Filthy night-skulker!”

  A chill skated down Étaín’s spine, forming a cold knot in her belly. “He must have drugged us … yes, something in the smoke of his fire … some poison or other … some mountebank’s trick to make us think he was a sorcerer, to make us see his visions of blasphemy!”

  “No tricks. No smokes or poisons. No wretched visions. We walked the Ash-Road.” Grimnir rocked back on his haunches. When he spoke again there was a note of reverence in his voice, a tone that reminded her of the respect he’d paid to Hrolf Asgrimm’s son. “The Ash-Road! The limbs of mighty Yggðrasil, whose branches twist and weave through all of creation, from Ásgarðr down to the cold roots of Niflheimr, and the rest of the Nine Worlds. Bálegyr walked it; old Gífr, too, after the Æsir drove my people from Jotunheimr. And now I have walked it.”

  “No!” Étaín shook her head. She stands upon a branch—the smallest branch of a vast tree—far above, three wood-woven spheres—from them streams light like that of cold, caged suns—yellow, green, and white—each a drey that might encompass a world … “Impossible! Your heathen myths are nothing but smoke and mummery—lies whispered by agents of the Devil! I cannot believe—”

  “That’s twice you’ve called me a liar, little fool.” Grimnir rose. “Try it a third time and you’ll regret it.” Unable to stand upright, he slouched and shuffled, kicking aside a pelvis and smashing a skeletal rib cage as he searched for a way out of the chamber. He stopped and glanced sidelong at her. “You can’t believe we walked the Ash-Road, but you can believe your Nailed God walked on water, turned it to wine, and came back from the dead?”

  “Because it is so written.”

  “So-ho! It is written, eh? But you didn’t see him do it, did you? Did your father see him do it? No? Did your mother’s brother see him do it, and then tell the rest of you lot the tale over the council fires? No? But I’m wrong and you—with your miserable books and a paltry score of years to stand on—are right? Even after seeing the Ash-Road with your own blasted eyes?”

  “I saw only the Devil’s handiwork,” she said stubbornly.

  Without warning, Grimnir bent; she watched him snatch something from a pile of debris. As he straightened, he lobbed it at her. Étaín flinched from reflex. The small missile struck her shoulder and bounced into her lap—a heavy, bright bauble, the tongue of a sword belt whose leather had long ago rotted away. Knots woven of gold filigree gleamed as though they were crafted yesterday.

  “Give that to your Nailed God,” he muttered, chuckling. “As payment for the fine wool he’s got covering your eyes.”

  “I pity you,” she said. Étaín did not try to hide her scorn. She was tired of dancing around as though on eggshells for fear she might offend him. “I pity you and I will pray for your salvation.”

  “Save your breath,” Grimnir replied, matching her scorn with his own. “That wretch, Half-Dane, has more need of your pity than I do. His day of reckoning is coming!”

  “Nevertheless, it is you I pity.” Étaín got her legs under her; using roots and jutting stones in the chamber wall, she pulled herself upright. Her limbs yet shook and her vision swam at the edges, but she could stand. “I may be narrow-minded in my thinking; there may be things under Heaven and under earth that I do not understand, things that I fear; things whose existence I will deny to my last breath, but it is not my world that is fading away. You’ve said it yourself: you’re the last of your kind. You claim the Old World is ending, but you need not end with it. Njáll was wrong—in the eyes of Christ, even a devil like you can find redemption. Forget this ridiculous errand of yours, this foolish quest for revenge! Peace and salvation can be yours, simply by asking—”

  Grimnir rounded on her. “Ridiculous, is it? Foolish?” Spittle flew from yellowed fangs; he was on her in a heartbeat, knotting one fist in her hair and dragging her close. “Tell it to the scores of kaunar that bastard betrayed in Jutland, when he led the Spear-Danes against them! Tell it to Hrungnir, my brother, who was murdered by Half-Dane’s hand! The dead don’t clamor for salvation, little fool! They clamor for blood! My brother’s shade shrieks for it, and for vengeance! And that’s what he’ll get, as the gods are my witness!” Grimnir shoved her away. “Peace? Faugh! Keep your Nailed God’s empty promises. I want no part of this milk-blooded world you hymn-singers bring with you.”

  Étaín stumbled back and fought to keep her balance. “It doesn’t matter that you want no part of it,” she replied. “The world is what it is, and unless you plan to cut your own throat you are a part of it. In your father’s world, you might have walked through a tree to cross an ocean, but in our world you needs must have a boat—and the boats we need are to the west. But you tarry about the heart of Sjælland in hopes of what? Finding a magic door to England? Faugh, as you say! Lead us west, and perhaps together we can find a way across the ocean, to where your prey waits!”

  Grimnir, though, merely grunted and shuffled to the far end of the chamber, where a passage doglegged off—presumably leading to the outside world. He vanished; a moment later she heard the impact of his hobnailed sandal on ancient wood. Once. Twice. With the third blow came a splintering sound as that end of the chamber suddenly suffused with light.

  Grimnir laughed. “Who tarries now, foundling?”

  Étaín stifled a sob of frustration. She moved slowly, dragging her feet across the dusty chamber as sharp-toothed hunger gnawed at her belly. She was cold. She was angry. Her heart yet broke for Njáll, her worry for him greater even than her concern for herself. And now this unending nightmare: lost in the wilds of Sjælland and forced to wander until
… until what? Until that wretch decided to listen to her advice? I’ll sooner see winged swine in the heavens! But with a prayer poised on her lips, a plea for this nightmare to end, Étaín followed Grimnir out into the light.

  Rotten splinters of wood crunched underfoot as she emerged from the heart of an ancient chambered cairn—a tall, green howe made more conspicuous by its position at the crest of a low hill. Gnarled ash trees grew around and on top of the cairn, but beyond its perimeter Étaín could see a forest of thick, moss-girt oaks and spreading chestnuts. It was mild; a breeze out of the west ruffled her coppery hair, and chased lacework clouds across a sky as blue as a field of cornflowers.

  “Christ Almighty,” she whispered, crossing herself, for all around her every leaf was green and bright with the advent of spring.

  But it was snowing, she thought. An hour ago it was not yet winter and already it was snowing! Her legs gave way. She fell to her knees in the weeds bordering the cairn and looked around, unable to believe the truth her own eyes revealed to her: late autumn had given way to early spring in the passage of but a single hour. “This … This is impossible!”

  If it was spring, then … her mind raced. What of the Day of Wrath? Did the Ending of the World come with the New Year? Étaín saw no sign around them of tribulation and distress, nor was there evidence of calamity or misery or darkness or clouds or whirlwinds. There was only sunlight, a breeze that warmed her bones, and the smell of good clean earth. “Where are we?” she said, her voice rising as a panic gripped her chest with icy talons. “Where are we, damn you? H-How did that miserable wretch … where…?”

  “The Ash-Road, just like I said.” Grimnir flared his nostrils, snorting in triumph. “And that—” He jabbed a finger at a great mossy stone that stood canted at an angle near the foot of the howe, dappled sunlight picking out deeply incised runes. “—had better tell us we’re in England. Read it. Read it and you tell me where we are.” Grimnir sat heavily on the exposed roots of one of the ash trees. He looked different in the bright sunlight, darker and more savage; even narrowed to slits his eyes gleamed with a monstrous killing lust. “Faugh!” he said suddenly, clawing at the soil of the cairn. “It must be England. This land is steeped in the poison of your Nailed God. I can feel it. It burns just to touch the earth. And the silence…”