by Scott Oden
“I am Lord Hrothmund,” he said, two disparate voices speaking in near unison—but where the man spoke West Saxon, the other spoke a tongue Étaín could not fathom. He came closer; there was no harmony in his movement, only the unnatural grace of a spirit caged in a prison of flesh. Watching it caused Étaín’s world to spin. She screwed her eyes shut. Hrothmund smiled like a cat toying with its prey. “I see my name precedes me. You’ve heard, no doubt, of my reputation for breaking the minds and bodies of your brother Danes? I have had occasion to test the mettle of their women, too. An interesting mix of the feminine and the masculine.”
“I’m no Dane,” Étaín replied through gritted teeth. She forced herself to meet his gaze. “You’ve made a mistake—”
The jailer drove his fist into her kidneys. Étaín cried out in pain and fell to her knees. “You will address my lord properly, you heathen bitch!”
Hrothmund held up a hand, forestalling further violence. “What did you say?”
“I said,” Étaín gasped, “you made a mistake, my lord. I am no Dane.”
“And yet, when you speak your voice carries the accent of the Danemark. If you are no Dane, then you have spent time among them. Time enough to forswear Christ and bend your knee to heathen gods. Fordræd”—he gestured to the rat-faced jailer—“chain her.”
Grinning, Fordræd seized Étaín by the scruff of the neck and dragged her back into the lamplit transept, where an upright post of knurled iron and wood stood near a table brimming with the implements of torture—the pincers and tongs and gouges and straps designed to inflict equal parts pain and degradation. Each one had the sheen of long use. Futilely, she struggled against Fordræd’s wiry strength as the jailer imprisoned her wrists in manacles, the pitted black iron still tacky with the blood of his previous victim. The manacles led to a chain, which in turn ran up through a hasp at the top of the post. Fordræd hauled on the chain; links clacked, and despite her desperate thrashings, Étaín could not stop the jailer from wrenching her arms above her head. Chuckling, Fordræd raised her slowly, her back scraping the post until only the tips of her toes could touch the ground.
“Please,” Étaín said. “Please, my lord! I am no enemy.”
Hrothmund strolled down the table, his fingers brushing the various implements of torture. He selected a wickedly curved skinning knife. “Then what are you?”
“A West Saxon, my lord. The monks at Glastonbury found me orphaned. They raised me, and the abbot himself secured for me a suitable husband.” Étaín chose her words with care, since she had a span of fifteen years she could not account for—and she had no wish to delve into her journey with Grimnir across the heathen branches of Yggðrasil. “The … The Danes killed him and took me when they sacked our home. It is true I have spent many years among them, but as a captive. I have only recently escaped and made my way back to this, my homeland.”
“She lies!” Fordræd snapped.
But Hrothmund did not reply. His expression was unreadable, but after a moment, man and spirit shook their heads as though agreeing on some course of action. “No. No, she speaks the truth. Or part of it. You must have heard something of their plans. With Forkbeard dead, his milk-livered son, Cnut, is king of the Danemark. Will he return to plague Wessex?”
Étaín hesitated. Forkbeard? Cnut? These names meant nothing to her; those who were leaders of the Danes now were children and men of no consequence fifteen years ago. Her pause drew longer, and with each second Hrothmund’s smile widened.
“You do know, don’t you?” he said. “You have some inkling, at the very least. If you’re no enemy, then why keep this to yourself? Share your thoughts, O child of Glastonbury.”
“I know nothing, my lord. You must believe me.”
Fordræd snorted.
“Must I?” Hrothmund stepped closer. Hanging from the pole—her arms above her head, her body stretched taut—left her midriff exposed. Against her clammy white skin, Étaín’s ribs stood out like those of skeletal Famine. “Perhaps you’re not sure of what you know, but know you must. And I’m certain I can tease the truth from you.” The lord of Badon flicked his wrist; the tip of the skinning knife opened a shallow gash along Étaín’s flank. She gasped as warm blood welled up along the cut and slowly trickled down her side. “You see, here is my dilemma: I believe you are, as you say, a West Saxon. But my captain, Æthelstan, says he found you in the company of heathens. Thus, you are either a Danish sympathizer or you are something worse—a spy as well as a traitor.” A second flick of the knife; a second gash. Étaín writhed, hissing in pain.
“If I am a spy,” she snarled, “then what are you? I see the both of you!”
Fordræd laughed. “She’s lost her mind already, my lord!”
Hrothmund, though, said nothing. He turned away and tossed the knife back on the table. To the jailer, he said, “Fetch a brazier.” Étaín watched the rat-faced man scurry off to do his lord’s bidding even as Hrothmund swung back to face her. “You can … see me?”
“I can. What manner of devil are you, spawn of Lucifer?”
The lord of Badon made the sign of the cross. “I have no congress with the Dark Powers. But you … you must have the Sight. A rare gift, indeed, among your people.”
“What are you?” Étaín ignored the physical body of Hrothmund and instead focused only on the leaf-clad spirit.
“I am beyond your understanding.” The spirit threw its arms wide; a heartbeat later, so did Hrothmund. “This vessel came into my keeping at Ringmere, in East Anglia, where he had gone with his king to crush Forkbeard’s invading Danes. He was certain of victory right up until the moment a Danish axe felled him.” The spirit caressed Hrothmund’s chest, then thumped his breastbone with a balled fist. “This vessel was strong. Even mortally wounded, he crawled over the carpet of dead men and horses, through pools of gore and drifts of entrails. He crawled across the blood-blasted heath and into the cool and beckoning shadows beneath a thicket of willows. My willows. The last of my forest.” The lord of Badon’s voice dropped to a whisper. “The days of my kind, the landvættir, are numbered in this new world. The coming of the White Christ … the growing indifference of Man, these things are like knives. They cut deep, severing us from the land—and the land is the source of our power, the magic of leaf and bole our life’s blood.
“But this one … this one crawled to me and he prayed. His prayers drew me from the threshold of oblivion. They woke me from a sleep of centuries. His words burned like acid. Out of pity, I … I sent my essence into him. I believed my presence would ease his passage into the next world.” Hrothmund turned suddenly. The spirit’s eyes blazed with fervor. “Have you ever experienced faith so beautiful, so perfect, so … alive, as a man’s faith in Christ at the instant of his death? This one’s soul departed, but not before it filled me with a new magic, the sorcery of Christ! So profound was it that I forsook my beloved forest, renounced my kind, and went in search of our Lord and Savior.”
Suddenly, the clamoring voices made sense. “So it’s you,” Étaín said. “You’re the oathbreaker.”
“Oathbreaker?” The willow spirit laughed, echoed by Hrothmund. “In Christos veritas. What is an oath among heathens worth compared to the truth of Lord Christ? Let them howl, my dying brethren. Let them wail and gnash their teeth in vain. I am protected by the armor of the Lord, and I am eternal!”
“But, if you are a follower of Christ as you claim, then why this?” Étaín rattled the chains that bound her to the post. “Why do you inflict such suffering? Christ taught us to love our fellow man, and to let God alone be the sole judge of their worth. Why—”
Hrothmund’s anger crackled. “Our fellow man killed Him! Our fellow man tortured the Son of God with scourge and thorn before hanging Him from a wooden cross! Our fellow man deserves to burn!”
Hrothmund whirled around as Fordræd returned, his face damp with sweat from the heat rising off the brazier he carried.
“Fordræd, I have changed my mi
nd,” the lord of Badon said. “This one is neither spy nor traitor. She is a witch. At sunrise, she will burn. But do not look so glum, my savage friend. Bring up some heathens. Let us entertain her before we send her to meet her Dark Master!”
18
Grimnir descended into the valley of the Avon River with the seed of a plan growing in his mind. In his youth, he had traveled far with his mother’s brother, Gífr—for he was Bálegyr’s second surviving son and his elder brother, Hrungnir, would not stomach any of his kin meddling in the affairs of the wolf ships of the North. At their mother’s urging, Gífr had taken Grimnir off to walk the shadowed roads of Miðgarðr, where he might learn the lore of their people and hone his skills by preying upon these starveling dogs called Men.
Gífr recalled the Elder Days before the Æsir had cause to broach the walls of Angrboða’s fortress and drive his people from Jotunheimr. He recalled when the Nine Fathers of the kaunar were but dwarves, lured into shadow by the Sly One’s honeyed words and made to gorge upon the afterbirth of monstrous Fenrir, scaled Jörmungandr, and deathless Hel—a bloody repast that twisted their limbs and turned them from dvergar into what they were now. Gífr recalled the Doom of Odin and the harrowing of the kaunar and the flight to Miðgarðr on the Ash-Road. He recalled these things and passed his recollections on to Grimnir.
Old Gífr, Grimnir remembered, was as lean as whipcord, his rawboned frame a head taller than Grimnir’s own and knotted with gristle and sinew; scars seamed his bald pate, and the fringe of hair that hung about his long ears was the color of storm wrack, woven with countless old bone discs and beads of silver, garnet, and malachite—some from as far away as sand-swept Aegyptus. Sharp eyes burned like forge gledes from beneath a heavy brow as he taught his sister’s son the ways of the goði, the words of power that could break iron and the battle songs of the ancient skalds.
Or tried, at any rate.
It took no effort on Grimnir’s part to conjure his uncle’s voice, his hollow, grating laughter that sounded like an iron pot dragged slowly across a shingle. Skáfi, Gífr had called him—little rat in the tongue of their people: “You’re a precious sort of fool, little rat,” he would say, every time Grimnir failed to sum up some useless nugget of wisdom he’d been told in passing a century before, “and dumb as a stump, to boot!”
And dumb though he may have been, young Grimnir nevertheless picked up the crumbs of Gífr’s teachings—especially where it concerned the lands Bálegyr raided, such as the island of the Britons and the green jewel of Ériu in the Western Sea, where the dreams of his people died in the dust at Mag Tuiredh. Long ago, even before the tyrant Odin arose in the North, these lands had been under the sway of the Stone Folk, the Cruithne, who had raised great rings of standing stones. These circles were as temples, and the primordial god they howled to and sacrificed the hearts of their enemies to would, in time, become known as the Shepherd of the Hills. But Grimnir could never pin wily old Gífr down on whether the landvættir of these islands were conjured by the Cruithne or if they were the spirits of the Cruithne themselves. It mattered not. For if he could find something of theirs, one of their standing stones, perhaps then he could strike a bargain …
Grimnir slunk unseen across the bridge and plunged headlong into the twisted undergrowth on the far bank; he moved slowly, slithering through skeins of briar and thorn, his nose to the ground like a hound seeking some elusive bit of prey. He rooted through drifts of sodden leaves for stones that bore the ancient taint of the Cruithne, whose scratched runes still oozed traces of their old potency. Every promising stone he found he clawed from the damp earth, upending it and muttering over each one. Some he slung aside with a curse; others he replaced with an unexpected sense of reverence.
Dawn was not far off when, mud-spattered and desperate, he found what he sought: the foundations of a ring of eight standing stones. It rested in the shadow of a gnarled oak as old as Miðgarðr itself, on a low rise that preserved it from the infrequent floods that came with the spring thaw. The elements had worn the stones down like a graybeard’s teeth; thorn-draped, they barely came to Grimnir’s knees. Even still, he felt power massing there, something welling up from deep in the earth. He trod carefully around the perimeter of the stones.
This would do. He glanced at the eastern horizon, already beginning to lighten with the false dawn. Then, with an exhalation of pent-up breath, he stepped into the primeval circle of Cruithne stones and drew his seax. He should have had human blood, or the blood of a sacred ox, but the scraps of wisdom he’d gleaned from Gífr reassured him that any blood would draw in the spirits. Grimnir opened a gash in the heel of his left hand and massaged it until his palm glistened with the black blood of his kind. He began to chant in the guttural language of the kaunar as, with this bloodstained hand, he anointed the top of each stone in turn:
Of old was the age | when Ymir lived;
Sea nor cool waves | nor sand there were;
Earth had not been, | nor heaven above,
But a yawning gap, | and grass nowhere.
Soon came hateful Odin | and the sons of Bor,
With spear and sword, | against the frost-king;
They did slay him | on his mighty throne,
And carve his corpse | like a suckling pig.
Out of Ymir’s flesh | was fashioned the earth,
And the mountains | made of his bones;
The sky from the frost-cold | giant’s skull,
And the ocean | from his blood.
You remember yet | these giants of yore,
Who gave me life | in the days gone by;
Nine worlds I know, | the nine in the tree
With mighty roots | beneath the mold.
Grimnir finished and walked to the center of the circle. He sensed the movement of spirits, like a cold breeze tickling the back of his neck; he heard the creak of tree limbs, the faint clash of stone on stone, and the moaning dirge of the dead. Ravens croaked in the damp dark overhead.
“Hear me, spirits of this wretched place!” Grimnir roared. “I have lived a thousand mortal lifetimes! I am the Corpse-maker and Life-quencher, the Bringer of Night, the Son of the Wolf and Brother of the Serpent! I am of the flesh of Ymir! I am the last son of Bálegyr One-Eye and I am all that remain of the kaunar of the Kjolen Mountains! Taste my blood so that you will know the truth of what I say!”
He felt the spirits recoil from his words even as he watched the smeared blood slowly vanish, soaking into the stones. In answer, they raised a dreadful cacophony; earsplitting howls mingled with humanlike sobs and curses, like a mob that did not know whether to be angry or afraid. A breeze buffeted him; branches clacked and rattled but Grimnir stood his ground, eyes blazing with impatient fury.
Without warning, the disharmony of the spirits died away. Grimnir sensed something impossibly ancient looming over him—something that emerged from the earth itself, a part of it but yet separate from it. A slow, sonorous voice throbbed: “Synscatha, I name you. A son of evil, begotten by evil. Why do you trouble this place?”
Grimnir resisted a primal urge to quail before the power in that voice. He turned. The gnarled oak at the edge of the stone circle had grown larger, its spreading limbs twisting over him in the eerie suggestion of a hand. Grimnir marshaled his nerve. “I have been wronged, lord of the landvættir. Men from Badon have stolen from me. I seek your aid to recover what is mine, and offer payment in return.”
“Aid? Why would we aid you? Short may be the memories of flesh, but stock and stone never forget. My children remember the wolf ships of Bálegyr and the biting axes of the kaunar. As for payment … can you give us eternal spring, synscatha? Can you heal the rot that turns the hearts of men from us? No. Your kind do not belong here, twisted child of Svartálfheimr.”
Grimnir gave a short bark of laughter. “I am the last of my kind, earth wight, but here I stand. Aid me and I will fetch this oathbreaker your spirits blather on about. He dwells beyond your ken, does he not? Inside Badon? Aid me and
I will truss him up and bring him out to you, alive and unspoiled.”
“That traitor!” The oak shuddered; the force of the Shepherd’s anger cracked the stones of the circle and sent Grimnir tumbling to his knees. In spite of himself, he cringed before the display of naked power. “That defiler! He calls himself Hrothmund, now. Lord Hrothmund! He rules the city of stone, under the aegis of the Nailed God of the East. The White Christ’s sigils protect him from harm. Would that we could break him, smash him, tear him root and bough! For him we would sacrifice much!”
“Hrothmund, eh?” Grimnir replied, glancing up at the trembling boughs of the oak. “Lord of Badon? That is interesting. That is very interesting. We have a common enemy, then. This Hrothmund, his dogs are the very ones who have taken something of mine, something I must get back. We can help one another, eh? You and your cursed wights can’t reach your filthy oathbreaker, but I can.”
The Shepherd of the Hills said nothing for a long moment; when it did speak, its voice was subdued. “What aid do you seek, son of Bálegyr?”
Grimnir surged to his feet. “Shake the bones of Ymir! Call up whatever sorcery remains to you and crack open that cursed stone city! Topple its blasted walls and send your spirits to guide me. I will bring Hrothmund to you, and at the same time recover what he stole from me!”
“And the innocents who will die?”
“Innocents? Have they not turned from you and embraced your enemy, the Nailed God? Have they not burned your groves and wrecked your stones? Do they not hunt the last of your followers? Innocents? Faugh!”
Silence. Minutes ran free like the sands of an hourglass. Finally, Grimnir heard a great sigh, and then the world grew still. The gnarled oak shrank, its trunk twisted and bereft of the Shepherd’s essence. He felt a familiar swell of power, though stronger than before, as though something buried beneath the earth had awakened after a long sleep; it stretched its cramped limbs, tearing root and soil as it came to life.