A Gathering of Ravens

by Scott Oden

  “The prayers of the White Christ are anathema to me,” he said, and his voice was like a gentle breeze. “But such are my thrall’s crimes that I will permit you this indulgence, though there can be no peace between the Old Ways and the New.”

  Étaín nodded her thanks and moved carefully to Hrothmund’s side. Grimnir spat and turned away, muttering about the “miserable hymn-singers.” Étaín knelt. Among the collected spirits watching from beyond the boundary stones, those who had been Christian in life also knelt.

  Gaunt and hollow-eyed, the willow spirit stared up at her as the Shepherd’s strangling roots siphoned off its life force. “I cannot absolve you of your sins, spirit,” Étaín said. “But, if your faith is true, then let these prayers be as a balm to you.” She made the sign of the cross. “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven…”

  The limbs of the oak shivered and groaned as she spoke the words of the Lord’s Prayer. Lesser spirits shrieked and fled, while those dead souls who had pledged their lives to the Son of God took solace from it. With her thumb, Étaín drew a cross on Hrothmund’s forehead. Feeling her touch, the willow spirit smiled and closed its eyes.

  In a high, clear voice Étaín chanted in Latin:

  From the depths, I have cried out to you, O Lord;

  Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive

  to the voice of my supplication.

  If you, Lord, were to mark iniquities, who, O Lord, shall stand?

  For with you all is forgiveness; and because of your law, I stood by you, Lord.

  My soul has stood by his word.

  My soul has hoped in the Lord.

  From the morning watch, even until night, let Israel hope in the Lord.

  For with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him is plenteous redemption.

  And He will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.

  Amen.

  Étaín heard a rattling sigh, like a breeze through the fronds of a weeping willow, as the spirit possessing the body of Hrothmund dissipated; the corpse itself, freed from the animating glamour, decayed before her eyes, blackening into a desiccated husk that reeked of corruption. Étaín fell back on her haunches and scrambled away.

  The roots of the ancient oak released Hrothmund’s body and tore at the earth beneath him to create a shallow grave. In moments, there was no sign that Hrothmund of Wessex, who died in battle at Ringmere in East Anglia a handful of years before, had ever existed. The gnarled tree became once again a simple oak, old as Miðgarðr and slow to come into bloom.

  The Shepherd’s voice welled up from the ground itself. “Our discourse is at an end, daughter of Man. Go.”

  Wordlessly, Étaín rose and staggered from the ring of Cruithne stones without a backward glance. The gathered spirits faded as she passed, their spectral voices growing faint. The weight of the past few days—the grief, the shock, the pain—threatened to topple her into a chasm of despair. Blurry-eyed, she stumbled over root and tussock, managing to keep her feet under her through sheer force of will.

  Grimnir crouched not far away, watching. The skrælingr—Njáll’s would-be murderer, her captor, and yet a creature to whom she owed a debt—looked sullen, the vicious gleam in his eyes undimmed. He could have been a part of this barren landscape, as hard as the stony earth, and as tenacious as thorn and bramble.

  He said something she did not catch.

  Étaín shivered. She pressed the heel of her hand to her bruised forehead, wincing at the pain. Grimnir spoke again, but she could not focus. The roaring in her ears, unnoticed until now, redoubled. She took a swaying step.

  “He’s … He’s in Dubhlinn. Bjarki Half-Dane … he’s in … Dubhlinn.”

  Even as the words left her lips, Étaín’s world went black.

  24

  Awareness returned …

  Cool water passing cracked lips. A rustle of sound. Heat from a fire.

  Images and sensations flickered in the darkness, distorted. Dreamlike …

  Leather and blackened ring mail. The smell of smoke and musky sweat. Intertwined serpents in faded woad curling across swarthy flesh. Damp moss and old linen. Weightless, carried by powerful arms. Thirst. Hunger.

  In the netherworld of consciousness time ceased to have meaning. Hours? Days? All were the same. All were nothing …

  A familiar voice singing, deep but soft; tuneless but filled with melancholy:

  Where the Wolf?

  Where the Serpent?

  Where the Giver of Iron?

  Where are the ships of the kaunar?

  Where are the flames of slaughter?

  Étaín opened her eyes. Blurred shadows resolved into a smoke-stained ceiling made of old timber and thatch. She lay on a cot beneath a woolen blanket that stank of sweat. Above her head, fingers of ruddy orange light leapt, dancing like slender maidens in an endless display of willowy prowess. Étaín heard the crackle of brine-soaked wood; turning her head only slightly, she beheld its source: a stone-ringed pit where a fire blazed, fed by chunks of gnarled driftwood. Her face felt clammy and hot, her fever-ravaged body as hollow as an empty flask.

  Beyond the fire pit, framed by the open doorway, she saw Grimnir’s broad back. Naked to the waist, he sat cross-legged and worked a whetstone along the edge of his seax. And as he tended the blade, he sang—his song accompanied by the distant crash of surf:

  Alas for the spear-shatterer!

  Alas for the mailed warrior!

  Alas for the splendor of the chieftain!

  How that time has passed away

  dark under the cover of night,

  as if it had never been!

  Étaín listened, and the sonorous tune, combined with the soft slish of stone on steel and the sighing of the ocean, caused her eyelids to flutter; soon, with measured breath she sank once more into the realm of dreams …

  It is a cold Danish night; snow swirls over a crackling fire as two sentries laugh and drink mead from a horn. Behind them, the great hall of their lord Hróarr is bright with light and they can hear their kinsmen roaring in song. A dozen stakes line the approach to the hall; on each rests a severed head—black-haired, swarthy and misshapen, some bearing tattoos in blue woad. The dreaded skrælingar of the North, defeated in battle weeks ago by the Spear-Danes of Hróarr. Atop the highest stake are spiked the head and sword arm of a skrælingr chieftain, a word cut by Hróarr’s own hand into that broad forehead: Grendel.

  “I saw that one rip the heart from Magni’s breast and cleave poor Einar from crotch to crown ere Bjarki Half-Dane crossed its path!” one sentry says. His companion hawks and spits at the foot of the stake. “Half-Dane? Half-skrælingr, more like! Aye, he’s one of them, by the Allfather! Should put his head right up beside that ugly brute’s!”

  The two sentries continue swapping tales of battle and making sport of the trophies. Neither man notices the dark shape loping toward them, eyes like embers, as silent as death. Steel flashes in the firelight; one Dane spins away, blood gushing from his slashed throat. Without pause, the hurtling shape strikes the second Dane full in the chest; both figures crash to the ground. The crunch of steel on bone, a muffled cry, and from this welter of limbs Grimnir emerges, blood-drenched and terrifying. He has come to avenge the death of his brother, the kaunr chieftain Hrungnir.

  A dozen more kaunar emerge from the snowy darkness and make their way to the gabled hall of Hróarr; some carry flasks of whale oil and pitch, while others string their bows or heft their spears and take up positions around the hall’s entrance. Grimnir silently sends a few around to watch the back. Taking a flask of oil, he begins to douse the planks. The other kaunar follow suit. Soon, pitch and oil drench the boards.

  Grimnir takes up a guttering torch and ignites the pitch. The oil crackles and burns slowly, eating into the wood and setting the snow-damp thatch of the roof to smoldering. Greasy orange light illuminates the smoke rising from the hall. Spirits lurk at the edges of th
e darkness, the Choosers of the Slain, drawn by the promise of violence. Grimnir laughs. Inside, the singing stops and is replaced by shouts of alarm. The tall doors open, and the slaughter begins …

  The air is thick with spears and arrows, with the shrieks of the dying and the curses of those trying to flee the burning hall. The flames crackle and bite, and the skrælingar howl like the wolves that are their kin. “Kill them all, brothers!” Grimnir roars. “But leave that miserable wretch, Hróarr, to me!”

  The kaunar do their work well. Those Spear-Danes who make it through the fire and the hail of arrows are cut to pieces by the swords and axes of their ancestral foes. The corpses of men, women, and children litter the frozen ground. Finally, Hróarr himself emerges—an old Dane with a long double-plaited beard that gleams like silver; he is one-eyed, a priest of Odin as well as a warrior chieftain. He leans on a heavy iron-tipped spear, the scalps of kaunar hanging from the haft.

  “Villain, I name you! Foul beast that stains the hearth with the blood of good men! The gods curse you, skrælingr!”

  “Little fool!” Grimnir snarls. “Did you think I’d let Hrungnir go unavenged?”

  Hróarr spits. “He earned his death a thousandfold!”

  “So have you, old wretch!”

  With that, Grimnir and Hróarr crash together. Grimnir is as quick as a serpent; he twists away from Hróarr’s spear and hamstrings the old man with a flick of his long seax. The Dane falls to his knees with a bellow of pain and rage. Grimnir’s heel snaps the haft of his spear even as he drives his blade into Hróarr’s chest.

  Grimnir lets go of his blade and holds Hróarr’s head in his gory hands. The chief of the Spear-Danes sees his death written in the heavens.

  “Where is Bjarki Half-Dane, little fool?” Grimnir whispers. “He is not here. Where has he gone?”

  Hróarr’s single eye focuses on Grimnir. A bloody smile splits the old man’s lips. “I … I s-sent him … sent h-him away, on the whale-road. S-So much for your vengeance, skrælingr! Bjarki will be mine! For all the long years of your cursed life, he will be as a thorn in your side!”

  Grimnir releases Hróarr and kicks the broken spear shaft from his hand. The implication is clear: he will go into the next world weaponless, where the Einherjar will mock him and deny him a place at their table. Grimnir wraps a hand around the hilt of his seax.

  “Hear me, Sly One, Father Loki! Bear witness, O Ymir, sire of giants and lord of the frost!” Grimnir saws his blade upward; Hróarr screams his agony as the skrælingr reaches into the open wound and rips forth the Dane’s still-beating heart. “By this blood, I swear! I will not rest until Bjarki Half-Dane is under my blade!”

  The voices of the wolves split the night as the kaunar add their howls to Grimnir’s; the world rumbles and thunder cracks. From the mountains of the North, the gods accept Grimnir’s oath …

  25

  Étaín woke with a cry of terror; wild-eyed, she bolted upright and cast about, half-expecting to find a dozen wolflike kaunar creeping through the gloom, bloody-handed and knife-cunning, as the thunder of the gods reverberated from the icy mountains of the North.

  What she saw inside that dank fisherman’s hut, by the pale gray light of day, was a single pair of familiar red eyes, glowering at her from the shadows. The echo of thunder rolled on as she sank back down onto her cot, her heart pounding against the walls of her chest. The fire pit was a sullen nest of embers that did nothing to relieve the damp chill. Outside, a tempest howled. Wind-lashed rain pummeled the tumbledown shack; jagged flares of lightning split the heavens, followed swiftly by the titan’s tread of thunder.

  Grimnir sat near the door, its curtain of poorly cured leather billowing in the storm, and stared at Étaín, his sharp features unreadable. He said nothing as she coughed, then used her fingers to explore the bandage covering her forehead—a poultice of soft sphagnum and peat tar mixed with medicinal herbs and wrapped in old linen. She tried to feel the wound beneath.

  “Nár! Let it be,” he snapped.

  She nodded. “Water?”

  He gestured to the floor beside her. Carefully, Étaín raised herself on one elbow. Beside her cot sat a clay beaker of water and a wooden bowl of stew, a gelid concoction made from fish and dried vegetables that smelled as unappetizing as it looked. She winced and passed over the bowl to take up the beaker; with trembling hands, she drained half its contents. Étaín lay back, once more. “Where are we? What happened?”

  “That crack to the head nearly did you in,” Grimnir said. “Infection took hold, and that blasted fever … treated it best I could.”

  “Whatever you did, I’m alive—God be praised—and in your debt a second time.”

  “Your god had no part in it, foundling,” Grimnir muttered. He peered out the curtained doorway and spat. “We’re on the coast west and south of that pisshole, Badon. It’s been six days since you dropped at my feet, and the only reason you’re not waking up alone is this damnable weather. Turned foul two days ago.”

  “Six days?” Étaín said nothing for a long while, her brow furrowed in thought. She recalled flashes, washed-out images that could have been phantasm as easily as reality. “You … carried me all this way?”

  “What of it?”

  “I … I told you what you wanted to know,” she replied. “You could have left me to rot outside Badon’s walls and been in Ériu, by now. But you didn’t.”

  “What of it, I said?”

  “Thank you.” Étaín lapsed into silence, again; she listened to the rain, to the basso rumble of thunder. This last reminded her of her dream, of the slaughter of Hróarr’s folk in the icy wastes. But, was it merely a dream or was it a vision of things past? What did it have to do with her? She stirred, looking over at her companion. “Grimnir,” she began. “My dream … I … I saw you with the last of your people, avenging your brother—his name was Hrungnir, was it not? I saw you slaughtering the Spear-Danes of Hróarr.”

  Grimnir glanced sharply at her. “What do you mean, you saw?”

  “It was as if I was there, among you,” she replied. “His head, Hrungnir’s head, they took it and put it on a stake…”

  He grunted. “Aye,” Grimnir said. “Aye, but those maggots aren’t the ones who took his head. No, that crime sits on the bent spine of another.” He rose and went to the fire pit, stirring the embers to life with a rod of blackened oak.

  “Bjarki?”

  He gave a sharp nod. “Hrungnir’s bastard,” he said, tossing a chunk of driftwood on the embers and settling back on his haunches.

  With that revelation, a great many answers fell into place, from the span of years between Rastarkalv and the raids with Olaf Tryggve’s son to the cryptic words of the dvergar. “Your nephew,” she said solemnly. Grimnir gave her a sour look.

  “Not mine,” he replied, prodding the fire. “I don’t claim the little wretch as kin. He was Hrungnir’s pup, is all.”

  “What happened?”

  Grimnir was in a foul mood; he looked askance at her, lips curled in a snarl. “What business is it of yours?”

  “Please,” she replied. “I would hear the reason behind all this.”

  Grimnir’s nostrils flared. Étaín could sense his impatience, but he could go nowhere until the storm outside abated. Finally, he leaned forward and spat into the fire pit, his saliva sizzling on soot-blackened stone. “What happened, eh? It’s no quick tale, foundling.” Étaín’s shrug encompassed the wind-and-rain-lashed coast; Grimnir nodded. “Hrungnir, my brother—older by nigh upon a century—was a lucky fool who could find silver in pig shit. He was born to raid, and under his hand the wolf ships of our people harrowed the Jutes, the Saxons, and the Angles without pity. They called him Grendel, the Bone-Grinder, and through them Hrungnir earned his name as a chieftain and a ring-giver and a slayer of men. After Mag Tuiredh, we thought we were done for. But Hrungnir, he brought us back from the brink.”

  “Mag Tuiredh?”

  “Aye, the Great Battle,” Grimni
r said. “Where Bálegyr died fighting the vestálfar—the cursed west-elves of Ériu—and where some say the Doom of Odin fell at long last on the kaunar. Faugh! There were still a few of us left to spite that one-eyed tyrant!”

  “You were there?”

  At this, Grimnir’s face darkened. “Nár! I was still lapping milk from my mother’s tit. Hrungnir survived that spear-shattering, his first battle, and with Gífr led a single shipload of survivors back to Orkahaugr in the Kjolen Mountains. As eldest, Gífr should have taken the mantle of chieftain, but that old git was ever prowling off in search of wine and silver. No, he passed it on to Hrungnir, who set about rebuilding the wolf ships and making the kaunar a folk to fear, once again. Took a few hundred years, but by the time of the Great Plague in Miklagarðr—they call it something else, now.”

  “Constantinople?”

  “Aye, that’s it. Well, by then we were sitting pretty.”

  Étaín shifted into a more comfortable position. A flare of lightning cast Grimnir’s face in sharp relief, followed by an earthshaking roar of thunder. He said nothing for a long moment. Then: “But he got lazy, my dolt of a brother,” Grimnir muttered. “Lived too high and too soft for too many years. The idiot, he had a weakness for Danes … for their women. Took one in a raid on Sjælland, kept her, and got her with child. When her time came, he cut the bastard out of her belly, himself. Should have let mother and child both die. But my precious fool of a brother kept the whelp and raised it, thinking it would serve him as faithfully as a hound serves its master.” Étaín watched a ghost of a smile twist his lips. “It was the ugliest little maggot I’ve ever seen. A spindly-legged, hunchbacked wretch the color of piss. For all that, he proved he was no weak-bellied whiteskin. But the little bastard was still only half kaunr. His filthy Danish blood made him fork-tongued and oath-treacherous.” A memory bubbled up that drove all sense of mirth from Grimnir’s visage. “Bálegyr would have twisted his head off.”