A Gathering of Ravens
Page 19
Grimnir was silent again for several moments, his eyes boring deep into the red heart of the fire. What he saw Étaín could not say; she waited, and soon he roused himself, shaking off the memories like a wolf shaking its coat.
“Anyway,” he said, “we named the maggot Daufi, ‘Little Fool,’ but he called himself Bjarki. Hrungnir taught him the ways of the wolf ships, took him out on raids—let him kill a few Angles and Saxons before testing his mettle against his mother’s people, the Spear-Danes of Sjælland. The maggot did well for himself, as I heard it. What’s more, he was a smart little bastard. Earned his own ship and crewed it with outcasts when he was just a little older than you. Made Hrungnir proud.”
Étaín’s brow creased. “As you heard it? Where were you?”
“Away in the East with old Gífr, seeking wine and silver and bringing ruin to the plague-ravaged dogs of Miklagarðr. Nár! Hrungnir didn’t want me anywhere near him. He was afraid I’d rise up against him.”
“Would you have?”
Grimnir’s look spoke volumes; Étaín saw the fires of war glimmering behind his eyes. Civil war or foreign war, it made no difference to him. He was a creature of Strife, and would seek it out in any one of its myriad incarnations. “I didn’t witness the start of the feud between my brother and his bastard. But I heard it was over a joke about his mother that Bjarki chose to take as an insult.” Grimnir bared his teeth in a fierce snarl. “Little fool! She was passed around like a sheepskin on a cold night. Well, the maggot took exception, and soon words came to blows. Even Bjarki’s ragtag crew took my brother’s side. In the end, things were said that could not be unsaid, deeds were done by firelight, and Hrungnir had to choose whether to kill his bastard or turn him out. Idiot sent the little wretch off when he should have followed our sire’s lead, gutted him, and hung him over a roasting fire.”
Outside, darkness crept over the rocky shingle. The wind still howled off the Severn Sea, but the rain had slackened and the lightning had faded in intensity. Inside, the flames crackled and burned blue, the shadows dancing.
“I only found out later what Bjarki did, how he took his revenge. I was still away in the East. It was profitable, this slitting of Byzantine throats. Well, Bjarki’s half a Dane and can pass for one of them, so he goes among his mother’s people until he catches the eye of Hróarr. There’s an ancient hate between my people and his, and the little maggot fed that hate, twisting it back on Hróarr until he was deep in the old chief’s counsel. Five seasons came and went. That sixth winter, under Bjarki’s banner, the Spear-Danes gathered their numbers and set a trap for Hrungnir.” Grimnir shook his head. “Lack-witted fool! Turns out, little maggot knew his sire well.”
“He used women as bait,” Étaín said. “Danish women.”
Grimnir nodded. “Wives and daughters of the Spear-Danes, posing as a shipload of slaves. Hrungnir’s bastard put the word out that the ship would be braving the waters of the Skagerrak, part of a fleet of fat merchant ships bound for the markets at Borghund. So my brother, who hears it from his spies, trades on his luck and sets out with nine wolf ships to bring the prize home.” Grimnir’s narrowed eyes blazed in the half-light. “The Spear-Danes sprung their trap and drove him ashore on the eastern tip of Jutland, hounded him inland, and caught up with him in a peat bog. My folk lost any hope at a future in that wretched swamp, all because my brother—Ymir take him!—could only think with his prick!”
Grimnir got to his feet; the ivory and silver braided into his long hair rustled as he paced the confines of the small hut. His taloned hands clenched and unclenched.
“Two good lads survived and brought the tale east. A close fight, they said. Hrungnir’s blade sang the death song of many a Spear-Dane, that day. He had nearly fought his way clear, but somehow Bjarki got in behind him and took his sword arm off with an axe. Bit clean through it. My brother had some fight left in him, yet. Ha! It was a wild scrum, they said, with black blood spewing from his shoulder … he grabbed Bjarki by the throat and was choking the life from him, all the while he crushed another Dane under his heel—broke his skull like an egg. Then, that piss-blooded bastard, Bjarki, got his axe up and hacked it into Hrungnir’s neck. Took three blows to see the deed done. For all that, I might have let Hróarr’s folk off the hook since it was a fair fight by my reckoning, but they did honor to Daufi and celebrated their victory by putting my brother’s bloody head on a spear; this could not be borne. Gífr and I came back and I took up the mantle of chief. I plotted our revenge, but there were only thirteen of us left. We had to use craft and guile … and you say you saw how it played out.”
“But I don’t understand how I saw it,” Étaín said, after a moment. “Ever since Nunna’s Ford I’ve been seeing things. Odd things, like auras, spirits, and ghosts. Demons, perhaps. Maybe the blow to the head…?”
“The Ash-Road, more like.”
“But, nothing happened to me on your Ash-Road. If we did walk it, in truth, then I emerged from it unscathed.”
“Did you, now?” Grimnir stopped pacing and snorted. “Unscathed? Still a little fool, eh, foundling? No mortal can walk the branches of Yggðrasil and emerge ‘unscathed,’ as you call it. Its roots drink from the wells of Fate, Wisdom, and Death. Likely the gods have marked you out for some greater purpose. Who can say?”
“There is only one God whose mark I bear, and that is the God of Israel, the blessed Lord God Almighty.” Sleep tugged at the corners of Étaín’s mind. She pulled the tattered blanket tight against the chill air streaming through the curtained door. “What will happen to me, now? Am I still your captive?”
“You have your freedom, like we bargained,” Grimnir replied. “Go where you will, foundling.”
“Even … even if it’s with you?”
Grimnir looked askance at her, but said nothing.
“I have no home,” Étaín continued. “No family. My only friend is fifteen years dead. You … you started something when you took me from that cave in Sjælland. If you had told me, before that day, that I would bear witness to such acts of sorcery as I’ve seen in your company, then I would have doubted your sanity—even as I’ve doubted my own every day since. I would have quoted to you the work of Saint Augustine, who claimed it was the error of the pagans to believe in some other divine power than that of the One True God. I would have recited the law of the Church that declared sorcery to be a crime against God. And I would have prayed for your everlasting soul. But, I cannot deny what I have seen, nor can I explain it away as the work of the Devil. You’ve set me upon a road, son of Bálegyr, and I would see its end.”
“Baggage!” Grimnir said. “What use would you be to me, save as a stone around my neck, eh?”
“Unlike Bjarki, you can’t pass for one of us,” she replied. “And if he hides among Men I can yet be your eyes and ears in places barred to you. Let us start anew, with a clean slate—tabula rasa. Without threat or debt.”
Grimnir weighed her offer. “If you fall behind you’re on your own, foundling. I’ll not stop to snatch your fat from the fire like I did at Badon.”
“Agreed.”
Grimnir stretched, his joints cracking, and went to the door. Étaín heard him snuffling the damp air. She blinked, her eyelids growing heavy. She heard him muttering: “That’s how you want to play it, eh? So be it! Let the winds roar and the thunder crash! What matter to a son of Wolf and Serpent? There is the promise of blood on the air! Spears will shatter and shields will crack!” He looked back at her, his face alight with savage glee. “Rest while you can, then, foundling, if you would see this road’s end. We sail for Dubhlinn on the tide—and I dare man or god to try and stop me!”
Étaín drifted to sleep as lightning rippled across the storm-bloated sky, but she could not shake the feeling that, much like the memory of his oath of vengeance, the gods had heard.
BOOK THREE
THE GAELIC KINGDOM OF LEINSTER, SOUTH OF DUBHLINN
THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1014
1
Off the coast, a wooden currach founders on the boulder-strewn mudflats. Broken-masted and rudderless, it is helpless against the onslaught of wind and wave; each surge of night-black froth sends it careening toward the deadly rocks. Tatters of canvas sail snap like pennons in the gale. The keel rises and falls. Abruptly, there is a grinding of wood on stone; planks crack and splinter as the currach’s hull is ripped open. The surf recedes, and a figure emerges from the wreck. It is a creature broad of chest and long of arm, apish in strength, with tattoos of cinder and woad snaking among scars etched into its swarthy hide. A veil of black hair hides its face, but eyes that gleam like the forges of Hell blaze forth. It carries another figure, a woman, pale-skinned and slight and clad in a sodden cloak, fringed in ermine. The figure braces against the ripping waves, the mud sucking at its calves and threatening to drag it down. But inch by inch the creature fights its way ashore, at times driving a long seax into the mud and using the blade as an anchor. Always, it keeps a tight grip on the woman’s limp body.
Soon, it is staggering through the windblown dunes to where the soil meets the sand. Lightning crackles; thunder follows with such clamor as to render a man dumb with fear. But, as the shadowy creature’s foot touches the good Irish earth, the world suddenly goes silent—save for a keening scream. It echoes across the land, from the fens and hollows of Leinster and Munster to the mountains of Connacht; from the shores of Lough Neagh in fierce Ulster to the sacred hill of Tara in Meath. The scream freezes the blood, stops hearts, and causes even the most hardened warrior to avert his face in fear. It is the lament of the mná sidhe, those harbingers of death; their scream is a warning to the Gaels that one of the Plague Folk has come back to Ériu …
2
Kormlada did not wake that night as another woman might, clutching her bedclothes against the frightful echo of the mná sidhe. She did not bolt upright with a wild-eyed scream of terror; nor did she stumble onto her knees and with clasped hands beseech Christ Jesus and Saint Pádraic for protection. No, the Witch of Dubhlinn simply woke. As the cry faded she opened her dark, smoky eyes and sat up, a frown creasing her forehead.
A lamp of Byzantine crystal lit her quarters, and by its pale glow her gaze swept over the opulent furnishings as though they did not exist. Amid rugs from the hinterlands of Persia and tapestries from Ghent, behind chests carved from Lebanese cedar and ebon-wood couches covered in Andalusian brocades, Kormlada sought hidden menace; she sniffed the air. Tendrils of aromatic smoke—Arabian frankincense worth twice its weight in gold—coiled up from the perforated copper dome of a censer. Beneath that heady fragrance she could smell only damp stone and ancient dust.
The Witch of Dubhlinn rose from her bed. Silken gown rustling, she crossed to the window and flung open the shutter. A damp gust of wind stirred her raven-black hair as she peered out from the pinnacle of Cuarán’s Tower, oblivious to the needles of rain that stung her face. By day, she could see the hills of Leinster, a line of purple away to the south. By night, it was like staring into a stygian maw. A few lights gleamed beneath her, and she knew them to be the shielded lamps her son’s Norse mercenaries carried as they walked the circuit of Dubhlinn’s walls. But the city itself, which sprouted like some trade-borne fungus on the south bank of the River Liffey, was lost to darkness.
She raised her eyes to the heavens. Chains of lightning stitched the firmament, turning the sky bright as daylight for half a heartbeat; the dull rumble of thunder shook the stones of the tower. In the fierce afterglow of that galvanic blast an image was graven on her mind, a phantasm forged of cloud and storm: a drifting disembodied eye, wreathed in fire. Kormlada’s frown deepened as she turned away.
“Something is amiss,” she said. “Something unnatural.” Kormlada gave a weird whistle, which was answered a heartbeat later by the croak of a raven. A great brute of a bird, coal-black and ancient, came fluttering in from another room. She did not flinch as he came to rest on her shoulder, its talons gripping her flesh with exaggerated care. She scratched the raven under its beak. “Cruach, my love. Find Nechtan,” she whispered as a woman sighs to her lover. “Find him. See what he knows.” The raven, Cruach, nodded and took to wing; banking sharply, he plunged through the open window and vanished in the storm wrack. Kormlada stood, watching the play of far-off lightning.
Though not yet fifty, she was well beyond the age when men expected their women to put aside the mirror and take up the spindle, taking that first step down a well-trodden path ending first in the prison of matronage, and thence to a cold, forgotten grave. But the Witch of Dubhlinn was no ordinary woman. The essence of the ageless Tuatha, her mother’s people, flowed through her veins, though the blood of her mortal father diluted its potency. She was the daughter of Murchada, the old king of Leinster, and half-sister to Maelmorda, who wore that crown, now; the son of her loins was King Sitric of Dubhlinn, and she had thrice been wed to kings—of Dubhlinn, Meath, and Munster. Her arts rendered her as dark and perilous as fabled Circe, but it was her fey blood that preserved her beauty and lent her the ethereal grace of hard-fought Helen. Yet, despite all her sorceries, Kormlada understood her most powerful enchantment to be both base and artless—it was simple lust, and in that sphere of provocation she was without equal among the Gaels.
The sound of raised voices intruded on Kormlada’s reverie. She cocked her head to one side and listened. Her brother’s voice, she recognized; her son’s, too … and another, deeper and more powerful than the other two. Familiar voices, all, rehashing a familiar argument. She left the window, paused to drape a shawl of emerald-hued brocade about her white shoulders, and followed the clamor.
Kormlada glided down a circular flight of stone steps that debouched into a long darkened gallery overlooking a torchlit hall where three men stood around a table. It was a work of art, that table: its edges engraved with elaborate knotwork and its center inlaid with tiles of glass and semiprecious stones in a mosaic map of the kingdoms of Ériu—Ulster in the north, Connacht in the west, Meath and Leinster, and Munster in the south; inlays of bone, rune-etched and yellowed with age, marked the Viking enclaves of Dubhlinn, Veisafjorðr and Veðrafjorðr, Corcaigh and Hlymrekr. Figures of carved wood were scattered about the map like pieces on a game board, each one a token in her brother’s bid to oust Brian mac Cennétig from the high kingship of Ériu.
“And I tell you,” the man on the left was saying, each word emphasized with a rap of his knuckles on the table’s edge. “Not a man of Ulster will fight for Mac Cennétig! I swear it, by Christ and by Crom!” This was her half-brother, Maelmorda, the rebel king of Leinster—a dark-eyed, ruthless Gael whose prowess did not match his grand delusions: he coveted the high king’s throne, but Kormlada wondered whether he had enough steel in his spine to take it.
“And Meath?” asked the youngest of the three, her son, Sitric, king of Dubhlinn. He stood at the right-hand side of the table. Though not as ambitious as her brother, Kormlada knew, her son had the sharp cunning of a Norse pirate—he was like his father, Olaf Cuarán, in that he found it more favorable to rule one city and build his fortune than to beggar himself by trying to rule a nation. “What of Meath? Whose side do they stand on? Ours or Brian’s?”
“The Meathmen play it close to the vest,” Maelmorda said. “Their king, Malachy, is as changeable as the wind. My guess is he will wait before he announces his allegiance, to see who stands best poised to benefit from the affray.”
But it was the man at the head of the table, in the position of highest honor, who drew Kormlada’s ey
e. The other two, despite being close kin and her own child, were useful only as pawns; like the carved figures, they were resources she could guide into place and expend for her own benefit. The man at the head of the table, though, was no woman’s pawn.
“What does Mac Cennétig have?” the man said. His voice never rose above a menacing hiss, but it carried to the corners of the hall. Though a giant in height, he had gnarled limbs and a twisted spine. Long black hair receded from a broad, sallow forehead, and he wore his thick beard knotted in a single plait. “Good King Brian has Munster and the Dalcassians, his own people, and portions of Connacht—all told, a few thousand bastards in sheepskins with axes and clubs. But he also has the support of the Christ-Danes of Corcaigh and Hlymrekr. A hardy lot, mail-clad and bearing weapons of good steel. They will be Brian’s center. The rest…” The man flicked dismissively. “Chaff for the winnowing.
“Maelmorda, you have Leinster and Dubhlinn, and our Norse brothers of Veisafjorðr and Veðrafjorðr. Even without Sitric’s embassy to his cousins in Orkney and Mann, you will have a mighty host, armored and thirsty for blood—they are your anvil. And soon you will see your fortunes rise even higher as the reavers of Sigurðr and Bródir arrive. They will be your hammer, and together you will break Brian like brittle iron.”
“God willing,” Maelmorda said. Sitric nodded.
“Thus,” the man continued, “Ulster stands aloof, and Meath … what of Meath, eh? That’s the question. There is no love lost between Brian and Malachy. What would it take for Malachy of Meath to throw in with us, or at least to not get involved in the shield-breaking that is to come?” His eyes gleamed cold and grim as he glanced from man to man; Kormlada saw something less-than-human in his features, something predatory, and it filled the Witch of Dubhlinn with consternation, with desire, even with a measure of terror—for here was a man whose power came not from title or blood, but from some elemental source beyond even her reckoning. Bjarki Half-Dane was no king. He was the man who made kings. “Tell me, what would it take?”