A Gathering of Ravens

by Scott Oden

  9

  Kormlada reached the gallery as Bjarki set his foot upon the stairs to Cuarán’s Tower. The raven’s words made barely any sense to her; that they were Nechtan’s doing was beyond doubt, but what was the lord of the Tuatha playing at? What had the warning meant? And, more to the point, what was it that could inspire such a look of fear—however briefly—in a man like Bjarki Half-Dane? What did Nechtan know that she did not?

  He comes, Draugen had said. After all these years, he comes. Some enemy, to be sure, but who and from what quarter? The Witch of Dubhlinn ground her teeth in frustration.

  There must have been a serving woman on the stairs. Kormlada heard a feminine voice, a muffled apology; she heard a curse followed by the sharp crack of Half-Dane’s knuckles across flesh. There came a short, terrified cry. The woman must have lost her balance, for what Kormlada heard next was the sound of a falling body and, finally, the sickening crunch of bone as she landed in a heap at the foot of the stairs.

  Kormlada stood motionless in a pool of shadow. Bjarki’s footsteps came back down—not out of concern for the woman, of that she was certain. She watched as he stepped out into the gallery, his back to her. Like a vulture he crouched over the serving woman, a fair-haired Briton who tended to her bath and toilet; Kormlada saw her, as well: her neck at an unnatural angle and her golden hair floating in a pool of blood, spreading out from her lacerated scalp. She gave a final wheezing moan and was still, sightless eyes staring at the smoke-darkened ceiling.

  Bjarki pondered the arrangement of her limbs. He studied the patterns of spilled and spattered blood as though trying to divine the future in the viscous fluid; after a moment, he spat a litany of words in a tongue Kormlada didn’t recognize, rose, and resumed his ascent.

  Kormlada emerged from the darkness and stared down at the woman’s body. The fall had rucked her coarse saffron dress up around her thighs, and one soft leather shoe was gone. Close to her heart she’d worn a silver chain, and from it hung a pendant made from a rough garnet captured by a cage of silver wire—a gift from some Norse admirer, no doubt. The fall had crushed the wire cage. The pendant lay in the woman’s blood, where it had taken on the appearance of a red, gore-streaked eye. Like the eye in the clouds, last night.

  “He fears whatever it was that roused the mná sidhe,” she whispered, frowning. She heard a flutter of wings; turning, she found that Cruach had alighted in one of the openings of the gallery. The ancient raven cocked his head, stared unblinking at the corpse. “What was it, Cruach, my love? You know, don’t you? You know what roused the night hags … you know what he fears, for they are one and the same.”

  Cruach shifted his gaze to her, a primordial light kindled in his eyes. There was hatred, yes, and something deeper. Something Kormlada had never seen in the raven before now.

  “You … You fear it, too? Does this terror have a name?”

  When Cruach spoke again, she heard the echo of a darker age in his croaking reply. He uttered a single word:

  “Fomórach.”

  And with a chill running up her spine, the Witch of Dubhlinn suddenly understood the warning cry of the mná sidhe.

  10

  Run, little rat, Gífr’s voice commanded.

  And he did.

  Though bandy-legged, Grimnir set a steady pace, his long loping strides like the gait of a hunting wolf. He kept the sea on his right hand as he crossed deep glens on the flanks of a thickly forested range of hills; he skirted settlements and kept to the tree line, breaking only to scoop handfuls of water from streams in spate.

  Run, Gífr’s voice prodded. Run till your lungs burst! Run! Run till your blood boils and your bones crack!

  And he would, though he needed no urging.

  Despite the constant haranguing, Grimnir drew up near the edge of a rocky shelf overlooking a shallow, wooded valley. He wrung sweat from his eyes; bending low to the ground, he ferreted out the trail Bálegyr had laid down for him—the stench of the vestálfar, like corpse rot and ancient cerecloth, mixed with the heady iron scent of kaunar blood. It led away from the coastal glens and high into the mountains, where ancient oak and rowan gave way to pine, and thence to stony moors and sedge-girdled mires. Grimnir’s nostrils flared; hatred for their west-elves rose up in him, ancestral and as old as root and bole. He bellowed a challenge; it echoed over hills, into hollows; it faded, and only silence came in answer. No birdsong, no creak and craak of insects, no barking of dogs; the red squirrel kept to its drey, the owl to its hollow, the fox to its den; the land itself felt like it had drawn in the breath of wind and was holding it in expectation of violence. Grimnir’s laughter echoed across the lonely moors.

  Run, damn your eyes, Gífr roared. Run, to Carraig Dubh or to Helheimr! The stinking whiteskins have your sire at bay and you stand here laughing? Run!

  Grimnir cursed and blew froth from yellowed fangs. He set forth again at a redoubled pace. He was the son of Bálegyr, a black-hearted knot of vengeance, a weapon honed to a thin, cruel edge. He was tireless, sleepless, deathless, and pitiless; his enemies would get no mercy, for mercy was the dominion of weaklings and fools! He understood strength. He understood fear. And he understood violence. But he was not without craft—no son of Bálegyr could claim to be. His guile was the guile of the serpent. And like the serpent, he would strike at Bálegyr’s enemies—

  Not if you’re too late, little rat, Gífr said.

  “I won’t be, you old git! You’re the lazy swine, not me!” And so Grimnir ran on, ducking branches and leaping fallen trunks, his endurance beyond anything mortal. Deeper he went into the heart of Ériu, to find the survivors of Mag Tuiredh while there was still time …

  Lost amid the glamour of the Tuatha, Grimnir failed to mark a wind-scoured face that stared out from a thicket of rowan and hazel. The man, whose fierce silver beard bristled, lurked in the lee of a great boulder—like a giant’s head, split and weather-scarred, its chin bearded in flowering moss. The man watched him pass, felt his eyes rake over him without comprehension; then, crossing himself, he withdrew and went to find help.

  11

  Morning faded and afternoon was in full bloom by the time Étaín finally stirred. She thrust herself up from the bolster, knuckled sleep from her eyes, and squinted at the warm sunlight slanting through chinks in the cottage’s shuttered windows. “What happened? Grimnir?” Her voice was raspy and dry. No one answered her. A springtime breeze spiced with the scents of damp earth, grass, and budding fruit trees drifted through the open door; birds warbled in the distance. And like the faint thrum of a heartbeat, Étaín could just barely hear the murmur of surf on the rocky coast. “Grimnir?”

  “He’s gone,” Blind Maeve said. Étaín craned her neck and saw the old Irishwoman sitting in the same position she’d been in since the night before, with her brittle spine against the unyielding stone of the hearth. Pain thinned Maeve’s lips, making deeper the lines etched around her mouth. She tried to move and winced from the effort.

  Though she wore not a stitch of clothing beneath her blanket, Étaín nevertheless clambered to her feet and tottered to Maeve’s side. She helped the old woman rise; with exaggerated care, the pair of them shuffled over to a padded chair where Maeve could sit. By the light of day, she seemed more careworn to Étaín. More fragile. A thatch of unkempt gray hair half-obscured the gnarled scar of the wound that had robbed Maeve of her sight. It reminded Étaín of her own scabbed-over wound. But Maeve was not merely blind—the physical organs of her vision had atrophied, as well, becoming shrunken and unfocused, vestigial reminders of a gift lost to violence. At the sound of movement, the wolfhound Conán trotted in from outside the cabin. The great beast whined; he nuzzled Maeve’s trembling hand. “Aye, I’m alive, you great hairy heathen,” she said.

  “Grimnir’s gone, you say? Gone where? What happened to us? That was no natural sleep.” Étaín found a knitted shawl the color of autumn leaves and wrapped it around Maeve’s shoulders before snatching her blanket off the hearth and
covering herself.

  “Aye.” The old woman pulled the shawl tighter, shivering despite the sunlit warmth of the cottage. “Aye, that was a rare bit of deviltry, indeed.” Maeve reached for Étaín’s hand. “I am sorry, child. Whatever trouble your Grimnir has caused you in the past, whatever you were hinting at last night … well, he’ll trouble you no longer.”

  “Why?” Étaín said, crouching by Maeve’s side; a knot tightened in her belly, a knot of … was it fear? She was alone, now. Alone and … free. Free. For the first time since she could remember. The knot of fear sharpened to a pain. “What happened? Where has he gone?”

  “To a place you cannot follow.”

  “Please, Maeve! Tell me.”

  “They have claimed him.”

  Exasperation brought a flush of color to Étaín’s cheeks. She clenched her fist, hard enough that her nails bit into her palm, and then exhaled. “Who are they, Maeve? Not the Norse, surely? Was it some faction of the Irish, allied with … Half-Dane, perhaps?” Étaín grasped at shadows. Grimnir’s gear—his shirt of rings and his jerkin, his cloak and his old Roman satchel—still hung by the hearth where he’d left it the night before; she spotted his seax under the table, cast aside like it meant nothing. She saw no blood, no evidence of strife—both things she fully expected to find even if someone came upon him unawares—nothing. “You mentioned deviltry. Was it … something else?”

  “You’ll think Blind Maeve mad, child.”

  “No, I assure you. What was it that took him?”

  Maeve sighed. “The Fair Folk. The Tuatha, who were the masters of Ériu before the coming of good Saint Pádraic. This was their doing. They sang us a right lullaby and lured him away, all in the same breath.”

  The fear knotting Étaín’s guts suddenly turned to dread. She recalled something Grimnir had said back on the coast of Britain, about Mag Tuiredh and the doom of his people. “These Tuatha … do they have a name among the Danes?”

  “Elves,” Maeve answered.

  “Vestálfar.” Étaín shook her head. “Merciful Christ! Where would they have taken him?”

  “Likely to the Black Stone atop the spike of Carraig Dubh, where they dwell. And if you be wondering why, well, Blind Maeve can’t answer that…”

  “Oh, I know why: the sins of the father visited upon the son, and his father was—by all accounts—well-steeped in sin.” Étaín rocked back on her heels and stood. She nodded, to herself rather than to Maeve. “I have to go after him.”

  Maeve tilted her head. “Aye, are ye daft, child? The only help you can give your Grimnir is to pray, and pray hard, for he is beyond your reckoning. No mortal can resist the Fair Folk, but if he is a good Christian then perhaps the Almighty will intercede.”

  At this, Étaín laughed. The sound of it brought a frown to Maeve’s seamed brow. Étaín saw and hastened to add, “I would do as you say if there was any hope under Heaven it would help, but Grimnir is none of the things you mention.”

  “What do you mean, child?”

  “He is neither mortal nor a good Christian.”

  The old Irishwoman’s sightless eyes widened, and then narrowed. “Aye, your tale, is it? Best tell it from the beginning.”

  Étaín looked around for her clothes—mere rags, now, but better than running about in her skin. “Have you anything I could wear besides this blanket?”

  “Whatever you can find that Blind Maeve has is yours, child. So long as you explain yourself.”

  And so, as she hunted around the cottage for clothing, Étaín began to tell her tale: “I met him in a cave, on the road to Roskilde in the Danemark, in the autumn of anno Domini nine hundred and ninety-nine. That was fifteen years ago, by the reckoning of any sane person, but to me it was scarcely a fortnight past…”

  Étaín chose her words with care, and painted for Maeve an image of the cave and the creature that lurked there; she did not stint when she told of Grimnir’s attempt to murder Njáll or her own terrible descent into the fringes of the Elder World. Blind Maeve shivered and crossed herself at Étaín’s description of the dvergar and their shrine to Yggðrasil, and of her nightmarish journey along the Ash-Road.

  Étaín spoke quietly of her capture, of the destruction of Badon, and of her encounter with the Shepherd of the Hills. And she talked of those lost on the way: of Njáll and Hrolf Asgrimm’s son, both victims in their own way of Grimnir’s fury; Jarl Óspak of Mann, who had shown her extraordinary kindness; and she spoke of Grimnir himself, who was, for all his profane ways, possessed of a rudimentary sense of honor. “He carried me. For six days he carried me and I still do not understand why; all he had to do was leave me where I fell. Do you think me mad?” Étaín asked suddenly, as she put the bundle of clothing she’d found on the table and let the blanket slip to the floor. “I would, if I heard this tale from another.” She drew on a long linen tunic the color of old charcoal that fell above her knees, girdled at the waist with a broad belt of rough leather and green brocade. Among Maeve’s things she also found a pair of soft leather shoes with hardy oxhide soles, and a patched cloak of russet wool—which she settled over her shoulders and gathered under a ring-pin brooch of gilded bronze. Étaín ran a hand through her short copper hair. “I would think the teller either mad or a liar.”

  It was Maeve’s turn to laugh. “Not among the Gael, child. We of Ériu have long believed in the power of the Otherworld. Aye, it ebbs and flows around us like the tides; wild and fey with no rhyme or reason to it—and sometimes our only protection from it is in the salvation of Christ Jesus. There is magic, there, too.”

  “Salvation,” Étaín said, barely above a whisper. There was a sense of heaviness in her voice, the echo of a pain borne too close for too long. She crouched, fishing under the table to retrieve Grimnir’s fallen seax; as she straightened, she added, “When I was a child at Glastonbury, there was a novice from Ériu, a Gael called Aidan, who would gather us foundlings together and take us out beyond the walls of the monastery to harvest herbs for the kitchen. We expected a sermon, something from the Gospels, but instead Aidan told us stories—tales of orphans who did battle with sinister witches or caught talking fishes; girls who rode the shoulders of giants or boys who ran with the skin-changers of the North.

  “Well, we clamored for more; all hours of the day and night, and young Aidan would oblige us. He had more passion for those tales than he had for the Word of God, I think. One evening near midsummer, in my twelfth year, Aidan should have been at Compline. But, God bless him, we’d lost one of our own to the bloody flux that day, so he came to see us, instead. Crept into our sleeping hall and raised our spirits with the tale of Cúchulainn.” Étaín smiled at the memory; but as quickly as it appeared, her smile faded. “The abbot found us out, of course. That man knew nothing of kindness, nothing of restraint, not even for one of his own. He packed Aidan off, back to Ériu I presume. Our punishment—for the crime of leading his novice astray—was dealt right to where it would hurt a cast-off child the most … our bellies.”

  Étaín went to where Grimnir’s weapon belt hung and carefully slid the seax into its wood-and-leather scabbard. The weapon belt, and the rest of his gear, she brought back over to the table. “For a fortnight,” she continued, “we ate only stale bread and bitter herbs. At each meal, as we gagged down this meager ration, the good abbot would reiterate how foolish we were to believe such stories, and that there was no magic left in the world—and if by chance some did exist, then it was the province of the Enemy and we would be damned for all time if we so much as looked upon it. ‘There is only Christ,’ he told us. ‘Christ and the Church, and the only concern you should have is that your soul is pure enough come Judgment Day to earn entrance to the Kingdom of Heaven!’”

  Étaín turned from the table. Tears glistened in her eyes, the bounty of long frustration; she swiped at them with the heel of her hand. “What happened to that promised Kingdom, Maeve?” Étaín’s voice cracked. “What happened to it? It never came to pass, did it? And
the world as I knew it has upended! Salvation? I have looked upon the sorceries of an elder age, walked a shadowed road that has never known the light of Christ, and held forth with creatures both deathless and profane! But day and night marches on, as it has since the Almighty spoke light into being, and I begin to wonder if this long-promised salvation is a myth! Am I … Am I already in Hell…?”

  “Oh, child.” Maeve held out her hands; Étaín came and took them in her own. Maeve drew the younger woman down, kissing the crown of her head as she knelt. That gesture, one of infinite tenderness, wrenched a sob from deep within Étaín’s breast. Her shoulders trembled with pent-up grief. “Listen to me.” Maeve stroked her hair. “You are no more in Hell than is old Blind Maeve, here. The Almighty’s given you a precious gift, child. Aye, a gift and a burden, as well … for He has chosen you to walk the boundary between the worlds. You are the beacon of Christ, and if the fey folk reject His offer of salvation, then His word will be your blade.”

  “But…” Étaín gasped between sobs. “But the … the Ending of … of the World?”

  Maeve answered with a derisive snort. “And who says it will end, child? This abbot of yours? Or some other learned fool who thinks they can divine the will of the Almighty from scratchings in a book? Nay, God himself will choose the time and place, if an ending is to happen, and He’ll not seek the counsel of these cross-kissing charlatans. All we must do, child, is live well, help where we can, and take the good times with as much grace as the bad.”

  Étaín blew out her cheeks and nodded. “Live well?” she said.

  “Aye, live well.” Maeve’s callused thumbs smoothed tears from beneath the young woman’s eyes. Étaín caught Maeve’s hand, kissed it, and stood. She dried her face on the sleeve of her tunic. “You’ll be going after him, then?”

  “If it is my gift to walk the boundary,” Étaín said, “then I don’t see how I can not follow my instinct. Grimnir’s going to need me, I know it.” She returned to the table and started making a bundle of Grimnir’s belongings—rolling his cloak and shirt of iron rings together and strapping them to the Roman satchel; she settled his weapon belt over her neck and shoulder, where it hung like a baldric, the sheathed seax heavy against her hip.