A Gathering of Ravens

by Scott Oden

  “Bjarki,” Draugen said as he limped up the steps of the low dais. One of the raven banners of the House of Ivar had been torn from its mountings to serve as a blanket; the other hung askew, scorch marks along its lower edge where someone had tried to burn it. “Bjarki, the gods damn you!” Half-Dane snarled and groused under his breath. Draugen kicked the throne. “Wake up, you piss-colored bastard!”

  “Pester someone else, you one-eyed stormcrow,” Bjarki rasped.

  “You’ve been summoned.”

  Bjarki raised his head slightly, the makeshift crown slipping off to clatter across the dais. Wincing, he peeled back one jaundiced eyelid. “Who would dare?”

  Draugen gestured back at the blood-spattered youth. “Your pet priest.”

  Both eyes opened, now, and the ale-fogged gleam in Half-Dane’s gaze could yet scorch iron. “Is this some kind of jest, boy?”

  The youth trembled, shook his head. “My father, lord. He bid me fetch you. The omens … you must come.”

  “Oh, must I?”

  “Please, lord!”

  Bjarki looked at Draugen, who gave a halfhearted shrug. “You’re the one who claims to give a fig about the omens. Here’s your chance to prove it.”

  “Pah! Bugger you and your wretched omens!” Nevertheless, Half-Dane heaved himself from the throne. He stretched and looked around, tendon and sinew cracking in his shoulders and down his twisted spine. “Too bad Mac Cennétig isn’t here. Look at this sorry lot! One fucking Irishman and a knife is all it would take to rule an empire.”

  “Lucky for us.”

  “Please, lord! Hurry!” the priest’s son repeated.

  “Go on, you rat! I’m coming.” Bjarki staggered down the dais and across the room to follow in the boy’s wake. Draugen came after, pausing only to retrieve his axes. Neither man saw Kormlada’s drawn and haggard face in the shadows of the gallery overhead, watching with a thin smile curving her pale lips.

  To reach the precincts of the temple from the throne room at the heart of Dubhlinn Castle was a journey of a thousand steps—across arcaded courts and up narrow stairs, past the stables and through the kitchens—and most of it blissfully shadowed. Only at the end was Bjarki forced out into the harsh morning light. Squinting, he shouldered open the temple’s heavy doors. As his eyes adjusted once more to the gloom, he took in the details of a slaughter.

  Eight sacrificial victims lay naked on the blood-smeared floor—a mix of Irish prisoners and slaves plucked from the market—all of them strangled and gutted, their viscera slopped across the stones like streamers of flesh; a ninth was stretched supine on the altar, his belly ripped open. The silken cord that killed him was still looped around his neck. Above him, ghoulish in the dim light, stood blood-spattered Ágautr—his gory arms up to his elbows in the dead man’s guts. He tore an organ free, looked at it, and then slung it at Bjarki’s feet. It struck with a wet splatter.

  “The Allfather has spoken!”

  “What goes, Ágautr?” Bjarki said.

  Ágautr raised his hands and implored the incense-wreathed heavens. A madness was upon him, Bjarki could see it. “Nine times, has the Hanged One’s will been made manifest! Nine times have the livers been heavy with yellow fluid, the lobes of war engorged with blood! Nine times have the entrails spelled out the doom of our people! The signs are clear! The omens do not lie!”

  “What are you yammering about? Speak plain, man!”

  “Battle will be joined upon the morrow,” Ágautr replied.

  “Aye, and so?”

  “It is Odin’s will that you lead the armies out from behind the walls of Dubhlinn! The Allfather has chosen you, Bjarki Half-Dane! And if you shirk from this honor the Hanged One has paid you, then our people will suffer defeat at the hands of those sworn to the White Christ! So it is written in the flesh of the dead!”

  Bjarki sobered instantly; his eyes narrowed. “You’re certain?”

  “Nine times have I read the same omens. This is the will of Odin.”

  “Do it again.”

  “You are chosen, Half-Dane!” Ágautr said. “Do you doubt it? Nine is the sacred number. Nine is all the gods allow—”

  “The gods will allow a tenth!” Bjarki snarled.

  Bjarki whirled and seized Ágautr’s son by the throat. The father started forward, then stopped; with a look of grim purpose, he shoved the ninth victim off onto the temple floor, where it splashed in the broth of blood and fluids that pooled at the base of the altar.

  “Do not be afraid, my son. The Allfather waits in the shadows, and he will greet you with open arms.”

  But far from being calmed by his father’s sentiment, the boy struggled in Bjarki’s grasp, plucking at the long fingers that encircled his neck like bands of iron. Half-Dane hauled him to the altar, through puddles of blood and drifts of ripped intestines, lifted him bodily as though he weighed nothing, and slammed him down upon the place of sacrifice. Ágautr took hold of his son’s thrashing limbs while Draugen rushed forward and ripped the lad’s tunic open, revealing the pale and hairless flesh of his torso.

  “Hear me, Odin!” Bjarki cried. “Allfather, ever-wise, I give you the gift of this life!” Slowly, he squeezed the boy’s throat till cartilage popped, choking off his air and killing him by inexorable degrees. While his legs yet trembled in the death throes, Half-Dane took the sacrificial dagger from Ágautr’s hand and split the still-moving body open from sternum to navel, like a butcher jointing a haunch of beef. Hot blood sprayed; steam rose from the pierced bowels, and a stench of overwhelming despair. Undaunted, Bjarki plunged his hands into the reeking heart of the boy’s corpse. He looked. He felt the slippery blood, the vital fluids, the sacks of flesh that gave the body its anima. He searched for the omens … and they were there. In the coloration of the viscera; in the weight of the spleen and the way the twisted guts mirrored the carvings on the temple’s staves; in the engorged liver, yellow and angry; in the way the heart wanted to escape its cage of bone …

  After a long moment, with Ágautr peering over his shoulder and Draugen waiting in breathless anticipation, Bjarki Half-Dane had no choice but to concede. “It’s true.”

  “It is the will of Odin,” Ágautr muttered. “I told you.”

  Bjarki nodded. It was the will of Odin. Unless he personally led the Norse against the Gaels, the battle would end in a slaughter. Dubhlinn would vanish in an orgy of flame and the vengeful Christians would crucify him the way the Romans had crucified their Nailed God. Ten sacrificial victims told the same tale. Odin had selected him, Bjarki Half-Dane, to strike a blow for the Old Ways, to lead the Northmen to victory.

  The Allfather had chosen him.

  Bjarki reeled back, chest swelling with pride. He raised the bloody knife to the smoke-laced heavens. “Odin!” he roared. “Odin! Look here! I accept your mantle! I will not fail you!”

  And in the distance, as if an answer, came the mocking cry of a raven …

  33

  Cormac O’Ruairc shaded his eyes against the bright sun and watched as thunderheads of smoke drifted inland. Finegall and the rich peninsula of Howth burned. Farms, villages, the estates of those Norse and Irish bastards allied with King Sitric … all of it an open pocket ripe for the picking. Names and fortunes were being made, yonder, yet here he sat on the south bank of the Liffey, miles from what looked to be a fine spear-whetting, watching a road only a fool would use. All because Brian mac Cennétig had become squeamish in his dotage.

  “Damn him,” O’Ruairc muttered for the hundredth time. “Damn him to the pits of Hell!”

  The Connacht chief turned away. He couldn’t bear to look any longer; the thought of his enemies growing fat and happy on the spoils of a generation of reavers-turned-landsmen made his blood boil. His men, who had the honor of leading the vanguard yesterday, now ranged about a low hill between the river and the road from Dubhlinn to the Irish camp at Kilmainham. They groused and bitched about the idle nature of their task, and O’Ruairc had no call to disagree. One man o
r two could have easily watched the road; instead Murrough—at his father’s insistence, no doubt—had dispatched the whole of the Uí Ruairc of Lough Gill? Cormac fumed; despite his transgressions, belittling his clan was an insult that screamed for redress. But how?

  The land hereabout was marshy and flat, save for a few rises like this one, and but for a tree here and there and the remains of an old stone wall—wrecked by floods in the past—it offered nothing in the way of cover. On his right hand, looming in the distance, Carraig Dubh rose from the forested foothills and joined the peaks of the Cualann Mountains.

  A sharp whistle brought Cormac around.

  One of his Connachtmen, a bowshot from him, gestured up the Dubhlinn Road; frowning, O’Ruairc looked in that direction and saw movement. A dark-clad figure emerged from the tall grass at the edge of the road, its arms outstretched in a gesture of submission. It had an eerie gait to it as it moved forward, as though someone had taught a wolf to walk upright. But at this distance, O’Ruairc could tell precious little about the figure, save that a swatch of patchwork cloth muffled its visage.

  O’Ruairc’s lads vaulted from their saddles and leveled spears at the newcomer, as though daring it to take one step closer. Man or beast, the figure was smart enough to understand. It stopped and kept its hands away from the blade it wore strapped to its waist. It must have said something, for he watched his boys exchange perplexed looks. More of his riders drew near, and O’Ruairc himself swung up into the saddle and touched his heels to his horse’s flanks.

  And as he trotted closer, Cormac O’Ruairc of Lough Gill heard the figure speak; in that moment, he knew that while he was hearing a male voice it was not necessarily the voice of a Man.

  “Your king,” it said. “Faugh! Which one of you dunghill rats can get me to your king, eh? I got a message for him.” Its strangely accented tongue mingled the speech of the Danes with that of the Norse, with strange words drawn from another language, as well.

  O’Ruairc’s horse balked. Even so, the stubborn brute refused to give ground. Its ears flattened; it snorted in anger at the newcomer. Cormac patted its neck. “Are you Dane or Norse, friend?”

  “Neither,” answered the stranger.

  He was clad in odd war gear: a shirt of iron rings, a horsehide kilt, sandals like those Cormac had seen plucked from the graves of long-dead Romans, and a long seax in a worn leather scabbard. Still, something about him set O’Ruairc’s teeth on edge—the swarthy skin, the faint suggestion of red eyes deep within the makeshift hood, the way no horse would come near him; all of it triggered a primal need to gut the stranger ere another moment passed. But O’Ruairc stayed his hand.

  “I need to see the old king.”

  “King Brian? And why do you need to see good King Brian?”

  “That’s my business, wretch!”

  Cormac’s eyes narrowed. He swung a leg over his horse’s neck and dropped to the ground; his men, all feeling the same instinctual desire to drive their spears into the stranger until he was nothing but a red ruin at their feet, opened their leaguer so he might come face-to-face with the stranger. “You’d best keep a civil tongue in your feckin’ head, then! I am the chief of the Uí Ruairc. This is my road. You want to see the king? Convince me why.”

  Cormac felt the stranger bristle. An odd snuffling sound came from the depths of the hood. One of the stranger’s sinewy hands, long-nailed like a beast’s talons, hovered near the hilt of the long seax at his belt, its bone and silver haft worn from use.

  O’Ruairc braced for an explosion of violence; that was the sense he got from this devil who wore the guise of a man, that bloodshed was its dominion. Instead, however, the stranger gave a harsh and humorless chuckle, a sound like the creak of the gallows. “Faugh! You hymn-singers are all alike! I try to do a right turn by your king and this is how you repay me? By hoisting me like a hog to slaughter? Who’s off in the grass, there,” he said, inclining his head to the left. “More of your cursed kneelers with their arrows on the string?”

  “Slingers,” O’Ruairc replied.

  “So-ho! Going to take me alive, then, are you? And what? Torture me? Ungrateful wretch!” The stranger ducked his head and spat, and then held his arms up and away from his sides. “I promise you this, maggot: if that’s your plan you’d better put me in the fucking ground, because when I’m done saving your miserable hides from the trickery of the Danes, I will find you! I will crack your spine and suck the marrow from your bones, hymn-singer! By Ymir, I swear it!”

  For a long moment, Cormac O’Ruairc studied the savage figure of the stranger. He weighed his words, and though his gut told him to kill the beast, Cormac could not gainsay anything he had said. “What’s this about the Danes?”

  The stranger shook his head. “Nár! That’s not a tidbit for the likes of you. Take me to your king.”

  O’Ruairc exhaled. “Will you surrender your blade and submit to having your hands bound? You have a foul appearance, friend, and that makes me wonder what manner of mischief you might be part of, to be cursed so by God.”

  “Bugger your god.” With exaggerated care, the stranger drew his long seax and flicked it point-first into the ground between them. “Come, we’re wasting time.”

  O’Ruairc bent and scooped up the rune-scored blade before motioning for his men. “How are you called?”

  “Many things, but what’s it to you, swine?” The stranger drew back his hood; O’Ruairc’s lads recoiled from his monstrous face, sharp and feral. There was no fear in the thing’s unsettling red eyes, and even a trace of mockery in the curl of his lips—as if he knew some deadly secret they didn’t.

  And as the creature allowed one of the Uí Ruairc to bind his hands with ropes of braided leather, Cormac wondered what sort of devil’s bargain he had just brokered.

  34

  At the mouth of the River Liffey, on the long strand beneath Dubhlinn’s walls, Bjarki Half-Dane crouched on the damp sand and watched as crews of reavers floated their dragon ships on the outgoing tide. The sun was setting, and for all intents and purposes his allies from the Isle of Man and the Orkneys were fleeing in droves—taking to the water like rats from a burning scow.

  At least, that’s how Bjarki hoped it looked.

  “You think they’re watching?” Maelmorda asked. The rebel king of Leinster stood off to one side from where Half-Dane crouched, his cloak-wrapped figure lean and irresolute.

  “They’re watching. They will think we’ve had a falling-out; an argument over spoils, perhaps. I’d wager my eyeteeth that, once he hears of it, this so-called turn of events will cause that idiot, Murrough, to rest a little easier, this night. We’ll catch that cross-kissing wretch on his knees, tomorrow.”

  Bjarki glanced down the strand to where Bródir’s black-prowed ship pulled out into the bay. The Manx lord stood beneath the carved figurehead and screamed obscenities at them, calling upon his ancestors to make the balance right. In the opposite direction, Sigurðr’s thunderous voice matched Bródir curse for curse.

  “Seems like a useless bit of theater.”

  Bjarki came up off the sand and whirled to face Maelmorda. His eyes gleamed in the fading light. “You have a better plan, son of Murchada?”

  A bit of steel found its way into the king of Leinster’s spine. He squared his shoulders and met Bjarki’s gaze. “You foreigners.” He sniffed in disdain. “You’ve never understood the Irish. You want Murrough to come to fight? You need only tell him when and where and he’ll be there. He’s no great thinker, Brian’s son.”

  “Aye, true, but neither are you. This way, we can catch him at unawares. He’ll be expecting space to breathe and time to worship his useless god. What about you, eh? Any qualms about drawing steel tomorrow?”

  “The cost of any rebellion is blood, and the butcher’s bill has come due. But, what I don’t want is to be served up like a fatted calf. Who is to say our allies will return?”

  Bjarki chuckled. “Those greedy bastards? They’ll be back, for they l
ove the song of battle, the chance for glory, and the lure of spoils more than they love life. Come the dawn, you and I will lead the companies from Dubhlinn and Leinster out and over the old bridge, into the fields of Chluain Tarbh between the River Tolka and Tomar’s Wood. Bródir and Sigurðr will land their fleet at our backs. We’ll march forward from there.” Bjarki sobered. “It is Odin’s will, this battle. It is Odin’s will that we meet the Gael tomorrow, in defiance of their Nailed God. And the chosen of Odin will stand in the vanguard. How can we lose?”

  “Because Odin hates a liar!” a voice roared at Bjarki’s back. Half-Dane turned to face the furious king of Dubhlinn. Clad in a hauberk of iron and silver mail, a heavy broadsword at his hip, Sitric stalked across the damp sand to confront his rival. Draugen came warily in the young king’s wake, followed by the pale figure of his mother, Kormlada. “That’s how you will lose—by profaning the omens to suit your own ends! Odin’s will, my arse!”

  “Guard your tongue, boy!”

  “Boy? You impertinent wretch! How did you do it, eh? Did you buy off the priest with my gold, or is this more of your cursed mummery?”

  “I did nothing, little fool!” Bjarki snarled. He and Sitric circled one another like sharks, waiting for the scent of blood to trigger a frenzy of violence. “One omen is easy enough to conjure … but ten? Not even my art is that potent! No, the Allfather has spoken! This—”

  “Drop this charade,” Sitric said. “You have no audience but us, now, and we know what you’re about, fool! You steal my men, you steal my wealth, you steal my city, and now you would steal my chance at glory? You forget yourself, Half-Dane!”

  Bjarki exploded. Though unarmored and unarmed, he crossed the interval between himself and Sitric and thrust his bristle-bearded face nearly nose-to-nose with that of Dubhlinn’s king. “I stole nothing, you miserable pup! It was my plans and plots that gave you a name, beyond the spineless son of a thrice-wedded whore! Who sent you abroad to gather the likes of Bródir and Sigurðr? Who strengthened your walls with good stone and trained your men to fight like the heroes of old? What have you done, little Silky-beard, besides whine and clutch at your mother’s skirts?”