by Scott Oden
“The how of it matters little,” the Witch of Dubhlinn replied. “The outcome is all that is important. The son of Olaf Cuarán is king in Dubhlinn, once more. The balance is righted. The rest…” Kormlada turned away.
Sitric glanced at her. “The battle isn’t over. Will you not see it to the end?”
“I have seen its end.”
“Who triumphs?”
Kormlada stopped. A breeze from the sea lifted her long raven tresses; in its salt tang she could smell the changing weather. The Old World was ending, teetering on the edge of the Long Night; a New World was poised to arise in its place, and that world would have no need of her. The Witch of Dubhlinn would diminish, and Kormlada ingen Murchada would become nothing but a name etched on a stone and perched above a cold and forgotten grave.
“Mother?” Sitric repeated. “Who triumphs?”
Kormlada smiled a melancholy smile. “The living, my son. It is always the living who will recall the deeds, who will write the histories. It is the living who will triumph.”
The Witch of Dubhlinn turned away and disappeared into the shadows of Cuarán’s Tower …
5
As the day peaked and waned, Étaín watched the battle rage away across the plain of Chluain Tarbh. She watched from the high king’s pavilion near the eaves of Tomar’s Wood, unable to make sense of the roars and the screams and the flashes of steel winking through a low veil of dust. All she knew for certain was that men died, yonder, and the fate of the high kingship hung on the balance of a blade.
The king had dismissed all but six of his guards—Dalcassian elders, their mustaches gray and faces seamed from the long years of fighting—and had given leave for his servants to join the fray. Ragnall had gone forward, seeking news. Brian himself knelt inside the shadow of the pavilion, his hands clasped in prayer. Étaín paced. An hour. Two. Thirty-two steps separated the pavilion’s corner poles, and in that span she counted fourteen rocks, six tussocks of sedge grass, a knot of periwinkle, two small anthills, and a sun-bleached shell dropped by a passing bird. Counting what she could touch, what belonged in the world of the living was more comforting than counting the myriad faces of the dead. It was enough that she could hear their voices.
Sing for us, the dead asked. Sing us the song we heard in the night. Sing us into the light of God. Étaín closed her eyes. She was the beacon of Christ. And as the living strove in blood and slaughter, she sang for the dead. Her voice lifted across the green plain of Chluain Tarbh, where the sea foamed against the shore. Her song tinkled like chimes in the soft breeze, a balm to the wounded who stood at the threshold of death, who cursed the unseen blow that stole their life away, who fretted over those still on the field, who cried bitter tears and pined for heather and hearth. Étaín sang for the dead; but she sang for the dying, as well, and for those who would bear the guilt for having lived …
As her song ended, Étaín opened her eyes to see two men rushing across the plain, a pair of the king’s Dalcassians; between them, they half carried a third man: old Ragnall. They were all three hollow-eyed and blood-blasted, their limbs trembling and spent—though Ragnall looked as pale as a man who’d been bled dry.
The king met them. He took Ragnall’s cold hand and sank down beside him as the Dalcassians lowered him to the grass. He had no wound upon his body.
“His heart,” Étaín murmured.
“Brian,” Ragnall gasped through lips gone pale and bloodless.
“I am here, my old friend.”
“My king.” The steward’s fingers tightened around Brian’s. “The … The s-song of doom … the … the d-daughters of Odin! They r-ride … they ride for me … and for … for your son! Murrough … your son … Murrough … fallen! Murrough has … has fallen!”
The old Northman sank back in death, eyes glazing. A sob caught in the king’s throat. Étaín saw the bulwark of his faith crack and crumble from the blow; she watched the light of his soul grow dim and his flesh crumple in on itself. “No,” he whispered.
Étaín knelt beside the king and Ragnall; she took their joined hands in hers. Eyes fierce and unblinking, she looked past the living and into the faces of the dead. “Tell me,” she said.
And they did. The dead sang to her. In the chanting cadence of war, they sang of a great beast made of flesh and steel that writhed across the field of Chluain Tarbh, twisting like a serpent in its death throes. They sang of Black Murrough of Kincora, resolute in his love of Christ Jesus, who strode fearlessly into the maw of the beast. The dead sang of his prowess and of his ferocity; they sang of the strife beneath the Raven Banner of Odin, where the blessed blade of Murrough cleft the heart of the giant, Sigurðr, and broke the spine of the great beast. But their praise song became a dirge as the dead recounted his last moments, breast-to-breast and dagger-to-dagger with a king’s heathen son of Norway. The dead sang of the harrowed earth, salted with blood, which rose up to embrace the two fallen princes. Their song ended, the dead of Chluain Tarbh wept …
Tears fell from Étaín’s eyes as she turned to look at the frail old king. Brian mac Cennétig bowed his head.
“It is as God wills it.”
6
As implacable as Death itself, the son of Bálegyr ranged the broken field in search of Bjarki Half-Dane. He did not stop to gloat over the flight of the Dubhlinn Danes, driven back to the Liffey Bridge by the axes of Hlymrekr and Corcaigh; he barely registered the fall of Maelmorda, rebel king of Leinster, who was torn apart by the wolves of the Uí Ruairc. He passed the death mound of corpses surrounding slain Prince Murrough without remark, and paid no heed when young Turlough of the Dal Cais caught Bródir of Mann in a death grip as the reaver fled for his ships, and vanished with him beneath the bloodstained waters of Dubhlinn Bay.
Nothing else mattered, save Grimnir’s long-delayed vengeance on his brother’s slayer. He returned to the site of their combat and combed through the wounded and the dead. Grimnir snuffled the blood-soaked ground, seeking the elusive scent of his prey. He found Bjarki’s broken shield, but nothing else.
“Faugh!” he snarled and spat. “Ymir take that piss-colored bastard! When I find him—!”
Near at hand, Grimnir heard a weak but familiar voice. “Skrælingr, I name you. Ch-Child of Satan.”
He crouched. From under a mound of dead Northmen and Scots, Grimnir spied the one-eyed visage of Draugen. Clots of blood stiffened his gray beard, crusted his lacerated scalp; he had one arm free, and with it he struggled to shift the weight of armored dead pressing upon him. “Christ-Dane,” Grimnir said, grinning. He used the point of his seax to ease the flap of skin off Njáll’s scalp and examine the wound beneath. “Should have taken your wretched head off, maggot.”
“Did you lie? Is … Is she alive? Is Étaín…?”
Grimnir rocked back on his haunches. “She lives. Where has Bjarki gone, Christ-Dane? Where has your master gotten off to, eh? Not back to Dubhlinn. Oh, no. The witch would never stand for that! Where, then?”
“His day is done,” Draugen replied. “I have bled for him, and my oath is fulfilled. If he is to die, by your hand or by another’s, he’ll try to take Mac Cennétig with him. He hates the old king, body and soul.”
Grimnir stared back across the plain to where Brian’s white linen pavilion stood on a slight rise, hard by the dark fringe of Tomar’s Wood. “Does he, now?”
“Where is she, skrælingr? You said she’s alive. Where is she?”
“Where do you think?” Grimnir shook his head, chuckling. “That foundling has a knack for getting in the way.”
Draugen clawed desperately at Grimnir’s blood-slimed boot. “Help me!”
“Help you?” Grimnir rose. He reversed his grip on his seax. “Help you? Do you think me a fool, Christ-Dane?”
Daugen struggled. He turned his head so his one good eye could meet the hateful gaze of his lifelong enemy. “You’ve won. I expect no mercy from you, skrælingr. If the Fates had written our end differently, with our places reversed, I wou
ld have no mercy for you, either. But if Étaín is with the king, then she is in danger. I swore an oath when I took her from England. An oath that I would not let her come to harm. I failed her once before. But, by Christ, I will not fail her again! I beg of you, help me! I am Draugen no longer!”
Grimnir snorted. He glanced again at the white pavilion off in the distance, then reached down and caught Njáll by the wrist. Grunting, he dragged him free of the clinging embrace of the dead.
Njáll rose on unsteady feet; though yet reeling from the thunderous blow he had taken to the head, he was otherwise unharmed. Grimnir bent and grabbed a long-handled axe off the ground. He thrust it haft-first into the Dane’s hands.
“Go get your precious little hymn-singer and get her away from there. Your life is my gift.” Grimnir snatched a handful of Njáll’s beard and dragged him close, red eyes boring into his like forge-gledes. “But if you think to flout me—if you think this little bit of mercy makes me weak—then, by Ymir, you will watch me gut her like a fattening calf before I send you shrieking down to Hel!”
7
Bjarki Half-Dane crouched in the undergrowth at the edge of Tomar’s Wood and glared at the pavilion of the Irish king. This morning he’d been nigh a king himself, with an army at this back and the world at his feet. And now? He was a tattered vagabond lurking in the shadows, penniless, with only a ragged hauberk and a notched sword to his name. Bjarki cursed the Fates that had brought him to this sorry state. He cursed Ágautr and his wretched omens, and he cursed his own useless pride. Chosen of Odin? Pah! He smelled the hand of a rat—and unless he was far off the mark, a cunning and perilous rat named Kormlada. Bjarki ground his teeth. Should have killed the whore months ago! Ah, no matter. Let that bitch revel in her little victory. He would be back, and he’d bring fire and steel to this green little shithole.
Bjarki glanced over his shoulder. Eight other men crouched behind him. Six were Norse mercenaries, blond giants in bloodied mail who had come out with him from the city; the last two were dark-haired Gaelic rogues, Leinstermen he’d picked up along the way, braggarts hot to avenge their fallen kinsmen. Nine of them, all told. Odin’s sacred number. Bjarki snorted. Well, he’d come to this Hel-blighted land with less than this, and nearly carved an empire. Least he could do was leave it in ruins …
“That bastard, Mac Cennétig, is mine,” he snarled, drawing his sword from its sheath. “Kill the rest.”
8
Étaín unfastened her cloak. Shaking it out, she draped the patched and worn garment over Ragnall’s body like a shroud. The captain of the remaining Dalcassians, a clean-shaven man with the face of a boxer, came to the king’s side and offered him an arm as Brian struggled to rise. The king nodded his thanks.
For a moment, the high king remained motionless; he gazed out over the trampled and blood-sodden field of Chluain Tarbh, where men yet strained and contended like yoked oxen. “Send for a horse,” Brian said, quietly. “It is time to call an end to the slaughter, time to care for our wounded and honor our dead. I must fetch Murrough home. Send to King Sitric, if he yet lives, and bid him do the same. Our differences can wait.”
The captain nodded. “Aye, as you wish, sire.”
But, as the man turned to do the king’s bidding, Étaín felt an eerie sensation tickling her spine. A spirit had joined them, grim and indomitable; she heard its whispered warning. “Protect my father.”
“Wait.” Étaín laid a hand on the Dalcassian captain’s shoulder … and felt him quiver even as she heard the thudding impact. He half-turned, looking down in wide-eyed disbelief at the thrown axe that had suddenly sprouted from his breastbone. Breath rattling in his throat, the old soldier crumpled without a word, his spirit suddenly free.
Étaín saw them, rising from the edge of the woods: six mailed reavers and a pair of traitorous Gaels led by a twisted giant whose sallow skin and skrælingr’s eyes marked him as Bjarki Half-Dane—and in the dark shadow of his soul, she beheld the one-eyed titan who hung from Yggðrasil.
“Protect the king!” she screamed, wrenching the bloody axe free of the dead Dalcassian’s chest.
Amid incoherent roars and shouted imprecations, the blond-bearded reavers crashed into the king’s remaining Dalcassians. And though they were old men, slowed by the weight of their years and stiffened by the stigmata of past glories, they nevertheless fought with the fury of their kind. Norse spears darted and licked; broad-bladed swords, blunted from the day’s butchery, shattered Irish shields and the bones beneath. But the whickering axes of Dal Cais reaped a red harvest among the Foreigner.
The two Gaels, dark-eyed jackals of Leinster, skirted the fray and made straight for Étaín, their eyes aflame with lust. And Étaín did not shrink from them. All fear had left her, and the courage that put steel in her spine was her own—hard-earned and precious.
She leveled her blood-smeared axe at them. “Know this, dogs of Leinster! I am a daughter of the Blind Witch of Lorcan’s Wood! Harm me and her curse will be on you!”
One of the Gaels slowed—which was Étaín’s intent—and glanced about him, half-expecting to see imps boiling from the ground at the mention of Blind Maeve. The other only showed a mouthful of blackened teeth as he grinned. “We ain’t in Lorcan’s Wood, now, are we? You’d best come with us, girl, before these heathens go and get their feckin’ hands on you!”
And as he reached for her, Étaín lashed out at him. Her axe caught him high, between the brow and the bridge of his nose. Blood fountained, and the sickening chook of impact vibrated up her arm as the blade staved in the Gael’s face. He toppled like a sapling, dead before he hit the ground.
The second Gael snarled. “Witch’s daughter or no, I will gut you, bitch!” He threw his axe down and drew a curved skinning knife from a sheath at the small of his back; he came at her with the wariness of a hunter stalking wounded prey, and she knew he would not fall quite so easily.
“Hold!” the king thundered.
The Gael stopped in midstep, cowed by the power in the old man’s voice. The two remaining reavers ceased slitting the wounded Dalcassians’ throats and looked up. Only Bjarki was unmoved. He stalked toward the king with murder in his eyes, a naked sword in his fist.
“You bring your leman to war?” Half-Dane mocked. “Or is that one of your cursed daughters?”
“Let her be, spawn of Satan!”
A malicious grin split Bjarki Half-Dane’s face. “She can watch your end, ere my lads have their fun,” he said. “Will you fight?”
“I cannot spill blood this day. Not even yours.”
Bjarki laughed. “So be it. Your hymn-singers may have won the day, but their victory will be bittersweet! Odin! Look here! A last sacrifice! The blood of a king to assuage your anger!” And with a grunt, he brought his blade up and hacked into Brian mac Cennétig’s neck. Étaín cried out as Brian sank to his knees, clutching at the wound with trembling fingers as though mere hands might stem the blood that sheeted down his front. Cursing, Bjarki struck again, and again, until the head of the high king came free of his body with the dull crunch of vertebrae. With a bark of triumph, he stooped and snatched it up by the hair, thrusting it aloft. “Now let Gael tell Gael that it was by the hand of Bjarki Half-Dane that Brian mac Cennétig fell! I spit on their king, as I spit on them!” He turned to Étaín and gestured to her with Mac Cennétig’s dripping head. “Come here, girl, and kiss your father good night!”
She screamed her rage, her grief. She hefted her axe … and reeled as the wary Gael darted in and slammed his fist into the side of her head. Her axe thudded to the turf. Before she could fall, the Gael caught her up and held her tight, his knife pressed to her throat. “Gotcha, you feckin’ bitch!”
“Half-Dane!” a voice called out.
Through a blur of tears, Étaín saw a ghoulish figure emerge from the taller grass to the right, where the eaves of Tomar’s Wood ran down into a low hollow. Though one-eyed and bloody, his beard more gray than chestnut, there was nevertheless some
thing familiar about him—in the breadth of his shoulders and the way he carried the long-handled axe so casually in his fist. She struggled in the Gael’s hard grasp.
“Draugen.” Bjarki laughed. “Well, you’ve earned your moniker over and again, you bastard. Thought the snuffler killed you.”
The man touched his lacerated scalp. “God loves a fool,” he replied; Étaín’s breath caught in her throat. She recognized that voice, though she dared not look at him for fear of seeing only some cruel trick of Fate.
“Not our gods,” Bjarki said. “Or did that blow knock you back on your knees with the rest of those useless hymn-singers?”
“It knocked a little sense back into my thick skull, is all.” Njáll turned to the two reavers. “Sense enough to know it’s over, mates. Time to start thinking about your own hides. These Irish are coming for blood, and you don’t want to be standing over the corpse of their king when they get here.”
Bjarki’s eyes narrowed. He tossed the king’s severed head off to the side. “What are you doing?”
“It’s over,” Njáll repeated.
“Aye, it’s over. But we’ll skin out when I say we’re ready.”
Njáll ignored him. “You lads, I know you, and you’re both good men. But if you follow this one’s lead, all that will come of it are hard blows on the way to an ignoble grave. You deserve an honest gold-giver—”
Bjarki snarled. “Gold-giver? I’ll give gold to the one who brings me your mutinous tongue!”
But neither of the two reavers moved to do Half-Dane’s bidding. They exchanged glances, looking from Njáll to Bjarki and back again, weighing what they knew of each man, what they knew of their reputations, on a scale of their own devising; suddenly the balance tilted. The older of the two Norseman, with a plaited beard and a torque of twisted Spanish silver, nodded to Njáll. “You’re an honest gold-giver.”
“No, lads. I got amends to make. Head inland—west for a day, then south. Keep your wits about you and you’ll be knocking at the gates of Veisafjorðr in a fortnight. You’ll find jarls aplenty, there.”