“No!” I screamed, rushing forward. “That’s not Ingharr!”
Brandr turned at the sound of my voice. I expected Frey to lunge forward and strike my friend unaware. But the gentle god merely sighed and leaned upon his battered sword.
“Omat?” Brandr blinked. Unlike with the other Norsemen turned gods, my Viking’s mind was still his own—though with his vision clouded by the swirl of magic around him, he barely recognized me. “You came back?” His relief soon surrendered to ferocity. “Get back!”
“It’s not Ingharr you fight, but Frey! Don’t you see? You’re Surtur, the fire fiend, just as Galinn dreamed.” I clung to Brandr’s sword arm. “Where did you get this blade?”
“It’s my sword. Muirenn gave it to me, remember?” He shook his head as if to clear it. “She stole it back when we escaped.”
“Stole it indeed. Loki took it from Frey, don’t you remember the story you told me? This isn’t your sword—it’s the one Frey traded for the love of a giantess.”
He turned the weapon over in his hands. Branching symbols snaked along the golden blade. Its yellow pommel stone glowed like trapped sunlight. Yet Brandr merely scowled, unseeing. “It’s the same steel sword I’ve had for years.”
Just then, a woman’s scream cut through the battle’s roar.
Uqsuralik, his coat covered in blood, had pounded a hole through the ice with his forepaws. A young woman lay upon the frozen sea, sliding forward into the watery deep. A young woman with blue flowers in her golden hair.
“Sister!” Frey cried, all his composure fled. The goddess of love slid inexorably toward the water, scrabbling in vain. Her hair streamed behind her, shedding its flowers. Before Frey could move to save her, she was gone. He slumped down, his battered blade falling from his grasp.
“Get up, Ingharr!” Brandr lifted his sword high. “Stand and fight! This isn’t done yet.”
He was right. The carnage was far from over.
I watched in horror, spinning slowly in place like a bewildered child, almost able to hear the story taking shape within my brain—not the story as the Norse would tell it, but the one I knew to be true:
No Aesir will survive the Ragnarok, and no Jotuns, either. In battle after battle, no one emerges victorious.
One-armed Tyr slashes at Garm with his sharp sword, opening the white hound’s throat and severing the black hound’s head from her body. But before he dies, the white hound’s jaws tear the god’s heart from his chest. Together they crash to the ground, their lives slipping out in the pulse of blood upon the ice.
The white dog’s long tongue, which lolled so often from smiling jaws, now freezes to the frozen sea. His wagging tail lies still as he curls beside the black dog’s motionless form. Her warm brown eyes scan the plain one last time, looking for her mother’s mate—then grow dim.
Loki the Betrayer laughs and laughs, feinting and twisting from Heimdall’s grasp, but finally his laughter turns to gurgles, to chokes, to silence as the two gods stand with their hands circling each other’s throats, each sinking to his death, hushed for eternity. The three towering Frost Giants fall still, their mighty limbs turning from flesh back to stone.
Held tight in Jormungand’s bloody maw, Thor raises his hammer and crushes the beast’s skull. A last bloody plume of spray shoots from its head, then falls upon the ground in shards of ringing ice. Upon its back, the ogress named Sanna weeps with fingerless hands upraised, until Thor’s hammer crashes against her bare breast.
The ice shudders as the serpent-whale slides back into the chasm from which it erupted. Sanna, limp and still, tumbles from its back and disappears beneath the waves.
Thor looks around, dazed and bloody from the whale’s jaws, then takes nine paces toward the smaller of the ships, where his mother, Frigg, watches in horror through the steely eyes of his most faithful follower.
But no woman’s love can save him now.
Thor’s knees buckle and he crashes to the ground. With his death, the lightning ceases.
The last roll of thunder echoes off the mountains and falls silent.
Thor’s iron fingers slacken and his hammer falls free, cracking the ice in its path, rolling faster and faster until it reaches the ships.
The battle draws to an end as it began—with the bending and buckling of ice.
To the east, I watched the Icelanders’ large knarr rock and pitch in the sudden rush of water as the ice, already weakened by the blows of the animals and the tides of Taqqiq, finally gave way beneath Thor’s hammer. This part of my plan would work—a few Norsemen would escape to tell the tale of carnage. But even as I watched, an iceberg slid forward, crashing into the boat’s side and opening a wide, splintering hole. The overloaded knarr tipped to the waterline, the last of the long Vinland logs rolling across the deck like thunder, then plummeting beneath the waves.
Soon the sea had swallowed it all.
Frigg-and-Freydis stood in the prow of the other knarr, face twisted in terror. A circle of ice still held the Greenlandic ship in place.
Brandr had eyes only for the yellow-haired man bowed in front of him. He raised his brilliant sword.
“Stop!” I begged. Even if Brandr’s weapon could kill the gentle god, he would forever regret it. “This is Frey!”
“I see Ingharr before me. A murderer.” He lunged.
I flung myself between them. Everything slowed, the whole world confined to our tiny patch of ice, the last dying gasp of a battle to end the world.
Brandr twisted aside with a curse, just managing to angle his blade away from me. But then—a hum beside my ear, a gust of breath as Frey swung Ingharr’s sword at my back.
A grunt. A loud crack of breaking wood.
I spun to face the god—but a familiar broad back stood in my way.
Kiasik.
My brother raised the severed haft of his stolen spear.
Frey, his tears now dry, his face suffused with rage at his sister’s death, lifted his sword one more time. I reached forward to defend my brother with my bare hands, but Kiasik thrust me aside.
As one, they came together—Ingharr’s battered iron blade passing through my brother’s woolen rags and into his heart, while Kiasik’s splintered spear shaft bounced against the god’s flesh like shell striking stone.
Kiasik stumbled forward, and I threw my arms around him, cradling his trembling body there on the ice. Over my head, another blade hummed, this one so bright I felt the warmth of sunlight on my cheek as it passed by. Frey’s own magic sword passed beneath its former owner’s ribs and emerged, bright with fresh blood, on the other side. Brandr leapt over me to slam the wounded god into the ground.
Now I saw Frey as Brandr had. The spirit gone from his body, the slack-mouthed corpse beside me was only Ingharr Ketilsson. Barley sheaves no longer twined through his long yellow hair. He wore his carven metal helm instead. Through clothes torn by blade and claw, I could see the puckered scars that disfigured his body, each wound suffered at my hands. One on his side, made by my harpoon head when he’d killed Kidla. A long seam across his thigh from the sword wound. A deep indentation in his stomach from my spear, like a second navel that tied him to death instead of birth. Other wounds marked his body, large and small, all healed with thick white flesh. Ingharr should’ve died long ago—only the gods could’ve kept him alive. Now he was just another tool, used up and discarded.
Like me. Like my brother.
Kiasik’s blood poured onto my hands as I tried to stanch the flow from his wound. “Why?” I begged. “Why did you come back?”
“It was my turn,” he gasped, blood burbling at the corners of his mouth. “To save you, whether you wanted me to or not.”
“Foolish, foolish Sister’s Son,” I moaned, rocking him in my arms. Soon his shaking ceased. His eyes glazed, and I knew he looked not at me, but at the sky above.
I wanted to weep, to scream. I had come so far, fought so hard, to get him home, and he had died within sight of the whale mountain. The wei
ght of that knowledge crushed my chest, stifling my sobs. I could barely breathe.
I pulled his old seal totem from my amulet pouch and curled his fingers around the carved bone as I watched the spirit leave his body on a last whistling exhalation.
“You will play the kicking game among the stars,” I managed, “with Kidla at your side, and Ataata always watching.”
The first warm beams of the risen Sun bathed Kiasik’s still face. But I could take no joy in Malina’s return.
Brandr sank down beside me, wrapping a long arm around my shoulders. His head rested against mine. He knew what it meant to lose a brother.
We sat like that for a long moment, barely able to comprehend the slaughter around us.
Thorvard Einarsson fallen beside his battered war hammer. One-eyed Olfun with his throat ripped out. White Paw with her torn jaw and glazed eyes. Sweet One and Floppy Eared, their bodies curled together in a tangle of bloody limbs. Uqsuralik, his hide pierced with many blades, lay beside the sprawled forms of Bjarni and Muirenn. An aarluk’s fanged corpse bobbed in a patch of open water, its blowhole crusted with blood. Sheep and wolves and birds and Norsemen, their bodies already stiffening with frost, lay among the scattered boulders that had once formed Giants. One form larger than the others. A mound of white fur, streaked with frozen blood. Singarti.
So many men. So many animals. So many gods.
The world was empty indeed. The Aesir had fallen, as Loki had desired—but so too had his kinsmen—my own gods. Not at Taqqiq’s hands after all—but dead nonetheless.
Nearly all the mortal men who had ventured to my land had also lost their lives upon its shores. Most of those who still stood with Freydis aboard the Greenlanders’ knarr were thralls. Men captured from distant lands where the Aesir held no power. Like Brandr, they did not believe. They couldn’t see the true battle that surrounded them. They witnessed only a bloody skirmish between Norsemen and beasts.
But Freydis saw. She saw it all.
She balanced atop the ship’s rail, one hand grasping a line, the other outstretched toward the carnage. Frigg was gone, and Freydis’s own red hair danced like tongues of fire about her tear-streaked face. The wind twisted her green skirts around her legs. Eyes wild, she began to chant a new tale—one destined to be retold for a thousand years:
It is an ax age, a sword age,
A wind age, a wolf age,
Before the world falls;
Men shall never spare each other.
The Sun shines from the swords of the battle-gods,
Mountains are sundered, and ogresses sink,
The dead throng the road to Hel, and the sky is riven.
Brandr no longer looked confused.
Grasping his sword firmly once more—no magic blade now, but merely his familiar steel—he set off across the ice toward his old enemy.
“Wait!” I cried. But he was deaf to my pleas. I lay Kiasik’s limp form on the ice and ran after him. “Let her go!”
“Don’t try to stop me.”
I dashed ahead of him. Seizing Thorvard Einarsson’s fallen hammer, I began to pound at the weakened ice edge, opening a new, spreading lead toward the trapped knarr.
“What are you doing?” Brandr roared. He sprinted past me, leaping over the lead and onto the circle of ice. Too late. The knarr rocked now in open water.
Freydis Eriksdottir wiped the tears from her face and turned to her few remaining Norse sailors. Once more she was the woman I knew. “Raise the sail! While the sea is open. Hurry!”
Brandr landed on a floating ice pan barely the length of a man’s stride. He dropped his sword into the water as he tried to balance, swinging his arms like a new-fledged bird.
“Get down!” I screamed. “Lie down, spread your weight!”
He tumbled onto his stomach. I crawled toward the ice lip, careful to stretch my limbs wide, as an ice bear would, and reached out a hand for him. Beside us, the Greenlanders’ ship had already sailed through the open lead, Freydis’s urgent orders growing ever fainter.
Brandr looked at me with such hate I almost drew back my hand in fear. “Why did you do it?” he asked, his voice rough with despair, his cheek pressed against the ice.
“Freydis had to go back. Someone had to tell the story of how the Norse were defeated by strangers and skraelings. So no Greenlander, no Viking, will ever come again.”
“She ordered Galinn’s murder.”
“She ordered the murder of the man I love, too,” I retorted, stretching my hand toward him. “This is not easy for me, either.”
His face softened at my words. He took my hand in his, and very slowly, carefully, I pulled until the floating pan knocked against the solid ice. He struggled forward—I dragged him free with a final burst of strength as the pan beneath him finally flipped over.
We lay in each other’s arms, staring up at the ever-lightening sky.
Malina climbed higher.
Blackness turned to purple. Pink. Blue.
But our trials weren’t over. The lead I had opened in the ice soon met with the larger cracks opened by Thor’s fall. The entire ice shelf was collapsing. If we stayed much longer, we would drown, and this time it would not be Taqqiq’s doing. Brandr and I struggled to our feet.
We ran through devastation. Past the still forms of those I’d hated and those I’d loved. Those I’d worshiped and those I’d feared.
I looked back only once. The great crack widened, the ocean surged through. The bodies of the fallen, gods and wolfdogs, Inuk and inuksuk alike, slipped into the sea.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Back on land, we huddled inside the crude iglu I’d managed to build with my small knife and bare hands before the sunlight disappeared once more.
With no lamp and no window, our iglu was as dark as a cave. Slowly our breath and bodies warmed the interior. We rubbed at our hands and cheeks. We melted snow in our palms so we might lick a little moisture to soothe our parched tongues.
I could not stop trembling. Now that we were safe, the full horror of my actions rushed upon me in a smothering wave.
“Taqqiq was right,” I whispered. “Kiasik dead. Singarti dead. I am the destroyer. I thought that if I sacrificed myself, you’d be safe from the Moon Man, but I hadn’t counted on Loki. I hadn’t counted on the Aesir.”
“What are you saying, Omat?” Brandr begged. He smoothed the hair from my brow as if I were feverish.
And so I told him all of it. Muirenn’s possession by Loki. My conversation with Sanna. My visit to the Moon. The death not only of so many animals, so many Norse, but of all the spirits and gods, too.
He did not question me this time. He had seen too much to doubt that all my wildest tales were true. “Then I really killed…”
“Frey,” I sighed.
“How did he—”
I explained what Loki had told me of gods possessing those who pray to them. “But now the prayers don’t matter,” I groaned. “Now they’re all gone.”
All except Malina, whose presence offered me little solace. She hunted Taqqiq across the sky, but she would be little help to those of us below.
“If what you say is true,” Brandr said slowly, “why mourn their loss?” He rose to his feet and poked a vent hole in the roof. Some of our heat escaped, but at least we could see each other in the starlight. He stood looking down at me. “I already gave up on the gods long ago. We’ll survive without their help. The Moon still hangs in the sky. The Sun will still rise, the animals still roam the tundra, the tides still ebb and flow.”
“Yes, but there’s no spirit in it, Brandr. When Loki gave me back my magic, I could sense the spirits around me once more, could feel the power in the wind, hear the voices of the sea. Now all is silence. I’m powerless again.”
“But you’re not hunted. No one stalks your path. No spirits to please, no gods to fear. No Aesir, no Christ, no Norse to conquer your land. You’ve lost your brother and your magic. You will grieve. But you’re free, Omat. Free for the firs
t time.” He sounded so sure that I almost began to believe him. He slid his arms around me, and the warmth of his embrace finally penetrated my fear, my self-loathing. For all that I had lost, I had gained something, too. Brandr was right. I had a future. With him.
Then we heard the crying.
I crawled from the iglu, peering into the darkness.
“Kiasik?” I shouted, knowing he was dead and yet daring to hope.
“Help!”
I stumbled toward the voice—then stopped in my tracks when I realized it spoke in Norse.
“Help!” Again that cry, ragged and hoarse.
A figure plunged through the darkness and into my arms, babbling through his tears.
“It was so dark! Then the lightning and the sea ice—I looked again—the ships were gone! And I couldn’t see, so I followed the snow ridges like she said and—”
“Shhh…” I held him awkwardly. “Shhh. You’re safe, Snorri.”
Brandr sat, tense and angry, on one side of the small iglu. Snorri shivered on the other, his legs drawn up against his chest so his feet might not touch his enemy’s. I had little patience left for their hatred.
“How did you survive, Snorri?” I asked, my own grief tempered by my need to care for the shivering boy.
“Freydis—she was so angry after you escaped.” His story came out in fits and starts through his numb lips. “She was bent over Ingharr, praying to Frey to heal him, and shouting at the men to go after you. Then she saw me holding my cross and realized I was a Christian. And she went mad—slapped me and kicked me, like I was a dog. Threw me off the boat. I just stood there on the ice. Where was I supposed to go? I stayed in the knarr’s shadow for a while—thought she’d change her mind. I fell asleep—on the ice—woke up when the thunder started. I could see the ships, could see Olfun and Thorvard and even wounded Ingharr jumping overboard and heading toward shore. I called out to Bjarni, thinking he’d help me, but he left, too, walking like a deaf man toward the strange piles of stones.
“The ice started cracking. I was caught on an iceberg, floating adrift. The waves came up and the knarr was sailing away in the open water and I was sure the iceberg would carry me off to sea. I prayed. To God and to Jesus.” The boy pulled the cross from beneath his shirt. “And He saved me, as He has saved us all through His death on the cross. The iceberg drifted to shore in the darkness, and I got off and followed the snow ridges north and then you found me.”
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