“Here, you!” Snorri’s mother appeared in her apron to scoop the infant away.
Snorri’s eyes prickled, as they always did when he thought of Mhaeri, and a dull, unfocused anger filled him, trembling in his limbs.
“How big is this troll?” a man shouted.
A woman yelled something Snorri didn’t catch but that set the fishwives around her cackling lewdly.
The Eight Quays crowd had the air of an audience seeking entertainment rather than of Vikings itching to take up axe and sword in the name of their jarl. Einhaur lay far away, and a jarl was not a king. Not quite a king even in his own hall, and this far up the Uulisk, his authority was more of an appeal to old loyalties. He did not order men to join his raids. Rather he tempted them with talk of gold and glory. Such temptation had led Snorri’s own father onto one of the jarl’s longboats and seen him sail into southern seas on a voyage from which he had yet to return after more than a year. Rumour had it that new longboats would come soon, calling for more warriors. Snorri had already decided to go.
From the rickety quay before his boat, priest Ingolf was describing the Iron Troll’s predations among the villages on the north shore of the fjord. Snorri gazed out across the dark waters of the Uulisk. Four miles wide and unknowably deep. But, however deep it might lie, in a hard winter the ice would spread from shore to shore, joining hands in the middle. Some winters it was thick enough for the whole village to march out onto it for the Yulefest and stamp for the return of the sun. Thick enough for trolls to cross. Even an armoured one of unusual size.
“We should go,” Snorri said.
“Ha!” Olaf punched his arm. “Maybe you can do the jokes too.”
“We are all the Uuliskind, after all,” said Snorri. “North shore or south should make no difference.”
“Comedy is about timing,” Olaf said. “You have to know when to stop.”
“We should be ready to bleed for our brothers,” Snorri said.
“Oh gods, you’re serious.” Olaf sighed.
“Ingolf says we have a duty.” Snorri repeated what the priest had said a moment before.
“You have a duty to raise your son,” Olaf said. “That’s the hard path. Not rushing off every time the jarl calls for axes.”
“You’re too young to be an old woman, Olaf.” Snorri slapped his smaller companion’s shoulder. Harder than he had intended. Hard enough to stagger his friend and put him on his knee. Instead of helping Olaf up, Snorri raised his head and called out. “I will go!”
Courage is most often a collective property. It needs to be sparked. Like an avalanche in the high passes it will lie hidden, disguised as everyday life, and then with one small action, everything can be set in motion.
Snorri’s lone voice gathered others, and soon the slope was ringing to lusty cries demanding vengeance for the fallen, demanding retribution, demanding blood.
Later, when they climbed the slope back to their homes, Olaf was furious with Snorri.
“You’d rather die than raise that boy? Is that it? The mighty Snorri afraid of his own son?”
“You shut your mouth, Olaf Arnsson,” Snorri growled.
But Olaf, red-faced and panting from the climb, was having none of it. “Something good went out of you the day Mhaeri died.”
“You talk like an old woman.” Snorri veered away across the bare rock, leaving the path. It was true though. Something good had gone out of everything when the last breath left Mhaeri and her body lay abandoned by her spirit, the baby howling beside her.
“Snorri!” Olaf called after him but chose not to follow across the slickness of rain-wet stone.
Snorri hunched his shoulders and went on toward his parents’ home. Karl would be in bed by now, deep in his dreams. When Karl had been a baby, Snorri would watch him sleeping. Sometimes he would reach out with a big, calloused hand, large enough to wrap about his son. The hand would stop, tremble, and withdraw as though the boy were a burning coal, too fierce to be endured.
Snorri had given his heart once. Too young. Too freely. And she had died, taken by a foe there was no fighting. His whole life Snorri had met every challenge, taken on boys twice his size, hunted with his father in the depths of winter, entered into battle with a howl of joy that frightened his friends almost as much as his enemies. Fear had been a stranger to him. But now . . . now, after the hurt that Mhaeri had done him just by dying, things were different. He had come to know fear. The fear of losing what he loved. And the defense had been a simple one. He had armoured his heart and set his child in his mother’s care.
It had seemed on the night of the priest’s arrival that all in Eight Quays were prepared in the very next moment to leap into their boats and row to the north shore. But when the cold morning rolled in from the east and the sun’s eye stained the fogbanks on the fjord with crimson, there were only five who gathered at the long quay.
Snorri had slept poorly, brooding on Olaf’s words. The truth of them grated on him. He should stay and raise Karl. That’s what Mhaeri would have wanted. Though she had been just fourteen when the baby came, and perhaps if bringing him into the world hadn’t killed her, she would have been as poor a mother as he was a father. They had both been too young. She always would be too young now. Locked in his memory. And he was still too young.
His mother hadn’t argued with his decision to hunt the troll. “Like your father you are.” Then she’d nodded toward Karl in his crib, just the white blond of his hair visible above the red wool blanket. “Him, he’ll probably grow to be the same. All of you a hundred times more ready to stand with your axe to protect your babies than to clean the shit and puke off them. You think the harsh realities of life are tooth and claw, spear and sword. When the real fight is right here, tearing a living from the ground, raising a child to know how to live in this world.” She had shaken her head and given it up. Words don’t change hearts.
Snorri nodded to the men as they arrived. None of them so large as him—he’d taken after his father in that, standing halfway between six and seven feet, and with a natural inclination to muscle—but these were men who had been tested time and again.
Audun ver Boldorfson came first, five years older than Snorri, a big man with a blond beard and a reckless smile. They had been rivals in the past, but now he came with his round shield, iron bossed, and a broadsword taken from the Red Vikings of Hardanger.
Erik Red Beard stumbled down the slopes, grumbling and perhaps still drunk. A narrow man bulked out by a black wool coat, good with bow and knife. He had two girls not much younger than Snorri. The eldest of them, Freya, had caught Snorri’s eye, though he had taken no steps toward her.
Some of the tension went out of Snorri when Ulf Greyheart came striding along the shoreline, his mail shirt sounding like soft metal rain as he raised his arm in greeting. Over his shoulder he bore a six-foot poleaxe, blade on one side, hammer on the other. Ulf practiced the lesson that he had once been taught in scars: Never get close to a troll.
The men were loading their gear into Ulf’s boat when the fifth member of the hunting party came down from the huts.
“Go home, boy,” Erik grunted. “This is man’s work.”
Olaf stopped in his tracks, looking half relieved, half angry. It was easy to understand why Erik Red Beard would call him a boy. At sixteen, Olaf had clouds of red fluff on each cheek where Erik had a luxuriant beard. He was short. Fat, despite the long hunger of winter. Worse, he was no warrior. More times than Snorri could count, he had seen his friend back down from a fight, deflect hostility with humour, run if need be, and if all else failed, just lie there and take his beating.
Snorri hefted his father’s axe, Hel. The double-bladed head was a wicked piece of steel from the old days, the weapon passed down their line for generations. His father had left it in his care when he sailed last, claiming a völva had advised him to do it for luck. But Snorri knew that if Snagga had truly consulted a witch, then the völva must have told him there would be no returning f
rom the voyage. He wouldn’t part with Hel just for luck. Snorri’s mother had told him, after the first year passed with Snagga gone, that his father had known his wyrd. He had known the path the gods had set before him, and handed over the axe knowing that this would be his last chance to leave the chain unbroken.
“Why did he go then?” Snorri had asked.
“When the Norns reveal a person’s wyrd it is a gift. To try to turn from it would be to offer insult, and no good would ever come of that.”
Snorri looked up from the memory reflected in the blade of his axe to see Olaf still standing there at the start of the quay, defiant, yet scared. Olaf was always scared. It was in him like his bones were. Part of who he was.
“My friend, I need you to watch out for Karl if I don’t come back.” It was the least hurtful refusal Snorri could manage. Even so, he saw the hurt in Olaf’s face.
“Undoreth, we.” Olaf began the clan-song, taking his hatchet from his belt.
“Don’t do it,” Ulf rumbled, untying the boat’s prow from the quay post. “This isn’t for you, lad.”
Olaf scowled, his face reddening, and continued. “Battle-born. Raise hammer, raise axe, at our war-shout gods tremble.” He took a breath. “I’m of age, same as Snorri.”
Ulf shook his head. “But you are not the same though.”
Even so, he beckoned Olaf aboard. When a man of the Undoreth formally invited himself to battle, none could deny him. “Get in and try not to be in the way. You’ll be wanting one of my spears.” He nodded to a bundle wrapped in oiled skins. “Your little chopper’s only good for kindling. You don’t want to get close to a troll. The other side of a fjord is ideal. Arrow range maybe, but you won’t get to loose many shafts. If you find one at the end of your spear or poleaxe, you’ll get one chance, if you’re lucky.”
Olaf sat down in the stern, pale all of a sudden. Snorri frowned, sighed, then nodded his appreciation, all in the space of one breath. He bent his back to the oar, dipping, pulling, launching them toward the distant shore in a series of smooth surges.
None of them spoke. Nervous chatter was unbecoming in a Viking. Snorri watched Olaf and, behind him, the huts of Eight Quays receding into the distance, the goats becoming dots of red scattered on the slopes.
As he rowed, and thought about Olaf’s foolishness in joining them, it gradually began to seem no more or less foolish than any of them being there in that small boat. Around the winter fires, “going on a troll hunt” meant doing something suicidally foolish. Arne Deadeye was going on a troll hunt goading Erland Eskilson like that. Bera Aslaugdottir was going on a troll hunt returning to her drunken wife-beater of a husband. And surely the Iron Troll would see little difference between Olaf and Snorri. All of them in that boat were as children to a troll.
Olaf’s crossing the fjord was, Snorri thought, the greatest feat of bravery of any there with him. Olaf lived with fear, and yet he had overcome it for the sake of friendship. He had nothing to run from, and still he chose to come.
Snorri wasn’t sure what the others were running from, but he knew that the great warrior he hoped to become was running from responsibility, running from a tiny boy and telling himself the child would be better with his grandmother than with his father. He was running from that, and pushed by the restless need for challenge that had driven him all his life. It made him feel less of the man he wanted to be to call it a need for violence. But sometimes on a rare windless day, he would see himself in the cold surface of the fjord and recognize that he had no place among the herd, however much it saddened him to know it.
The Eight Quays hunting party put in at the hamlet of Rolf’s Rock. All the villages on the north shore were smaller than on the south. Rolf’s Rock made Eight Quays look like a southern town. Snorri could easily see why they needed help. Those who came to greet the hunters from their boat were old, beaten thin by the years. The young escaped this shore any way they could, but these were the roots of Viking strength. The harshness of an upbringing at the edge of survival set aside a young man’s fear. It made him see an axe as opportunity. He would return with foreign riches or die and feast in Valhalla. Either choice was better than scrabbling to squeeze a crop from thin soil in the brief gaps between bitter winters.
“Has the troll been seen here?” Ulf took command, addressing a tall old man wrapped in wolfskins, standing straight despite the burden of his years.
The man shook his head. “Where that one goes, little remains standing.” He indicated a woman watching from farther up the slope, a grey-haired crone, bent like a wind-shaped tree. “Myrgiol survived Uttgar. Nothing remains of that place.”
“Uttgar. The cottages beneath the Ram’s Head Rock?” Ulf asked. “Magyar Uteson’s place?”
“The same.”
Snorri had heard of Magyar Uteson, though not of Uttgar. Magyar’s silverwork was much sought after. Even Jarl Torsteff was said to have goblets worked by the old man and his apprentices. Any other smith of such skill would have set up shop in Einhaur, but Magyar was said to find his muse only in the place he’d been born.
Ulf led the way up the slope to talk to the woman, the others trailing behind with the locals following. Olaf puffed along beside Snorri, struggling to keep pace with his friend’s longer stride.
“Old Mother.” Ulf stood before Myrgiol and inclined his head, respectful of her years. “We have come from Eight Quays to kill this troll of yours. First, though, we have to find it. Tell us what you remember of the night it came to Uttgar.”
“It came by day.” She watched Ulf with eyes that were the same startling green and blue as the crater lake Snorri had once climbed for two days to see.
Ulf shook his greying mane. “Trolls hunt by night.”
“He came by day,” the old woman said. “Roaring something across the slopes. It was almost words. We saw him from the step-fields. Magyar came out from his workshop. His three lads got their spears, Old Arne had his great axe, though the fool could hardly lift it at his age, and Young Arne had the sword that was all Jarl Torsteff gave him back of his brother. The rest of us hid in our huts.”
“What did he look like?” Snorri asked.
Myrgiol stared as if noticing him for the first time, even though he was the biggest man there, and likely the biggest she had seen in a long life. “You’re very young,” she said.
“Old enough to have a son in the world and to have taken other men’s sons from it.” Snorri tried to soften the words with a smile. “It would help me to grow older if you would tell us more about the beast.”
Myrgiol sucked at the remaining stumps of her teeth, brow furrowed with the pain of remembering. “My boy, Thorson, sailed south three times before the Red Vikings took him.” She spat on the rocks to clear the name of the Red Vikings from her mouth. “He told me about those southern knights, so thick in their iron that an arrow can’t find an inch of skin to kiss. Like lobsters he said they were. This troll looked like the picture Thorson’s words put in my head.”
Audun snorted behind Snorri. “Where would a troll find knight’s armour?”
“And what sort of man would it have been made for to fit a troll?” Erik asked.
Ulf shook his head. “Trolls are cunning. Clever at killing. But they’ve no use for weapons, not even a club. I thought maybe one of them had wrapped a dead man’s chain mail around its shoulders as a trophy. This though . . .” He shook his head again. “I’ve seen southern armour, down in the port of Den Hagen. Metalwork like that takes tools to put on a man. Those noblemen who sit in their steel, on horses bigger than any you’ve seen . . . they can’t get into or out of that armour by themselves. They need a trained servant to lock them into it.”
The men gathered at the edge of the hamlet to depart for Uttgar.
“You should stay here, Olaf. Guard the boat.” Red Erik pointed to Ulf’s boat, hefting his pack as he did so. “You’ve crossed the Uulisk with us. That will be something to tell your mother.”
“Enough,” growled
Snorri. “He said he’s coming.”
Erik, old enough to be their father, looked from Snorri to Olaf. “What can he do apart from eat?”
“He’s funny,” Snorri said. “Before this is over we’ll probably need a laugh or two.”
“Nothing funny about a fat boy being ripped open by a troll.” But Red Erik shrugged and walked away, clutching his bow.
“Funny?” Olaf hissed at Snorri’s side. “Is that the best you can say for me? How about the fact I’m cleverer than the rest of you put together?”
It was Snorri’s turn to shrug. “If you were clever you wouldn’t be here.”
They left for Uttgar in the early afternoon and hoped to reach it by nightfall. The troll had struck settlements to the west, some closer to Rolf’s Rock than Uttgar in the east, but Myrgiol’s report was the most recent. The Iron Troll had killed Magyar Uteson no more than three days ago.
Before Ulf led them from the sorry cluster of huts, Olaf had asked Myrgiol one last question. “All the others are dead. How did you survive?”
“I heard the troll kill the men who stood against it. It came against them roaring an unearthly cry, over and over. It was still roaring as it tore down all our huts. When I saw the sky and felt the pieces of my home fall around me, I closed my eyes, lay still, and prayed to Lady Freya to take me to the holy mountain.”
“And then what happened?” Snorri had asked, after one of those long silences that old people sometimes stumble into.
“Nothing.” Myrgiol turned her curious gem-like eyes on him. “I opened my eyes again and sat up, and the monster had gone off shouting into the mountains. So I came here.”
The ruins of Uttgar lay in darkness by the time the hunters came there. They made their own camp in the lee of a steep ridge of granite running down into the fjord. The summer had yet to make its brief appearance and crowd the air with mosquitos, a fact Snorri was glad of. He had heard that mosquitos could be found the world over, but that everywhere had exactly the same number. In Viking lands, however, there were only a handful of days warm enough for the bloodsuckers to endure, and so on those days, the folk of the north got their entire year’s allocation in one fog-like monthlong swarm.
Unfettered III Page 5