Icefall

by Matthew J. Kirby

  “I do like him,” I say. “Thank you, Hake.”

  “You’re welcome. Will you name him?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know what.” And then I remember that the god Odin has two ravens that whisper to him what they see in their flights across the land. Their names are Huginn and Muninn. Thought and Memory. “I think I’ll name him Muninn.”

  Hake’s smile says he is pleased. “A good name.”

  I crouch down near the cage, and Hake lingers a moment longer.

  “Well,” he says. “Good afternoon.”

  “Good afternoon, Hake.”

  He marches out the door, a different sort of man to me now than he was but minutes before. As brutal and violent as berserkers can be, Hake can also be thoughtful. And caring.

  I look into the eyes of my bird, my new friend, and he looks back at me. “Hello, Muninn,” I whisper. Now that I have memory, all I need is sight.

  After the night meal, Harald tries poking Muninn with a stick through the bars of his cage. Muninn flaps his bent wing, trying to get away, and I snatch the stick from Harald’s hands. “Leave him alone.”

  “Look at that ugly bird.” Harald laughs. “Why’s it bald?”

  “He’s not ugly,” I say. “He’s picked on and bullied. His feathers will grow back.”

  Harald laughs again, and Per comes over.

  “Leave the bird alone, lad,” he says. “It was a gift from Hake.”

  Harald wrinkles his nose. “I’d give it right back.”

  Per smiles at me with a slight shrug, and I give my eyes a little roll.

  Other than Harald, everyone admires Muninn. Raudi continues to smile at me. The berserkers worship Odin and they nod to the cage in respect and appreciation. Ravens mean something different to them. The berserkers call ravens swans of blood, because they feed on the bodies after a fierce battle. Hake probably thought it was a noble gift, but my Muninn doesn’t look very noble half-bald, and I don’t like to think of him eating anything but bugs and berries.

  I try to feed him from my hand. At first he is wary, and jabs his beak at me as if he wants me to just drop the food on the ground for him. But I am stubborn. And patient. He must learn to take the food from me, so he will trust me. As the evening passes, he begins to come closer to my fingers, and his beak becomes gentler. Before long, he is feeding right out of my palm.

  Hake comes over and watches me pass Muninn bits of food. “He’s already taken to you.”

  “I hope so,” I say. “But I don’t think he’s ready to ride my shoulder.”

  “No. But he will be.” Hake smiles and moves off to be with his men.

  Asa joins me after he has left, and we sit together, wordlessly. I pass her a bit of bread, and she holds it just inside the bars of the cage. Muninn makes a grab, and Asa flinches, dropping the crumbs. The raven snatches them with a caw that sounds like a laugh, as though he has won some victory. Asa laughs, too, a sound I haven’t heard from her in a long while.

  “Your bird reminds me of Gunnlaug,” she says. “You remember what he was like when he came to our hall? Before the war?” Asa sits up. “Gunnlaug’s head is just as bald and pink.”

  I remember him at Father’s table, after he’d drunk too much mead. “And he laughs like Muninn, too.”

  Asa nods, but the smile falls from her lips. She reaches for another bread crumb and doesn’t bother to hand it to my bird. She just tosses it inside the cage.

  “He wanted to marry me,” she says.

  I stare at her. “I didn’t know that.” Then I think about Asa leaving our hall to be Gunnlaug’s wife and I don’t know what to say.

  “Father refused him,” she says. “That’s why we are at war. Because of me.”

  No. That’s not right. “It isn’t your fault,” I say. “Nor Father’s. Gunnlaug is the one who declared war.” And I begin to feel the burden that Asa has been carrying. This is what has driven her into silence and sadness.

  She stares at something across the room, and I follow her gaze. She is watching Per, as he laughs with Hake. Asa’s eyebrows are sloped in worry, and she stays that way for some time without moving.

  At last she rises. “I’m tired. I think I’ll go to bed.”

  “Good night, then.”

  “I envy you, Solveig,” she says over her shoulder as she walks away.

  I am stunned. What is there in me to envy? Asa is everything to our father, and I am nothing.

  Muninn flutters and draws my attention. I give him a bite of turnip and watch him swallow it down. The more I think about it, the more I realize he does resemble Gunnlaug. Wrinkled skin, sparse black hair. I stare at him, seeing not my bird but that old chieftain in my cage.

  I know I’ve told myself that I would gladly marry for Father, but I’ve never considered that such a pledge might mean marriage to an old man who resembles a scraggly raven. I feel foolish for never having thought of it. I am sad for Asa, and for the first time see her beauty as a burden instead of a blessing. And I feel the guilt-weight she has been carrying this whole time.

  She is asleep when I climb into the bedcloset later that night. I nestle down next to her, trying to think of how I can help, but my thoughts are like snowflakes drifting away from me, or melting on my skin as soon as I catch them.

  The next several weeks bring the fullness of winter’s cold weight. The pale sun is too weak to warm us for the few hours that we have its light, and the nights seem to swell, filling the world with stars and endlessness. The glacier has slowly settled into its season-sleep and fallen silent, and the fjord is a narrow white road to the sea.

  We spend more of our time indoors, and the fires in the long hearth are never allowed to burn out. The berserkers have stopped complaining, but that frightens me even more than when they bluster and fight. If they’re pacing the hall like chained dogs, I at least know how they feel. Silence makes them even more unpredictable.

  Ole sits with his bone knife in the corner, showing Harald how to repair the frayed ropes and holes in one of his fishing nets. His movements are practiced and almost loving, like an old woman braiding a granddaughter’s hair. Harald yawns and gets his fingers tangled.

  Muninn hops around his cage, cawing at me, his head feathers still a little sparse. But his flight feathers have lengthened. I have never let him out since Hake gave him to me. I felt that I had to shrink his world before I could trust him to not fly off. But perhaps it has been long enough, and I can let the walls loose just a little.

  “Raudi,” I say. “Will you watch the doors for me?”

  Raudi gets to his feet. “Watch the doors?”

  “I’m going to let Muninn out of his cage.”

  Raudi looks at my bird, nods, and walks over to the doors. He stands in front of them, arms crossed. Those in the hall with us, including several berserkers, are watching me now.

  I take a deep breath and look right into my raven’s eye. “I’m going to let you around the hall for a bit. But only for a short while. And I’d like it if you perched on my shoulder for at least a moment.”

  Muninn shakes, ruffling his neck feathers.

  I pull one of the cage sticks free, and then another, and then a whole side falls open. Muninn cocks his head and hops right out. He looks back at the outside of his cage for the first time. Then he launches himself into wobbly flight, hampered by his bent wing. But he manages to flutter up to one of the rafters, where he caws in delight and proceeds to preen.

  I go and sit under him, my head bowed, a bit of food in my hand. At first I hold the food in my lap, then up at my neck. I tap my shoulder.

  “Patience, miss,” one of the berserkers says. “He’s looking right at you.”

  I call to him. “Come to me, bird of Odin.”

  “He’s cocking his head,” Harald whispers. “He’s got one eye on you.”

  I whistle. “Come, Muninn, my memory.”

  His talons click on the wooden rafter.

  I smile and look up. He shuffles his little rear end
out over the beam. And he squats. His droppings fall right in my hair. I let out a little yelp; everyone laughs. Raudi looks like he’s trying not to laugh, and covers his mouth with his hands. He is distracted when the hall doors open. A blast of frozen wind pushes into the room and sends Muninn flapping and cawing. He staggers into the air and flies straight for the opening, that strip of free sky.

  “Raudi!” I shout.

  He slams the doors just as Muninn reaches them, and my bird thumps against the wood. Then he turns in the air to find a new perch, frantic wings beating, unable to keep him aloft.

  He slowly descends to the floor, where I’m able to scoop him up and drop him back into his cage. I close the side and slide the sticks back in place. Muninn hops and screeches, as if I’m trapping him for the first time.

  “I’m so sorry,” Raudi says.

  He’s still holding the doors shut, but now lets them go. In walks Per. He glares at Raudi, confused. Then he sees me at the cage.

  “You had him out?” he asks me.

  I nod. “I think he almost came to my shoulder.”

  Harald laughs. “And then he pooped on her head!”

  I grimace and raise my hand to hide my hair. I’ll have to brush the droppings out later, after they’ve dried.

  Per grins. “He must still be trying to figure if he can trust you.”

  “That’s not it,” Ole says. The old man is still sitting in his corner, the net spread over his lap and around his feet. He looks up at me. “You’re the one trying to figure if you can trust him. It’s you that needs the cage, not that bird.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Once you’ve trapped a wild animal, he’ll always want out. So you always have to keep him locked up, or else wonder every time you open those bars if this’ll be the day he turns on you and flies away.”

  “He’ll come to me,” I say. “I trust him.” But even as I say it, I know I won’t let Muninn go flying around again anytime soon. Perhaps in the hall, but not outside.

  Ole looks at the cage, and then goes back to the rope in his hands.

  The rest of the afternoon and evening pass uneventfully. We eat our night meal. Alric recites a few stories to make us feel something bigger than the hall we’re trapped in, and then it is time for bed.

  I am standing at the cliff, and it all happens as before. The drekars, bearing evil. The berserker corpses, open-eyed and pale. The wolf-cloud, snarling destruction. The burning hall and our doom under the glacier’s heel. There is nothing I can do to stop it. I wake with a gasp and lie panting in the darkness. I have had the dream twice now, which means it must be a portent. And then I think of Hake’s suspicions about a spy, watching me from the woods.

  Something is coming. The enemy will find us, and maybe already has. I hug myself, feel my own heart beating in my chest, and find it hard to fall back asleep.

  It was only last Midsummer, Asa, when you tried on one of Mother’s finest dresses for the first time. Father said you were a woman now, and so it was time. I remember you standing there before the fire and how amazed I was at the deep colors in the fabric, the softness of its weave.

  “Oh, Asa, you look so beautiful,” I said.

  You smiled. For a moment. And then you began to cry. You fell to your knees and wept into your hands, and I looked around confused, not knowing what I had said or done.

  “It’s all right,” I said, and tried to hug you, but you pushed me away.

  But then you came over, Bera.

  “There, there,” you said, and rubbed your hand across Asa’s back. “She’d be happy to see you wearing it.”

  And, Asa, through your tears you said, “I miss her.” And then I realized that you were talking about our mother. The mother you remembered, but I could not. But now I know it wasn’t only that.

  “I wish I could say it gets easier,” Bera said to you. “But I have to be honest with you, child. You’ll cry on your wedding day, and you’ll cry at the birth of your first child, and each child thereafter, because your mother won’t be there. But she’d be proud of the woman you’ve become.”

  Asa, you looked up at her then, tear-streaked. “You think so?”

  “I know it,” Bera said.

  Then you said, “You’ll be there, won’t you, Bera?”

  And Bera said, “Always.”

  CHAPTER 7

  THE WOLF

  It takes me a few weeks more to tell anyone about my dream. When I finally decide to, I go to Alric. We sit in a corner of the hall away from the others, and I whisper my fears to him. As I say it, I sound foolish even to myself, and I expect Alric to dismiss it all as a childish nightmare. But he doesn’t. He nods his head gravely and leans toward me, listening.

  “So who is the wolf?” he asks when I’m finished.

  “I don’t know.”

  “And how deep was the snow in your dream?”

  “The snow?” I ask. Why would that matter?

  “Yes, in your dream, how deep was the snow?”

  I stop to think. I remember the bodies of the berserkers lying on the ground. “Not as deep as it is now. The snow was melting.”

  “So it was near the end of winter. Months from now.”

  “I suppose it was. Why? Do you think it will come true?”

  Alric shrugs. “I don’t know. But it’s best to be aware, isn’t it? We have some time, at any rate, before the ground begins to thaw and we meet our doom.”

  He gets up and walks away, leaving me alone, counting days. Months from now seems no time at all before the coming of the wolf when the berserkers fall dead and the hall burns to the ground.

  Raudi comes around one of the columns and stands next to me. Then he sits on his hands and looks at the ground near my feet.

  “I heard what you told Alric,” he says.

  I don’t mind that he was listening. It’s hard to avoid overhearing things in the winter-hall.

  “Why would I think it’s your fault that we’re here?” he asks.

  “I don’t really think that, Raudi. It was just a dream.”

  “But I don’t feel that way, and I would never say it.” He looks up at me. “So I don’t think your dream can come true. You see?”

  “At least not that part of it,” I say.

  He nods once, as if satisfied that he has said what he meant to say, and rises to his feet.

  “Wait,” I say.

  He pauses.

  “If you don’t feel that way,” I say, “why have you been so angry with me?”

  “I’m not angry with you.”

  “Raudi.”

  He rubs his chin as though he wears a beard, like a man would do, even though his face is still smooth. “I’m just frustrated that we’re here. All of us. I’m supposed to be fighting alongside the other men. But they didn’t think I was ready.”

  I don’t like to think about the fighting back home, and I’m glad that Raudi is here instead of there. But I don’t tell him that. “Just because you’re here doesn’t mean you’re not ready.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, the berserkers are here. It seems my father has only sent those whom he trusts the most. That includes you.”

  “I guess that’s true.”

  I lean forward and punch him lightly on the arm.

  “What was that for?”

  “For being so cross with me this whole time.”

  He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes, and I can tell there is something he has left unsaid. “I better go help Mum.”

  “All right.”

  He walks away, and after he is gone, I turn my attention to Muninn in his cage near my bedcloset. I wish, like Odin, I could send him flying back to my father’s hall, or to the battlefield. I wish Muninn could return and tell me what he has seen.

  The next morning, I help dish up skyr for Harald’s day meal. Our two cows can’t keep the whole steading in fresh milk, but they produce enough that we don’t feel so far away from home. I’ll miss the skyr and curd w
hen we have to butcher the cows for meat, and judging by our stores of pork and dried fish, that isn’t too far off.

  After I’ve served Harald, I dish some up from the crock for Asa and myself, and I sit to eat it. But before I’ve taken my first bite, I look up at those sitting around me, those eating something other than skyr.

  Bera always insists the sour milk and curds go to Harald, Asa, or me before she offers what’s left to any of the men. And there’s an order there as well. Per is first to receive a portion, then Hake, then Per’s men, then the berserkers. Poor Ole is last because he is a thrall, so he never gets any. Bera doesn’t take any for herself, but I am sure she lets Raudi eat some occasionally. I hope she does.

  Harald scoops his into his mouth until his bowl is empty. Everyone watches him and he grins.

  I pause before eating mine, and stare into the bowl. Then I get up from my bench and cross the room to where Ole and Raudi are sitting next to each other.

  “Would you two like to share this?” I ask.

  They look up at me and then at each other.

  “Thank you,” Raudi says, and takes the bowl from my hands.

  Ole sucks on one of his cheeks like he’s puzzling something over. “That’s yours,” he says.

  “I want you to have some. We should all have a share.” I look at Raudi. “Eat.”

  But he has refrained. He looks back and forth between us as if Ole’s words have made him unsure of what he should do.

  Ole looks at the bowl in Raudi’s lap. “If you insist.”

  “I do,” I say. Before he can summon any further protest, I turn and walk away.

  This place has done strange things to the people I know. Before coming here, Ole was always a friend to me, but he seems to resent me now. And he is not the only one who has changed. Bera no longer hums while she cooks at the hearth. Harald seems even more impatient and impulsive than he usually is. Asa’s beauty used to have a rich glow, like a golden summer evening when the setting sun seems to light the fields on fire as it touches them. Now her beauty has become a winter wood, stark and frosted and still. It makes me wonder how I have changed.