by Robert Low
Hring flushed at that, for it was true and he was aware that he had delivered his challenge badly. Embarrassment and frustration made him stupid. ‘He has two good legs, though,’ he said.
There was the briefest of pauses; the world held its breath. It was unspoken, but a rule, that no one made a joke of Pinleg’s crippled limb. Even Hring knew he had gone too far. Perhaps, like me, he had reasoned that runty Pinleg was no danger.
When the focus of the quarrel then landed up in his balls, swung with considerable force, driving the air out of him with a savage whoof and the pain into him with a leap of blinding tears, he should have seen sense.
Instead, writhing, his hands clutched between his legs, he screamed out through the snot and tears and pain: ‘Holmgang!’
Once out, it couldn’t be put back. The news that Pinleg and Hring were to fight spread and even those away on a hunt hurried back.
Illugi Godi, after consulting with a grim-faced Einar, had the proper area paced out and roped off with strips of cloth and as much true ceremony as could be mustered under the circumstances. Then Pinleg and Hring appeared, stripped to the waist, bareheaded and armed with sword and a shield.
The holmgang was simple enough. You fought in an enclosed area with no armour and the same weapons. If you put one foot outside – going on the heel, as it was called – you lost. If your blood was spilled, you lost. If you ran, you lost – and were counted a nithing, with no honour. The only other way out was to win. There’s a lot more ceremony and a few more rules, but that’s the weft of it and all anyone standing in the square of it needs to know.
Pinleg looked ridiculous, a white body with ribs showing, scrawny as an old chicken. Another of the Oathsworn, who had never seen him fight, actually jeered. Hring was much more powerfully built and stepped up, swinging his sword to loosen his arm.
But I saw Pinleg was muttering to himself, that his head was shaking and I felt the hairs all over my body prickle.
They stepped into the roped area and Illugi Godi began the ritual, cleansing the combat, making sure no bloodprice penalty lasted with the winner from his friends or family.
And all the time Pinleg muttered and his head shook. Little flecks appeared at the corners of his mouth and I believe, around then, Hring began to realise the awful truth and just how much of a mistake this was.
Illugi Godi stepped out of the ring. Hring boldly slapped sword on shield and fell into a crouch. Pinleg stood for a moment, then his whole body spasmed, spittle flew from his mouth as he screamed, the shield went flying to one side and he launched himself across the ring.
I had never seen a berserker. I have heard all the tales since, about them being shapeshifters, turning into bears, or that they got their name from wearing bearskins, or that it was really wolf pelts.
Some say they chew strange herbs, or drink bark brews to get into the state of it, but the truth is that a berserker is a frothing madman with a blade, a man who does not care if he lives or dies as long as he gets to you and kills you. And the only way to kill one is to cut the legs off and hope he can’t crawl as fast as you can run.
Pinleg lurched like a troll on wheels, faster than anything I had ever seen, his neck out, his chin jutting. It reminded me, in that fleeting moment, of the snake-headed white bear when it roared at me after falling through the roof.
Hring was taken by surprise, overwhelmed. He had no chance. There was simply the shrieking and then sickening, wet chopping sounds as Pinleg, spraying strings of saliva, hacked Hring into bloody pats of meat and kept on hacking.
‘Fuck …’ said someone.
Kol Fish-hook, one of Hring’s Christ-following friends, moved as if to drag Pinleg away, but Einar roared, ‘Stay. If you value your life.’
And, realising what they were dealing with, the circle moved cautiously backwards as Pinleg carved and roared.
When he finally ran out of screams, he stood, soaked in blood, his hair sodden with it, his face a mask of clotted red, save for the eyes, which seemed to dull suddenly, like the sea under a cloud. He slumped to his knees, drooled a little, then he fell forward on his face and snored.
Einar stood up as Illugi Godi and Valknut moved to carry Pinleg away. ‘You should know that one of the forty-eight names of Odin is Frenzy,’ he said, sweeping his black-ice gaze round us all. ‘Know also that anyone else who decides what religion will be followed in the Oathsworn will have me to deal with. I will not be as merciful as Pinleg and kill you quickly.’ Then looked at Martin and said: ‘You made this. You clean it up.’
Stunned at what he had seen, Martin stumbled forward to where the red ruin that had been Hring lay. Einar would not let anyone help him and, when Martin took up an arm to try and pull the bloody thing away, it tore free in his hands and he fell backwards on his arse into a puddle of blood.
Everyone laughed, even the Christ-sworn, then turned away in sorrow and disgust. Hring had found his death and it had not been a good one. Arguments broke out about whether he would make Valholl, given that he had been a Christ-follower when he died. Some of the others were uncomfortable with this, realising only now what following the White Christ really meant.
I watched as Martin, his robes soaked with red, gathered up and hauled off the bits and suddenly realised I knew nothing much about Hring other than that he liked to fish and he had been the only other one to help consign the Serkland woman to the sea when she died at Skirringsaal.
But something had happened here. Hring had broken his oath and I knew it was because Einar had broken his oath with Eyvind.
I think Einar knew it, too, so that when Valknut came up and announced that Ulf-Agar was gone, it was just another turn of Odin’s subtle revenge. Or Loki’s. Who knew?
‘One of the fishermen saw a limping man get on that knarr just before it left,’ Valknut added.
‘He has broken his oath as well,’ I said and, for the first time, Einar’s black eyes would not meet mine.
The next morning, I stood on the shingle in another spring mirr of rain and watched the Elk slide out and away from the village. All around, watching with me, were the Oathsworn, all but a dozen – all the Christmen – who had gone with my father and the Trimmer to safety down the coast.
Watching, too, was Martin, his ruined hand still tucked under one armpit, the puddle at his feet tinged pink from the blood that still seeped from his brown habit. He wore a leather collar now and a leash that attached him to Pinleg like a hound.
When the Elk had all but vanished into the rain mist, we turned in ones and twos and started to collect our gear. Hild, who had a spare cloak that had belonged to my father, had more of my essentials, wrapped in a bedroll.
With scarcely a word, falling into the familiar routine, we formed up, with Bagnose and Steinthor questing out in front, and started the long march upriver, to Koksalmi and the forge.
Hild knew the way, but Einar didn’t trust her, so she was kept close to his side, with Pinleg and the leashed Martin. He would have leashed Hild, too, but Illugi Godi, knowing I would cause trouble over it, persuaded him, I think, that it would be better to have the woman on his side, not an enemy.
We climbed, for an hour at least, through birch and alder, where the sun slanted. As the trees thinned out, we halted, waiting for Bagnose and Steinthor to come back from scouting ahead. It gave everyone a chance to adjust straps and the weight of pack and shield.
I looked back, rubbing a raw place on my neck, feeling the wind, a good onshore blow hammering from a sea that sparkled. Below, somewhere to the right, the river meandered, reed-lined and narrowing.
Hild hunched on a rock, arms wrapped round her knees.
‘Can you walk?’ I asked and she looked up. Her eyes rolled, focused, rolled again. Then she nodded. I bent to take her bundle as well as my own and her hand, clawed and fierce, caught my wrist. From under the curtain of her hair I heard her say: ‘She is waiting. She will guide me. She told …’ The voice stopped, the slanted eyes grew slitted with cunning. ‘No one is to know,’ sh
e hissed.
I liked her – I believe I loved her, in that way first love is. At least I thought I did, because she was the first woman I did not want to upend and fuck. I never thought of doing that casually with her, though I sometimes grew hard thinking of her white body in the dark.
Yet even then I couldn’t seem to see it without the weals and the bruises, couldn’t see her face gasping in passion without her eyes rolling up, white and dead, and hearing that Other voice, sometimes a hiss, sometimes a rasp.
I now knew that I was afraid of her, of her magic. If it had been me, I would have turned her loose, for all the lure of Attila the Hun’s hoard.
Bagnose and Steinthor strode back in, spoke with Einar, then loped off again. The Oathsworn rose, shouldering their burdens, and we set off across a wide, pale plateau carved with rocky gullies and studded with knuckles of green-spotted grey stones. Here and there were stands of birch like white sentinels and mountains rose on either side, faint and purpled in the distance.
Gunnar Raudi fell in step with me, glancing sideways from under the faded red of his tangled curls. ‘Faring well, young Orm?’
‘Well enough, Gunnar Raudi,’ I answered, in between breaths as we stepped out.
He was silent for a while and there was only the creak and clink of gear, the grunts and pants of labour. Eventually he said, ‘We have come a long way in a short while.’
‘Indeed,’ I answered, wondering where all this was leading.
‘It seems to me you are marked,’ he went on slowly and I looked at him warily.
‘Marked? By whom?’
He shrugged. ‘Odin perhaps. But marked. And Einar knows it.’
‘Einar?’ I was lost now.
He caught me by the arm and we halted, men filtering round us, some with muttered curses at our blocking the trail. ‘You are Einar’s doom, I am thinking,’ he said in a low, urgent voice, looking right and left, waiting until we were out of earshot. ‘Everything bad happened to him after you came.’
‘Me?’ I answered, astonished, then thought I saw what he was about. ‘You and I boarded the Elk at the same time. Why are you not Einar’s bane? Why me, Gunnar Raudi?’
‘I thought of that,’ he replied, perfectly seriously and so honestly I felt ashamed at my suspicions. ‘But the white bear was a sign … Einar came because of you, took you aboard because of the bear. I do not know which god stole his luck – Odin is my bet, though – but he used you to do it.’
It was nonsense, of course, and I could not shake the feeling he was up to something, so I shook my head and shouldered my gear.
‘Einar believes this,’ Gunnar Raudi said and now I saw why he had stopped me. Our eyes locked.
‘Truly?’
He nodded. Then he clapped me on the shoulder. ‘We’d better run, young Orm, or be left behind.’
Towards evening, we hit meadow grass, still yellowed but with new shoots coming through. Then, as the first stars appeared, Bagnose and Steinthor quartered back to Einar’s side.
‘We saw cattle,’ said Bagnose.
‘A bull and three milch cows,’ added Steinthor.
‘And a boy with yellow hair watching them,’ finished Bagnose.
‘Did he see you?’ asked Einar and got a curled lip from the pair of them. He stroked his moustaches and then announced that we would camp in a hollow, fringed with trees, that we had left behind some minutes before. Only one fire was to be lit and that for cooking, in the centre of the dip, where it wouldn’t be seen.
Later, after we had eaten, he called me to where he sat, with Gunnar Raudi and Ketil Crow and Skapti and Illugi – all the Oathsworn’s faithful hounds.
‘Orm,’ he said, his face tomb-dark on the other side of the fire, his hair a shroud for it. ‘Tell me the truth of it. Is Hild right in the head enough to go to her people and let them know we mean no harm?’
I thought about it, and found myself scrubbing my chin like my father did – found, also, that there was a down there to be scrubbed. I wasn’t considering the question – Hild had enough sense for the task – but what it meant.
It meant, I reasoned, that Einar was worried about the villagers, which was sensible. After all, Vigfus’s crew had been routed by them and they were, presumably, hard-enough fighters. It meant that he wanted to see if he could persuade the villagers to help. If not, he would stamp them, swift and hard, in the dark.
It’s what I would have done.
The problem was, as I told him, that I didn’t think Hild would want to do it, that she was following her own saga here and needed to be in that forge. I believed, too, that if we had any hope of reaching the end of this whale road, we needed her to be there.
And the good people of Koksalmi wouldn’t stand for that.
‘You think they would kill her?’ Einar asked. I nodded. Skapti hoomed and then spat in the dying embers of the fire.
‘How do you know so much? I know you cared for the woman, but she is out of her head half the time. And you are a boy – Frigg’s tits, you have not even been with us a season, are barely big enough to fit in that mail you strut in.’
I bridled, half rising, and big Skapti waved a placating hand. ‘Easy, easy – I meant no insult by it. Do not mistake me for a bear, young Orm.’
There were chuckles and I lost my anger in embarrassment and scrubbed my face again. ‘She will lead us to the forge if you give her leave and trust her to do it,’ I said, with only a slight twinge of fear that I was wrong. ‘Perhaps we can stay quiet and sneak in and out, no harm done.’
‘I thought the forge was in the village?’ growled Ketil Crow.
‘No. From what I understand, it is in a small hill nearby. The villagers count the place as a god place, but they fear it, too, and never go there, from what Hild says.’
This was stretching the cloth a great deal. It was what I had garnered from Hild’s ravings, which was not quite the same thing as a straight fact.
Einar considered it, then nodded. ‘In, out and then we move west and south, to where the Elk lies,’ he said.
‘And on to somewhere,’ Skapti rumbled, ‘where there is something on the cookfire that isn’t fish.’
The next morning was misted, tendrils of it snaking round our ankles, lying in the hollows and under the trees like smoke.
We had been moving for no more than a few minutes when we broached the cap of a hill. Below, the mist roiled down the slope as the morning sun burned it off and the bare hillside led down into the beginnings of a fair-sized forest, where the river sparkled.
Hild stood and pointed, right across the river and the trees, to a great craggy outcrop, almost bare save for stunted stands of fir. ‘The forge lies under that,’ she said, then turned to the north. ‘And the village is an hour that way. I came here sometimes, but she …’ She broke off, wrapped her arms round herself, moaned slightly.
Ketil Crow, looking dubious, glanced at Einar. Hild swayed and Illugi steadied her. I moved to her side and heard her say, as if fighting for breath: ‘The old entrance is closed. Barred. Only from the top. Barred, Orm. You understand? Barred …’ Her eyes rolled and she fell against me.
‘Fuck,’ said Skapti. ‘Now we’ll have to carry her.’
‘What was all that growling about?’ demanded Einar. I told him as we moved on, four men sharing the burden of Hild, on another spear-bed.
We moved through the whispering trees, splashed across the fast-running, knee-high stream and on, up to where the ground started to rise and the trees thin. Then there were only withered efforts, like a crone’s clawed hands, and Einar called a halt as Geir Bagnose and Steinthor came sliding in.
‘We found a track,’ said Bagnose.
‘And a door.’
It was the faintest of trails, and it led to a hacked-out entrance. Sunk a little way into it was a stout wooden door.
‘It was a mine once,’ someone noted and when we looked, we could see the faint remains of the old wooden slats which had carried ore carts long ago.
‘This door is a good one,’ remarked another, whose name I knew to be Bodvar. He had been a woodworker and knew one when he saw it. ‘But it has been repaired a few times, here just recently.’
He pointed and we saw the difference in weathering, the thick new cross-planks.
‘Vigfus,’ muttered Einar and we all saw the remains of axe scores, where his crew had tried to cut through. It was clear someone had come and repaired the damage caused after they’d been chased off. Which meant, of course, that they were not entirely afraid of their mountain forge.
Skapti gripped the edge of a cross-plank and heaved. When nothing happened, he pushed, then stopped, shoved his helmet up and scratched. ‘There’s a thing,’ he said. ‘It’s barred from the inside. I can feel it.’
‘So there is someone in there,’ said Ketil Crow and chuckled nastily. ‘Perhaps we should knock.’
‘That’s what Vigfus did,’ Valknut said, pulling off his helmet and wiping the sweat from his brow. ‘Look where it got him.’
‘The thing of it is,’ said Bodvar, ‘that this door has not been opened in a long while. Look, there’s an old bird’s nest in the angle of that hinge.’
He was right. And the more we looked, the older the door was and the longer it had been shut. There was silence and Einar stroked his chin. Finally, he said, ‘Bagnose, Steinthor, see if you can find another way in round this rock. The rest of us will go to where Hild said to go – the top.’
‘This is a mountain,’ protested Steinthor. ‘It will take hours to go round the whole circle of it.’
‘Then get started,’ growled Einar and they left, splitting to right and left. The rest of us hefted our gear and got ready to climb. No one spoke. If challenged, they’d have said they were saving their breath for the task, but their minds were on dwarves and trolls and other things that lived under mountains, guarding the secret of treasure.
I thought most were chewing over the prospect of turning up some of Atil’s hoard – and a few droop-lips were just stupid enough to think that it was actually buried here.
But I was wrong. Everyone was too busy wondering who had barred the door inside the mountain.