by Robert Low
Something whirled next to me; the man shrieked and dropped. Wryneck popped up like some mad puppet, rammed his sword straight through the open front of the screaming man’s helmet and yelled, ‘Too many to go dancing with them, young Orm. Cut the feet from the fucks.’
I remembered, then, Gunnar Raudi’s lessons back in Bjornshafen: any way you can. Teeth, fists, elbows – aim for the feet and ankles. My father, teaching me how to survive …
There were too many. I had three on me, one with a spear, two flanking him with shields as guards. My breath was ragged; my whole arm throbbed from blows on the shield. The spearman waded in chopping in a cross-pattern, which was lucky for me. It let me know these men had no idea how to fight on foot.
I slapped the iron blade point away with a sweep of the sword, stepped, spun up inside it, rammed the shield against his armoured carapace and slammed the fat pommel of Bjarni’s old sword into his face.
I knew where they all were, as if I could see it. I spun out of that, weightless it seemed to me, went into a crouch and scythed round, taking a second one just above the ankles, feeling the blade bite, hearing him howl.
The spearman was on his back now, so I leaped up, landed both feet and drove the air from him as I hurled myself at the third man, who was snarling and swinging his sabre furiously.
The blow hooked up under my shield and slammed into my ribs so hard I felt them bend. Then I hit him hard, felt the searing agony of pain in my shield-arm as we collided, falling together like two steel trees.
I rolled right, over the sword-arm, came up in a half-crouch, shield up. My left arm was pure fire now, but I hacked viciously with the sword as he struggled like a trapped beetle in his heavy armour. It swept up under the nasal of his helmet, took his nose off in a flick of blood, ripped the helmet half off his head and left him yowling and scrabbling away from me.
I sliced again, seeing the spearman wallowing back to his feet, felt the blade shear down into muscle and bone, through Noseless’s neck.
The spearman was up, dragging out his sabre and I had no shield-arm, just a mass of fiery pain with a dead weight dragging it. I lunged forward as Black Beard’s sabre cleared the sheath, hacked forward, backstroked and he squealed, the sabre flying away, hand still attached.
I was on one knee, sucking air. One was dead, one was rolling around with blood seeping from his boot, one was howling with the stump of a right hand.
And Einar was coming at me, dust spurting under his boots.
He had lost his shield and helmet and his hair was flying like a black net. He had also lost his sword and gained one of their cavalry sabres, the great lazy S-curve of it pointing at me as he roared forward.
I couldn’t get my left arm to move. He came hurtling at me and all I could think to do was snarl back at him and slash.
The blow took him hard in the side. I saw rings explode, the straw of his padded jerkin puffed out, then blood sprayed and he shrieked, the sabre curving over my shoulder.
Taking the cavalryman coming up behind me straight in the face.
He hit, we fell together in a grunting heap of dust and blood, spilled apart, lay there. My shield straps broke – mercifully – and I rolled free of it and got up, left arm dangling.
Einar struggled up, grinned at me with bloody teeth, collected his sabre from the face of the man who had been about to kill me and hirpled off, half-bent.
I stared as the dust swirled. Men groaned, yelled. Valknut moved wearily over, finished off the one whose leg I had all but severed – the other one was gone – then walked a few paces forward and raised both arms. ‘Any more? Have you any more, you pox-eaten holes?’
I hoped they hadn’t, but there were some ragged cheers. With my breath thundering in my ears I looked at the cavalryman with the punched-in face. Had Einar saved me? Had he tried to kill me there and was his luck so bad he had actually stopped me from being killed?
I didn’t know; I couldn’t be sure. But I had hurt him. Ketil Crow was with him, helping him off with his mail. Others, Illugi among them, were moving among the bodies, looking for dead and wounded.
Wryneck lay up against a wagon wheel, pinned to the ground like a hunted boar, thick blood welling round the point where the lance had sliced into the rings and mail and through him to the steppe.
I couldn’t speak as I knelt by him. He felt it, opened his eyes with difficulty and grinned, spilling blood all over his white beard. ‘She said I’d never get old and rich,’ he said and died.
‘Are you hurt bad?’ I heard and turned to see Valknut looking at me. I stood up, weaving, and he steadied me, looking me over.
‘This needs sewing,’ he said with a chuckle, flicking the dangling rings round rents in the mail. My ribs, I knew, were bruised, but not cut. The pain in my hand was beginning to subside, too, and I realised I had got off lightly.
So did Valknut, who slapped me on one shoulder and looked at the dead men nearby. ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Three in one – but that fourth would have had you if it hadn’t been for Einar.’
And he strode off, sword round both shoulders, as if coming off a practice field. Over by the fire, Einar was naked to the waist, grim-faced and white as milk, while Illugi picked rings out of his flesh and heated up a knife.
I saw him force Einar to drink and, an hour later, I could already smell the garlic from his severed gut from where I stood, but Einar gave a little shake of his head when Illugi came to him and put his tunic back on.
Hild crouched nearby, watching like a buzzard waiting for prey to die.
Eight were dead, almost all the others wounded and two of those had soup wounds, which Ketil Crow dealt with. Sixteen enemy corpses were left where they lay, though they were stripped naked. The horsemen had disappeared.
An hour after the battle, half of those still fit started to shore up the tunnel and recommenced digging, those too hurt to dig tended the wounded and prepared food. At noon, I handed Einar a bowl of meat and bread and our eyes met.
He was so pale the veins on his hands were blue ropes, but his eyes locked with mine and were still black and steady and I was first to look away, still unsure whether he had been trying to kill me or save me.
When I collected the bowl again, it was still full, the food congealed. Einar looked asleep, head on his chest, face hidden by the matted wings of his hair, but his hands looked so white I thought, for a second, that I could see through them.
All that day I wondered about him, while the heat grew brassy and the corpses swelled and began to blacken and stink.
‘We shall have to get out of here soon,’ muttered Kvasir. ‘If not, we will get sick and die.’
They called him Spittle as a joke, after the wise man made from the saliva of the gods, because there were stones with more sense than Kvasir. But it is possible that he had made his first-ever joke, since most of us were sick or dying already. Kvasir himself had an infection in one eye that leaked pus: if a cure wasn’t found, he would go blind in it.
I wasn’t even sure of my own state. The bindings round my lost fingers were filthy and stained, my ankle ached and, once I had peeled the tattered mail and padding off, my ribs were looking anything but healthy under the tunic.
‘Looks like Bifrost,’ said Finn Horsehead. It was a measure of how bad things were, for he never said much at the best of times. ‘It will have more colours than the rainbow bridge by morning, I am thinking. Does that hurt?’
It did and I slapped his hand away and told him to leave off prodding it. I could feel it grate when I moved and worried that I had broken a rib or more.
‘We are so cursed that we will soon come to envy the dead,’ answered Short Eldgrim morosely.
We still called him Short Eldgrim, even though the reason for it – another Eldgrim, nicknamed Long – was under the mound of earth nearby. Short Eldgrim, slashed badly about the face and hands, didn’t look like he would be long in lying next to him.
‘You old woman,’ answered a man called Arnod, though
he made a sign against the evil eye with the one arm that was still good. The other was strapped to his side with two wooden spars on either side, badly smashed by one of the cavalrymen’s maces.
‘I would like to see my old woman,’ Finn muttered and everyone glanced at him, stunned by this display of affection. He saw it and scowled. ‘She owes me money.’
I sat by the fire, whose flames twisted and flattened in the rising wind and listened to them talk, as if they had no injuries worth speaking of, about what they might find inside that gods-cursed howe.
They had everything in there, from Odin’s magic ring, Draupnir, to the Mead of Poetry, brewed from blood and honey.
Then Short Eldgrim, hunched and grumbling and in pain from the carvings on his face and hands, moodily pointed out that, if we were descending into the realm of saga tales, there was every chance we’d find Hati, the wolf who chases and tries to devour the moon, or even Nidhogg, the corpse-devouring dragon.
In the distance came a rumbling on the rising wind. As the twilight grew and the wind moaned down the balka, Valknut came up to where we all huddled round the fire, watching the blue-white flashes light up the sky in the distance, listening to the rumbling wheels of Thor’s goat-pulled chariot.
He held up a guttering torch, whose flames were nearly flat in the wind. ‘We have broken into the howe of Attila,’ he said, ‘and Hild has gone inside.’
There was a mad scramble from the fire then, a scrabble of eager men heading for the tunnel until they were brought up short by the grim figure of Ketil Crow, standing light on the balls of his feet, his sword, saw-edged with nicks, swinging in one hand.
‘Best if only a few go in,’ Einar said, moving slowly, half-hunched to one side. His face seemed to have shrunk and had a greenish tinge, the eyes sunk so deep that his face already looked like a corpse. There was a huge seep of blood from his bandaged side. ‘The tunnel isn’t all that wide, or safe. Ketil Crow, me, Illugi, Sig – Orm, you are fit, I am thinking, so you will go. The rest remain.’
‘Prepare the carts, lads,’ Ketil Crow added with a grin. ‘We will be hauling out a fortune soon.’
That mollified them but it didn’t take much – while the lure of plundering a huge hoard of silver was strong, the fear of Nidhogg or worse was stronger. Best, I could see them all reason, to let someone else find out the dangers. There was plenty of opportunity for plunder later.
The dawn horizon flashed and roared behind me as I ducked into the tunnel. I was the last man, almost on all fours, wincing at my various pains and carrying only my sword. Ahead, Einar’s arse was barely visible and I could hear him grunt and pant. Up front, Ketil Crow, Valknut and Illugi Godi struggled to keep torch flames from their faces and still avoid elbowing all the shaky timber uprights.
Earth trickled down my neck – a run of it, like thick water, spilled over the back of my hand as I brushed the roof. Something dug into my knee: metal. I dug it out, made out a dull gleam, held it close, saw the wink of silver.
Now that I looked, I could see other lumps of dull, age-black metal. We had dug straight through a wall of silver objects and earth.
I crawled on, feeling my other hand slap into something sticky and, when I brought it close to my face, smelled the iron tang of fresh blood. Einar, leaking like a sprung bucket, slithered along the tunnel and, suddenly, stood upright.
I followed, scrambling out into the howe of Attila.
I had had no idea what we would find, even from the start. A cave, I had imagined, with neat piles of gleaming treasure, like all the sagas seemed to have. Hopefully with no coiled dragon.
But this was no cave. Even in the light of the torches, held high by Ketil Crow, Sigtrygg and Illugi, you could see that his people had done Attila proud.
The howe was the size of a small town, though I only had that impression from the great vault of the roof. The floor was flagged with stone; the roof, which should have been dirt, was a vague, arched shape in the darkness, its great wooden beams socketed into solid stone pillars and, though crusted with age, still firm.
At one end of this flagstoned square was a huge throne, a magnificent edifice of wood and gleaming silver raised high above the flagged level, with a pile of bright, brocaded robes in red and green and blue lying at the foot of it.
And all around, everywhere, piled to the roof, gleaming here and there, were blackened shapes, ominous and flickering in the torch shadows, a great tumble of forms, like buildings, strange and slanted, holding the gods knew what.
Each arm of that throne was as large as a table and, fastened to one, I saw with a sudden leap to my throat, was a skeleton, held at the neck and wrists by short, thick black chains embedded in the base.
I knew it was a woman, though there was nothing there to let me know that. Naked, she had been chained to the throne of the dead Attila. I knew who she was: Ildico, his bride of one night. The dream rushed back to me, of Hild and the collar of silver.
Ketil Crow saw none of this, just the pile of robes at the foot of the throne and he knew what that meant. His scream of rage should have echoed. Instead, it was sucked dead by that place. ‘The sword. She has taken the sword!’
He rushed forward and raked his own blade in the robes. Yellowed bones and insects spilled out from the bright, curling gold embroidered dragons on it. A skull rolled, part of what was left of Attila, who had been on that throne until flung from it by Hild, tearing free the sword he had held in his lap for centuries.
With a curse, Ketil Crow flung himself at the dark, bulked shapes, searching for her and yelling curses. Things clattered and fell and he screamed wildly and hurled bits of black metal backwards. He wanted that sword, as badly as Einar wanted the gifthrone.
Einar was now moving like an old man, bent and shuffling. I watched him give a choking, bitter half-laugh and hirple weakly forward, then slowly and painfully climb on to the great silver chair, where he slumped, laughing blood on to his moustaches.
I scarcely noticed, or heard Illugi Godi’s muttered chanting. I had just realised, for the first time, what the building-sized shapes really were.
Age-blackened silver. The sheer extent of it sucked breath and reason right out of me. Acres of it, piled high to the roof, round the throne, beyond the throne, the riches of a dozen kingdoms, the craft of a thousand smiths.
Jewelled fans, I saw, with silver feathers. A miniature of a castle gleamed, sparkling with gemstone flags. A silver ship reared out of a sea of coins, with ropes and stays of silver wire. A shirt of mail, each ring silver, every small rivet gold. Anklets and brooches and rings and tumbled pots on tumbled pots of coins, spilling like waterfalls.
For the first – and only – time, I discovered the silver-lust that so grips a man he loses his reason. I was, on that day, infected and cured of it for ever. I grabbed Illugi’s torch from him and I doubt if he noticed.
I fell on my knees, picked something up. A cup, slightly flattened on one side, with stem and embossing. I picked up another, then another, until I was scrabbling in the piles, heedless of the hurts. A silver pin stabbed me: I stuck it in my tunic. A silver-hilted dagger drew blood on my palm: I stuck it in my belt.
There were rings and armrings, which we still call ringmoney. Plates, shields, helmets, brooches, bowls, ewers, bracelets, necklaces, earrings and coins, thousands of coins. There were knuckledusters of gold and daggers of silver with jewelled hilts.
They were everywhere, piled high, forced together until cups flattened and thrones bent, a fortune, all in silver, wrenched from the world by Attila and his armies, a fitting panoply for the greatest of great steppe kings.
It was the scream that wrenched me out of it, my tunic stuffed, my boots full, my arms laden with a bowl the size of a bath.
‘Burning ice, biting flame,’ Illugi said. ‘That is how life began, in the south, in Muspell, where it seethes and shines and no man can look on it.’
In the flickering torchlight, I suppose, all that cold silver, bouncing with flame, could ha
ve reminded him of Muspell, the land of molten ice and shining flame where life was first created. At the time I thought his mind had gone. I am still not sure what was right.
The scream came again, then Ketil Crow slid down a hill, stumbling in an avalanche of coin, cursing and shrieking. He had lost his sword and there was blood on his mouth. He hit the flagstones and fell, scrambled up, fell again and tried to crawl to the exit.
Valknut went to him, but he was already sliding out of this world, bleeding in slowing gouts and spilling blue-pink coils from the rip in his stomach that went from groin to throat. Cunt to jawline.
His eyes chilled us. They were livid with fear and he was so gibbering with it that he couldn’t speak, his mouth moving like a fish until it stopped and he died.
I stood up and moved, shedding rings and cups and a fork with two tines. I let the huge bowl clatter and Valknut whirled, searching the darkness.
‘Einar … ?’ I asked, but there was silence.
I moved to where he sat, like the jarl he had always striven to be, surrounded by all the wealth of the world, on the throne of a ring-giver. He looked like spume on a wave, as if a breath would blow him away.
‘Was it worth it?’ I demanded of him and the sunken eyes flicked open, the pale face rose a little. One strand of black hair stuck to his cold-sweated cheek like a scar and his grin was as pale as the torc he wore, that mark of his status.
He grinned and touched it, that thick, braided ring of silver, shredded and lopsided where gift-sections had been hacked off.
‘You … may have … to learn … for yourself,’ he said, with that wolf-snarl of his. ‘The weight of a jarl torc like this.’
It was the smile that finished it. I had seen it before, just as he’d reached the back of Gunnar Raudi in Dengizik’s tomb.
‘Before you die,’ I said. ‘I have a message.’
His head wobbled as he raised it to look at me. I took Bjarni’s sword and rammed it hard in him, so that he folded round it and gasped.