by Lou Anders
Karn and Thianna stood at the edge of a clearing. It was maybe two acres in size, dominated by four small hills. The hills weren’t naturally occurring, but were manmade mounds of earth. Three of the hills were smaller, with stone doors about a foot or two in height set at their bases.
“What?” asked Thianna. Her experience with the graves of frost giants was very different.
“Tunnel entrances,” Karn said, pointing out the stone doors. “These are barrow mounds. Stone chambers covered with earth. The big one must be for someone important.”
Thianna nodded, grudgingly impressed.
The fourth mound was indeed taller. It was surrounded by a ring of standing stones and had a larger stone door set into it.
Karn walked forward for a closer look. Thianna followed at his side.
“Listen,” she said.
“I don’t hear anything,” he replied.
“That’s just it. The air is so still here. Where are the animal noises? I don’t even hear a breeze.”
She was right. There was an uncanny stillness in this clearing. Not even a single insect buzzed. Karn felt a chill that had very little to do with the weather.
“Look at this,” said Thianna. They had reached the ring of standing stones now, pausing to stare closely at one. It was taller than she was.
“It’s a runestone,” he said. The stone was covered in runic letters. He read them aloud. “ ‘For if you stand you’ll surely fall. And if you fall, stand you will for now and all.’ ”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
The runes formed a half circle around an image, but grime and moss had filled in the inscribed lines and obscured it. Karn wiped away at it with his palm.
“It’s of a man, I think,” he said.
As the moss came away, more of the figure was revealed. It was indeed a carved image of a man, a Norrønur by his dress. He was throwing his hands up and had a startled expression on his face. It wasn’t a happy image.
Thianna walked to the next nearest stone. She brushed at the moss on its surface. “There’s one here as well.”
Karn joined her. The runestone had the same written inscription, but the picture carved on it was of a different person. This new figure didn’t look any happier, and he had a wound on his neck. They moved on to the next stone, scraping the moss and grime away.
“They all seem to be on the losing end of a fight, don’t they?” asked Thianna. Karn nodded. He glanced around at the other stones. The shape they marked out was more elliptical than round.
“It’s shaped like a longship,” said Karn. “Whoever was buried here must have been the captain of a drakkar, a dragonship. Only …”
“Only what?” Thianna asked.
“It’s still missing a few stones to be complete.”
“So some fell down,” said Thianna.
“Then where are they?” Karn waved his hand. There weren’t any fallen or broken stones anywhere in the glade. “I don’t think even you could pick one of these up.”
Thianna made a face.
“That wasn’t a challenge,” said Karn. “I guess someone could have carted one off if they really wanted, but no Norrønur would risk offending the dead like that when there are plenty of rocks to be had elsewhere. I don’t think the ship shape was ever completed. Whoever put it up just stopped a few stones short.”
“Why would they do that?” Thianna asked.
“I don’t know. But that’s not the only thing that bothers me.”
Thianna shrugged.
“He’s buried a bit far from the sea to be a ship’s captain, isn’t he?”
“Very good, nephew,” said a voice. Karn and Thianna both jumped. “It seems I’m not the only clever one in the family.” Casually, Uncle Ori stepped out from behind a runestone.
“Uncle Ori.” Karn suddenly felt like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t, though what exactly he had no idea. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question.” Ori sighed loudly. “But really, I just needed some time alone. All the revelry gets to be a bit much after a while.”
Ori stopped in front of Karn, then made a show of turning his attention to Thianna.
“Um, this is my uncle,” said Karn. “Uncle, this is Thianna.”
“My, you’re a big one,” said Ori, who had to raise his eyes to look into Thianna’s own. “What are you?”
“I’m a frost giant,” said Thianna. Karn couldn’t miss the defensive tone in her voice.
“Sure you are,” Uncle Ori replied. “And all frost giants have that olive complexion, do they?” Thianna dropped her gaze but quickly raised it again. “No, you’re a curiosity, is what you are.”
Karn knew from his encounter with the wyvern riders in Bense that Ori harbored a dislike for the frost giants. He decided to change the conversation.
“What is this place?” he asked.
“Ah, well,” said Ori, “you were right. It’s the final resting place for a seawolf, a drakkar captain from over a hundred years ago.”
“Isn’t it a bit far from the sea for a captain?” said Thianna.
“Not if you know the story,” said Ori, looking sidelong, if slightly up, at her.
“And you do?”
“I know it well. Better than anyone living, I suppose. I got it, if not from the horse’s mouth, from the next best thing.”
Ori waved for them to follow him, then led them to where a slight downward ramp was cut into the hill. Smaller slabs had been placed to either side of the ramp to keep the earth from collapsing inward. Ori sat on a left-side stone, leaning a shoulder back against the door. He patted the flat stone surface beside him, inviting them to join him.
Karn glanced at Thianna, hoping her irritation had subsided. She shrugged, so he walked down the ramp and sat near his uncle, but not too near. It wasn’t Ori that bothered him so much as the stone door, which was covered with runes similar to those on the standing stones.
Ori looked past Karn to where Thianna still stood apart. The giantess shrugged again but came down the ramp, though she sat on the opposite slab and as far from Ori as possible. Ori nodded at them both and then began to speak.
“His name was Helltoppr,” Uncle Ori began, “and he was a dragonship captain, the last of the true Norrønir raiders. In his day, he raided Araland and Ungland, though to mixed success.” Ori glanced over his shoulder, as though looking into the hill. “I don’t care how the legends tell it. I’m sorry, but it really was mixed success, nothing yet deserving of a song from the skalds.” He shook himself as if dismissing a wrongheaded notion and turned again to Karn and Thianna. “At any rate, somewhere in there, he finds a sword, and not just any sword, but the legendary sword of Folkvarthr Fairbeard, the first true king of Norrøngard.”
Karn’s eyebrows lifted in surprise at this. “Really?” he asked. He looked to Thianna, but she pursed her lips and shook her head. The name Folkvarthr Fairbeard obviously meant nothing to her.
“Now, is this really a special sword? Perhaps.” Again, Ori glanced behind him. “Or perhaps he only believes it is. Sometimes that’s all you need to bring out true ambition. At any rate, Helltoppr’s raiding takes a turn for the better. He proclaims himself Jarl and forces the other jarls to acknowledge him. Some he bribes, some he intimidates. They put up with him for a time, but that’s not enough for him. He’s a man of vision and broad appetite. He wants to be High King. Helltoppr slays three other jarls, and lays waste to a good bit of their holdings. He seems almost unstoppable.”
The sun was setting now at Karn’s back, and the runestones cast long shadows. In the strange stillness of the barrow mounds, it was easy to picture the fearsome dragonship raider as he marched across Norrøngard on a path of destruction.
“But no man shapes his own fortune,” Ori continued. “Isn’t that what they say? So just when Helltoppr is about to close his grasp on success, one of his own men betrays him. For love of a woman, no le
ss. She tricks Helltoppr out of his legendary sword, gives it to his betrayer.”
“Sure. Blame the woman, why don’t you?” cut in Thianna. Ori scowled at Thianna’s interruption, then went on talking as if she hadn’t spoken.
“Without his sword, his confidence falters. The betrayer teams up with the remaining jarls. They face down Helltoppr and eventually they kill him.” Ori’s hands patted the stone beside him, but this time it was almost as if he were trying to reassure the rock. “Rather than doing him the honor of burying him at sea, his one-time followers carry him far inland and bury him in the woods. They bury three of his men with him—three who stayed loyal when the others surrendered or turned. And they put enough of his plunder in the grave that they hope he’ll be content to do the decent thing and stay dead. But they remember his ambition, so they put a corpse door on the barrow just in case he isn’t so inclined.”
“A corpse door?” asked Thianna.
“Never heard of it?” asked Ori with a touch of derision in his voice.
“We don’t bury our dead like you humans.”
“What do they teach young giantesses these days?” Ori tsked. “A magically warded door, marked with grave-binding runes to keep the dead properly in their barrows. Like the one behind me now.”
Ori reached across his shoulder to indicate the stone behind him. The woods were growing dark and the shadows were growing long, but Karn could still see Thianna’s face clearly. Ori’s face, though, was in shadow, limned in an eerie green light that seemed to be coming from the stone slab behind him. To Karn, the runes looked as if they were glowing, though they were hard to make out clearly. Surely, this was just an illusion of the twilight, his imagination playing tricks on him because of his uncle’s ghost story.
“That’s not really true, is it, uncle?” he said, hating the nervous tremor that had crept into his voice.
“Why don’t we stay and see?” said Ori. “The restless dead are said to scratch on the doors of their barrows when the moons are high.”
Suddenly, Karn wanted to be anywhere but sitting on a barrow in the moonslight.
“Actually, I think we should go back.”
Ori stared at him a moment, and then broke out into a barking laugh.
“Oh, nephew,” he said, “you really are wound up. Look at you, jumping at shadows. Does your uncle tell a good tale or what?”
Karn smiled weakly. “You tell a good one,” he said.
“I’m told that my stories really are to die for,” said Ori.
“We should get back,” said Karn. “I don’t want Korlundr to worry about where I am.”
“But of course,” said Ori. “It’s burden enough being a hauld. I’d ease it for him if I could just think of how.”
None of them spoke much on the way back. Karn kept pondering his uncle’s tale. Perhaps there really was a dead raider buried in the hill, but surely Helltoppr couldn’t return as an undead draug. Imaginative nonsense. Draug were fine as playing pieces on a Thrones and Bones board, but not something Karn ever wanted to meet in real life. Hadn’t Ori said that it was all just fun and games? Glancing sidelong at his uncle, Karn remembered something else Uncle Ori had said. About games. Uncle Ori always played to win.
That night Karn dreamt that he was in the woods. A cat, a horse, and a bull were circling him. There was something wrong with the way they moved. The bull had a slick, black look to it, as if it were wet. Not with water but with something more disturbing, some liquid that only looked black in the dark of night.
Even though it was a dream, Karn could feel his heart racing and his sweat trickling. The moon and her little sister shone impossibly big in the sky, their rays creating isolated bars of light as the beams passed through the trees. The cat, the horse, and the bull moved slowly as the light and dark slid over them. But they kept their eyes fixed on Karn—malevolent, hungry, cold.
He didn’t want to place his back to any of them. He kept turning around and around, trying to divide his attention between the cat, the horse, and the bull so that not one of them was out of his sight for very long. But each time Karn twisted around to glance behind him, he saw that one of the creatures had stepped in, tightening the circle. Their eyes never left his. The eyes said: Drop your guard for even a second, and we will get you.
Karn wondered how long he could keep his vigilance up. Sooner or later, one of them might pounce on his back. It seemed inevitable.
And then all at once, the cat, and the horse, and the bull began to sing.
Helltoppr his bold warriors heed:
Ship-ruler, man-slayer, he set to sea.
Ocean-proud longship that gleamed with his swords
was his storm-wrath’s harbinger to lands manifold.
As Karn listened, the song seemed to recount the story that his uncle had told him in the barrow. It was hard to make out all the words, but he caught snatches of verse. There was something that went “Helltoppr conquer’d and great grew his power, till High King seat alone was it left to devour.” And something that sounded like a reference to his own father’s sword: “The blade, storm of white, treacherous dart, sharp-piercing its thrust through Helltoppr’s heart.”
The verses rose and fell in volume like ghostly echoes on the wind, the animals chanting it in singsong as they circled around and around. But the final verse, when it came, came loud and clear.
Stand you your ground, and stone you may be.
Sword-failing, battle-losing, none then hears your plea.
For if you stand, you’ll surely fall;
and if you fall, stand you will for now … and all.
As the cat, and the horse, and the bull sang the last verse, Karn woke up. He was still in his tent, twisted in the furs that were his bedroll. Korlundr was snoring beside him, a loud, heavy, familiar noise. The reassuring bulk of his father made him relax. As his heart rate slowed, Karn laughed at himself. He was too old to be frightened by nightmares. But then, faint enough that it might just be a trick of the wind or the babble of a distant brook, he heard a chorus of voices, just a dying refrain fading with the last shadows of night.
For if you stand, you’ll surely fall;
and if you fall, stand you will for now … and all.
Karn shivered. It would be many hours before he would drift back to sleep.
Winternights
Karn’s party spent a week trading and feasting with the frost giants. Karn thought that they could have conducted all of their trade in a single day, two at the most, if the parties involved had stuck to the actual business of trading. Instead, the days were generously punctuated with plenty of breaks—breaks for the singing of loud and boisterous songs, breaks for the telling of tall tales, and breaks for the staging of what few games were of the sort that a human and a giant could play together without one of them getting squashed.
The games mostly consisted of chucking axes and clubs at distant objects or bashing rocks with clubs and axes until they broke. The giants played a game of Knattleikr among themselves while the Norrønir placed bets on one side or the other; and the Norrønir invited the giants to the nearby stream to watch them in a swimming competition. Karn thought that Knattleikr as the giants played it was brutally pointless, while Thianna was disappointed to discover that Norrønir swimming competitions weren’t races for speed. Rather, they involved one swimmer holding another underwater and timing how long it took him to drown. Midweek they did manage a good game of tug-of-war when Karn suggested that they could play if they agreed to a rule of three Norrønir for every one frost giant. Things got only a little rocky when someone suggested that Thianna either play for the Norrønir team or else count as only half a giant. She stormed off for a while, but the game itself was a big success with everyone else. When Thianna returned, she offered to show Karn her skis, which he thought might be her way of letting him know there were no hard feelings.
The last night was for the celebration of Winternights, the evening in which summer gave way to winter. It was th
e largest feast in a week of feasting.
Before the meal, two of Korlundr’s freemen put on animal-hide masks and cavorted in a brief ceremonial dance. The giants looked awkwardly at this, and a few of them walked a little ways away.
“Where are they going?” Karn asked Pofnir.
“The dance is to bid Beysa, goddess of summer, farewell,” Pofnir explained. “And to welcome Uldr, god of winter.” Karn gave the freeman a blank stare. Pofnir winced. “The giants aren’t comfortable with our invoking the gods in their presence.”
Karn shook his head.
“The things you don’t know, Karn. It was the first of the gods of the Norrønir who slew their father, the giant Ymir,” Pofnir explained.
“Are they still mad about it?”
“Well, that was a long time ago. This is Winternight, and we should all stick close to our fires. When the world changes seasons, it is a time of transition for all things. Wild magic is in the air and anything can happen. Why, do you know there’s a barrow mound not far from here? They used to say that if you sat on a barrow mound all night long on Winternights, you would gain magical powers.”
Karn hadn’t thought much about Helltoppr’s Barrow since his first day at Dragon’s Dance, and he had dismissed the memory of those eerie voices chanting in the night.
As the evening wore on, Karn thought he should find Thianna. He wasn’t quite sure why. The giantess had only proved marginally good company. She was temperamental and reckless. But as they were close to the same age, they had found themselves lumped together off and on during the week, and Karn was smart enough to know that perhaps he was a little bit jealous. He longed to leave the responsibility of Korlundr’s Farm behind. He imagined Thianna skiing down mountainsides with wild abandon, and he admired her boldness, even if she didn’t see the value in playing Thrones and Bones.
Karn scouted amid the pockets of revelers, but he couldn’t find Thianna anywhere. He made his way to Magnilmir’s enormous tent. He peeked inside, but Thianna was nowhere in sight. He called her name anyway.
Someone coughed behind him. Karn spun and saw his uncle Ori.
“You always manage to creep up on me, uncle,” he said. “Why aren’t you off celebrating?”