Medi-Evil 1

by Paul Finch

“Understand, my son, this will be a test of your trust … and of your faith in me.”

  “My faith is weak, Lord. You know this already.”

  “That is why I give you this rare chance. I promise, you will not fall.”

  Radnar regarded the cliff-edge, and licked his lips nervously. Finally, he nodded. “I’ll do as you ask. One thing first … may I see where the nails penetrated?”

  Solemnly, the stranger extended both his hands. In the middle of each palm, a gruesome hole had been punched through the flesh, bone and muscle.

  “The cruelty of cold iron,” Radnar said, before glancing up. “Though I suspect you’ve never seen anyone crucified in real life, have you?”

  “Radnar?” There was puzzlement in the stranger’s eyes.

  “I have,” Radnar said. “I’ve partaken in it. In southern England, during the reign of Ethelred the Uncounselled. I was a young adventurer attached to Thorkell’s war-band. We raided throughout those rich shires, hunting geld. If geld wasn’t paid, we slew on a grand scale. One such victim was Archbishop Alphege, taken near Canterbury. We found two sturdy branches, made a cross with them, nailed him to it, and threw hambones at him ’til he was dead. Afterwards, I was so stricken with remorse that I went to my brother, who was toying with the idea of conversion. He said that because I was turning from wickedness at my own choosing, it must have been fated …”

  “I know your past, Radnar,” the stranger said.

  Radnar smiled, showing his teeth. “But you don’t know your own, it seems. Because, as I say, I have not only seen it, I have done it. I have crucified … in reality.” He took one of the stranger’s hands and held it up. “And I know that these wounds would never bear the weight of a hanging man. He pointed at the slim wrist. “It should be here. Between these two bones.”

  They regarded at each other carefully.

  “You’ve got it wrong, spirit,” Radnar said. “You sought to have me cast myself down on the midden and dash myself to pieces, maybe kill half a dozen of my kinsmen in the process. I don’t know Jesus Christ; that is certain. But I do know that you are not Him.”

  The stranger gave a silken smile. “Can a man like you afford to take such a chance?”

  “Let me perform a test of my own,” Radnar said. He raised his broadsword, holding it by the blade just beneath its cruciform hilt. “I’ll press this cross-hilt against your brow. If it burns your flesh, I’ll know you are false.”

  “Don’t presume to test the Lord your God, Radnar.”

  “You’re no Lord of mine, and no god of anybody’s.”

  “I assure you …”

  “Prove it! Touch this voluntarily. This symbol of the true God.”

  The stranger smiled even more, inclined his head forward, opened his mouth, and clamped it shut around the crux of the hilt. And as he did, a growl rose from the depths of his belly, and hot drool spilled over his jowls. Suddenly Radnar was looking into the face of a savage, lupine creature, dense hair on its cheeks and brow, its eyes like beads of fire, its nose a jutting snout. Startled but unafraid, he swung his mail-clad fist in a hammer-blow that would have brained an ox. But the instant he made contact, the apparition broke into swirls of vapour.

  “Mist-thing!” Radnar roared, drawing his sword. “Mist-devil!” He hacked and slashed at the empty air, and then he laughed. “I thought as much! You can’t harm me. For your magic to work, your victim has to have faith, does he not? He has to believe in something … something you can use against him. Perhaps you’ve never met one whose heart is a void, whose soul is a pit of doubt. I have you, spirit … I have you!”

  12

  The heated debate was still raging in the long-hall.

  At first nobody noticed Radnar arrive. Sigfurth held his normal place on the high-seat, but all around him thegns jostled and argued.

  “It’s the troll-kind!” Assbjorn insisted. “I’ve seen them.”

  “And I’ve seen my father’s ghost!” another swore. “And I know that it’s him.”

  “And my brother saw Hel, and Jarl Sigfurth saw the Skraeling!” Radnar thundered, in a voice so loud that it drowned out all others.

  There was an ear-numbing silence. They stared at him, their bearded faces flushed, running with sweat. He strolled into their midst, his ring-mail clinking with each step.

  “And I saw something too,” he added, “something that might have had great personal significance for me … had I not known better.” The silence dragged on. The drengir waited, sensing that something huge was coming. Radnar turned his eyes towards Sigfurth. “Tell me, uncle … what have you done since you arrived here? Who or what have you offended by your presence?”

  The jarl’s brow furrowed. “What’s that you say?”

  Radnar glanced at the men again. “Whatever we face, it is clever … it fights us in the manner we are least able to resist. By some contrivance, it has us face the enemy we each one of us dreads the most. Yet they are nothing more than phantoms, visions conjured from our own minds. So tell me, uncle, who have you offended?”

  “No-one. Save those I already told you about.”

  Assbjorn came forward. “Conjures demons from our own minds? I’ve never heard of such a thing. No man has.”

  “No man set foot here before,” Radnar replied. “So I ask again, uncle. What was here before you arrived? What did you displace when you built Bjarkalstead?”

  Sigfurth rose to his feet. “Nothing! There was nothing here! There is nothing here! Only us!”

  “That’s not true, uncle,” came a weaker voice.

  Everyone looked around. Ljot had entered, leaning on Marta for support. He was wrapped in a cloak, but the ravaged flesh of his throat was still visible.

  “I don’t accuse you of lying,” he added, breathing hard just from the effort of walking. “I think you believe what you say … because your real enemy remains unseen, as it has done from the instant you arrived here.”

  Radnar moved towards him. “You remember what happened?”

  Ljot nodded. “Yes. And this was no phantom, no dream … it was real, as solid as you or I. And it lurks in the fjord.”

  There was an explosion of bewildered jabber, but Radnar roared for silence.

  Ljot took another tortured breath, before trying to describe the thing he had fleetingly seen – the foul, gelatinous form beneath the ice. Normally, it might be a difficult tale for anyone to believe. But now, after such tragic events, with the blackness of Morketiden seeping in at every crack, there was a feeling among those gathered that they stood on the brink of an abyss, and that anything, no matter how hellish, could emerge from it. In addition, there was something in Ljot’s aspect that forbade skepticism. He was weak and pale, but up close there was a wildness in his eyes that even Radnar had never seen before. Sweat shone on Ljot’s brow, but it wasn’t the sweat of terror. As he spoke, his voice grew stronger, his words becoming coarser, angrier. When he’d finished, he faced them boldly, challenging them to dispute with him.

  “Whatever the monster’s reasons for wanting us out of this place, it uses devilish cunning,” he said. “From a place of hiding, it twists our minds and goads us into destroying ourselves, thus forsaking all hope of glory in the after-world. Neither your gods nor mine would tolerate such blasphemy!”

  Radnar rounded on the fire-lit host. “Come! Every one of you! He pointed at the jarl. “You too, uncle.”

  Sigfurth stepped down from his high-seat. “And where, may I ask, are we going?”

  “We’re going a-Viking. Just like we always used to.”

  13

  They marched to the shoreline in a straggling, uncertain band.

  Radnar moved out onto the ice, scanning its surface carefully, and at last located the drag-marks where Marta had hauled Ljot back from the edge of death.

  “This way,” he said. “And bring timber. We’re going to build fires. Many fires.”

  There was some hesitation at this, but Assbjorn followed Radnar out onto the gleaming
surface and relayed his cousin’s orders aggressively. “Do as he says. Bring timber … as much as you can. Break up the boat-sheds, if need be.”

  Only Sigfurth stood back, watching aloofly as his hearth-men rallied to the cause. Soon, several heaps of fuel had been stacked on the floe and were ready to be lit.

  Assbjorn wandered among them: “Ignite! Melt this bloody thing down!”

  “We’ll drown ourselves,” someone argued.

  “Didn’t you ever run the oars?” Assbjorn replied. “In your pirate days? I’ll wager drowning didn’t worry you then, when there was fame to be had. Just keep your eyes peeled for this creature. It’s down there somewhere. Ljot says so.”

  “Ljot says so,” a thegn muttered scornfully, but, one by one, the fires were lit. Hot smoke swirled in the frozen night.

  Further out, Radnar still followed the trail that Marta and Ljot had left. It reached a point where the abrasions in the surface revealed that this was the spot where Ljot’s near-fatal scuffle had occurred. Radnar drew the war-axe from his back, swung it over his head and brought it down with a mighty impact. Another followed, and another – shuddering, ear-splitting blows. The ice chipped, cracks running every which way. Radnar went at it harder, regardless of his own safety. Other men now appeared, carrying bundles of wood.

  “Build fires here too,” Radnar instructed.

  “Radnar,” Sigfurth said, approaching. “This is madness.”

  “This is war, uncle. And a war we are about to win.”

  “Nothing could survive in these waters. Not during winter. Even the seals go south.”

  Radnar aimed more axe-chops at the floor, rending huge clefts in its surface.

  “You’re a hundred yards from shore,” his uncle warned. “Go through at this point and you’ll never be recovered.”

  Those stacking the firewood looked worriedly around. But Radnar ploughed on, hot breath pouring from his mouth. Sigfurth glanced at his thegns and nodded that they should do as commanded. They lowered their torches, and flames were soon licking into the night from this part of the ice as well.

  Thunk … thunk …

  Radnar’s heavy blade bit through the surface, great chunks of ice flirting into the air.

  “At least do me the honour of telling me what we’re looking for?” Sigfurth said.

  “We’ll know when we uncover it, uncle. When we expose it and drive it into the deeps, where it belongs.”

  Sigfurth glanced around, and saw that in many places on the fjord, gangs of his warriors, as well as building fires, were also hacking and chopping with their axes.

  “Gods,” he said. “It’s as though we’re challenging Morketiden itself.”

  Radnar nodded, the sweat spraying from his brow. “Morketiden has chosen to be our enemy’s ally. In that case, Morketiden too is our enemy …”

  Before he could finish there came a CRACK from directly beneath him, and the next thing Radnar knew his world had toppled sideways.

  The others reached out for him, but it was too late.

  The burly warrior had simply gone, slipping downwards and vanishing though a mouth-like crevasse, as though sucked under and swallowed.

  14

  Radnar plunged downwards like a spear, his ring-mail and water-logged furs increasing his weight drastically.

  Initially, the water was so cold that he could barely hold his breath, even for a few seconds. But his survival instincts quickly kicked in, and he struggled with his straps and buckles, shaking his helmet from his head. It didn’t slow his descent. Some twenty feet down, he alighted on the floor of the fjord, his boots sinking to the ankles in soft sand, his body pitching backwards until he was in a seated position.

  He continued to strip off his armaments, refusing to panic, his eyes attuning to the gelid darkness. Overhead, the fires on top of the ice illuminated it in varied hues, casting down slanting rays of blue, indigo and wavering aqua-green. As a youngster, Radnar had swum in Norway’s lakes, diving in pursuit of mountain-trout; on all those occasions, the thick forests of kelp and brackish fogs of peat had rendered him blind. But here he could see clearly: the barren sand floor rolled endlessly down the length of the fjord, flickering with shadows from above, where Sigfurth and his men scrambled back and forth.

  Radnar almost laughed. That they should be frightened.

  His hauberk now came loose, followed by the straps holding his chain leggings. The thought struck him that maybe he’d survive after all.

  But then – it came.

  Approaching slowly along the wide corridor of the fjord.

  Ghosting towards him through the gloom.

  At first it was a distant object, a hallucination perhaps. But it drew steadily closer. Radnar felt his blood run even colder as it came fully into view. This was it, he was certain – the abomination that guarded this hidden corner of the world.

  At first sight it was a great globule, drifting towards him rather than swimming, though it palpitated, its gelatinous sides swelling out and in as it inhaled and exhaled vast quantities of sea-water. Layer on layer of translucent tendrils squirmed below its immense, bell-like structure, the longer strands trailing along the sea-floor as though seeking to draw energy from it, though doubtless what they really sought was food – for Radnar knew this voracious beast very well. He’d seen it countless times on his travels, and was well aware that those longer, string-like appendages bore diverse poisons, sufficient even among the smaller species to sting a man into senselessness and death. And if that was the case with the smaller ones, what of this individual, which in the middle of its upper orb-like bulk, was ten-to-fifteen feet in diameter? Its inner configurations glowed and shimmered, one minute blood-red, the next a fiery orange, the next a searing purple-blue, each change intense enough to throw dappled patterns over the sands of the fjord bed.

  Again Radnar wanted to laugh. Though the terror of this deep-water denizen struck him to the marrow, he couldn’t help but wonder – with all the voyages he’d made, all the towns he’d fired, all the champions and bare-sarks whose crushed and riven helms he’d trodden into the mire, could anyone have imagined that he’d finally meet his end on the writhing tentacles of an overgrown jellyfish?

  He continued to wrestle out of his mail, though in the paralysing chill it was a losing-battle. The monster rose upwards in front of him, the swollen canopy of its body billowing outwards, then clenching inwards again, pushing itself higher and higher, so that soon only those long, sting-loaded tendrils were on level with him. Mesmerised, he craned his neck back to watch it. Should he find the strength to slide his sword from its scabbard, he wouldn’t even be able to reach the abhorrent creature now. Better to open his throat, and let the sea flow in. Certainly better than the pain that would come from those toxin-filled stingers – though all the gods he’d ever worshipped, from Odin to Christ, deemed suicide an act of cowardice and betrayal.

  He would fight, he decided – but unfortunately, his frozen, bloodless fingers were unable to find a grip on the hilt of his sword, and now the gaudy luminescence gushed over him and the first of those lethal strands touched the skin of his face.

  Every muscle in Radnar’s body tautened as blazing light flooded through him; as he was swiftly infused from one end of his being to the other.

  But not with pain, not with toxin.

  With vision.

  Vision the like of which he’d ever imagined, even for those gifted: the prophets and soothsayers, the witch-women like Theora.

  He saw, as vividly as if he was there to wallow in it, the hideous spewing of Jormungand the Serpent. Its viscous black sludge choked the tides of the sea, its fumes befouled the air so that trees withered and died and birds fell from their nests. Next, he gazed upon the dead men’s ships that it was foretold would rise at the height of dread Gotterdammerung. They were neither knorrs nor longships, but leviathans of steel, cluttering up the harbours and ports of the world; ancient, caked with rust, evil ichors pouring from their rotted guts into the riv
ers and waters, turning fresh-flowing streams into sullied sewers clogged by rubbish and bobbing with the decayed husks of fish.

  But this, it seemed, was only the beginning, for now the final days erupted.

  The sun – that great, eternal spark in the vault of Ymir’s skull – was swamped, the titanic wolf that chased it blotting out its light and warmth in the form of a black roiling cloud, which spilled across the skies casting stagnant shadows on all the kingdoms of men. And then Fenrir, the wolf’s father – not a being of flesh and blood, as imagined, but a great jumble of metal and stone, a thing constructed in the mind of a madman, all towers, turrets, wheels, pipes and chimney-stacks – spread out over the whole of Midgaard, disgorging filth and smoke and fog. The infernal fires that spurted from Fenrir’s nostrils seared the clouds themselves, so that a plain of waste and destruction soon lay around it, where, when the Winter-of-Winters came, the snow would fall in an endless torrent of tar-black feathers.

  But even that was not the end. As the skalds had predicted, Surt struck, the fire-demon, who, once he had cut down Bifrost, the bridge connecting Earth to Asgaard, turned his flaming blade against Man, and made this world a furnace, where the ground cracked and the vegetation desiccated and died, and the cities seethed in a sulphurous, suffocating smog, and at length, in due destructive course, all life perished.

  Radnar saw all this with appalling clarity, as the fleshy strands danced across his turgid face and his eyes peered up into incandescent chaos.

  But then, just as the very plain of existence seemed about to crash into ruin and darkness, he saw something else.

  With his outer eyes – those red-rimmed organs now sore and swollen with salt – he beheld an intruder who burst down from above in a tumult of fire-lit bubbles. There was a deep whumph as the watery silence was shattered, and at once Radnar remembered where he was and who he was, and more to the point, who this intruder was, whose fair hair and beard swam in wild flurries, who was armed with a long ash spear, the iron point of which he drove towards the translucent globe.

  Radnar tried to cry out, tried to tell Ljot to wait, to hold back, but brine rushed into his throat, and suddenly he was gagging and choking, and fighting again, and kicking free of the slime that bound his feet and the last remaining sheathes of mail that weighed him down. And up above, his brother went a-Viking.