A Dynasty of Giants (Viking Sagas Book 1)

by J. A. Snow

  Chapter Forty-Four “The Curse”

  Nordrana sat at her window, watching the battle on the docks that was spilling down the street and into the village. Finally, she stood up and began to prepare. She shuffled across the room, where she took the tattered blanket from her bed to cover the window and bring the darkness. Then, she went to the corner of the room where she had placed Dansa’s aborted fetus and unwrapped the stinking blob of tissue and soft bones, the tiny heart that had once beat in her mother’s womb, the tiny skull with the bulging eyes of a reptile. She pulled down from the string the shriveled funis from Logi’s birth, the vessel of life blood he had shared with his mother. Putting these things down on a table, she then built a fire, setting a soapstone pot of water to boil over it, before she began to chant.

  She closed her old eyes and opened her crinkled, old mouth but the voice that emitted from her was not her own. A hideous screech, a suffering moan came forth, echoing between the walls of the shanty. “Oh, my goddess, Hel, queen of Helheim, realm of the dead, daughter of Loki, the most evil, granddaughter of Odin the powerful.”

  The room was silent, with only the soft bubbling of the water in the pot. She tried again to summon the spirits of the underworld. “Hear me, oh Queen! Come back for this wretch you have put among us! Rid our lives of Logi, the evil one, for the rightful jarl of Kvenland is Kari Fornjotsson and none other!”

  Still, the room was silent but the bubbling in the pot became a rolling boil, spilling over the edges, spitting into the fire. Nordrana pulled the long needle from the basket on the table, the same she had used to rid Dansa of her evil spawn. She heated it over the fire until it burned red stripes into her fingers and then began to pierce the fetus with it, pricking it again and again, deeper and deeper, murdering again what she had murdered before. “Kill this demon spawn, the spawn of the evil Logi. Kill his seed so that it will never return to Kvenland.” She turned and began the same ritual with the severed funis, beginning at one end and moving along it slowly, poking, stabbing, skewering it. “Now his feet are dead, his knees are dead. Fill him with death, long and painful, oh Hel, Queen of Helheim!”

  The intensity of the ritual was taking its toll on the old woman. She had to pause to catch her breath before she could continue. She pierced the funis again. “Kill his groin so that he may never produce children ever again! Twist his joints, so he will be unable to walk upright, rot his insides until his heart festers and his lungs breathe no more.”

  Nordrana felt her strength leaving her body, consumed by the power of the deadly ritual. She knew there was a price to be paid for every spell cast. In one final action, she picked up the fetus and the funis and dropped them simultaneously into the boiling water. They exploded from the heat, turning the water red from Logi’s blood. It frothed and foamed in the pot, swirling and whistling, emitting a horrible stench. She would let it cook until the last drop of water had cooked away, until there was nothing left and the pot ran dry, until every trace of Logi and his progeny had been destroyed.

  Then, Nordrana sank to her knees. She gripped the table for support. She sensed the presence of Hel in the room and it pleased her. Her heart began beating in a staggered, uneven rhythm. She clutched her chest. She had done her best to rid Kvenland of Logi, the monster she had brought into the world. His sins had now been paid for with her own life.

  Just as the pot burned dry, Nordrana’s tiny body dropped dead on the floor.

  Chapter Forty-Five “The Weak Becomes Strong”

  Outside Nordrana’s shanty, the battle raged on. Valdar’s already-weary men had been caught by surprise by a well-prepared, well provisioned army, who charged over the dock and met them aggressively in the street. With axes and swords, they clashed, metal on metal, weapons against flesh, until blood ran down the street and flowed into the harbor. Valdar’s men began to retreat toward the palisade where Kari and Aegir watched from the wall.

  “We must go out and help them,” Kari insisted, grabbing his axe and reaching for the gate. “We can’t stay behind the wall like cowards while Gustav’s men are dying for us!”

  “You are nei warrior,” Aegir told him. “You will only succeed in getting yourself killed if you go out there. You are our jarl, Kari. Leave this to the soldiers who know what they are doing. Kvenland needs you alive.”

  “I refuse to sit by and let them fight my battle!” Kari replied. He grabbed the bar on the gate and began to raise it. “You can stay here if you are afraid. I could not protect my wife. Now, I am going to defend our village! What kind of jarl would I be if I did not?”

  “Don’t be a martyr, Kari,” said Aegir solemnly. “There is no honor in the grave.”

  Kari turned and glared back at his younger brother. “I would rather be a martyr than a coward!” It was a cruel thing to say and he knew it. He could tell by the pain in Aegir’s eyes that the words cut him deeply. He turned his back to him as he opened the gate.

  No sooner had he stepped through the gate, he saw Logi limping up the road, fleeing from the battle in the village. The sleeve of his tunic was red with his blood, the shaft of an arrow was protruding from his shoulder. Behind him, it appeared that Valdar and the ragged remains of his army were fighting a losing skirmish; their numbers were now few and they were facing almost certain defeat at the hands of Gustav’s forces. Kari froze, his axe nearly fell from his hands as he watched his brother approach. They stood and stared at each other for a long moment.

  “Let me inside,” said Logi, breathlessly. “This was my homestead before it was yours.”

  Kari was dumbfounded. Did his brother’s hypocrisy know nei bounds? he thought miserably. “How dare you ask me for anything after what you have done?” The words finally came out in bitter pieces.

  “I only wanted what was my birthright,” said Logi. “You took that from me. You had nei right to it.”

  “Nei more right than you had to kill my wife,” said Kari.

  “Kill her?” said Logi. “I don’t know what you are talking about.” Logi’s eyes shifted, unsure of what to say. “I took her because she was betrothed to me,” he said finally. “You stole her from me just as you stole my place as jarl! Did you expect me not to fight you?”

  The noise of the battle was coming nearer. Both Logi and Kari turned toward the village and saw that Valdar and his men were cornered in an alley. Gustav’s men were closing in on them.

  “Now, are you going to let me in, or will you let your brother stand out here and be killed?” Logi asked, resting his battle axe against his thigh and clutching his arm in pain. “Who are these men anyway? Where did they come from?”

  Kari recognized Logi’s ability to remove himself from a conversation and change the subject to one of his own liking. “They have come to support me, as the honorable grandson of the great Kaleva.”

  “I, too, am the grandson of Kaleva,” said Logi sourly. “So is the cripple on the wall there. Why would they be supporting only you?”

  “You have forfeited your honor,” said Kari, “with the wicked crimes you have committed.”

  Aegir was perched above them, watching his brothers from the wall. He stood, with his bow positioned and aiming at Logi, waiting for him to make a hostile move toward Kari. His hands trembled as they gripped the bow and his fingers twitched nervously against the string. He watched as Kari’s shoulders relaxed slightly and his hands rested loosely on his axe handle. Logi was wearing him down; he could see that Kari’s resolve was weakening by the language of his body movements. He knew his brother was still in a vulnerable state, so soon after Dansa’s death. He was not himself or he wouldn’t have said such cruel things to him. He also knew how cunning and deceiving Logi could be.

  “We can rule together,” said Logi, looking up at Aegir on the wall. “The three of us! We can work this thing out. There is nei need for us to kill each other!”

  “We thought you were dead,” said Kari. “When you disappeared, we all thought you had drowned in the lake.”

 
“I nearly did,” said Logi, watching the battle that was growing even closer from the corner of his eye. “Now, Kari, let me inside! Call off your army and I will call off mine. Let’s settle this matter once and for all.”

  Kari’s heart was troubled. Once again, he thought of a younger Logi, back when they were boys together, to a time when they had listened to their grandfather’s stories and shared adventures in the forest. He stared at this young man before him; had his time in the Trondelag changed him? Could they ever be brothers again? He hadn’t the heart to murder Logi, no matter what he had done. Still, the memory of his dead wife tugged at his heart and his words locked in his throat. Mute and confused, he turned and looked up at Aegir to be his voice.

  “You have committed an unforgiveable sin, Logi,” Aegir shouted from the wall, shaking his head in disbelief of Logi’s arrogance. “The people of Kvenland have spoken! They have chosen Kari as their jarl. Go back to the Trondelag and spread your misery there! You are nei longer welcome here!”

  For a moment, Kari continued to stare at Aegir, not knowing what to do. Did one murder make a second acceptable? Could he ever live with the knowledge he had taken the life of his own kin? It was the moment Logi was waiting for. He raised his axe high over Kari’s head, without any qualms about murdering his own brother. The axe faltered in his hand for an instant. It was an instant too long. Like a bolt of lightning, there was the whoosh and the simultaneous twang of a bow-string as an arrow came down from the wall, piercing straight through Logi’s chest. He fell forward, his eyes glazed and unfocused, the arrow’s stiff fletching brushing Kari’s tunic with a smear of fresh blood before his body hit the ground. Kari shuddered and closed his eyes to shield them from the gruesome sight of his brother’s corpse. Tears welled in his eyes. The sounds of the battle were fading in his ears, drowned out by the pounding of his own heart. He heard a rousing cheer coming from somewhere in the direction of the village and the villagers were running up the road toward the palisade. They had triumphed! Logi’s men had been defeated! But, strangely, Kari felt nei elation over it. He opened his eyes once again, turning away from Logi’s lifeless body at his feet and searched again for Aegir on the wall, the brother who had, at the last moment, become his strength.

  “He is dead, Aegir,” said Kari.

  Aegir was standing there, the empty bow resting in his hands, his shoulder leaning against the spikes on the palisade. There was nei remorse in his face; his expression was as cold and as hard as the ground in winter. He nodded down at Kari.

  “Nei more Logi,” he said softly, barely above a whisper, “Nei more Logi!”

  Chapter Forty-Six “The Final Fire”

  While the villagers began the task of collecting the corpses of Valdar’s army and washing the blood from the streets, Aegir and Kari returned to the longhouse to gather their senses. The mood in the room was solemn. Despite the congratulatory words he had heard in the aftermath of the battle, the victory was bittersweet for Kari. He sat beside the fire, sullen and brooding. Hildi went about lighting candles, for the sunlight was waning, but still the room remained dark.

  “He destroyed the Kaleva,” said Aegir, after an extended silence. Strangely, as elated as he felt over Logi’s death, something else was troubling him. “We mustn’t bury him, you know.”

  “What?” asked Hildi, who was standing nearby. “What on earth do you mean?”

  Aegir shook his head. “He came back from the dead once, he can do it again,” he said. “Nei, we must burn his body with the rest of his army and wipe out every trace of him.”

  “Aegir, you are not thinking clearly,” Hildi replied. “I know he did some very bad things but he was still your brother. He was still my son. He belongs in the burial mounds with his family.”

  “He was evil, Moder,” said Aegir, “pure evil. Only fire can break his curse upon us.”

  Kari had not spoken. His eyes were empty and he kept nodding his head like a crazy man.

  “I know what must be done,” said Aegir.

  He rose abruptly and left the house. Logi’s body was still lying outside the gate, face down in the dirt, with two blood-encrusted arrows protruding from his back, the fatal one Aegir had put there himself. With Snapp’s help, he carried Logi’s body down the road toward the village. Weyland met them there, standing with a torch in his hand. “Shall we burn him with the others? he asked.

  Aegir was aghast at the sight of the amount of carnage. So many men were dead because of a family feud and he blamed Logi for all of it. The sight of the blackened shell of his boat still tied to the dock gave him pause. “Nei,” he told Weyland. “Burn the other bodies and bring me the torch. Logi must die alone.”

  At the touch of the torch, flames took hold of the heap of dead soldiers and shot high into the sky. The air soon reeked with the smell of blistering flesh and the sky was thick with a putrid, grey smoke. Aegir and Snapp carried Logi’s body and set it down on the dock beside the Kaleva.

  “The hull is sound,” said Aegir. “She will still float.” He leaned over and picked up Logi’s feet. Snapp took Logi by his head and they pitched him into the belly of the boat. Snapp and Weyland watched as Aegir untied the Kaleva’s mooring lines and pushed the boat away from the dock. “Let me have that torch,” he said. Just as the current pulled the boat in, he threw the torch into it and they all watched the last of Logi’s remains go up in flame.

  The tide was ebbing and it quickly took hold of the Kaleva. While Logi’s body was crackling and sizzling in its own fat, the vessel in which it cooked gradually drifted out into the Gandvik. Total darkness had fallen by then and the sea stretched out before them like an endless pit, a fitting grave for one so evil. Determined to see his brother completely destroyed, Aegir sat down on the empty dock, just like he and Kari had done so many times in their youth, letting his long legs dangle over the edge, watching his brother burn in the distance. There was an eerie silence in the harbor, quiet now that Gustav’s boats had sailed home, but it was much more ominous.

  Then, something very strange happened. The flames consuming Logi’s body suddenly changed. Much like the shifting lights of the nororijos, the orange of the fire that was burning his brother’s body turned a strange shade of green. They had never seen such a thing. The fire was as green as a lake toad, as green as spring grass. It was as green as the skin of a forest troll.

  Epilogue

  Five years had passed since the bloody battle for Kvenland. Just as it had been so long ago, with Kaleva and Fornjot, Kari recognized the irony of the fact that, once again, the jarl of Kvenland was a widowed boat builder raising a son alone. The village had healed, Prince Gustav’s fleet of ships had returned to Eistland, soon replaced by a fleet of their own ships, which were tied up in the harbor where commerce was thriving. Kari had moved his sweet Dansa to a place of honor next to Kaleva and Helga at the foot of the mountains. And, every spring, when the snow melted, he would take Frosti and they would go out to dig up the rhizomes beneath the sneezewort flowers planted on her grave and separate them, planting the pieces where they multiplied. The entire field was covered in white and gold blooms, more blooming each year.

  “Your moder loved these flowers,” Kari told his son. “I brought them back from the land beyond the Gandvik especially for her.”

  Frosti was growing taller and he had the dark look of his father. Doted upon by his two grandmothers, Hildi and Rolleka, and a loving uncle, and secure in the love of his father, the boy wanted for nothing except a mother, and her memory was fading. Now, she only seemed real to him as they planted her flowers every spring.

  They began their walk back to the village that morning, with the sun on their backs, their hands crusted with dirt from planting, laughing and talking with each other. Kvenland had grown; scores of new people had come to live there and raise their families and many had travelled across the Gandvik to the new land on the other side, where other villages sprang up and new trading routes were established. Their boat-building business wa
s flourishing and times were good again.

  “You slept in the boathouse again last night,” said Kari, who had noticed that the boy had not been in his bed earlier that morning. “Is the belly of your uncle’s new boat more comfortable than your mat in the longhouse?” He smiled at the boy, remembering the passion with which Aegir loved his boats; Frosti was very much like a young Aegir.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” said Frosti. “Dreams were keeping me awake.”

  “Dreams?” Kari asked. “What kind of dreams?”

  Frosti shrugged. “I don’t know, just dreams,” he said.

  “Well, what are they about?” Kari prodded. “Do they frighten you? Dreams are just that, Son, dreams. They can’t hurt you. Besides, there was nei fire in the boathouse last night. You must have been freezing! Did you, at least, take your robe to keep yourself warm?”

  Frosti nodded. “It was cold but I slept better,” he said. “When I have the dreams I wake up sweating. I can’t stand being near the fire.”

  “We could move your bed to another place, if you wish, not so near the fire,” said Kari.

  “Nei,” answered Frosti. “I have tried that. Nei matter where I go the dreams follow me. Except in the boathouse. I don’t know why but I can sleep in my uncle’s boat.”

  “Tell me about them,” said Kari. “What is it about them that is so frightening to you?”

  Frosti took hold of his father’s hand and whispered near his ear. “I dream that I am underwater.”

  “Underwater? In the lake or in the sea?” Kari asked.

  “The lake,” replied Frosti. “You know I love the sea and sailing in your boats! I could never be afraid of the sea!”

  “But, why would you fear the lake?” asked Kari. “You swim quite well, I have seen you swim from one shore to the other!”

  “It is not the lake that frightens me,” said Frosti. “It is what is under the lake.”