The Raven's Table: Viking Stories

by Christine Morgan

  By the next afternoon, all was in readiness. Those who would not take part in the ceremony itself—elders and children and slaves—remained at the hall to prepare the feast. The rest gathered outside as dusk approached.

  The men wore shaggy goat-skins draped over their shoulders, their heads crowned with goat-horns, their bodies and faces daubed black with charcoal and soot. The women, barefoot and bare-headed, wore plain shifts of linen and garlands of mistletoe. The babies the new mothers carried in their arms, seven of them this year, had been painted with a mixture of clay and red ochre. They fussed at the unfamiliar itchiness of the caked, drying substance against their tender, naked skin.

  Sigride, her blonde hair unbound, rode nude astride the large buck with the grey chin-tuft. Younger men and women, those of adult age but as yet unmarried, led the pregnant she-goats in a line.

  The Goat-Girl went at the head of the procession, clad only in a cloak of snow-white goat-skin tied at the throat. In one hand she held her stave, in the other a tallow lantern. Hafrvid, alone among them armed and armored, brought up the rear. That enemies from neighboring lands, or those who did not share their faith, might seek to disrupt this ceremony was a remote risk… but a risk nonetheless.

  In the deep grove of the dark-timbered forest, they came to a place where cairns of moss-covered stones held unlit torches. These, the Goat-Girl touched with the lantern’s flame until they sputtered with wild pagan light.

  Jugs of drink passed hand to hand, mead mixed with fermented goat’s milk, foul-tasting but powerfully strong. Each of the folk partook of it, even the babes having a droplet spilled upon their little tongues.

  A wide pit had been dug from the earth, its bottom strewn with straw, a bramble-gated sloping trench leading down at one end. The she-goats were herded into it, rotund and waddling, fluids already leaking from the swollen nether lips of their hindquarters.

  No sooner had the bramble-gate been shut behind them than the birthing pangs began. The she-goats strained and bleated. With wet squishing sounds and meaty plops, the slimy birth-sacks squeezed forth to drop into the straw. The small, struggling shapes within kicked their way to first breath’s freedom. They tottered upright on unsteady legs. The grey buck, their sire, bawled a loud and proud cry.

  The Goat-Girl untied and spread her cloak of snow-white goat-skin upon the dark forest soil. Standing naked upon it, she lifted her engorged breasts in both hands, holding them out. One by one, the seven mothers brought their babes to suckle on the sweet honey-nectar oozing from her nipples. The same was done with the newborn kids, carried squalling and protesting up from the birthing-pit.

  Sigride, still astride the buck, went slowly around the inside of the ring. She held in her slim hands a vessel made from the skull of an enormous goat, gripping it by the twisted curves of horn.

  The nursing mothers milked their own breasts into this bone bowl as Sigride stopped before them. The other women made offerings of their moon-blood or pierced their thumbs with ivory needles. The men likewise pierced blood from their thumbs, or took their pricks in hand to coax forth spurts of seed. The fluids dripped and dribbled, flooded and flowed, mingling pale and crimson together.

  When each had made his or her contribution, Sigride climbed down from the grey buck’s back and brought the bowl to the Goat-Girl, who raised it aloft.

  “Ia Sib-Njurath!” cried the Goat-Girl. “Great Goat-Mother, we honor you with blood-letting and with birth!”

  “Ia Sib-Njurath!” the rest answered in chorus.

  The Goat-Girl tipped the bowl, letting its life-warm contents pour onto her face. Some of it, she caught in her mouth and swallowed. The rest coursed down her neck, over her breasts and belly, along her thighs and legs.

  Spasms seized her body. A heat that was not quite pain, a dull forge-iron glow, spread through her. She felt her bones shift and move, her flesh re-shape.

  From the waist up, she was for the most part unchanged… but for the horns that protruded with gristle-crackling noises from her temples, the narrowing elongation of her pupils, and the wispy tufts of dark wool curling along her jawline and chin.

  From the waist down was another matter altogether.

  The joints of her knees creaked as they bent back. Her toes curled under and merged, hardening, splitting, each foot becoming a cloven hoof. Her skin bristled as coarse black hair grew in sudden profusion from hips to ankles. A short, up-curving goat’s tail sprouted from between her buttocks. A large, up-curving goat’s prick sprouted from between her legs, rising turgid and pink. A pendulous leathery scrotum hung heavy against her thighs.

  “Ia Sib-Njurath!” the Goat-Girl called, in a voice made resonant and unearthly.

  The others went into a frenzy of stomping, swaying, and chanting. “Ia Sib-Njurath! The Black Goat of the Woods!”

  The large grey buck shrieked a challenge, gouging the ground with a forehoof, snorting. He lowered his horned head. His shoulders bunched with menacing power.

  The transformed figure of the Goat-Girl crouched, lowering her own horned head, her new eyes shedding an eerie, eldritch, marshfire radiance.

  They leaped at each other in a sudden lunging charge. Their bone-plated skulls met with a terrible crack, the sound like that of a thunderclap violently shaking the sky. Both reeled back, dazed, then charged again.

  The second crack was louder, earth-splitting, as of boulders and mountains rent asunder. The grey buck crumpled, falling senseless in a shaggy heap. The Goat-Girl stepped toward him, nudged him with a cloven hoof, and lowered her prick to unleash a steaming torrent of goat’s piss to douse him.

  Tossing her horns with triumph, the Goat-Girl turned then to face Sigride, her strange form looming, casting shapeless shadows in the torchlight.

  Sigride fell to her knees. The slim young hands that had held the bone bowl wrapped eagerly around the jutting prick. She deftly stroked it back to full erection. The Goat-Girl groaned with pleasure, pumping between Sigride’s palms and fingers.

  “Your mouth,” said the Goat-Girl, in that unearthly voice.

  The girl obliged instantly, parting her lips to engulf the erection, slathering her tongue up and down the thick shaft, taking the tip as far into her throat as she could without choking. The Goat-Girl held a loose fistful of Sigride’s fine flaxen-blonde hair.

  The Goat-Girl, in a guttural growl, spoke again. “Your cunt.”

  Sigride turned, going to all fours with her white buttocks in the air, presenting the gold-fleeced cleft of her young sex, its delicate folds plump and pouting, moist with need.

  Uttering a lusty grunt, the Goat-Girl hunkered behind Sigride, grasped the girl’s hips, and mounted her with a deep, forceful thrust. They commenced at once a crude and fast rutting, Sigride wailing far more in passion than pain, driven to increasing convulsions of ecstasy with every stroke.

  The Goat-Girl groaned as her fleshy hardness plunged in and out of that snug, clasping channel. Her teeth clenched, grinding in her jaw until they nearly shattered from the strain. Her heavy breasts bounced on her chest, raining their milky honey in spatters on Sigride’s bare back.

  All around them, the onlookers gave in to their own urges. They fucked in every possible position and permutation… some that might have seemed impossible… in pairs and in groups… tangles of limbs, the wet slapping and smacking and squelching of skin and of sex… moans and groans, gasps and screams… the air redolent of musky sweat, of juices and exertion… each of them no sooner finished with one act or partner or orifice than turning to another…

  With a howl such that the dark-timbered forest seemed to shudder, the transformed Goat-Girl emptied into Sigride a hot and copious flood. It overflowed Sigride’s womb and cunt; it ran in rivers down her thighs to soak the dark soil beneath them.

  The rite went on, the fuck-lust orgy of fecundity and fertility, potency and pregnancy. It went on all that long spring night, fraught and teeming with the rich, rutting abundance of the Great Goat-Mother.

  Dripping
with seed and blood and milk and honey.

  Ia Sib-Njurath!

  AERKHEIM’S HORROR

  Thor’s hammer shattered the skies, splitting them jagged with white-hot lightning-strokes. The great noise crashed. The sea heaved. The wind howled a cold death’s breath from a fimbul-wolf’s throat.

  Sails furled and oars stowed, at the storm’s mercy, the ship tossed upon the waves. The timbers groaned with the agonies of a living beast. In that beast’s belly, bodies huddled under cloaks and limewood shields for shelter, amid close-packed chests, crates and barrels laden with provisions and possessions. In the livestock pens, goats bleated and pigs grunted, protesting the conditions of their confinement.

  Mjiska clung to the prow, its post bereft now of a carved dragon’s head because they were on no errand of war but in hope and search of settlement. The rain dashed her face and the salt spray stung her eyes as she squinted into the turbulent darkness, waiting for the next bright crack of the thunderer’s mighty weapon.

  A thick blonde braid swung against her back, slapping like a length of wet rope. Drenched garments of linen, wool and leather plastered her frame. An axe hung at her belt. She was tall for a woman, broad through shoulder and waist and hip, broad of brow and nose and chin.

  In looks as well as manner, she was very much her father’s daughter… just as Aerk, her brother, was in looks and manner very much their mother’s son, black-haired and slender, with fine features of which he was notably vain.

  God-fire struck again, dazzling in its brilliance, painting the foaming ocean silver. In its flash, Mjiska saw what she’d thought she’d glimpsed before, but now she could be certain.

  She turned without loosing her hold on the prow and raised her voice against the storm-fury.

  “Land!” she cried. “Land to the west! West!”

  The words were, despite her effort, swallowed by the wrath of wind and wave.

  Nonetheless, she knew that, far back at the steering-oar, Aerk understood. It had ever been that way with them, in moments of trouble or urgency. He threw his full weight upon the oar-pole.

  Some joked that the Norns must have crossed and tangled their life-threads while they grew together in the womb, hence their way of seeming to know the others’ mind. This also, some said with knowing looks or sly winks, was why each had been born with traits more befitting the other. It was of no matter to Mjorsk Boarstooth, whose grandfather had followed Erik the Red first into battle and then outlawry and exile.

  It was, however, of great matter to Aerk. He was as vain about his reputation as he was about his handsomeness, taking quick offense to any perceived slight or insult. That, in their younger days, his sister had more often than not been the one to wade in fists flailing against the bigger boys that bullied him… well, it was not his favorite truth, but it had made him cunning as well as ambitious.

  The ship, their trusty White-Bristle, angled westward.

  The Boarstooth had been proud of his son and daughter in equal measure, and would be prouder yet of them now. Proudest of all if they succeeded.

  To succeed, they must first survive.

  And to survive…

  A monstrous swell reared up beneath the hull, as if Jormungandr himself meant to surface from the deeps and bring challenge again to red-bearded Thor. But it was surge and not serpent, lifting the ship like a child’s boat made of twigs.

  More lightning, stark-white and sheeting, tore through the clouds. Land was near, yes, land; Dunvik and Njallan saw it as well and called out.

  The White-Bristle gave a sickening dip and tilt. Folk screamed, by no means all of them women. So too screamed the horses, tethered close to the mast, the pregnant mares and yearling stallions that were to begin their new herd.

  For a terrible moment it seemed they must roll and be capsized, that their struggles would mean nothing, that they would be cheated of triumph as their long journey ended in destruction within the very sight of shore.

  Then they crested the swell just as it began to curl into a wild white-maned wave. A dark, glassy slope plummeted away before them. The prow tipped into it and the sleek ship coursed down with such speed that Aerk uttered a loud whoop of exhilaration.

  Her brother was cunning, Mjiska knew, but could also be reckless. He had a way with charm and clever speaking that might have well served him as a skald, and there was proof of it in how he’d convinced forty men, some with their families, to accompany him on this brave undertaking.

  She herself had needed neither convincing nor persuasion. Where Aerk went, she went as well; someone had to look after him. And the White-Bristle, their inheritance, was as much hers by right as his.

  It was Vinland they sought. Vinland, which Leif Eriksson had discovered, coming home with such tales of. Lush and green Vinland, where the grape-vines grew in wild abundance and the timber-forests put even those of Norway to shame.

  Vinland, which others had subsequently sought but forever failed to find.

  Or, perhaps, had found it but never returned.

  In the next of Mjolnir’s blinding blows, sharp shadows leaped into view between their ship and the land. A black reef jutted up through the seething waters. Surf pounded against it with ferocious force, froth flinging high in tatters and spume.

  Mjiska shouted a warning but Aerk had already seen the peril. He strained at the steering-oar with all of his might. Dunvik, who was closest, rushed to help him. But the powerful current and northeasterly gale had seized the White-Bristle in an iron grip, hurtling it inexorably toward this unforgiving barricade.

  The reef, the deadly black reef…

  It formed a long, curving shield-wall lined with spear-points and axe-blades, as if some ancient army waited braced on the battlefield… some ancient and undead army made from slick sea-stone and coarse coral… bony and bleak, disease-raddled with clusters of cankerous barnacles.

  Closer now, Mjiska noticed how the reef was pocked with caves and with crevices, how skeins of lank kelp tangled rotting among its spires. Such a stench of dead fish hung around it that not even the incessant waves could wash it away.

  The White-Bristle would be dashed against it, broken like an egg—

  Another swell came, another surge of the ocean. It bore them up and over the reef with a hideous scraping of the hull-planks. The ship shuddered from it but carried on past, then swept in toward the coast.

  The jaws of the reef had torn three ragged gaps in the hull. Men rushed to plug the leaks with wads of oakum.

  Pretty Eyn, old Ypsvik’s daughter, made her way to the prow. “Is it Vinland?” she asked, wiping rain-soaked red hair from her brow.

  “I see no grape-vines from here,” Mjiska told her. “Not that there’s much of anything to see.”

  Eyn nodded. She stood a time, pensive, peering into the night.

  Thor’s battle above the clouds had moved southward by then, the bright lightning-strokes and thunder-crashes more distant.

  “My father says,” said the girl at last, twining her fingers with Mjiska’s, “that once our new home is settled, I’ll have to marry. He wants grandchildren.”

  Mjiska squeezed her hand gently. “We must all do our part.”

  “What about you?”

  At that, Mjiska snorted. “Persuading some man to marry me would be the greatest challenge yet to Aerk’s silver tongue.”

  They had no more time then for talking. To the north were the weathered bluffs of a wooded headland and what might have made a good harbor at what might have been the mouth of a river, but the tide carried them past it and ran them aground in a wide, fetid bog.

  The hull splashed through sluggish creeklets and squelched to a stop in a gritty salt-mud sand bank. Rain pattered on briny brackenweed. A few stunted, dead trees canted this way and that. Crabs scuttled. A startled bird flew.

  Land.

  Such as it was.

  Here again was the smell of decaying fish-flesh, not as vile a stench as before but a low and seeping miasma that seemed to waft
in from all sides.

  No one spoke. Even the penned livestock and tethered horses held their silence.

  Then Aerk laughed, such a glad and joyful laugh that the others could not help but laugh with him. They leaped ashore, floundering in the silt and sludge, wading in cloudy brine-water. There were hearty embraces, and back-slappings, and cheers.

  Whatever else might come, they were alive.

  They sacrificed a pig, cutting the beast’s throat, spilling its blood in thanks to the gods. By sputtering, smoky torchlight, they beached their injured White-Bristle on higher and dryer ground, and made what camp they could for the duration of the night.

  Aerk went among his folk at their tasks, jesting, bringing words of encouragement to lighten their spirits.

  “All right, I grant you, it’s hardly wine-grapes in abundance,” he said as they gathered by the cook-fires for a meal of boiled meat, hard bread, harder cheese and ale. “But, by day, this land may show us a fairer face. Let us give it a chance.”

  Nods and murmurs greeted this.

  Aerk grinned. “We are here, and it is ours if we want it. Is that not why we came? To find a new land, claim it for our own?”

  “Yes!” cried several.

  “We’ll build halls and houses, farms and settlements,” he went on. “Towns, even cities! More folk will come, our kin and friends, following our bold example. Our names will live on in lore and mens’ memories…” Arms outstretched, he turned in a slow and encompassing circle. “Aerkheim, my home will be called!”

  “Aerkheim!” they echoed, lifting their cups.

  “And who else?” Aerk asked, striding among them. “Mjiska, my sister, would you have a hall or a town with your name? Dunvik, how about you?”

  With more jests and laughter, they passed the evening until the fires burned low, then went to their sleeping-places. Notched beams fitted together in frameworks, over which they’d draped the sturdy sail-cloths to fashion long tents to ward off the rain. For beds they had mats of leather, wool blankets, and fleeces or furs.