The Raven's Table

by Christine Morgan

  The entire doorway was covered over by cobwebs, so thick that he had to slash through them with his blade.

  Even that was easier said than done, for the strings were sticky stuff and tenacious, but finally Thorbjorn cleared them from the entrance.

  He looked in and saw more webs… draping the walls and the furniture, swaying from the underside of the thatch.

  And spiders, everywhere, spiders, some small, some the size of a plum. Spiders busy and bustling, spinning more webs.

  “Sighilde?” This time it was only a whisper.

  His gaze found the stiff, bloated figure on the floor, crisscrossed with white threads and crawling with spiders. Crawling with them, teeming with them, tiny spiders by the thousands, hatching from the egg-sacs bulging like blisters beneath her stretched, splitting skin. They crept over her staring, sightless eyes. They scurried in and out of her mouth.

  Already dreading what he knew he must find, Thorbjorn made himself turn toward the cradle.

  Spiders scuttled in it, but that was all.

  Then Thorbjorn lifted his head, and saw in the roof-corner a large bundle… silk-wrapped, and twitching… hung up like a ham.

  THE VULGARITY OF GIANTS

  All went well enough for us until Sennulf pissed upon the troll-stone.

  We’d put ashore in a narrow inlet lined with beaches of sand and shell and sea-smoothed drift-wood. The Sea-Sword glided sleek with oars tucked and striped sail billowing in a favorable breeze. No fierce beast’s-head graced her prow; the dragon we set there when raiding was stowed below. We came seeking shelter, not plunder.

  For all that we loved Njord’s country, those wide rolling blue-grey fields and the roads where whales and ships traveled, every man now and again needs the feel of steady ground beneath his feet. Each of us craved dry land to sleep on, and a hot meal cooked over a good fire.

  This place looked to promise both, and more. To either side of us, rugged bluffs rose steep and scrubby, home to nesting gulls. At the inlet’s upper end, where stream met fjord, an expanse of green meadow stretched toward denser woods.

  Yggmot was the most glad. The fickleness of his bowels was no secret, and he often complained that he could never manage a satisfying shit at sea.

  “His mother told him,” Verdfol liked to say, “that if he stuck his bare arse over the side of a ship, Jormungandr would come up to bite it.”

  This always earned a laugh, and a suggestion that the sight alone of Yggmot’s rump would send the Midgard Serpent diving to the depths as fast as it could swim.

  “It’s a wonder, then, that he can piss,” said Bjalg.

  “Ah, but that’s why he stands so far back from the rail!”

  “Unlike Hrotig,” added Jat, elbowing his friend, “who does just the opposite, in hopes of fishing for wave-maidens!”

  “If I did that,” Hrotig retorted, “you’d think I dropped anchor-chain!”

  So it was that, as soon as we’d secured the Sea-Sword, Yggmot rushed for the bushes while the rest of us went to work.

  Finleif, whose ship the Sea-Sword was and whose sworn men we were, posted keen-sighted Ivald to keep a watch. Finleif was a fine and fair leader, jovial of temper and generous of silver, and we had profited much under his banner. We had also in the course of this made some enemies, and if we had been followed by those hostile to us, Ivald would see them with ample time for us to prepare.

  We were Vikings, yes, sea-wolves and raiders, brothers of the oar and the sword. We’d sacked villages and burned halls. We’d joined the shield-walls to fight great battles and attack great cities. The Sea-Sword’s belly groaned with wealth. None of us wore less than two arm-rings, and Thordun, Bjalg’s brother, wore six all of gold.

  Vikings, yes, and rich men, but men still like any others, and it was the humble comforts of food and fire we anticipated now.

  Some of us gathered firewood and replenished our water-barrels, others scaled the bluffs for eggs and plucked mussels from the shallows. We set pots to boil. We washed ourselves and our clothes in the fresh-running stream.

  Then, as the sun yet lingered well above the westernmost edge of the world, Leiffyr, Finleif’s nephew, begged leave to explore. Finleif did not refuse but asked that some companions go with him.

  Nine of us offered, and I was one. We liked the lad. He was young but bright, new to war and eager to learn, and never sullen.

  We went armed, of course, though we left our mail coats behind in favor of leather. Our shields we left as well, but donned helms and each man had his favorite weapons.

  Jat, Hrotig, Sennulf and I would let pass no chance for adventure. Verdfol loudly proclaimed we’d be lost without him, unable to find our rumps with both hands let alone find our way home. Andain doubtless felt the same but was quieter about it; he was wise and knowledgeable, a fine skald when the mood for storytelling took him, but his best wisdom of all was in knowing when to speak and when to not. Bjalg and Heimnir were always wary of unfamiliar places, the former wearing his war-axe strapped to his back and the latter carrying a horn-tipped bow.

  I was surprised that Karvyk chose to come along. He was known as Karvyk Twig-Thin for he was anything but, being a man of hearty appetites built like an ale-barrel. But that, of course, proved why he accompanied us… he brought a bag with him to gather fruits, nuts and berries… and although he did not say so in as many words, I soon surmised he hoped we might find some village or farmstead tucked away inland, where he might get butter, milk, or cheese.

  We ten made our way through the meadow, following the streambed’s meandering course to the tree-growth. Butterflies flitted and bees droned, fieldmice scurried. The song of the birds in the trees was much sweeter than the gulls’ raucous cries.

  It was mild. It was peaceful.

  Then we found the troll-stone.

  ***

  How long had they known of us, I wonder?

  How long had they followed as we walked along, so silent that even Heimnir was unaware of their presence?

  How long had they listened to us talking and joking, sharing laughter, wondering aloud what land this was and why no folk had settled here?

  Would they have waited and watched, but otherwise left us alone?

  I wondered, and I wonder still, but I will never know.

  We should have turned back at once. But we were most of us young and most of us foolish, and all of us brave in the way men become when they’ve known a string of victories.

  Jat saw it first, the blunt grey point jutting above the leafy boughs.

  We were no strangers to such things. Rune-stones, cairn-stones, monuments to forgotten gods… these were everywhere. Standing stones, ancient and weathered, dotted the landscapes of most of the islands we’d visited in our raiding. So too did ruins of walls and roads and fortresses, built long ago by vanished people in the names of vanished kings.

  This one seemed a tower, it rose so tall, and our curiosity compelled us to go closer. Even Verdfol was awe-struck to an unaccustomed hush when we reached the clearing where it stood.

  The trees ringing the clearing were very old. Very old indeed, trunks thick, black bark seamed and deeply fissured, roots thicker than a man’s thigh where they hunched from the dark earth.

  The pillar, four-sided and tapering at the top to that blunt point, looked to have been hewn from a single great slab of stone. It was unlike any of the rocks we saw around us, as if it came from some far-away quarry, brought here and erected by a means that seemed impossible.

  Its base was a massive square, collarbone-high on Bjalg, and though it was muddy and overgrown with moss, we readily saw that carvings had been worked into it.

  They were carvings of faces, monstrous faces, lumpy and hideous, each one uglier than the last.

  “Trolls made this,” Andain said. “Earth-giants.”

  We should have left. We should have gone back to the shore with all speed, back to the ship, to our oar-brothers, to the safety of the Sea-Sword and the salt-waves.


  Instead, we crowded near to the stone, marveling at it, poking at it, scraping away moss to exclaim over the ugliness of the troll-faces.

  “This one looks like Yggmot’s mother,” Verdfol said.

  “This one looks like Yggmot’s arse!” said Bjalg.

  “And this one like that girl you met in Olfston!” Jat said to Hrotig, who reddened.

  “Her name was Sigga and she looked nothing like that!”

  “Because you were drunk as a stoat!”

  The two fell to rough-housing, pushing about, Karvyk and Verdfol urging them on while Heimnir shook his head like an impatient nursemaid. Leiffyr gazed upward as if contemplating climbing the stone—he was agile, but there looked to be few hand-holds and if he tried I would have to stop him, as I did not want to bring word back to Finleif that his sister’s son had lived through so much only to fall and break his neck.

  Then Sennulf declared that the fourth troll-face was the very image of his step-father, who he hated. He unlaced his breeches to aim a stream of bitter piss into the squinting, sculpted eyes.

  Bjalg roared with mirth. Andain frowned.

  “Have some to drink, as well, you whore’s goat-bastard!” Sennulf pissed into the leering stone mouth next, and Verdfol, who loved a ripe insult, cheered.

  And, suddenly, they were upon us.

  Giants. Earth-giants, mountain-trolls, the smallest of them still half again the height of the tallest of us, burst from the surrounding trees. They were huge brutes, massive, and they came brandishing iron-tipped spears a strong man could barely have lifted.

  We had no warning. We should have heard them but we heard nothing, not even Heimnir, the hunter. Filthy as they were, sour-breathed and sweat-reeking, we should have smelled them long before we saw them, but we didn’t.

  They were upon us.

  It ended quickly.

  We fought. Heimnir’s bowstring sang. My blade tasted giant-blood but only a sip before it was knocked spinning from my hand and I was dragged bodily to the ground. I saw Hrotig fall, dead, and Jat leap screaming onto the broad back of his killer. I heard Bjalg’s war-cry become a shout of pain, the big man impaled in the belly by a spear-point and lifted so that he flopped and gurgled like a gaffed fish.

  Soon, we had been overpowered. They forced us to our knees, those of us who’d survived. They tied our wrists behind our backs with tight cords, and roped us together man-to-man in a line with loops knotted around our necks.

  Eight of us. Eight of ten, with little to show for it but scratches inflicted on our foes. Heimnir had sold his freedom most dearly, an arrow taking a troll’s eye in compensation. The rest of us were beaten and bruised, battered and bleeding. We gasped for breath. Jat wept unashamedly for Hrotig. Karvyk looked stunned, and Sennulf had been pummeled until he was half-conscious.

  Verdfol found his voice again and loosed an onslaught. Our captors were, he informed them, fuckers of pigs and eaters of dog-vomit, motherless bags of pus and hair shat out by their fathers after those fathers had stuck their eager rumps in the air for the rutting of disease-raddled dwarfs.

  Whether they understood his words or not was unclear. Perhaps they did, or perhaps the tone itself was enough. At any rate, he would have gladly gone on in that spirit. He was warming to it, finding his stride, when one of the giants drove a cudgel-sized fist into his face.

  They stripped us of weapons and valuables, leaving us only our clothes. The corpses of Hrotig and Bjalg they slung over their backs like deer-carcasses. Then they tugged at the rope and led us—like cattle, like slaves—away from the clearing where the troll-stone stood.

  ***

  “That one,” muttered Jat, low through clenched teeth, “that one, the grubby bastard with his ear half sliced off, that one is mine!”

  None of us argued. We were too sore and tired for that.

  How far we had trudged, I could not begin to guess. Our going was slow, clumsy, hampered by our bound wrists and our various injuries.

  The sun had set, that much I did know. Some light still hung in the sky, and a few star-specks glimmered. But here, in the mountain-ringed forest valley, shadowed by trees, dusk had already come.

  They’d let us stop for this brief rest, by some fast-flowing creek where the water chuckled merrily as if enjoying our plight. When the giants made no indication of untying us, we dropped as one to our stomachs on the fern-thick bank and plunged our faces into the cold water, thirsty as hounds.

  The one that Jat stared at, with hate in his gaze, was the one who’d slain Hrotig. His ear was indeed half sliced off, the doing of Jat’s blade, which had also stabbed him, if not deeply, in the back.

  We had, in this miserable march, the chance for a much better look at our captors than any man would have wanted. Encroaching darkness, frightening though it was, at least spared us further sight of them.

  They were very ugly.

  Their faces, like those on the stone’s base, were both squashed and twisted, like clay dolls in the hands of a petulant child. They wore ill-cured hides with clasps made of iron or bone, and garments of cloth-scraps crudely stitched patch-work together.

  Being spared further sight of them was an incomplete mercy at best. There was still the stink, which could have peeled paint from a shield. Their speech, when they did speak, was also far from pretty. It was not our language nor any that we recognized… neither was it the grunting of beasts… but something of both, and at times the sounds they uttered did seem almost within the reach of our minds.

  Our respite at the creek was a brief one. They hauled us up again, and we continued now over rougher terrain.

  The giants with their longer legs and surer steps went at a good pace, while we continued shuffling and stumbling. If we lagged too much or if a man fell, a cuff to the head or a prod with the butt end of a spear would get us moving.

  They brought us to a place where a great hall had been hewn from the mountains, by the same skill that had crafted the troll-stone. Other such pillars stood about, and torches of whole tree-trunks blazed. There were firepits, and stone slab benches heaped with mangy furs. By the hall’s entrance, bones and offal mixed into a huge shit-pile, a fly-swarming midden-mound high as a hill.

  Dozens more of the brutes rushed to meet our arrival, with much excitement and gabble. Their women, giantesses and troll-wives, were smaller and somewhat less hideous, though by no means less foul. The young ones capered up to us, teasing and poking, until swatted away by their elders.

  Near the shit-pile was a cage, and this was where they brought us. It was of stout logs and iron bars, its latch so heavy ten men couldn’t have lifted it, and the gaps between so narrow that not even Leiffyr, the slenderest of us, could have squeezed through. They thrust us into this prison still bound, and we fell in muck and rotted straw.

  What followed was a hallmote, a council-meeting, insane as it seems. The giants all gathered to gesticulate and shout. Though their words were senseless to us, their meanings were not—grievances were stated, arguments made, as if they decided what was to be done with us.

  Two of the trolls were persistent, these being the one whose eye Heimnir’s arrow had shot out and the one Jat had dubbed Half-Ear, wanting satisfaction. Verdfol was pointed out as well, and a mocking imitation done by the one who’d struck him in the mouth. But Sennulf, it was clear, was the object of the most outrage for the offense he had given.

  Meanwhile, as we untied each other’s wrists and the knotted rope around our necks, we witnessed more horror. The corpses of Hrotig and Bjalg were gutted and cleaned, then spitted and set to roast over the fire.

  They’d taken our weapons. Our arm-rings, buckles, bracelets and brooches had been tossed as trinkets to the troll-wives. Our helms, the younger ones put on their lice-ridden heads. We were caged, unarmed, and helpless, awaiting our fate.

  The discussion went on while their feast was prepared. Some of the women threw food to us, cackling when they saw that we would eat nothing touched by their filthy hands. Better t
o starve, and better to die than let such as they ate pass our lips.

  At last the hallmote was finished. They approached us. We held our ground bravely, determined to show no cowardice or weakness.

  “We will die like men,” Heimnir said to us, giving each of us a firm grip of the shoulder. “Proud men of the Sea-Sword.”

  We all nodded, but the giants were not ready to finish us yet.

  Our humiliations were to be their entertainment.

  They opened the cage and hauled four of us out.

  Leiffyr, who was beardless and slim and with long fair hair, they gave to the troll-wives, who dressed him in a frock and set a wreath of woven flowers on his head. They burdened him with a clay ale-jug big as a barrel and sent him around serving the giants at their feast. He staggered under it, flushing with fury as they laughed and slapped him on the rump.

  Jat, they brought before Half-Ear. The troll plugged a hairy nostril with a knuckle, and from the other blew gobbets of snot into Jat’s face. With a wet rumbling of phlegm, Half-Ear hawked up and spat out a slick wad that clung and oozed down Jat’s chest like a great yellow slug. Finally he turned, exposed an arse even uglier than the rest of him, pinned Jat down and sat on him, and commenced such a farting that the noisome stink of the juicy flatulence made even the other ogres’ eyes water.

  Heimnir, at the urging of the one whose eye had been blinded, had his boots removed, and was then hung by the arms from chains so that his bare feet rested on a metal shield laid over a firepit. Heimnir held them aloft as long as he could, and hopped and danced to the trolls’ amusement. But when his strength gave out and he had to let his legs take his weight, the soles of his feet sizzled and blistered, frying like bacon.

  As for Sennulf, he was made to crawl down a line of them who dug into their fetid groins to unlimber their pricks, then pissed upon him in turn, drenching him, soaking his clothes and his hair. Then they dragged him to the shit-pile and forced him head-first into it, holding him as he struggled and kicked, pushing him deeper and deeper until he was finally buried and struggled no more.