Shadows of the Short Days

by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Garún took a step back. The soldiers visibly jumped at her movement. She was lucky she wasn’t shot right there and then, she guessed. They were all on edge. The portal to Rökkurvík was just behind her, but it would take time to activate it. She’d have to pull a brick out of the wall and insert it the other way around. She’d be lying on the street, bleeding, before she could find the right brick.

  “You chose this,” Sæmundur said to Þráinn. “Remember that.”

  The galdramaður looked up at the officer, who gave a curt nod. The galdramaður started muttering an incantation, holding the bone with both hands as if trying to strangle it. Garún felt her body lock up, suddenly and violently, as if rigor mortis was instantly setting in to her living body. Sæmundur became similarly rigid, his back too straight.

  “Good, Sæmundur.”

  Þráinn gestured to the soldiers, who approached with handcuffs and straps that were intended to go over the head of a rogue galdramaður, blocking off their senses completely.

  “Don’t make them suffer,” Sæmundur said.

  The soldiers pushed him to his knees and cuffed him. He looked subdued, almost as if he was talking to himself, lapsing into some kind of trance. At that moment he didn’t look human to her.

  The winter darkness didn’t yet take up most of the day, but by now it reached deep into the morning. A wind ran through the alleyway and Garún involuntarily shivered. Suddenly everything felt colder, darker, when the opposite should be happening. The sun was supposed to start its short crawl over the horizon shortly. The darkness grew thicker, closer, pressing up against her. It was almost as if it was moving. Whispering, just out of her range of hearing. She looked up as the soldiers pushed her down and pulled her arms behind her back to be cuffed. The stars were vanishing from the night sky.

  The soldiers’ movements became lethargic. They stopped moving. The galdramaður ceased their chanting, falling silent, slack-jawed. The darkness pushed up against them. Garún could almost see it. Like liquid smoke. Something out of a dream.

  Garún was able to move again. She watched as Þráinn retreated, staring at Sæmundur as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “What is this? How are you doing this?’

  Þráinn looked around wildly, as if he could hear some kind of sound and was searching for its origin. Numbly, Garún reached for her goggles and slid them over her eyes.

  She immediately pulled them back down. A blinding display of wild colours roared around her, barely unseen, almost audible. She was standing in the middle of a violent storm, brimming with a malevolent joy as it acted out its purpose. As it obeyed its master.

  Moving as one, Þráinn, the soldiers and the galdramaður fell to their knees and bent forward, as if in prayer, prostrating themselves before Sæmundur. They were whimpering. She could barely make out words. It sounded as if they were pleading for mercy. Þráinn forced up his head, staring at her intently, his face frozen in a wretched grimace, his eyes and mouth leaking writhing tendrils of pitch-black darkness. The handcuffs undid themselves around Sæmundur’s hands, falling to the cobblestones with a loud, jarring crash. This made Garún snap out of it, as if she herself had been entranced. She rushed towards the brick in the wall, too afraid to look back, too afraid to see what the sentient darkness was doing to these men. She pulled out the brick, turned it, and found herself back in the Forgotten Downtown as she pushed it back in. Just before she stepped through she heard sickening cracks of bones breaking and choked sounds of retching.

  She let out a breath. It seemed to echo through the unnatural stillness of Rökkurvík.

  “I’m sorry you had to see that,” Sæmundur said.

  She yelled, turning to face him behind her, afraid of what she might see there in the unrelenting dark of Rökkurvík. But he was just standing there, as he had been before the shadows surrounding him became alive, gaunt and dejected.

  “I’m also sorry that I led them to you. I was being reckless. But we should be fine now. I doubt they’ll bother us again.”

  “How did you follow me? How did you cross over?’

  They were standing behind two decrepit houses in Rökkurvík. She was yelling at him, her hands trembling.

  “What the fuck was that? What did I see in the darkness with you, Sæmundur?’ she said, her voice almost cracking. “What did you do?’

  He looked up and met her eyes, and the hopelessness that had come over him temporarily gave way to something else. A gleam in his eyes of something suppressed for so long, but now, at last, come to the surface. Some kind of pride. Some type of hunger.

  “You don’t have to be afraid.” He smiled. She found herself unable to return it. “I’m here to help.”

  Sextán

  BEFORE

  Garún was fifteen years old when she left home. She didn’t run, she just walked away. She had lost count of the number of times she had threatened to leave, or when she’d stormed out only to sneak back in the next day, wet and cold after sleeping in a crevice in the lava just outside the village, constantly terrified that she’d get too close to the wild seiðmagn, where the rocks would come to life and suffocate her. Or worse.

  Still, this was a better fate than to be forced to spend one more minute in the presence of her grandmother. That’s how she felt at the time, at least. Her anger kept her warm during the cold night, but just as that fire was quick to flare up, it quickly faded as well. So she learned to stoke the embers of her anger, to keep it alive and burning.

  It had happened late the previous summer, when the children had been out picking glowberries. In a place with so few luxuries, a few delicious berries at the end of summer were a unique treat. Garún had spent the summer working salt fish, spreading out the fish on a green field, to dry it out in the sun. Getting a day off to go berry picking and keeping an eye on the children made her feel like a kid again. As if they were back playing Fallen Stick together. Fæðey came with her, despite her being older and having got a job at the laundry. Already her hands looked redder and her attitude was more grown-up. Garún suspected she had started drinking and felt a bit hurt that she might have been left out.

  The boundary of relative safety in the lava fields was fluid and constantly shifting. Through years of experimenting the villagers had learned which areas were more stable, although they remained impractical for building upon or otherwise being utilised. It was there, among the moss-grown stones, the sharp, black lava rocks, that the children picked glowberries. They tasted sweet, even better when cooked into a jam. The faint luminescence of the berries stained their lips a faint blue, which would glow in the dark for a short while. The sun had started setting late at night, as autumn was just around the corner. So the kids made a game out of sneaking a few glowberries to bed and staying up late, eating the berries and laughing at the ghostly sights of their stained faces, glowing azure.

  Fæðey had always been the bravest. Ever since they were little. She stood up for herself. Fought for what was right. Spoke back to adults if she thought them unfair. Once, Garún saw a merchant slap her across the face for being rude. Her lip bled but still she didn’t cry or lose her composure. She calmly spat on his polished boots. Fæðey had always taken care of them. Garún, Styrhildur, Hraki – all of them were like family to each other.

  That day, Fæðey had gone further out than the other kids. She said she wasn’t afraid of the lava. She wanted more berries. She was going to make jam lasting through the winter, so they could have sweet jam on bread, freshly baked in the hot springs. Their faces, she said, would be glowing until the sun was shining through the summer night once again.

  A few days later, Fæðey’s hand started to itch. She figured it must be the work, all the chemicals and almost scalding hot water. They thought nothing of it. Then her neck and body started to itch, turning an inflamed red. Fæðey didn’t tell anyone about that until she showed Garún the flowers that had grown on her arm. Initially they were small, but
they soon bloomed and grew bigger, the skin becoming tough and knotted. Like bark.

  She was kicked out of her home. Made to live in the street. Garún demanded that they take her in, but neither Hulda nor Snædís wanted Fæðey in their house. Garún begged her mother to show her childhood friend some kindness. But she didn’t budge.

  Garún sneaked out to feed her. She bought ointment from the healer, but it did nothing to alleviate Fæðey’s pain. Her body stiffened up in only a few days, making her unable to move her deformed limbs.

  Then one early morning Garún found her standing out in the middle of the street. She stood in front of an abandoned shack she had been sleeping in, feet rooted in the earth. Beautiful flowers bloomed on her arms. The hair on her head had vanished, replaced by a thick, luxuriant crown of wild flowers. None of them were alike, each a previously unseen type of blossom. She couldn’t speak or move. But Garún saw her eyes still moving. She was crying.

  When the people in the village saw what had happened, they chopped her down with an axe and burned her. Blood did not flow from the stumps where they cut her down. Only tree sap. All the while, she remained frozen and silent. But she still screamed in the fire.

  Garún started to despise the village with all her heart after Fæðey died. Its ugly little houses, twisting roads, the small-minded people and their pathetic little politics and gossip. As if all these insignificant, mundane things mattered when the fucking walls towered over them and kept them apart from the country they were living in. She’d heard of the seiðskrattar and the galdramenn, powerful users of seiður and galdur who might have been able to save Fæðey. If only they’d had the chance. Of course, none of this would have happened if they could just live inside the city walls like everyone else. Not trapped out here, in their hovels, alongside the lethal nature encroaching upon them day and night. She didn’t understand how the people could stand it.

  She also suspected the villagers didn’t mind that Fæðey was gone. She had started being labelled as troublesome. Every time a new blendingur was born, she’d interject herself in the naming ceremony at the church and protest as the naming council gave the blendingar their names. It was an ancient tradition, believed to be a relic of the old world, although some weren’t so sure of that. Blendingar traditionally got their names from a separate pool of options. They were odd names, cursed names, given to what had once been considered cursed children. Quite a few people in the village resented that as well, and took Fæðey’s side when she protested. Parents should get to choose their child’s name themselves, not some town committee, and blendingar should have the same kind of name as anyone else. The committee and the village elders refused to give in, and to Garún’s surprise a lot of people stood with them on that. It was tradition. A part of their culture they needed to respect and hold on to. Deciding your own name was for humans.

  Garún considered changing her name, just to spite them. She was part human, after all. Why not? But she decided against it. Her name had become a badge of honour. She liked it, despite its connotations of being somehow distant from god. Her name was a corruption of the name Guðrún, meaning god-rune. The “Ga’ in Garún was a mangled pronunciation of the word for “god’. She liked that, it turned out. She denied all gods, as well as all authority. It suited her. She’d set an example and show them how far a person with a “cursed’ name could go. She’d turn it into a source of pride for others like her.

  Every day Hulda worked hard, washing linens from Reykjavík in the hot pools. Most of it was dirty laundry from the city hospital, but sometimes big imported automobiles, trucks with stencilled symbols, would show up and dump a huge order to be done the same day. Later Garún learned those trucks came from the Kalmar military base. Hulda slaved away for meagre aurar on the hour, working for a hospital that would never admit her should she fall ill or injure herself, and an army that would not protect her, but instead kept her out here. It made Garún furious. When Garún confronted her mother about this, she didn’t have much to say. Sitting by the kitchen table, her hands reddened from the chemicals and hot water, smoking a cigarette before going to bed at midnight only to get up in five hours’ time. She used simple charms, channelling seiðmagn with kukl, to help her ease her tiredness and worn-out body. Garún learned from her how to manipulate seiðmagn.

  “That’s just how things are, elskan,” Hulda had said wearily. “There are some fights you can win by yourself. This isn’t one of them.”

  “Mamma, that’s bullshit. What if you had said that when I was born? You fought for me. For us. You didn’t just accept things the way they were.”

  She shook her head, blowing smoke through her nostrils.

  “Huldufjörður is different. We’ve had to change a lot, you know. For better or for worse. We’ve always been good at adapting.” She tapped her cigarette on the ashtray. “This was the next step in the right direction. People wanted to change, I just pushed us along.”

  Garún had had this discussion with her mother countless times and couldn’t stand to repeat it again. Instead, she reached out to her mother. Opened herself. Hulda hesitated, then reached out as well. Garún felt that cloying presence, the soft and tender love Hulda had for her daughter, the weariness of toiling away for scraps, the deep-rooted resolve and defeat she had cemented within herself regarding her own situation. Garún didn’t know what her mother felt, but she tried to bring her feelings to the surface as calmly and purely as she possibly could. To show her how much she cared, how they could change everything for the better, if they only worked together. She tried to pass to her some of the flames that burned within her own heart.

  “You’ll only get hurt,” Hulda said after a while, and closed her off. And that was the end of that.

  Garún didn’t know what had brought her mother to this point. And if she was being honest with herself, maybe she didn’t really care all that much for the reasons why. She found it pathetic. Hulda had committed a cardinal sin, at least to Garún. She had let the fire within her go out. Garún pitied her. She was determined to never become like that. She would never give up hope, never stop fighting.

  When Garún left home there had been no argument, no screaming, no doors being slammed. She took everything she owned and went out just before dawn to the gravel road that led to the city’s southern gate. She’d been saving up a runaway fund ever since she could remember. Every single aur, every króna she managed to acquire, went into this fund. When she was a child she’d dreamed of travelling abroad, where people didn’t hate blendingar like herself and cities didn’t have walls to keep people out. That dream was quickly turned to ash when her mother told her that the huldufólk had been persecuted almost everywhere in the world, except in Hrímland, after their world collapsed and they fled into this one. But there were still rumours of huldufólk living abroad. Maybe not every place was like this. She decided to scale back her daydreaming and put her feet on the ground. Instead of fantasising about foreign lands, she decided to start by getting out of Huldufjörður, in through the city walls. The rest she could figure out later.

  The sun bloodied the sky and the wagons started appearing one after the other. Every day farmers headed into the city with what it needed to thrive. The earth was not as toxic with seiðmagn in Reykjavík’s surroundings when compared to most other places in Hrímland, but the closer to the mountains or the further from the sea you went, the more potent it became. The wagons carried crates of bottled milk, barrels of salted meat, livestock, barley, eggs, leather, wool, furs, sand, gravel – whatever was needed. She hailed them and offered them everything she had in return for smuggling her through the gate. Those who didn’t stop, she followed. It wasn’t exactly illegal for huldufólk or blendingar to live in Reykjavík, but the guards would stop every non-human party that tried to get through without having the proper papers or identification. The huldufólk were meant to stay down in the fjord and the marbendlar in the lakes.

  She was refused again and again. No one wanted to
risk angering the guards. The best case scenario was that they’d be fined and Garún tossed out. Worst case scenario, they’d be imprisoned and Garún sent to the stocks. To her, that was a more desirable fate than be forced to waste her live trying to survive in Huldufjörður. She didn’t give up. All her possessions didn’t amount to much, but were still a small fortune to those farmers, most of whom went so frequently through that no one saw a reason to look through their cargo. 176 krónur in total.

  The sixth one she stopped didn’t have a horse towing his wagon, but a well-horned reindeer buck. She’d never seen such a beautiful beast. He looked odd with a bridle in his mouth, but he carried his fetters like royal raiment. As if he’d voluntarily chosen to work himself to death for some peasant.

  “What the hell do you want, girl? Get off the road or my buck will ride you down.”

  “I have to get through the wall. I can pay.”

  The farmer stared her down for a long while. His gaze was heavy and suspicious.

  “To beg the aid of others is submission to an independent man,” he finally said.

  “I am no man, but I am independent,” she answered, defiant.

  The farmer snorted. “Does not seem so to me, standing like a dependant of the county begging for scraps.”

  She felt her face turning warm.

  “Very well. I am not fully independent. So far. But no person is an island and now I need help. So are you going to help me or not?’

  “Maybe you think that independence can be found on the other side of that wall? The skuggabaldur is more free, sitting in my cage.”

  A filthy, blond head jutted up from the carriage.

  “Hi,” the child said in a bright voice.

  “Down, and shut up!’ the farmer spat at the girl.

  The girl retreated from the farmer’s harsh tone, as if she feared he was going to strike her. When he didn’t seem likely to do so she studied Garún carefully with inquisitive eyes.