Suddenly, Lambi was beside him. “You’re not doing this alone!” He, too, had a rope around his waist. “I’d rather go down with you than have to tell your wife you perished because you decided to go dancing on a glider’s runner in the heat of battle. I wish I’d never met you, you maniac!” A smile took the edge off Lambi’s words, then he went over the rail first. Alfadas followed close behind.
The Rosewrath’s blades lay snug against the sides of the glider. Alfadas looked down at the steel runners slicing across the ice with a menacing hum. They were no wider than the blade of a sword. Curved wooden struts as broad as his hand connected the runners to the hull. The duke moved hand over hand along the railing a short distance, then lowered himself onto one of the struts. He wrapped his legs around the wood and hooked his feet together to keep a better grip. I hope Asla never hears about this one, he thought. He checked the fit of the safety line around his waist.
The Rosewrath had lost most of her speed and now moved no faster than a running man. They were heading straight for a knot of trolls.
“Hey-ho, you oversized shiteaters,” Jarl Lambi bawled at them. “Here comes Lambi to stroke your asses for you.” Like Alfadas, he sat astride one of the struts. He leaned forward a long way and waved his left hand at the trolls.
A naked troll fighter carrying a war hammer came running toward the ice glider from the side. He had his eyes fixed on Alfadas. The troll easily kept up with the glider and was moving in. He swung his war hammer in a circle over his head.
Alfadas knew very well how little room he had to duck the swing if he did not want to fall from where he was sitting. He glanced down at the steel runners hissing over the ice. They were red with frozen blood. Falling would not be a good idea.
Suddenly, the troll’s head jerked backward as he ran at full stride. A dark crossbow bolt jutted from his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose.
Veleif leaned over the side of the ship. “I’ve ordered the crossbowmen to cover you and Lambi. We’ll . . .” The skald’s words were lost in a din of screams and bellowing as the Rosewrath shot into the knot of trolls. Even though the blades had been retracted, the glider’s hull knocked many of the enemy to the ice. Alfadas saw the razor-sharp runners separate one of the warriors from his legs.
He ducked beneath a swung axe, which buried itself in the wooden side of the glider and was torn from the troll’s hand. Warm blood sprayed from the runner, hitting Alfadas in the face. Blinking, he tried to see what was going on ahead of them. A small remnant of survivors still stood together, back to back. The trolls had withdrawn a short distance, keeping a safe distance between them and the ice glider’s runners.
A shadow shot past the Rosewrath. The Willowwind had also returned to rescue the survivors but was going a lot faster. Lysilla and two other elves that Alfadas did not know had secured themselves with ropes and, with both legs, pushed themselves out at an angle from the side of the ship. Lysilla gave her companions the protection of her two whirling swords. With an effortless swing, she knocked a flying spear out of the air, then stabbed through the eye of a troll lunging for her. Then they were through to the survivors.
Strong hands reached out. Lysilla dropped her swords and pulled a wounded elf aboard.
Alfadas turned away. He had his own work to do and could not afford to miss the moment. Above him, he heard the sharp clacking of the crossbows with which his crew kept the trolls at bay.
Among the survivors now running toward them with outstretched hands, Alfadas saw, was Egil, the king’s son. The young man was supporting two wounded comrades.
Then Alfadas was reaching for hands, pulling the fleeing fighters to him, helping them get a grip on the ropes hanging from the sides of the glider. Like drowning men, they clung to Alfadas. Some were dragged along the ice by the glider.
Although the ship was moving slowly, it was still too fast for the wounded. Alfadas saw men screaming helplessly, their arms raised. Limping, even crawling, they tried desperately to get to the Rosewrath.
Egil helped his two comrades grab hold of ropes. Then he dropped back, racing back over the ice. He was not injured. He grabbed hold of another one of the wounded and with a heave managed to get the man onto his shoulders. He began to run.
Lambi waved at him. “Drop him, you idiot! You’ll never make it.”
The trolls had begun hurling chunks of ice at the ships. A dark-haired elf on the ice was hit in the back. The impact sent him staggering into Alfadas’s arms, where he coughed warm blood into the duke’s face. Alfadas pushed the elf higher, and hands came over the railing and hauled him aboard.
Meanwhile, Egil ran. He ran as fast as his legs would carry him, and Norgrimm himself seemed to be holding his shielding hands over him, for no spear or hurled chunk of ice hit him. Slowly, he was catching up.
Alfadas leaned out as far as he could. There were only inches between them. Egil stretched his right hand forward. Their fingertips touched. His face contorted with the effort, he grasped Alfadas’s wrist. “Take him!” he gasped, and he pushed Alfadas’s hand up until it could take hold of the injured man’s belt. “I’ll still make it.”
Alfadas swore. He hauled the man in by his belt and threw himself back at the same time. A chunk of ice shattered against the hull above him, and cold shards struck his neck. He quickly tied the end of a rope around the injured man’s belt and he was heaved on board.
Egil had fallen back a little. His breath was coming hard, his face red with the effort.
“Come on, man. You can make it!” Alfadas shouted back at him.
Again, their fingertips touched. Alfadas stretched desperately. Egil was at the end of his strength. Their hands lost one another. Alfadas threw himself forward, trusting in the safety line to hold him. If he could get hold of Egil, they would be pulled up together.
Their hands locked. Alfadas fell on the ice and tumbled between the runners as he took Egil down with him. Alfadas turned over, hanging on desperately to the king’s son. He looked up and saw the troll axe still buried in the hull. Above it dangled a frayed rope, flying in the wind.
The ice glider’s hull slipped past overhead. With the desperation of fear, Alfadas lunged with his left hand for one of the horizontal crossbars that supported the glider’s hull. His fingers closed around the ice-caked wood. Half kneeling and half lying, he was dragged across the ice. With his right hand, he still held on to Egil.
“Reach for my belt!” he shouted. “I need both hands, or I can’t hold on!” Slowly, his fingers were slipping from the round wooden crossbar.
Alfadas’s muscles were at the breaking point. He tried to pull Egil closer so that he could more easily reach his sword belt.
Something touched Alfadas’s shoulder lightly. White forms glided past. Uneven ice! A chunk of ice scraped across Alfadas’s knee, and he growled in pain. He could not do any more! The crossbar he was holding onto was too thick to get his hand all the way around.
Egil looked up at him. With his left hand, he was holding tightly to Alfadas’s trousers. The young soldier smiled. “It was right to come here with you, Duke. Save yourself.” With that, he let go.
“No!” Alfadas screamed. But it was useless. He could not save Egil now.
Trembling with pain and exhaustion, Alfadas reached up for the crossbar with his other hand. Looking back between the struts, he saw Egil get to his feet once the ship had passed completely over him. The king’s son drew his sword. A troll with a war hammer came running toward him. Egil strode toward the troll, then disappeared from Alfadas’s view.
Hand over hand, Alfadas edged along the crossbar toward the side of the glider. If he managed to get back on deck, he would order the ship to turn. Maybe Egil could hold on long enough. He could not simply leave him behind.
Alfadas hooked his heels over the crossbar. Blocks of ice hissed by beneath him. Every second, the ship was picking up speed. Alfadas looked toward the bow. It was only a matter of time before he was torn from beneath the glider. He l
ooked around desperately for a way to escape. The only route led up and over the wooden braces that connected the steel runners with the hull, but wide beams beneath the ship separated the crossbars from the braces on the sides.
Alfadas stiffened his back and stretched forward. For a moment, he hung with his head down, with only one heel still hooked over the crossbar. Far behind him, he saw Egil fall on the ice. The troll struck. It was over.
Exhausted, Alfadas managed to grab the brace. With the last of his strength, he pulled himself across. One of the crossbowmen spotted him. Hands reached down and pulled him back on board.
Lambi smiled at him. “I knew you were stuck to this boat like a flea to a dog’s ass. You gave us all a hell of scare, you bastard.” He offered Alfadas his hand. “Stand up and see what Ragni’s up to, the son of a whore.”
Still dazed, Alfadas stood at the railing. The Grampus was racing at full speed down the pass, ploughing a bloody path through the column of trolls marching toward the high plateau. There was no way for them to avoid the glider. Suddenly, the Grampus rammed a large supply sled, tilted to one side, and rolled over, smashing its masts. But the heavy wooden hull still slid onward.
“Never has one man killed so many trolls,” said Veleif reverentially.
“He sacrificed his crew for the privilege. He’s no hero to me,” Alfadas said.
“In battle, don’t you sacrifice men for victory with every order you give?” Veleif asked. “Did Ragni do anything that you do not?”
Alfadas did not know what to say to that. Weak and worn out, he turned away. They’d managed to rescue seven men. “How many made it onto the Willowwind?”
Lambi shrugged. “Only three or four, I think. More than seventy stayed on the ice. Who was that fellow bringing in the wounded? I’ve seen his face before, but I don’t remember where.”
“You’d find him at King Horsa’s court.”
The jarl frowned. Then his jaw dropped. “That wasn’t . . .”
“It was. Egil Horsason. I wish I’d given him command of the Grampus. He would not have sacrificed his men for his own renown. Maybe, one day, he would have been a great king.” Alfadas waved to Fenryl at the helm. “Take us back to Phylangan.”
“You’ve led us to a great victory today,” said Lambi, in an unusually somber tone. “And you’ve prepared a place at Norgrimm’s banquet for Egil. The boy I saw today . . . there wasn’t much he had in common with the swaggering little fucker Horsa’s son used to be.”
TWO HEARTS
Asla stared into the deep grave dug into the frozen earth. For half the night she had listened to the sound of the pickaxes battling away at the rock-hard soil. Isleif, a tall, dark-haired farmer from an outlying farm, carried Ole’s body down from the longhouse. In Isleif’s thatch of hair, the first silver strands were starting to show. He was a friend of her father, Erek, and the only one outside the family to turn up to Ole’s final farewell. No one from the village had come to give the dog breeder an escort of honor. Only Asla, the children, and Erek stood beside the open grave.
Ole’s corpse was thin and gaunt. He did not weigh heavily in Isleif’s arms. The stake jutting from Ole’s chest stood out brightly. They had come at dawn, the worried ones, the ones who feared that Ole, because of the terrifying nature of his death, would find no rest. They had brought the stake with them. It had been whittled from pale ash. Ignoring Erek’s objections, they had driven the wooden stake into his brother’s breast—where once his heart had been, if he had ever had one. The moment they did it, Blood let out an unearthly howl. Asla was sure that this alone would keep the villagers whispering for the rest of the winter.
Isleif climbed down cautiously into the grave, Ole’s body pressed to his own, like a mother carrying a large baby in her arms. Even in death, Ole looked to be in agony. No one will ever know what he did, Asla thought. No one would ever know why the gods had punished him and the village so cruelly, but all agreed that he had been responsible for the appearance of the enormous phantom wolf. The killings had begun immediately after he’d been found so horribly mutilated in the woods.
Asla held Kadlin on her arm. The little girl played with her hair. She wore her thin blue linen dress, the one her father loved so much, over warm woolen clothes. It was the same dress she had worn when she had learned to walk. Asla thought with longing of the warm summer days when she and Alfadas had gone down to the pebbled shore and watched the little girl together as she tottered over the stones. What would the next summer bring? Would she ever see her husband again? She looked at Ulric. The boy had his lips pressed in a thin line. He looked very serious, no longer like a child.
Isleif laid Ole’s body carefully in the bottom of the grave. A fine sprinkling of snow, thin as the flour on a baker’s table, lay in the hole. The big farmer turned the body so that the face lay in the muck. He looked up apologetically. “It’s how they wanted it,” he said softly.
“I know,” said Erek, his voice hoarse.
Asla sighed. That was how they buried someone they were afraid might become a revenant. If he woke in his grave and tried to dig his way back to the world of the living, he would only go deeper into the earth. While a stake of ash in the heart was indeed said to be enough to keep a dead man in his grave forever, for the village elders it was not certain enough.
Asla thought back to the time when she was still a little girl and Ole had given her a brown-and-white pup. As a child, she had loved her uncle. He had not always been as he’d become in the last few years. Maybe if he had found a wife . . . Loneliness eats away a heart, she thought bitterly. She knew that only too well! She had already spent so many nights alone in her bed. The smell of Alfadas that made her believe he was still lying next to her when she rolled herself up in her blanket was slowly fading. Soon it would disappear from her life completely.
Isleif pulled himself out of the grave. One by one, he took the heavy rocks that had been carted to the graveside and dropped them onto Ole’s body, and although he tried to be careful, Asla heard Ole’s bones crack as the stones came to rest on his corpse. Could they do any more to make sure my uncle never leaves this hole? she wondered. She looked to her father. Erek had shed no tears for his younger brother, but the old fisherman’s lips trembled as he saw the companion of his childhood slowly disappear beneath the stones. Her father had always felt responsible for Ole, had always stood up for him when, yet again, there was trouble on his account in the village. He’d even defended him when he knew full well that Ole was as guilty as sin. Asla ran her fingers through Ulric’s blond hair. Would he one day stand up for his younger sister as unconditionally? Asla’s hand left his head and fell to her navel. And what about this one? she thought. Will Ulric be its protector too?
Beside the pile of freshly dug earth stood a plain stone, and her eyes turned now to that. Erek had almost broken his back the day before getting it up from the shore to the longhouse, then spent half the night scratching at it with an old nail, carving a dog’s head into the surface. He did not want his brother’s final resting place to be forgotten.
“Mother, when are we going to Gundar?” Ulric asked softly.
Asla looked at Erek. He nodded. She was released from her final duty to Ole.
Downcast, she went with the children to the grave of the priest. She was deep in Gundar’s debt, and she would never have the chance to repay him, or even thank him. He had saved Ulric. The boy had told her how Gundar carried him all the way back to the village. Asla knew the effort had taxed the old man’s powers far beyond their limit.
The low mound of the priest’s grave was surrounded by thin branches spiked into the earth. The villagers had chosen the straightest branches they could find and had decorated them with strips of fabric that fluttered gently in the wind. Everyone who had come to Gundar’s grave to pay their last respects had tied a piece of cloth to a branch. There was not yet a stone to mark where he lay. Maybe he had not wanted one? Or maybe someone was still chiseling away at a beautiful marker for
Gundar’s final abode and had not yet finished his work.
Asla kneeled to say a silent prayer for the old priest. The day before, when he’d been laid to rest, she had not been able to come. With men like Ole—men who could not be trusted to stay in their grave—the obligation to sit vigil was strictly observed, and nobody had been willing to relieve her of the burden. Not even her father. Erek had been far too shaken to count on. Unreliable corpses like Ole’s were laid out in the center of the main room of the house. A large candle was pushed between their folded hands, and for a day and a night, the body was not left unattended for a moment. The villagers wanted to be certain Ole did not move again, and Asla, as a result, had been unable to attend the priest’s funeral.
Her only consolation was that, because his body had lain in her house, she had helped prepare him for burial. She had peeled the heavy chain mail from his portly body. Then they had dressed him in his best robes and had combed his hair and beard with care.
Ulric took the strip of cloth that he’d wound around his belt. It was two fingers wide, the decorative border from his best tunic. He’d insisted on giving it to Gundar. Tears ran down his cheeks as he tied the fabric to one of the long branches. But he did not sob.
Kadlin played in the snow while Asla tied a strip of her thin summer dress to a branch for her. Feeling chilled, Asla pulled her bulky red cloak closer around her shoulders. Alfadas had brought it back for her from one of his raids; apparently, it had once belonged to a king’s daughter. The coat was made of heavy wool dyed a deep red. There were no knots in the fabric, and Asla had often wondered how one could spin wool so fine. She had cut her own offering to Gundar from the coat.
“I hope you have found a place at a good table with plenty to eat and drink,” she said dejectedly. “There is so much more I would have liked to say to you. You brought my son back to me. As long as I live, I will never forget that.”
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