Winter by Winter

by Jordan Stratford

  We stop and make camp. At least there’s fire and pots of steaming water, rabbits and whatever bread or cheese our caravan has scrounged from our former lives being put to use.

  The burden of the day shows in our shoulders. Stooped low and sloped to the ground, like boulders after generations of rain. Worn away.

  Kara has a fire, and I make out the brightness of her quiet voice. Around her are some of the children who are not yet asleep in the cloaks of the tanter, the tribe of grey-haired great-aunts.

  “A world of ice,” Kara says, shivering. “Niflheim, so cold it would make night feel like the sun itself. And the sun world, the fire world, Muspelheim.” She grabs each idea in the air with her hands, and pulls them far apart. “And between them, nothing, just nothing. Nothing forever. Ginunngagap.” The children are rapt.

  “But slowly,” says Kara, wiggling her fingers, “the ice world sends a tendril of frost into the Gap. Closer, every year closer to the warmth of Muspelheim. And drip, drip, drip does the frost begin to melt, falling drop by drop by drop into Ginunngagap. Where it starts to form a puddle of cold water.” She shivers again. Some children gasp, some giggle. Other simply stare half asleep into the fire.

  “And the puddle grows. So huge is the ice world, that it has much water to spare and drips into the puddle, so much so that it begins to form the shape of… a giant!” And her hands spread wide and her shadow looms as she presses closer to the fire.

  “Ymir,” says a little girl. Four, I think. I remember the faces of her parents. Alive only two nights ago.

  “Ymir,” nods Kala. “He was the first Jotun, the first giant. But the drip made other shapes, more giants, and a great cow to keep them fed.” If this reminds the children of their own hunger, their faces don’t show it.

  “The cow was Audhumla, and she found a salt-rock jutting from the ice. And she licked it, and licked, and licked, and under the salt was a tuft of hair!” and Kara picks up her braid and lifts it above her head, the children mimicking her, thick fingers stretching whatever locks they have, baby-fine or matted with forest, up to the tops of trees. An offering.

  “And under the hair was a head, and under the head the rest of a god. It was Buri, the first of the Aesir. And Buri had a son named Borr, husband to Bestla, and they were the parents of Odinn, and his brothers, Villi and Ve.”

  “Villi!” says one little boy in delight. His own name. Kara smiles at him.

  “There was a war between the gods and the giants, and Odinn killed Ymir. So great was his death that the other giants drowned in the blood!” The children’s hands fly to their mouths at this.

  “Yes, all the giants died, save two, who vanished into the mist, to Jotunheim, where they had many children to restore the race of giants. But Odinn took the body of Ymir, and from his body made the whole world. All the world. Not just the parts of it we can see, but all the world beyond that. His blood became the sea, full of salt. His bones and teeth the mountains and stones. His hair the trees,” she says, half-whispering now, pointing to forest around us. “We can see the giant’s skull in the dome of the sky, and his brains in the clouds. And from his huge bushy eyebrows,” she adds, tracing her own, blonde, almost invisible, brows, “Odinn did circle our world, Midgard, a place for the first people, Embla and Ask, to keep out the giants, and the elves, light and dark.”

  On any other night, there would be a chorus of voices asking for more. A tale of the Aesir or the Vanir, of the war of the frost-giants, or of the elves, light and dark. But tonight, the children are bone-weary, rattled by the road that’s little more than a deer-path. Too exhausted to grieve or even understand what we’ve had lost together. We’re all of us a single bruise, raw and swollen and chafing under the weight of night and fading fires and the stones that are the teeth of a slain giant.

  A keening in the night, and suddenly the air is so much colder. The children snap awake, eyes wide, gulping light out of the blackness between trees. The call again.

  Wolves.

  Some of the men, despite their age, have roused themselves and run to wagons, fetching spears. The tanter throw more fuel on the fires, piling them higher with what was set aside to be the morning’s branches. We bundle the children towards them, the women in various stages of frailty or stoutness, but every one streaked with iron, and they grip shields in circles. There’s no telling if this is a single wolf or a dozen, a dozen famn’s distance or a mil. But wolves we know, an ancient enemy, who have culled children from these same families who now form shield-walls in the dark.

  Wolves would avoid the village. But they know our caravan is a threat—each rabbit caught or deer felled for us is meat snatched from their pack, from their cubs. So they will cull us, plotting and hunting and dragging away the least of us, until we leave. And we cannot leave.

  “Villi?” calls a voice from behind the shield-wall. “Villi?”

  I look around for the boy from Kara’s circle, but am met with each child’s face searching one another’s.

  Movement. There, amongst the trees. A reflection in firelight?

  Now it’s my turn to move. Still gripping the shield, I make for the closest wagon and grab a spear. The weight is ridiculous, but its point ahead of me keeps me from crashing headlong into a tree. If I’m chasing a wolf, then I chase my own death. If chasing a boy, then I likely run only to join him in his own death. There’s just no option. So I run.

  “Ladda!” Rota’s voice. A warning or encouragement, I don’t know.

  My breathing is already ragged, and my feet hot from blisters. I’m mostly blind, but there is a flash here, I think, or a sound just ahead, out of sight. A full minute, and no sign of boy or red eyes and bared fangs. A branch whips at my face, but I push through, until I’m no longer aware if I ran to save the boy or merely to escape the dead weight of infants and elderly, dragging them to some promise I made from the fragments of a half-remembered summer. I’ve lost all sense of direction, and could easily careen out of the trees and off a cliff. On, and farther on.

  A sharp bark, there, to my right. But it’s not a wolf: it’s a child’s cry of pain. Enough gaps in the branches and enough starlight that I see the fallen tree in time, and clear it in a leap toward the boy. Villi. His face a rune of panic.

  “Villi, come. Come on.” I drag him to me, my cloak around him, and he buries himself under my left arm, my spear arm. I scoot back so that I’m sitting on my heels, our backs against a tree and the spear planted at its root, so as to impale any wolf that might leap upon us in recklessness.

  But a wolf is not a reckless thing.

  When it approaches, it is calm. Confident. It’s a monster, larger, I think, than a bear, though it couldn’t be. Larger than a horse, perhaps, by some magic. Larger than me at any rate. I stare at its eyes to see if it looks for its friends, but if they’re out there this one doesn’t betray them.

  There’s a pain in my ribs. Two. One from the little boy, who’s sharp chin is trying to hide in my skin, the other from my heart crashing like a storm against the walls of its house. In the half-light, the wolf’s face narrows. Tenses.

  It pauses, slacks, trots off a pace or two, the pads of its feet soft on the forest floor. Thinking? Toying? The reprieve passes, it’s back and again its face a sharpness. A blade.

  A blade with muscle behind it.

  The wolf leaps and snaps in one movement. I unleash the great beam of the spear.

  A white flash of pain. I’ve dislocated my damn shoulder.

  All for nothing. I’ve missed, the wolf once again padding almost absent-mindedly. Sidestepping the fallen spear shaft which, momentarily, flaps on the ground like a fish. Alive, but futile. Impotent. Dying.

  I draw the sword. I have been wearing it through two loops of thong on my belt, mostly because I had nowhere else to put it. I pull the shield closer to my body, resting the blade on the shield’s circle, keeping Villi behind all of it. Between sword and shield there’s a little window I can barely see out of, but it’s enough because t
he wolf is inside that window, and all the world could fall away and there would be a girl with her back to a tree and a boy under her aching arm and a blade now heavy heavier still against the wood of shield that may as well be a hilltop under which to bury the both of us. And still, there is a wolf in the window.

  My heels dig into the tree bark, raw in my shoes, but I’ll not need them, neither shoes nor flesh in a moment, because this wolf is going to kill me. Kill both of us. There’s nothing subtle about its intention now, its face a leer in the starlight. And then it owns the air between us, mid-flight.

  Its body slammed by another, in the space between heartbeats, grey on grey, snarl on snarl.

  Kara’s elkhound.

  The dog’s size is no match for the wolf, which lands solidly and turns to face him. Cheeks slide back to reveal teeth forged for a single purpose.

  I push with all I have left against the tree, hurl myself, meet the wolf’s weight full against the shield. But my own weight is along the top rim, and the wolf pushes the wooden disk over, atop him like a lid, and we fall together to the ground. I am on top of a little round boat, the wolf pinned beneath me in a sea of snapping grey fur and ravenous anger. The shield protects the wolf as much as it protects me, while claws rake the ground for purchase. In a second, the wolf will right itself and those claws will kick me open like a fawn.

  I don’t mind. I’m too tired to mind. Too tired to really notice I’ve thrown the boy from me in my leap to my death, that he has risen and his hands are behind him, splayed out on the tree making the rune for protection, yr, out of some domestic habit or sudden insight into the way of the gods, I don’t know. The dog barks and barks and barks.

  But it’s enough and the tip of my sword seeks out flank and snout, foreleg and shoulder, over and over, hitting earth more as not. And when the jaws come round the maw is larger than my head but the jaw is there and the blade slides along the linden wood finding fur and sinew. I push. I struggle to free my shield arm from the leather and with both hands on the sword’s triangle of a pommel I push and try to climb onto the sword, pushing down and the scent is hot on me and I can smell the blood and I push and I push until there is silence save for my own raw and scratching breath. The dog’s back is to my own, blood in its mouth, it’s nose loud in the search for wolves. Maybe we didn’t almost make it, maybe this wolf isn’t almost dead. Maybe it’s just a trap.

  I’m not sure of the next ten minutes. Villi is crying silently on my arm while the sword cuts fur and hide in a familiar pattern, throat to tail, lightly so as not to gut the thing, along the legs, and after that it’s just gripping and peeling and yanking away the stubbornness of it. Villi makes no sound, but won’t let go of my arm. The dog keens constantly.

  When the thing is done we walk back, the three of us, Villi holding my leg, the elkhound, and me. The wolf’s coat is around my shoulders, its warm blood cooling against my skin as we stagger to the fires and asking faces.

  A dream.

  I’m in our house, or its charred skeleton. And my mother is there, cooking over the still smouldering beams. She asks me what’s wrong, smiling, but her scalp is torn away, the blood there and the white bone beneath, torn like the body of Ymir making the world, making my life out her wounds.

  I start myself awake.

  Kara still asleep holding the elkhound. Or I think asleep. As I watch her, she opens her eyes and smiles a little. I note the fire has died out completely in the night, and my shoulder feels rent off and stitched back on.

  “Your dog,” I ask. “What’s his name?”

  Kara whispers. “He hasn’t told me yet.” She goes back to sleep.

  I sit up as the caravan comes to life, perhaps an hour past dawn. Little boys pissing against a tree, others gathering wood, but no one ventures from the clearing alone, and the spears are no longer stacked in the wagons.

  Brandr approaches. He, I think, is the youngest of the old, just as I am the oldest of the young. “Walk with me, Ladda,” he says. I nod and rise, brushing moss and needles from my dress. He hands me a drinking bowl of steaming birch tea. I nod thanks, sipping carefully. Honey, somehow, the great-aunts again miraculous. I return the bowl to him.

  “Where’s Rota?” I ask.

  “Gone. She went ahead at first light with some of the men to scout and hunt.”

  “Deer should be simpler away from all this noise,” I say.

  “How far?” Brandr asks. “To your uncle’s fishing lodge? I don’t recall him talking about it, but then I’m not sure I really knew him. Not well.”

  “I don’t remember,” I admit. “It’s been years. I was eight or nine. This is the path though. The only path. We kept the water on our right until the ground meets the river, and the rocks become round. There’s a great moss-covered stone, big as a house, and it’s just left of there. North, I guess. Rota and I would run to the rock and swim.”

  “Is there a hall?”

  “There’s a house. Round, and large, or large to an eight year old. And a barn. Some sheds. We won’t all fit inside. But we can build there, I’m sure of it.”

  We walk together for a moment in silence. There are cooking smells. He notices I’m limping a little.

  “It’s nothing,” I tell him.

  “You speared a wolf,” Brandr says. “That is not nothing.”

  “I missed,” I say, rubbing my shoulder. “Kara’s hound distracted it, until I could get my shield on it.”

  “You’re a very brave girl,” says Brandr.

  “No, not brave,” I say. “Just tired. Frightened but too tired to care.”

  He almost laughs. “That is the secret of battle,” he tells me. “But I’m glad of you, Ladda. You’ll be the jarl of this new village. You know that, right?”

  I stop dead.

  “I’m no jarl,” I say, confused. “I’m only fifteen. All I have is this dress, and these shoes will not last me the trip.”

  “It’s your uncle’s land, so it’s yours now. You can be a barefoot jarl.” He smiles. “The gods have chosen you. The morning on the beach, and last night with the wolf.”

  “Tell me which god has chosen me,” I answer, “and I’ll knock out its teeth.”

  “We will follow you, Ladda,” Brandr says seriously. “To the Gaular, and after. Look well to yourself, and to your sisters. There will be much to do when we arrive.”

  “This winter will erase us,” I said. “That’s my fear. That we can’t farm or fish or build with what we have left, with who we have left. And winter will find its way into our bones and our bellies and then we will be nothing. Will have been nothing.”

  Brandr reaches out and touches my hair, a grandfather’s kindness, though I don’t think there’s blood between us.

  “I do not think that is the fate the Norns have woven for Hladgertha.” He thinks for a moment and rubs his belly. “And a winter with less pork and mead, well, I could stand to be a little skinnier anyway.”

  Without thinking I poke him in his belly playfully. To just be a child for an instant, it’s a simple and treasured thing. He smiles.

  But we have been made skittish creatures now, it seems. A single broken branch jars us from our moment, and we flinch at the sound.

  One of the children catching rabbits, spear-staved grandfathers in tow?

  No. A black shape, a tangle. Not an animal.

  A girl.

  Just not one of ours.

  We talked about dangers on this journey. Of terrain, of wolves and bears, of wild dogs. Of the landvaettir, the nature-wights who slaughter livestock when displeased. But we haven’t spoken of wolf’s-heads.

  Utlagi. Outcasts. Those no longer protected by law, whose life is as forfeit as the wolf who’s hide Kara still sleeps on. Whatever crimes they have committed, which do not warrant death, receive banishment. No longer fully human. Most are scavengers on the outskirts of villages. But some become bandits on paths like this one, though there are no travellers here, so it wouldn’t be much to live on.

&nb
sp; Still, Brandr and I circle back to warn the others. We must be together—it’s too easy for fading eyesight and the blur of boyhood to stumble into whatever trap might a bandit may have for hostages. How much would we pay for one of our own? More than we can spare, probably.

  Dammit.

  Again, the sound. She’s close, this one.

  I have an idea.

  “Meyla.” I speak to the crunching bracken in the forest. “If you are hungry, come with us and eat. No harm will come to you.”

  Brandr simply stares at me. It’s killing him not to speak, but he won’t. I know this.

  There is silence. I imagine her holding her breath, trying to swallow the beating of her heart. It’s what I would do. I know the taste of this terror, the fear your very life will betray you.

  “Meyla.” Little girl. I try again.

  “We are headed to my uncle’s fishing lodge, in the Gaulardale. When we arrive there, I swear you will not be harmed. I will offer you again the protection of the law. If you want to join us, join us.”

  I am only guessing. I am guessing she is a wolf’s-head, or the child of one. Perhaps she has never known a life among those who keep the law.

  “You can come and eat with us,” I say, “or you can go to your people and tell them about us. Tell them where we’re headed. But we go to our own land, and we’ll farm and build and fish there. If you help us, we will protect you. But if you mean us harm…”

  I do not know how to finish this. But Brandr holds his silence, and when I look to him he merely shrugs.

  “…we will eat you,” I say, finally.

  There is another dozen heartbeats of quiet, and then she bolts through the green like a deer, crushing the grass in a series of hisses.