by Matt Larkin
The man, a wrinkled elder who’d seen a great many winters and yet still wore no beard, applied a poultice to the wolf’s leg. While Freki would almost certainly have recovered without aid given his nature, aught that sped the healing process would prove a boon. They had spent too long already in this trek.
Events in Midgard were proceeding without Odin being able to see them clearly much less control them. Something had gone wrong with Fitela, but Odin could not clearly see what—only that it portended ill for Sigmund, Odin’s most valuable piece on the tafl board. A niggling sense warned him of other dangers he could not see, too far off to send Huginn or Muninn. It was like a blindness had settled upon him, one which he’d never felt in his youth, for it represented senses he’d never before known he had.
“There is strong silla in you,” the angakkuq said. Odin glanced at him. He hadn’t even realized the man had turned to stare at him. “It gives you power. It gives you destiny.”
Pneuma. He meant pneuma. “Thank you for helping my … friend.” Explaining that Freki was his son would have only served to raise other questions.
“Amaruq is strong. Dangerous and wild, but sometimes beneficent. This is what I do. Propitiate the spirits of all things. Without balance, humanity would perish, swept away in storm.”
Geri had settled down beside her brother, hand upon him while he slept.
One of the other Beringians brought Odin a steaming fish in a wooden bowl. Nodding his thanks, he greedily tore into it, heedless of the hot scales singing his fingers. The wolves had hunted for food, but none so succulent or well cooked as this.
When he had finished, he licked his fingers. Geri too had scarfed down the fish and begun sucking the bone.
“Amaruq hunts alone,” the angakkuq said, frowning at Geri. “I do not know what it portends, two at once.”
Odin sucked the last oils from his forefinger. “They’re twins.”
At that, the angakkuq merely cocked his head.
“I need to find a mountain to the east. A powerful vaettr … a spirit, it dwells there, in an icy abyss.”
The man frowned, then looked away.
“Please.”
Now the shaman grumbled something. “Diineezi. The dead spirits grow restless there and no man dares walk.”
“I must.”
“It is the tallest peak. If you travel east, and do not stray too far north or south, you’ll reach the range. Amid them you find it. But you should not travel there. Those few who return, they say they saw things. Things man was not meant to see.”
Odin stroked his beard and looked to Freki. The varulf should be ready to travel by morning. And Odin could waste no more time. “Whether meant to or not, I must see these things. I have to see … everything.”
47
Light snowfall dusted an already frost-drenched Rijnland. Winter would be bitter this year, a völva had told Sigmund. The frost jotunnar were angry, so the woman claimed. Perhaps she was mad, but certainly a chill had settled over the kingdom.
Still, cold bothered Sigmund less than it did other men. Another blessing of his nature, but one that came at the cost of a certain wanderlust. Alone, he strolled along the Rijn’s banks, even though dusk had settled in and most people had begun to flee the mist.
It wouldn’t do to practice these walks too oft. Men would talk, think him already mist-mad or perhaps even guess his secret. Sigmund had taken pains to conceal his and Fitela’s natures as varulfur from his host. Men didn’t understand such things and they rightfully feared aught to do with the Otherworlds.
Once, every so oft, though, he had to walk. Sometimes even, when no one was around to see his speed, he’d run. On a few occasions, he’d taken a small boat across the river and made for the Myrkvidr, and there taken the form of wolf and run with freedom and grace men could never fathom.
A bitter breeze swept over the river, following its course toward the sea. The breeze carried with it the scents of men and beast and … Fitela.
Sigmund turned as his son came loping toward him, running too fast for a man and paying too little heed to if anyone noticed. True, few remained out-of-doors now, but it was hardly midnight either. “Something’s happened,” he said when Fitela finally paused, panting before him.
“I … I killed a man.” Sigmund’s son rested his palms on his knees, chest heaving like he’d run a score of miles already. Perhaps he had.
“You’ve killed a great many men. What of it?”
“His father has demanded weregild. A high weregild.”
Sigmund scowled. “You mean you killed a noble, and not in war, I take it. Oh, Fitela, you should have learned to check your passions. But, yes, you need not ask. I will pay—”
“It was Elof Hildebrandson.”
Sigmund faltered. “Borghild’s brother? Odin’s spear, boy!” He cuffed Fitela on the back of the head. “Are you mist-mad? Do you have any idea what this will mean?”
“I …”
“What happened?” Sigmund demanded.
“We quarreled over a woman in Menzlin. We’d had much mead, the both of us, and I … he tried to wrestle me.”
Not knowing Fitela was a varulf. And Sigmund’s son had clearly killed Hildebrand’s son with his bare hands.
“Get inside the hall,” Sigmund snapped. “Speak to no one of this. I will deal with it.”
Borghild fair trembled with rage, her mouth quivering. Though tears welled in her eyes, they refused to shed themselves, as if unwilling to show even that much weakness before him.
Sigmund wrung his hands. “It is done, wife. It cannot be undone.”
“Your son is a murderer.” She didn’t shout. Just that quiet, slow voice.
Fitela surely was, but then, so was Sigmund, and so was Borghild’s own son Helgi. Such was the way of men at arms. One couldn’t get ahead without shedding blood. Hardly what the woman needed to hear at the moment though. “I’ve lost brothers. I know your pain.” Not knowing what else to say, Sigmund fell silent.
Borghild bared her teeth like she might leap over and bite him. “I will not ask you to execute your son. But you must at a minimum banish him from Hunaland forever. I will not deign to look upon the beast.”
It was like a blow to the gut. Years of staring down foes, of pain and fighting, they had taught him to weather such a blow without flinching. “I will not. Fitela fought his whole life to regain this home and to help us unify Hunaland. Under no circumstances will I even consider a plan that would deny him what he so fought for.”
“You deny me justice.”
Sigmund shook his head. “You seek justice? I have never before paid weregild to any man, but I’ll pay your father what price he names. Even I will pay you what weregild you name. But Fitela is free to go where he pleases.”
His wife trembled anew, clearly considering and discarding several tacts. “You must decide what is fitting, my king.”
Sigmund nodded. “Then I will throw a grand funeral for Elof. All will come from miles around to see his pyre ship sail upon the Rijn. Even Odin himself must take note of the honor I’ll bestow upon your brother.”
If that satisfied Borghild, she gave little indication. Instead, she simply turned and left.
As Sigmund had promised, great men and women did come to see the burning of Elof Hildebrandson. Warriors from Menzlin and a troop of shieldmaidens. King Garth and Prince Hildebrand, their expressions unreadable as their kin was laid upon the pyre ship. Jarls and housecarls and tradesmen, singing songs to call valkyries in the hopes one would carry Elof to Valhalla.
The burning ship smoldered through the mist like a fading candle vanishing and leaving them all in darkness. Sigmund could not take his eyes off it. The death of the prince’s son would become a festering rot in Sigmund’s united Hunaland, of that he had no doubt. The weregild would appease law and honor, yes, but how could Hildebrand ever forget the death of his son? How could any man?
Odin’s spear, Sigmund needed some damn mead. He needed great swathes of
it. The days ahead would grow dark before light returned. His dreams of peace already seemed to slip through his fingers as if he’d tried to grasp morning dew.
The songs died out as the last glow of the ship disappeared into the mist. Somewhere, at the bottom of the great river, it would lie among other such wrecks. Elof’s ashes would, perhaps, be carried all the way to the Morimarusa and spread out across the sea. No man could ask for a greater funeral.
But it still might not prove enough.
Neither the roasted reindeer nor the skald’s poems could shake Sigmund from his melancholy. Fitela had always proved impetuous, but never before seemed such a fool. Perhaps the varulf passions guided his actions that day, but still, a man of such cunning ought to have known better. Sigmund would not send his son into exile, no, but still his wife’s request tempted him.
Damn the man. Should have known better.
Sigmund rested at the head of the largest of the tables, almost drunk enough to ignore the biting looks King Garth cast him across the length of that table. The crush of raucous men and women, along with the skald’s yammering on about the glories of King Gylfi—guilt hardly ate at Sigmund for that murder any longer—at least served to prevent him from having to share words with the Menzlin king or his son.
For now. For one night.
A slave girl brought another horn of mead around and Sigmund drank deep, chugging until he had to come up gasping for air. Already, the room had taken on a fresh rosy glow, a warmth and light that still failed to alleviate his moods.
Fitela slunk through the crowds, face grim, before finally coming to sit at the vacant seat to Sigmund’s right.
Sigmund fixed the boy with a hard glare. “Somewhat … this lays … at your feet.”
“Some? Or all, Father?” Fitela bowed his head.
A cry went up, men cheering as a pair of shieldmaidens wrestled on the far side of the hall. Sigmund craned his neck but couldn’t catch sight of it without standing. And he lacked the will to stand, even if he could have done so without swaying in place and looking a fool.
A little more drink and maybe he wouldn’t care about that, either.
Borghild came around, her lips pressed tight, bearing a drinking horn herself. A peace offering. Good. It was good.
“Drink now, my stepson,” she said, offering the horn to Fitela.
Fitela took the horn, then scrunched up his nose. “I … It smells like it’s gone sour, Stepmother.”
Sigmund rolled his eyes and snatched the horn away from his son. “Now you’re timid, boy? No mead is bad mead.” He threw back the horn and drained it all. The sweet honey settled warmly into his gut, helping to dull the throb of tensions building in his head. Never enough to kill it all.
Everything was morning dew …
“I’ll get you another then,” Borghild said.
Sigmund waved her away.
“Look here,” he said to Fitela. “You have to … ingrate … in … ugh …”
“Ingratiate myself with the royals of Menzlin? I’ve tried, Father. They don’t wish to see me. We might have to replace them with a more malleable line.”
Sigmund slapped the table, drawing nearby eyes to gaze on him. He flushed then waved them all away. “Good idea, son,” he said loudly, before leaning in close to Fitela. “I’ll hear no such … treachery. They’re … allies.”
Borghild returned with another horn and offered it to Fitela. “Why let your father have all the mead? Come drink, and let us have peace with one another.”
Again, the boy sniffed the horn. “Treachery …?”
“Are you a true Volsung?” the queen demanded. “Cowering and refusing to drink?”
“Poison, Stepmother? At first I wasn’t sure, but now … the scent is off.”
“Bah!” Sigmund said. “Just strain it … through your … mustache. Seeing treachery … everywhere. Make me think … you want more war.”
Frowning, Fitela stared at the horn. He glanced to his stepmother, who stood with her arms folded over her chest. Then Fitela threw back the horn and drained it all. He swallowed, belched, then returned the horn to her. “Thank you, Stepmother.” The man turned to Sigmund, opened his mouth, then shut it. He blinked. Snarled, drawing the eyes of all around.
Fitela jerked one way and then the other, showed his teeth. Another snarl escaped him. He slumped forward and slammed his right cheek on the table, scattering plates and sending guests scrambling backward.
“Fitela?” Sigmund asked, a sudden awareness biting through his drunkenness like a hot brand in his mind. “Son?”
Fitela convulsed, then pitched over, off the table and sideways off the bench.
Sigmund dashed to his side. Or tried. He tripped over his own feet, caught his ankles around his chair, and came crashing down beside his son.
Dazed, he blinked.
Found himself staring into open, vacant eyes.
White foam oozed out of Fitela’s gaping mouth.
He remembered retching. Great heaving oceans of mead billowing up out of his guts. A deluge of all he’d eaten and drunk that night.
He remembered his head pounding. He remembered cradling Fitela’s head in his lap, screaming for his firstborn son. For the last memento he had of Sieglinde, his beloved twin sister. He remembered men and women clustering around him.
Cries of distress. A völva came and declared Fitela poisoned.
He remembered all those men and women around him being shadows. Strangers in darkness, when only he and his son lay in fading light.
Sigmund blinked tears from his eyes.
Fitela’s body cradled in his arms, Sigmund trudged through the night, toward the river. A crescent moon reflected off the waters, shimmering and empty.
On the shore, a woman rested in a small boat, one lit with but a tiny torch. Her build and sword identified her as a shieldmaiden, but she ought not to have been out alone in the mist. In truth, Sigmund was past caring about such things.
The woman rose as Sigmund drew nigh. “Shall I give passage to the sea?”
Sigmund nodded glumly. Yes, his son ought to have the same peace granted to Elof. At least as much …
“The boat cannot carry you both, so you’ll have to wait here.”
Indeed, it was a tiny craft, really intended for but one person.
“I … I’ll stay here all night if needs be. Carry him to the sea, then return for me. I must … I must find a grand ship for him.” His words stuck in his throat until he felt he could choke on them.
The woman simply nodded, and took Fitela from Sigmund’s arms, giving no sign of struggling under the man’s weight. She laid Fitela’s body in the base of her boat, then shoved off the beach with an oar.
The rowboat drifted toward the river’s center, caught the current, and began to float off into the mist. Then all at once, it faded away, as if it and the woman, too, had been naught but mist.
With a sudden, inevitable certainty, Sigmund knew. Fitela was gone forever.
The woman would not return.
And still he waited until dawn. He stood there, staring into the mist, eyes burning after all his tears were spent.
His son. Taken not in glorious battle nor claimed by the sea, but betrayed.
By his own stepmother.
A coldness settled upon Sigmund’s heart. A mound of glacial ice that slowly spread outward, filling his limbs and his head with bitter numbness.
Of course, what else remained?
And so he told Keld what the queen had done. And the thegn reached for his axe.
But Sigmund shook his head. “Tell the people. Let them drive her out, into the Myrkvidr. I want her to meet her end alone and frightened. Running through darkness and knowing something dogs her every step.”
As he commanded, Keld saw it done.
Sigmund watched, as his wife—his murdering, treacherous wife—fled through the fields, clothes torn and bleeding from a dozen gashes inflicted upon her by those who learned of her crimes. But Keld kept the
townsfolk from killing her.
That honor would belong to Sigmund himself.
The sun would set. The moon would rest.
And as a wolf, he would stalk the murderer of his son. He knew all too well her scent, and, bleeding, she could not disguise it even had she known he was coming. She would run.
She would hide.
She would scream as his howls echoed through the night.
And he would tear her limb from bloody limb, her torment becoming a dirge for Fitela.
The last gift Sigmund could offer his son.
48
Another moon, or nigh to it, Odin and his children traveled, drawing ever closer to the frozen peaks ahead. Those mountains had come into view long before they reached them, jutting up out of the mist, behemoths in a wild untouched by man.
And, as the shaman had predicted, they had seen no sign of people on the long trek. Snow bears and reindeer-like beasts and mammoths aplenty, but of civilization, naught.
Now, at last at the foot of those mountains, they stood dwarfed and awed by what lay before them.
Even Geri had fallen silent, offering no jests nor complaints, just staring up at the gut-clinchingly massive impasse blocking their way forward.
Beyond those first peaks, Odin could just make out another, rising up higher than any other. Somewhere amid that mountain, a root of Yggdrasil fed a well that would finally offer him the answers he needed.
Odin looked over his varulf children and they both met his gaze.
Without a word between them, they set out.
Odin’s breath froze in the air before his face as he stood, staring up at the greatest peak amid these mountains. Winter had begun to settle in here. Every night, the fire seemed more difficult to light. The storms would come soon and, if they found no shelter, they’d freeze on these slopes.
Unburied and unsent, perhaps they’d rise as draugar, damned to haunt a land empty of mankind. Would they then sleep away eternity, waiting for something to rouse them, as had the draugar of Thule before Gylfi’s ill-fated expedition?
