Twilight of the Gods

by Scott Oden

  “Geira asked me to help.”

  Laufeya shook her head. “There’s no time,” she said. “We’ve got to be away from here.”

  “Who says?”

  “I say!” Laufeya snapped. “We’re heading north, around the lake shore. Kjartan told me there’s a little market-town up in that direction. Tingvalla, he called it. We’re going there, and he’s going to join us, if he can. Here, take your things.”

  Berkano looked hurt. She made no move to take the bundle from Laufeya’s hand. “We can’t go. They need us here.”

  “Bollocks!” Laufeya spat. “Did you not hear what was said? The Nailed God’s folk are coming, sister. Coming here! Remember what they did to our village? What they did to you and me? What they did to Mother? We’ve got to skin out now, while there’s still time. Quit dawdling and let’s go!”

  Berkano stared down at the scalp hanging from the girdle of her skirt, and then shifted her gaze to the children who were waiting for her. She saw her own fear reflected in their eyes. She saw it, and she hated herself for it. “No,” Berkano said, wrenching her hand from Laufeya’s grasp. “This is our home now. We’re not running away.”

  Laufeya leaned close to her and snatched a handful of the arm of her tunic. “Do you remember what they did to you, sister? How man after man had his way with you? Do you remember their reek? Because I do! I swore I’d never let that happen again!”

  “I remember, Feya.” Berkano raised her eyes and met Laufeya’s pitiless gaze. “But I don’t want them to have such a memory.” She gestured over her shoulder at the young faces watching them, wondering what the sisters argued about. “I’m done running. I have no more fear of the Örms lurking out there. Let them do their worst to me if it spares just one of these flowers the same fate. You go, if you must. Find a home where you can feel safe, like we felt safe with Mama. I’ve found mine. I’m staying.”

  “Hel take you, then!” Laufeya spat, tears welling in her eyes. She turned away and stalked toward the postern gate. She felt their eyes on her—Berkano and those insipid child-warriors, the so-called Daughters of the Raven. Laufeya swore and spat. “Hel take all of you!” She knew the man on guard at the gate. He was a good man; a few tears, a tale of shame and degradation, and he’d let her slip out …

  Why wasn’t she moving then? Laufeya had stopped. She wiped her nose on her sleeve. She should go. She needed to go. The gate was right there! A few days’ journey and she’d be somewhere new, somewhere she could start over—pose as a hymn-singer, maybe, or … or … she struggled to find an answer. But she knew the answer. She’d be alone.

  Laufeya stiffened as Berkano draped an arm around her shoulder, drew her into an embrace. “This is our home now, Feya,” she whispered. “I know you’re afraid. So am I. But we’re home.” Berkano pressed her scalp into Laufeya’s hand, a totem to ward off evil. The younger sister looked down at it, then met Berkano’s soft gaze. She saw steel in her older sister’s eyes. Unbreakable. Unyielding. “If it comes to that,” Berkano said. “I won’t let Örm lay a hand on you, not this time.”

  Laufeya sighed. She looked once more at the postern gate. There was a rack of spears beside it, and shields. “I need a blade,” she said, wiping her eyes. “If we’re going to die here, I want to line our way to the meadows of Fólkvangr with the heads of Cross-men…”

  18

  The day crept by, waning into afternoon, and still there was no sign of the Crusader army. Men chafed and fretted, starting at every sound they heard from beyond the walls; women’s tempers grew short as their minds wandered down dark corridors—imagining the rapine and slaughter that was to come and building it into something far worse. Even the children fussed and whined, with the youngest squirming to be let loose and the oldest experiencing that stifling sense of boredom that ran hand in hand with the first caress of mortality. Only the elders remained serene, the crones and the graybeards. Sigrún hummed a tune as she busied herself with a whetstone and her sword; Old Hygge dozed in a chair in the shadow of Gautheimr.

  Dísa walked the parapet of the landward palisade. A chill breeze blew down from the north, stirring her lank hair and causing her beads and bone fetishes to click together. Out beyond the Scar, she could glimpse fallow fields among the tangled forest. The roofs of outlying farms, abandoned now, in the face of the Christian threat, still poked above the canopy—though she knew they’d become the first casualties of this invasion when the hymn-singers set fire to them.

  Some of the farmers who worked those steadings stood now, with Jarl Hreðel at the bridge. The man’s heartsickness and dithering had vanished; from the ashes of Flóki’s effigy pyre had risen the Hreðel of old—vicious and driven. He’d given away his mail, added his sword to the pile of those held in reserve, and opted only for a shield and an axe. The shield’s face he’d daubed black with ashes from the pyre—same as his face—with Flóki’s name written in white.

  “That’s a man who is ready to die,” Úlfrún said, approaching from Dísa’s left. She saw the intensity of the younger girl’s stare and followed it, taking in the grim silhouette that stood a dozen paces out on the gently swaying bridge, motionless and unyielding.

  “He has nothing left. Nothing but his life,” Dísa replied.

  “You admire him.”

  Dísa thought about it for a moment. “I guess I do. He loves—loved—his son more than he loves himself. He would have traded his life for Flóki’s, without giving it a second thought. Now, he’ll give his life to avenge him. I wonder if Flóki knew the depths of his father’s love…”

  “What you take as love smacks to me of need,” Úlfrún said. “He strikes me as a man who needed to live through his son, who saw himself in Flóki’s eyes, and saw in Flóki a chance to right the wrongs of his own youth. Granted, I don’t know him like you do.”

  “But that sounds like him.” Dísa’s lips thinned to white lines of disdain. “I’m ever the foolish girl.”

  “And that sounds like your grandmother, speaking her tripe through you,” Úlfrún said. Dísa harrumphed. “You doubt me? I know of very few fools able to do what you’ve done. Oh, your cousin, Auða, has told me a tale or two, and I know what I’ve seen with my own eyes. You’re no fool, Dísa Dagrúnsdottir, and whoever discounts you as merely a girl is not long for this earth.”

  Weaned on a diet of harsh words and harsher blows, hearing praise from one such as Úlfrún left Dísa scarlet to the ears. She ducked her head, muttered something that might have been a word of thanks, and then lifted her gaze to watch the forest with renewed intensity. Úlfrún studied her a moment longer, a smile flirting at the corners of her hard-lipped mouth, before peering with her at the land beyond the village walls.

  “I thought they were biting at our heels,” Dísa said after a moment, frustration heavy in her voice. “Where are they?”

  “Eager to come to grips?”

  The younger woman gave a small laugh. “Eager to get what’s to come over with. Eager for that white bastard to show himself. I fear he’s up to some deviltry. Does the waiting not gnaw at you?”

  “Child,” Úlfrún replied. “I have been waiting for this since before you, your mother, and your mother’s mother were born. Waiting a few hours more?” She made a dismissive noise.

  Dísa glanced sidelong at the older woman, who absently rubbed the knuckles of her iron fist. She could not reckon her age, for though she had strands of silver and gray woven through her ash-blond hair, and though she had more scars than wrinkles, Úlfrún’s eyes yet gleamed with the light of youth. Could she really be older than Sigrún? No, Dísa laughed to herself. There was no way. Úlfrún spoke with the truth of poets, is all.

  “What happened to it? Your hand, I mean,” Dísa said, after a long pause. She inclined her head at the iron weight at the end of Úlfrún’s forearm. This close, she could see runes and sigils etched into the surface of the metal; the limb had carved fingers and tendons, and old scars across the heavy knuckles. Úlfrún rapped it twice ag
ainst the palisade. It struck and bounced with a dull thock-thock.

  “I made a bargain I shouldn’t have,” Úlfrún said, finally. “This was the price I paid.”

  Dísa took the hint and dropped the matter.

  “Do you think they’ll come today?” she asked.

  Úlfrún considered the sky, the position of the sun. “I think the Ghost-Wolf is cautious, taking his time, drawing this out. I don’t think this Christian host will come until its lord has his plans laid, and not a moment before.”

  “Then you’d be a fool, wouldn’t you?” Grimnir’s harsh voice snarled from Dísa’s right. Neither woman had heard his approach. He did not look at either of them; he kept his attention fixed on the belt of woods beyond the Scar. He snuffled the air, nostrils flaring, and Dísa knew he smelled something beyond what she—or Úlfrún—could scent.

  “This is your little pond, Froskr dróttin.” (Frog-lord, Dísa would snigger to Auða, later that evening. She called him Frog-lord.) “And I will accept a measure of your bile,” Úlfrún growled. She turned, her cold blue eyes gleaming with the icy promise of murder. “But insult me one more time…”

  “It’s not an insult if it’s true. Tell her, little bird.”

  Úlfrún took a menacing step toward Grimnir, but Dísa put herself between them. “What do you mean, lord?”

  “You can’t smell it, can you?” He tilted his head back, eye screwed tight against the sun’s pale glare, and inhaled deeply of the crisp air. “Your little war’s started, first blood’s been claimed, and here you two stand like hens come to roost.”

  Dísa turned and glanced over the palisade. She could see no sign of an enemy. “What do you smell?”

  “Death,” Grimnir hissed. “Your Witch-man is a wily bastard. He and his rabble of kneelers and cross-kissers have sneaked up on us. Your two lads? Your so-called scouts?” Grimnir dragged a thumb across his throat. “And by the looks of it, you’re about to lose a third.”

  Úlfrún, fuming, followed Grimnir’s gesture. She saw Forne. He passed Hreðel, heading out to check on his wolf-brothers. The older woman drew a deep breath, put her thumb and forefinger in her mouth, and loosed an ear-splitting whistle. Dísa winced; Grimnir snarled and shied away. Down on the bridge, Forne heard it and turned. He looked up, eyes raking the top of the palisade until he spotted Úlfrún, who crossed her arms over her head.

  Whatever message it was the gesture conveyed, Forne understood. He retraced his steps. As he drew abreast of Hreðel, he paused long enough to mutter a word. The old Jarl nodded.

  “What do we do?” Dísa asked. She fairly vibrated with pent-up anticipation. Her hand cupped the pommel of her seax, caressed the hilt like she would a lover. “Should we form a shield wall? Prepare to defend the bridge?”

  Grimnir chuckled. “Ready to wade into the scrum, little bird? Nár! For now, we do nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Frustration drove Dísa’s voice up an octave. She turned, looking to Úlfrún for support. The older woman, though, grudgingly nodded.

  Grimnir’s fingers dug into the back of her neck, bringing her face back around to him. He pulled her close. “Nothing! Bastard thinks he’s sly. Bastard thinks he’s gotten one over on us. Bah! Now, he’s going to spend the night trying to find a weak spot from the other side of the Scar while we warm our feet by the fire, have meat and wine, and you lot get a good night’s rest. Let your Witch-man have the cold and the muck!”

  “He’s down there, then?” Úlfrún said.

  Grimnir shrugged.

  “Let’s see if he is.” Úlfrún leaned out over the village side of the palisade and bellowed: “Herroðr, fetch me Skaðmaðr!”

  * * *

  THE SHARP WHISTLE ECHOED EVEN among the trees. Under those eaves, under naked boughs and the thickly bristling branches of evergreens, two dead wolf-brothers lay steeping in their own gore. One died after an arrow pierced his throat and drove out the back of his neck; the other died as he turned to warn his mates on the bridge beyond the trees, his skull-split corpse still clutching a heathen’s horn carved with runes of protection. The eerie whistle brought the Crusader vanguard to a halt.

  These were Arngrim’s men, rangers and sappers, engineers who bore the scars of Outremer on their sun-browned hides. Clad in brown wool and soft leather, their cloaks festooned with bits of bracken and fir, they daubed their faces with slashes of cinder and ash and kept to the shadows.

  Arngrim was a measured and deliberate captain; Lord Konraðr wanted hard information—enemy troop disposition, fortification strengths and weaknesses, an idea of how the land might lie. Rather than undertake a reckless assault on the bridge, he instead tasked Arngrim with finding other ways across this accursed ravine. And Arngrim’s mind, ever inventive, was looking for ways to bypass the bridge altogether. “Too narrow,” he hissed to his adjutant, a stocky Dane men dubbed Pétr, the Rock. Pétr kept a waxed board and a stylus on his person, and onto this he’d transcribe his captain’s thoughts in pidgin Greek. “We need to breach the ravine in multiple locations, make the heathen dogs work to defend it. Nay, friend. We cross there,” Arngrim nodded to the bridge, “and we’re two ropes and four axe blows away from the grave.”

  Pétr chewed the end of his stylus. “How?”

  “We need to build a drawbridge,” Arngrim said. He smoothed his beard, lost in thought. The engineer looked from the short Dane to the ravine and back again. “Wheeled drawbridges. Two of them. And two covered galleries, in case the heathens have any surprises for us.”

  Nodding, Pétr made a note on his waxed board. “The farms hereabout. We could dismantle them. Use the wood for frames and the wattle for cover?”

  “Aye,” Arngrim said. “That might do the trick. If the heathens try to fire them?”

  “Wet hides?”

  “Shingles of green wood might be easier.”

  “Agreed.”

  Both men paused as a third crouch-walked over to join them. From under his hood, pulled low, they caught the flash of pale white skin and milky hair. Red eyes glinted in the light of the afternoon sun.

  “Lord Konraðr,” Arngrim said, nodding.

  “Have you found a way across this devil’s chasm, my friend?” The albino lord of Skara peered at the narrow bridge, his head cocked as he seemingly listened to the rattle of limbs or the moaning wind.

  “Drawbridges, lord,” Arngrim replied. “We—”

  A scowl creased Konraðr’s pale forehead as he motioned the dwarfish Dane to silence. “They … they know we’re here. They know their heathen brothers are dead,” Konraðr said. He glared at the top of the palisade. “The she-Wolf, and my little bird … and someone else…” The lord of Skara glanced around him, as though he could see something taking place that they could not. “Why do you run?”

  “Lord?” Arngrim touched Konraðr’s arm. “We remain here, by your side. Perhaps you should return to Father Nikulas and leave this bit of drudgery to us.”

  Konraðr brushed away his captain’s hand and looked him square in the eye. “Does skrælingr mean anything to you?”

  Arngrim shook his head. “No. Pétr?”

  The Dane shuddered. To Arngrim’s eye, the smaller man looked as though the Devil had just trod across his grave. “Th-that word is accursed,” Pétr said, making the sign of the Cross. “It signifies a creature of the Enemy! A monster—”

  It was a simple thing, really. A simple thing—the flash of pale sunlight on metal—that caught Arngrim’s eye; the rest lived in that intersection between experience and gut instinct. His brain wasted a fraction of a heartbeat in parsing what it was he saw: his lord rising from cover, drawn by Pétr’s cryptic words; a flash from atop the palisade. His head told him it was an impossible shot to make with a crossbow, but his gut … instincts honed on the killing fields of Palestine drove muscle and sinew to act. Without so much as a shouted warning, Arngrim lunged for the lord of Skara …

  And grasped only empty air.

  * * *

  KONRAÐR
THE WHITE HAD HIS own instincts—instinct that reached out from beyond the grave to warn him of impending doom. In his mind, he heard the cacophony of ghosts, their myriad voices forming a single word of warning: Beware! Konraðr ducked and rolled forward into a crouch. His shield came up, and he seized Pétr by the collar of his tunic, hauling him into its shadow. The lord of Skara heard the wet crunch of bone, a gurgling cry, the heavy thud of a body … and the splintering of wood as a steel-tipped bolt split the boards of his shield and stopped a hand-span from his pale face. Blood dripped from the head of the dart.

  “Merciful Christ!”

  “Are you injured, lord?”

  “Nay, good Pétr,” Konraðr replied. He cast a glance over the rim of his shield, and cursed. Arngrim lay on his belly in the space Konraðr had just quitted, his head an island in a spreading pool of gore. The bolt lodged now in Konraðr’s shield had first entered the back of Arngrim’s skull and exited through his right cheekbone where it met the eye socket.

  That eye, glazed and lifeless, stared up at the lord of Skara.

  And as Pétr scrambled past and fell to his knees at his dead captain’s side; as rangers converged on their position, blades drawn and arrows on the nock, Konraðr felt a new spirit move through the periphery of his vision.

  “My old friend,” he said quietly. The wraith turned and stared at him, his spectral gaze brimming with impatience. “You are right, as always.” Konraðr surged to his feet. Roaring, he slung his riven shield away and drew his sword. “Up, lads! On your feet! These heathen bastards know we’re here, so why slink and scurry? Up! Throw off those cloaks and let them see the divine cross stitched into every breast! Do it!” Konraðr snatched off his own cloak. He stalked back to where Arngrim lay, drove his sword into the ground so that the hilt formed the shadow of a crucifix on the corpse of his captain of engineers. His cloak he draped over Arngrim’s body. “Pétr,” he said, motioning to a pair of nearby rangers. “These lads will get him back to the rear and entrust him to Father Nikulas.” Pétr rocked back on his haunches. “I want you to get me over that cursed ravine. Can you do it?”