by Scott Oden
“Odin!”
The crash of these giants colliding with the Danes was like the sound of kindling snapped between fists. Men screamed, shields splintered, and bodies pitched over the edge of the ravine. All the while, the dull-throated roar of the berserkir was like a metronome of slaughter.
Dísa stropped the blade of her seax down her thigh, wiping the Dane’s blood from it, and sheathed it. She went to where the man lay. He was on his back, one leg folded under him; he yet clung to life. Though nearly drained of blood, his hand nevertheless clawed for his sword. Dísa reached it first. She drew it from the ground. It was a fine blade, she reckoned, lighter than she’d imagined and made from patterned steel that resembled watered silk spun from shades of gray. Foreign letters ran down the blade’s length.
Dísa looked at the sword, then down at the dying man. The Dane struggled to speak. Her face transformed into a mask of hate as she raised the sword and drove it point-first into the center of his chest, through mail and bone and into the blood-starved muscles of his heart.
Kraki Ragnarsson shuddered and died.
* * *
IN THE SHELTER OF THE trees, the lord of Skara flinched as though from an unseen blow. Father Nikulas watched as Konraðr made the sign of the cross; he heaved a great sigh. “You, too, my hound of war?” he muttered, shaking his head.
“My lord?”
“Recall the Danes, Starkad,” he said. “Withdraw them before they are routed.” To the priest, he added: “Have Thorwald attend me.”
A look of utter confusion crossed Starkad’s brow. “But my lord … they—”
“Do not test my patience,” the albino lord growled. “Not this day. Order the Danes back!” Konraðr whirled and stalked off. Nikulas placed a conciliatory hand on Starkad’s arm.
“Best do as he says.”
The captain nodded, though his sharp glance at Konraðr’s retreating back held a sour note that the priest had not seen before. As the call to withdraw echoed out from the Crusader lines, Nikulas hurried after the lord of Skara. He heard Konraðr muttering.
“She did this? You’re certain? Blood of Christ! I will add this to my list of grievances against that heathen trollop! Fear not, my war hound! We will recover your body and give you a good Christian burial.”
Nikulas cleared his throat. Konraðr spun around, eyes narrowed and one hand falling to his sword pommel. The priest held his hands up.
“You’d do well not to creep up on me, Nikulas,” he said. “I am in a killing mood.”
“So, he is dead, then? Ragnarsson?”
Konraðr nodded. “Our little bird dealt him his death wound.”
“Impossible!”
But the lord of Skara merely looked at him, a withering stare made worse by his ill humor.
“I presume this means the ramps are lost?”
Konraðr shifted his gaze, looking toward where the Danes reluctantly answered the horn cry to withdraw. They streamed back without any semblance of order—the uninjured helping those bearing ghastly wounds; some pairs carried corpses between them. Among the Danes drifted the spirits of the slain. Konraðr could sense their anger, hear their ghostly clamor. They cried out for vengeance.
The lord of Skara would give it to them.
“Pétr!” he bellowed. The summons filtered through the camp, and soon the engineer hurried over, Thorwald in his wake. But for the crucifix around his bull-neck and the Teutonic cross adorning his surcoat, Thorwald the Red was indistinguishable from their pagan enemy. He wore his red hair long; his beard was twisted into two plaits, and he boasted faded rune-tattoos on his ruddy cheeks. Thorwald leaned on his spear; his was a heavy-bladed weapon stout enough to bring down a bear, and he called it Hrænðr, the Corpse-adder.
“My lord?” Pétr said.
“The ramps are lost. We will need more, if you please. And move your machines. Target the main gate and the first terrace of that God-cursed village. Burn it!” Konraðr did not wait for the engineer’s reply. “Thorwald, my eagle! Have you any men among your entourage who might be both stout swimmers and capable mountaineers?”
“We are Norse, my lord,” he said. “The sea and the mountains, they are our birthright. Set us a task and we will see it done!”
“Good man! We’re going to take the far bank and bring this fracas to an end!”
“And the blessed saint’s bones?” Thorwald said. “They are inside?”
“Somewhere, yes,” Konraðr replied. He could feel Nikulas’s eyes boring into him. “And we will find them!”
Thorwald nodded. “What would you have us do?”
“We need that fallen bridge repaired, and we need to get enough of our lads over to discourage the heathens from trying to retake it. But first, if we are to do this, you must scale the walls of the ravine…”
* * *
AN HOUR BEFORE SUNSET, THE Crusaders began their bombardment in earnest. The folk of Hrafnhaugr heard the distinct thump of the siege engines before the first missiles began to fall on the lowest terrace. Sections of tree trunks slammed into the palisade around the gate, cracking the wood and loosening the foundations of the wall where the wooden palings pierced the embankment. Crenels shattered, showering the Geats manning the walls with jagged splinters of wood. The next volley brought a hail of lake stones. Most were fist-sized, large enough to snap bones and break skulls; a few were massive enough to bring down a roof. One such stone, twice the size of a man’s head, struck the center beam of Kjartan’s smithy, bounced, and punched through the wall of Ragni the Fat’s house, killing his wife.
With the fall of night, the Crusaders unleashed their incendiaries. Burning logs struck, spraying great rooster tails of sparks, embers, and flaming chunks of wood into the air to drift down into the tight streets of the terrace. Though the palisade smoldered under these repeated bursts, its mossy exterior was loath to burn. Not so the houses sheltering behind it. Men and women scrambled to fill buckets with water as a hundred small fires flared up; smoke hung like a shroud over the terrace.
And as the snap and splinter of wood continued, with the cracking thud of trunks striking the gate wall and the clatter of stones raining from the smoke-laced night sky, there came a new wrinkle: arrows. They came with the stones and the burning logs—iron-headed shafts fletched with goose feathers to fall at random. Archers stood at the edge of the Scar, at the edge of their range, and sent flights of arrows at random. Most embedded themselves in the outer surface of the palisade; a few, from the strongest bows, dropped among the Geats.
One such arrow slew old Hygge’s son, Hygelac. It pierced his neck, cutting the cord of his spine and sending him headlong into the fire he was helping put out. It became his funeral pyre. Deaths like his, senseless and random, undermined the spirit of the Geats; they looked up from the spreading fires and the incessant hail of death and wondered where their protector was …
* * *
FROM THE DOOR OF GAUTHEIMR, Grimnir watched the lower terrace burn. That the wretched hymn-singers were concentrating their fire on the main gate and the walls around it made him think they were up to something. He glanced at Bjorn Svarti. “Double the guard at the postern, and make sure they keep a good eye on the narrows, there. Crafty buggers are up to something. I can feel it.”
Svarti nodded and went to see it done.
Úlfrún, Brodir, Forne, and Herroðr sat on the benches behind him, Sigrún and the remaining Daughters of the Raven among them. Young Herroðr kept glancing their way, expecting to see Auða or Rannveig among them. Their absence cut him like a knife. Dísa sat alone. Berkano had bathed and dressed her wounds. Lines of exhaustion and grief etched her young face, giving her the appearance of years she had yet to earn. She drank ale from a horn cup.
“Lend me a boat or two,” Úlfrún said. “We’ll slip over to their camp by night and rid ourselves of those cursed machines.”
“It won’t work,” Dísa replied before Grimnir could answer. “He’ll know you’re coming and lay a trap. Whatever i
t is that protects him knows our hearts better than we do.”
“Aye, the little bird is right.”
“So we just sit here and let that white-skinned bastard batter the gates down?” Úlfrún snapped.
“Is there a way to blind him?” This was from Sigrún. “Rob him of this second sight, or whatever it is?”
Grimnir turned away from the door. His good eye narrowed in thought as he went to where Dísa sat. He stared hard at her, but directed his words to Úlfrún. “Your man said he was haunted, is that so?”
“Forne?”
The wolf-cloaked chief of her úlfhéðnar nodded. “So the word was in Eiðar. Haunted by his deeds off in the East, at Miklagarðr—Constantinople, they call it now.”
“And you say he seems to hear things?”
“Seemed that way to me,” replied Dísa. “The wind brings me your secrets, he said to me. I hear your thoughts in the chirp of insects, your dreams in the crackle of leaves.”
“Ghosts,” Grimnir muttered. After a moment, he added: “Old Gífr, who was my mother’s brother, he used to know things before they’d happen, too. I always chalked it up to him being witch-wise, but he told me something ere he went off to fight that hymn-singing dog, Charles Magnus. He said, ‘Hold troth with your ghosts, and they will hold troth with you.’ That was the sort of useless drivel the old git would spout, but here it makes sense.” Grimnir gestured out beyond Hrafnhaugr’s walls. “That wretch has turned whatever’s haunting him into his blasted eyes and ears!”
“So, what do we do?” Úlfrún said.
Grimnir fixed his gaze on Sigrún. “Like she said, we blind the bastard.”
“You can do this?”
“Not me,” Grimnir said. In one black-nailed hand, he toyed with the four chestnut acorns. “But I know someone who can.”
* * *
BEFORE HRAFNHAUGR CAME INTO EXISTENCE, before the foundations of Gautheimr were laid, there was the Raven Stone. Grimnir stared up at that spike of black rock. The whole thing was Gífr’s work. It was he who’d found this chunk of basalt, vaguely reminiscent of a raven’s feather—a bit over fourteen feet in height with one side that was broad and flat—and it was Gífr who had dragged it to the crest of the hill and raised it. Some seventy years after Raðbolg’s death his elder brother had carved his epitaph.
By the dim light of the lower terrace, Grimnir could still make out the weathered runes: Gífr Kjallandi’s son raised this stone in memory of Raðbolg, his brother. He died in the wyrm’s embrace. The stylized raven at the center of the stone was Raðbolg’s badge; around it wrapped the coils of the dragon, Malice-Striker.
“Stoke your fire there,” he growled to Dísa. He pointed to a space opposite the flat side of the stone. “Stoke it bright! I need a well of shadow. And have someone fetch me that Christ-Dane’s body. The one you killed.”
“His body?”
“What does every trap need, my precious little fool?”
“Bait?” she replied.
Grimnir tapped the side of his nose. “Bait.”
He watched the preparations closely; watched as men extinguished the torches along the wall facing the stone, as every living soul was ushered inside Gautheimr. It would be touch and go.
“Will this work?” Úlfrún said, echoing Grimnir’s own thoughts. It was her men who brought the body of the Danish chief, a pale and near-bloodless manikin stripped of its mail. Forne carried a bucket filled with the broth of slaughter—congealed blood wrung from the fallen enemy and chunks of spear-torn viscera; a bloody thigh bone protruded from it like a hellish ladle. The chief of the wolf-brothers grimaced as he handed the bucket to Grimnir.
“I’ve seen it work before.” Grimnir shrugged. “Or something akin to it. Put him there.” He motioned to the deeper shadow opposite the fire.
Úlfrún raised an eyebrow. “But have you ever done this?”
“Something akin to it,” he replied, fairly spitting each word. He snarled at the one-handed woman. “Get your lot ready and wait for my signal.” He watched Úlfrún lead two-score of her wolf-sons, her úlfhéðnar, out through the postern gate and down to the dock, to where a trio of boats waited to take them to the shore beyond the Scar. Grimnir heard the door to Gautheimr close with a thud; all that remained was the crash and rattle of the enemy bombardment—the whistling of incendiaries, the crunch of roofs staving in, the trembling impact of wood on wood. Bjorn Hvítr and his lads huddled in the shadow of the wall by the main gate, their eyes peeled; Bjorn Svarti had everyone else hunkered down inside the longhouse, packed cheek-by-jowl like a run of herring.
“It’s time,” Grimnir said, exhaling. “Keep that fire bright and hot, little bird!”
Dísa nodded. Someone had brought up the double bellows from Kjartan’s smithy. She worked them slowly, each exhalation sending tendrils of flame higher. Grimnir turned back to the front of the Raven Stone. The fire cast it in deep shadow. Nodding, he dragged the bucket closer; he stirred the blood and viscera with the thigh bone—three times in one direction, then three times in the opposite direction. Thrice, he did this, chanting under his breath each time:
“I call to thee, | my ancestors,
Who dwell beyond the pale;
Come to this door | of earth-fixed stone
And hear your kin-folk’s plea.”
At the end, Grimnir set the bone aside and hefted the bucket. With a grunt, he splashed its contents over the stone. Cold gore painted the runes, and chunks of flesh dribbled down the grooves in the carved raven. The stone’s surface steamed; from it there came such stench of boiling blood and foetor that even Grimnir winced. Still, he did not falter:
“I know a hall standing | far from the sun,
In Nástrond, under the | shadows of Niðafjoll;
War-reek rages | and reddening fire:
The high heat licks | against heaven itself.
“There is Bálegyr | the mightiest made
Of all the kaunar, | and Kjallandi next;
Lútr and Hrauðnir, | Njól and Dreki,
Naglfari and Gangr, | and fierce Mánavargr.
“Many a son of Wolf | and Serpent did they make,
To plague the deeps | of Miðgarðr;
Tjasse and Mogthrasir, | Aegir and Hræsvelgr,
Skríkja and Raðbolg, | and lore-wise Gífr.
“It is to you I call | Gífr Kjallandisson,
Plundered of life on | Miðgarðr’s hateful shores;
From Nástrond, under the | shadows of Niðafjoll,
Gífr Kjallandisson, | I call out to you.
“Attend!
“Grimnir am I, | Bálegyr’s son,
Alone of the kaunar to yet plague Miðgarðr;
I made this gate | by blood and bone,
And call you to its threshold.”
The echo of Grimnir’s words faded into silence—a silence punctuated by the crackle of the fire and the staccato thuds from a trio of impacts on the gate of Hrafnhaugr. The stone steamed; blood dripped and pooled at its base.
Nothing.
Grimnir’s lips curled in a snarl of rage. “Gífr Kjallandisson!” he roared. “Come to the door, damn your worthless hide! Gífr! I call you to this threshold! Gífr Kjallandisson!” Grimnir stooped suddenly and snatched up the blood-slimed thigh bone; cursing, he slung it at the Raven Stone. “Damn you, you old git!”
The bone struck the face of the stone … and vanished into it, like a pebble dropped into water. Blood splashed; concentric circles lapped across the gory surface, where gobbets of flesh now floated on this upright lake of blood. And slowly, Grimnir saw a face forming—a head and shoulders seemingly made from congealed ichor, eyeless and owning no mouth. He heard a wet exhalation.
“Why do you trouble us, | spawn of my sister’s loins?
Why do you call us | to that thrice-cursed shore?
Let us here abide | in strife without end;
Till the death-note blows | fierce on Gjallarhorn.”
Grimnir chuckled. “You alway
s told me to fight fire with fire, did you not? Faugh! Those wretched hymn-singers out yonder have their spirits watching us. I have plots to hatch and I need them driven off. Take this”—Grimnir kicked the corpse at his feet—“as payment.”
He heard a deep inhalation; a snuffling sound followed by a sharp hiss.
“More serpents there are | beneath the ash
Than these unwise apes would think;
Aye, Matteus and Markús | lurk beyond the bounds,
And with them stands | Lúkas and obscure Jóhannes.
“But while the fences wrought | by the sons of Kjallandi
Hold the Christ-god’s men at bay;
No fence can stop | the fey-locked wanderer
When he comes to collect his due.”
Grimnir loosed a dark chuckle. “You tell me nothing I don’t already know, you useless old git. I didn’t call you out for your so-called wisdom. Can you blind that sanctimonious ass, yonder, or not?”
The surface of the stone rippled, once more, as a hand and arm formed from blood reached out and caught the corpse’s ankle. The body started to slide into that grisly gate, but Grimnir stopped it by slamming his heel down on the corpse’s chest.
“First you blind the bastard, and then you feast.”
“Trust me not, | little rat?”
Grimnir gave a short bark of laughter. “You taught me well.”
There came a sudden ripping sound, as though black-nailed hands tearing through damp cloth; from the surface of the stone, something darker than the surrounding shadow detached itself. It poured around Grimnir—a shoal of deeper gloom that flowed up the wall and vanished over the top of the palisade.
Grimnir turned and watched. “Little bird,” he said, motioning for Dísa. As she left the bellows and came around to his side of the stone, the young woman’s face was as pale as curdled milk. “Take a torch up to the top of the wall and give Úlfrún the signal.”
