by Scott Oden
Through the wrack, she heard someone calling her name. Turning, she saw Berkano. The Otter-Geat looked like an apparition made of blood. “Dísa!”
“What is it?” Dísa snapped. “Spit it out, damn you! I’m neck deep in these dung-bearded pot-licking whoreson dogs!”
Berkano caught Dísa by the arm. “It’s your grandmother. You’d best come. Hurry!”
Dísa Dagrúnsdottir snarled. She glanced at Herroðr, who nodded. “Go, I’ll handle this,” he said. Cursing, Dísa allowed Berkano to drag her away.
She led her to the third terrace, to Gautheimr. Heavy fighting at the main gate had produced a raft of casualties, and repeated attempts by the Crusaders to force their way over the walls meant a good many of the dead were Dísa’s Raven-sisters. She saw Thyra, Old Hygge’s eldest daughter, dead from an arrow to her breast; Káta, her Raven tattoo still fresh, lay with Isgerdr and Perthro. All three had died from spear-blows.
“Is she dead?” Dísa asked. Berkano looked back at her, her dark eyes filled with pity.
“Not yet.”
Berkano led her inside, where Sigrún lay among those injured still fighting for life. Dísa bit back a curse. Rigid with agony, Sigrún’s body bore a hideous patchwork of burns. Both legs were twisted and broken, likely her hips, as well. Her right hand, her blade hand, was a mass of blood-sodden bandages, and the right side of her face looked like someone had gone after her with a skinning knife. Dísa could see the bones of her skull peeking through the torn flesh of her scalp.
“What happened?”
“The jötunn-machine,” Berkano said, and Dísa knew she meant the Crusaders’ mangonel. “It hurled its fire-log, and she was caught by it. The impact threw her off the wall. She was asking after you.”
Dísa knelt. “Sigrún?” she whispered. “G-Grandmother?”
Sigrún’s eyes fluttered open. Her breathing was ragged, and it whistled through clenched teeth. With effort, she fixed her gaze on Dísa’s face. Sigrún’s left hand clawed for her.
“D-Dísa?”
“I’m here.”
“Forgive … me,” Sigrún whispered.
Dísa shook her head. “All is past. Auða used to tell me the world was an anvil, and I was but virgin steel. ‘Your grandmother,’ she would say, ‘your grandmother is the hammer, sent by the Gods to mold me.’ And she was right. It takes a strong arm to forge a sword.”
Sigrún, though, writhed; she caught the neck of Dísa’s armor and pulled at her, drawing her closer. “No! F-Forgive … me! I … I have l-lied to you!”
Dísa frowned. “About what?”
“D-Dagrún. She … She didn’t d-die at … at Skagerrak.”
“What?” Dísa stiffened. She caught Sigrún’s hand and grasped it tight, her bones near to breaking. “What do you mean? Where did she die?”
“Here,” Sigrún said. She closed her eyes. “D-Down by the b-boats.”
“How?”
In a small, grief-filled voice, Sigrún said: “By my hand.”
Those three words pierced Dísa to the heart, as straight and sure as if her grandmother had wielded a lance. “You?” Without thinking, Dísa’s grip tightened. She splintered the bones of Sigrún’s left hand, but the old woman was too far gone to feel it. “You killed my mother? Your own daughter? Why?”
“To p-protect him.”
Rage coursed through Dísa’s veins. Her fingers knotted in the old woman’s hair, and she hauled her halfway off the floor. “What do you mean protect him? Why … Why did you need to protect him? From who? My mother?”
“She f-found out about him,” Sigrún said. In a weak and halting voice, she told the tale—how Kolgríma had betrayed the ancient compact by revealing Grimnir’s nature, and how Dagrún, eager to make a name for herself, had decided to kill the monster who’d been preying on Hrafnhaugr for generations. “F-Foolish girl! She listened to … to too many s-skalds. Wanted to k-kill a monster … the last … the l-last monster.”
“So, you killed her, instead.” A dangerous edge crept into Dísa’s voice. “Killed her and made up a story to hide your crime. And now you want my forgiveness?”
Sigrún blinked. “I … I was p-protecting—”
“Shut that wretched hole in your face,” Dísa snarled. There was a knife in her hand, suddenly, drawn from the small of her back. She’d used it at the gate; gore clotted its chape, and its blade was notched and ragged. “Where is she? Where did you bury her, you dung-eating old hag?”
Tears streamed down Sigrún’s burned cheeks. “Bog,” she said. “His bog. Kolgríma helped me—”
Dísa screamed; it was a feral sound, a cry of inarticulate rage and boundless grief. She did not stop to think. She did not try to rationalize. Teeth bared in a grimace of raw hate, she rammed the knife home. It slid up under Sigrún’s sternum to pierce her laboring heart. “Here’s my forgiveness, niðingr!” the girl snarled.
Rage lent Dísa’s limbs a fresh vigor. Ignoring Berkano’s pleas for help, Dísa rose from the corpse. She left her knife embedded in Sigrún’s heart and stalked from Gautheimr. None dared step into her path, nor to console her, so fierce was the look of murder in her dark eyes.
Outside, it was near sunset. Fires burned around Hrafnhaugr as she made her way down into the decimated first terrace. She stepped over dead men and women, skirted piles of rubble that had once been the houses of her neighbors.
She found Grimnir squatting in the lee of the main gate. Like the postern, it had taken a titanic beating. Rams had warped and broken the planks, but the iron-work held. There was a lull, beyond, but she could hear the thrice-cursed Crusaders massing for another charge.
And she did not care. She did not care if the world ended, if her friends and loved ones died in a welter of blood and horror. It did not matter to her if Gjallarhorn blew and the fires of Ragnarök descended to consume the earth. Nothing mattered, save answers.
Grimnir glanced up at her approach. His nostrils flared; she saw his black-nailed hand clench around the hilt of his seax.
“Little bird,” he said, spitting a gobbet of sooty phlegm in the dust.
“Did you know?” she screamed. All around, men stopped what they were doing. Úlfrún looked up from bandaging Brodir’s arm; the giant berserkr gently motioned her aside. “Did you know? Did you know what she’d done? Did you know what happened to Dagrún?”
For his part, Grimnir was unperturbed by her display of rage. In answer, he sucked his teeth and said: “That old hag should know when to keep her wretched tongue between her teeth.”
“So you did know? You lying bastard!”
Grimnir shot to his feet. “You think this is my fault? Faugh! Take it up with Sigrún, you little wretch!”
“I did,” Dísa snarled, leaning forward. “And I put my knife through her black heart!”
Grimnir rocked back on his heels, a sardonic half-smile on his blood-blasted face. “So-ho! And you mean to do the same with me, is that it? I’m not some old woman on my deathbed, little bird.”
Dísa’s fists clenched, but she made no move to draw her seax. Her rage seemed to deflate, replaced by a look of betrayal. Tears dampened the corners of her dark eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me? You knew, but you said nothing.”
Slowly, Grimnir sank back on his haunches. He bled from a dozen cuts, his blood thick and black. “What would it have gained me?” he replied. “More to the point: what would it have gained you? What would you have done, little bird? Gone after the old hag? Nár! You’d have ended up alongside your mother in the bog. You were brittle iron, girl. A long way from the steel you are today.”
Dísa sat. She felt hollow, used. Úlfrún started toward the girl, but Grimnir waved her off. Instead, he reached into his tunic and took out a strip of jerky. He bit a chunk off, handed the rest to Dísa. The girl accepted it and took a bite, chewing mechanically. “I boasted of my mother’s prowess,” she said, her voice small now. “I was proud of her. Proud she died fighting the Norse. She was Dagrún Spear-breake
r, and I was her daughter … but who was she? Who was she, really? My father … did he know?”
Grimnir shrugged.
“Who was she?” Dísa sniffled.
But it was Bjorn Hvítr who answered. His voice was a deep rumble, weary. “She was Dagrún Spear-breaker, little one,” he said. “I remember her, your age but no more, fighting with us when we stopped the Swedes at the Horn. They’d tried to push across the Hveðrungr and claim part of our lands. She was there, though Sigrún had forbid it. She earned her name in that fight, by Ymir! Broke the Swedish Jarl’s spear with the edge of her shield ere she gutted him. She was the first in to any fray and the last out. You look just like her.”
“She was at Skagerrak,” Bjorn Svarti added. “I swear, I saw her on the left flank, with the Daughters of the Raven. You remember? They broke the Norse right, and she was in the vanguard. I thought that was where she fell.”
“So she was a shieldmaiden,” Dísa said.
“Sigrún might have told lies about her death, child,” Úlfrún said. “But these brothers of the shield can tell you the truths of her life. She sounds like a mother to be proud of. You—”
Suddenly, Grimnir glanced up sharply, nostrils flaring. His good eye narrowed to a slit of baleful red fire. “It’s time,” he snarled.
And with no further warning, Dísa Dagrúnsdottir felt the earth suddenly rise up, and then vanish under her feet …
24
As a girl, Dísa had heard tales of the Miðgarðr Serpent, dread Jörmungandr, whose coils threaded around the roots of the world; she’d even felt a few tremors, its scaly muscles flexing as it moved in an endless circle through the deep places where the sun’s light never shone. But nothing could have prepared her for the full, thrashing power of the beast as it sought to escape its prison.
The battle-scarred gate of Hrafnhaugr ceased to exist. Though the world spun and bucked, she could clearly see the earthen embankments sift and pour away like water; ancient wood clattered and cracked as the palisade buckled. Bereft of its foundations in the earth, the mossy pales came apart and spread along the ground like a child’s game of sticks. The earth split; she heard a bellowing roar as Bjorn Svarti caught the heavy gate bar, then silence as the wooden parapet collapsed on top of him. Dísa felt herself lifted, carried in one of Grimnir’s arms as he scrambled for safety.
And she could see, if for just an instant, the waters of Skærvík. Just beyond the jutting peninsula where Gautheimr sat, the lake boiled and frothed. There, a mud and weed-encrusted hillock breeched the surface like the back of an enormous leviathan. It came under the overhang that formed the third terrace, and when the two met it was like the stamping of a colossal foot. Dísa felt herself thrown; she heard screams, rock cracking, and a sound like a hillside tumbling down the terrace.
And then Dísa knew nothing more; not until she woke to smoke and to ash and to the heat of crackling flames. Night had fallen, but the myriad fires that lit the shattered landscape relieved the darkness with their lurid glow.
She shook dust from her eyes, hacked up gobbets of mud and phlegm lodged in her throat. “G-Grimnir?” she said, her voice hollow. “Úlfrún?” Her hand found the shaft of a broken spear; she used this to support her weight, hanging by the cross-bar as she clambered to her feet. Her body was a mass of bruises, and one leg was numb from some unremembered impact. Still, nothing seemed broken. “Grimnir?”
There were bodies in the rubble around her. Some were corpses: pale and bloody-limbed Geats intertwined with bearded Danes and dark-eyed Swedes, their ragged surcoats emblazoned with the Nailed God’s cross. Near as she could reckon, she was at the center of what had been the first terrace. A great pile of rubble, broken pales and slabs of bedrock, marked where the gate once stood; left would have been Kjartan’s smithy and old Kolgríma’s hut. Ahead of her, limned in firelight, a hill marked what would have been the second terrace … and the Raven Stone still crowned it, though tilted and nearly cast down. Beyond that, the foreshortened horizon revealed nothing.
“Hello?” she called out again. Through the wreathing smoke, she spied shapes moving—aimlessly shuffling through the splintered ruin of the village; she heard the sounds of her people among the fires; weeping, coughing, the groan of an injured man and a woman’s voice pleading to the Gods.
The Gods, though, weren’t listening.
“Grimnir? Úlfrún? Answer me!” Behind her, coming up the slope of rubble that had been the gate—the same gate men had fought and died for that day—she heard the rattle of harness. “Grimnir?”
She started toward the sound. Stopped. Overtopping the slope, she beheld a golden crucifix atop a wooden staff. Dísa backpedaled; she dropped to a fighting crouch as Konraðr the White limped over the mound of rubble where the gate once stood. He was plastered in dust, bloody from a gash to his scalp; the albino’s red eyes caught the gleam of firelight and reflected it with an eerie glow. “Dísa Dagrúnsdottir, I presume,” he said. A handful of his men came behind him, Danes mostly, and with them a bearded priest carrying the hymn-singers’ staff, his black cassock gray with dust.
Konraðr drove the point of his sword into the rubble. “Do you yield?”
“What do your precious ghosts tell you, Witch-man?” Dísa’s lips skinned back over her teeth in a skrælingr’s snarl. “Oh, that’s right … you killed them all, didn’t you?”
Konraðr’s gave her a weary smile. “The answer is no, then? As you wish. Horsten! Yonder is the one who slew your Jarl, poor Kraki. Fetch her head for me, will you?”
A Dane in bloodied mail, his surcoat scorched and torn, peeled away from the knot of men surrounding Konraðr and stalked down the slope. He carried a long-handled axe, its bearded blade clotted with dried blood.
“That fat bastard was your Jarl, eh?” Dísa said. She kept ahold of the broken-hafted spear. “Does it make you angry that a woman killed him? Horsten, isn’t it? But I didn’t just kill your precious fool of a Jarl, Horsten.” Dísa backed up and circled. “Nár! I bled that sack of suet like a suckling pig, Horsten! Kept his mail,” Dísa said. “And his sword, with its cursed foreign writing! But his body? Ha! That we let ripen for a few hours, then fed it to the demon we sent after your master, there—that white-skinned bastard!”
Horsten’s face grew purple with rage. Roaring like a wounded lion, he sprang at Dísa; his axe whistled, struck empty air as she danced sideways, and rebounded off the broken stump of a rock-hard paling. Before he could recover, Dísa took him high, in the throat, stabbing the broad blade of the spear home with all her hate and her rage. Horsten loosed a gurgling scream, falling over rubble at his feet; Dísa bore him down. She hacked at his neck again and again, until the Dane’s head came free. She stooped. Her fingers tangled in the dead man’s beard.
Straightening, she threw the severed head at Konraðr’s feet. “I am a Daughter of the Raven,” she said, her voice rising. “Bearer of the rune Dagaz, the Day-strider, chosen of the Norns. I am a servant of the Hooded One, immortal herald of the Tangled God. My mother was Dagrún Spear-breaker, who was skjaldmær, shieldmaiden of Hrafnhaugr in the land of the Raven-Geats, and this is my home!”
“Oh, little bird,” the lord of Skara said, glancing up from Horsten’s mutilated head. “You shouldn’t have done that. Now I have no choice. Kill her!”
And suddenly, as the six remaining Danes came for her, the ground beside the gate erupted. Dísa had the impression of a giant bear—feral and starving for blood—even as the back of Brodir’s spade-like hand smashed Konraðr to his knees.
“Odin!” the berserkr roared.
* * *
OF ALL THE EVENTS OF his long life, one that Grimnir recalled with crystal clarity was the destruction of the walls of Badon, on the Avon River in the country of the English, some two hundred years ago. The lord of that wretched place had stolen his little hymn-singer, Étaín; to get her back, Grimnir had goaded the ancient Shepherd of the Hills, the last of an ancient race of landvættir, into shaking the bones o
f Ymir. Though he could not recall the name of Badon’s lord, he could still recall down to the smallest detail the toppling of its gate towers, the firestorm caused by clouds of rock dust, the rivers of scalding water and the choking clouds of sulphur; it was an act of wholesale destruction, more cruel and wanton than anything he’d ever perpetrated. And it had all been wrought at his urging.
But as violent and awe-inspiring as that had been to watch, it was as beads rattling in a tin bucket compared to this. This was no land-spirit shaking the bones of Ymir to cause a trembling in the earth; no, this was the hand of a god, seizing the coils of the Miðgarðr Serpent, cunning Jörmungandr, and shaking it with such ferocity that the skin of the world cracked and sloughed away. Grimnir saw Gautheimr vanish; he saw the ground where it sat crumble. Carved beams, black and ancient and nearly as hard as stone, splintered like a handful of dry twigs. Grimnir heard screams from within even as the walls of the longhouse broke apart; the foundations and hearthstones followed, tumbling over the edge of the peninsula and into the churning waters of Skærvík.
As the rumbling subsided and the nape of the earth settled back on its bones, Grimnir sighted a new horizon out beyond where Gautheimr had been—through leaping flames, wreathed in smoke and dust, he saw a spit of land that had felt neither sun nor moon in over seven hundred years: a promontory once called Aranæs. Eroded down, now, by currents and tides—an island-barrow where the remains of Raðbolg Kjallandisson mingled with the bones of that accursed dragon, Malice-Striker.
A place of vengeance …
Grimnir did not stop to search among the rubble for Dísa, or for Úlfrún. The geas-cursed old hag would find her own way there. Of that he was certain. Nor did he offer succor to the dozens of wounded Raven-Geats he passed along the way, though they beseeched him with bloody and broken hands. He had no time. He had to reach the barrow first, to survey the surroundings and get a feel for what the deed would entail.
He scrambled to the crumbling edge of the terrace and looked over. From there, he could see the ultimate fate of Gautheimr—and the fate of those who had sheltered under its eaves. Its collapse, and the collapse of the end of the village’s third terrace, had created a land bridge down to the island-barrow. Grimnir sniffed and wiped his nose on the back of his hand as he gazed upon a field of destruction.
