Snow-Walker

by Catherine Fisher

  “Will it spread?” Ulf said urgently. “If the whole of the Jarlshold falls into the witch spell, what’s to stop it spreading out here?”

  Wulfgar looked at Kari.

  Kari spoke quietly. “It won’t leave the Jarlshold. I’ve made a binding ring of bone. The dream spell is trapped inside. It won’t spread, as long as the people stay within.”

  “What sort of ring?” Ulf asked curiously. He stared down at Kari’s thin face shrewdly, without fear. “Sorcery, is this?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “And you trust it, Jarl?”

  Wulfgar smiled slowly. “I trust it.”

  “Then that’s good enough for me. But what about the people in the hold?”

  Wulfgar’s expression hardened. “We’ll stay. That’s the choice we’ve had to make.” Then, as if to forget, he reached out a lazy hand for more wine and leaned back. “This is a fine hall, Ulf.”

  “My father built it. Now there was a big man, bigger even than me.” He scratched his stubbly beard.

  “Indeed he was.” Brochael passed the wine. “They say he once carried a stray reindeer home, two days’ journey. Is that true?”

  Ulf nodded proudly. “Thorir Giantblood, they called him.”

  “Tell us about the road,” Wulfgar said.

  The huge man sat still, the firelight warming his face. Behind him his massive shadow darkened the hung shields.

  “There’s not much known about it. All the stories of the giants are almost forgotten; even who they were. Your friend here would know more about that than me.”

  Skapti nodded wryly.

  “But the road,” Ulf went on, “is real enough. It goes north. They say it runs even to the edge of the world, to a country where the snow falls all night and all day, and where in winter the sun never rises. No one has ever traveled a week’s journey along it, to my knowledge, except Laiki.”

  “Laiki?” Wulfgar murmured.

  “An old man now.” Ulf stood up and roared, “Thror! Fetch Laiki!” and sat down again. “He went in his younger days. He tells strange tales about it, and they get stranger year by year. I don’t promise, Jarl, that any of them are true.”

  The old man came up slowly. He was shriveled, his hair white as wool, long and straggly. A thick fleece coat covered his body, and as he grasped the chair and lowered himself into it they saw his hand had two fingers missing; two stumps were left, long healed.

  “Well, Father, we hear you know something of the giant road.” Wulfgar leaned forward and poured him a drink. “My friends will be traveling that way. Can you tell us about it?”

  The old man’s weak blue eyes looked at them all. He seemed delighted, Jessa thought, to have such an audience.

  “Once, I went that way.”

  “Long ago?”

  He wheezed out a laugh. “Forty years or more, masters. Forty years. Two other men and I, we set out to find the road’s end. We had learned there was amber up there in the north, and jet. We wanted wealth. Like all young men, we were fools.”

  He smiled at Jessa and put a cool hand on hers. “Are you going on this journey?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  “Not just young men, then.” He shook his head. “The road is paved at first, masters, whole and easy. After a while it becomes fragmented. It leads into a great forest, dark and deep. Ironwood, my friends called it, for a joke, but we were more than a week in that haunted, ghost-ridden place, and all the time we heard the stir and passing of invisible spirits, as if a great army of men whispered about us in the dark. None of us slept. We walked day and night to leave that nightmare behind. The air became colder. One night we came to a great ruined hall, deep in the wood. We were exhausted, and slept, and when we woke, one of my friends had gone. We never found him.”

  He gazed around at them soberly.

  “After the wood, the ice. We struggled on, but our food was gone and our hearts were failing. Then wolves came. Alric was killed, and the horses that we hadn’t yet eaten ran off. I wandered alone in the empty land, a place of glaciers, wide snow plains where the icy winds roared all night. I was lost there, starved and delirious. I do not remember, masters, how I got back through the wood. Sometimes it seems to me that I saw terrible sights, things I can’t piece together, a great city in a lake, a bridge that rose up to the stars, but I cannot tell if these things were real or a delirium.” He paused, sighing. “All I do know is that I came to myself in a shieling north of here, nursed back to health by a shepherd. For two weeks I had lain there, he said, babbling the nightmares of the wood.”

  He held up his hand. “And these fingers were gone. Bitten off, the good man thought. And to this day I do not know what happened to me.”

  He looked around at them all. “If your journey is not urgent, masters, take my advice. Turn back. That is no country for mortals.”

  They were silent a moment.

  Then Brochael shook his head. “Lives depend on it, old man. We’ve no choice.”

  Eight

  I tell of giants from times forgotten,

  Those who fed me in former days.

  The road was floored with great slabs, powdered with gray and green overlapping lichens. Here and there saplings had sprouted up through the gaps between stones, and bushes of thorn and rowan, but the way was still surprisingly easy to follow, leading downhill among the light-barred glades of trees.

  Jessa sat herself down on the edge of it and looked closely at the giants’ handiwork. The slabs had been squared and laid close, each one flat and slotted in neatly to its neighbor. It would take many men and horses to lift even a few. No wonder people thought of giants.

  “Are there such things?” she asked aloud.

  “Indeed there are. Or there were.” Skapti drew his long knees up. “Once, at Hollfara, I saw a merchant selling bones. Huge bones they were, immense, Jessa, bigger than any man or animal, except the great serpent that winds around the earth. What else could they be but giants’ bones?”

  She touched the amulet at her neck lightly. “Then I hope we don’t meet any! Ulf’s big enough.”

  She watched him saying good-bye to Brochael.

  “Time to go.”

  Reluctantly the skald got up after her.

  Wulfgar lifted her onto her horse and stood there while Hakon and Brochael mounted. Kari was already waiting, the ravens silent on a branch above him. Wulfgar looked at them all. “It hurts me bitterly to let you all go.” He glanced at Skapti. “Especially you.”

  Skapti gave a lopsided smile. “You can get yourself a better poet. You’ve always wanted to.”

  “There is no better poet.” He put a hand on Skapti’s shoulder. “If you don’t come back, and I haven’t been caught in the witch spell, then I’ll come looking for you. One day.”

  Skapti nodded. He climbed up onto the long-maned horse and the five of them looked at one another, silent among the crowd of men.

  “Good luck,” Wulfgar said simply. He glanced at Kari. “There are no others but you who could do this. Let the gods watch you.”

  “And you,” Brochael rumbled.

  “Good-bye, Wulfgar,” Jessa said sadly. She turned her horse and rode out quickly over the gray stones, the others following, Hakon tugging the long rein of the packhorse.

  They clattered down the slope, between the sprouting trees. When Jessa looked back she saw Wulfgar standing at the top, arms folded, watching them. He raised a hand. Then the bushes hid him, and all the men with him.

  They were alone.

  It was a silent journey, that descent of the ancient road.

  None of them wanted to talk, and there was no sense of danger on them, so they rode in a long, straggling line, picking their way over the broken paving.

  The road led down and up, winding over low hills, its gray line visible sometimes far ahead. Late in the day they rode over a high moor, with the gray scatter of broken paving stretching in front of them, mosses and peat spreading out over it, as if the land
was drawing it back.

  Hakon slowed his horse. “What’s that?”

  On the horizon a gaunt pillar stood stark against the cloudy sky.

  “Dead tree,” Brochael suggested.

  “Too straight.” Skapti narrowed his eyes. “A rock, maybe.”

  Cautiously they rode toward it. As they came close they saw that he was right, but that this rock too had been shaped, heaved upright. Sliced deep into its surface was a carving of three wolves, tangled together, their jaws agape. Behind them, his great hand reining them in, stood a huge man, his head roughly shaped, his eyes looking fiercely out. Unfamiliar words were carved at his feet.

  “Can you read it?” Jessa asked Skapti.

  The skald dismounted and went over to the stone, reaching up and fingering the carving thoughtfully. “No. These are no runes I know. And it’s old, Jessa. Centuries.”

  “It could be a gravestone,” Hakon said uneasily.

  “It could. But I think it’s a marker of territory. Or was.”

  “Giants?” Brochael wondered.

  Skapti shrugged and climbed back onto his horse. “Maybe. But long ago.”

  Jessa looked at Kari. He was gazing up at the stone, his eyes strangely distant. For a moment she thought he was listening to some sound, straining to catch it, but when he saw her looking, he said nothing.

  They went on, but after that silent warning a sense of foreboding seemed to fall on them; they rode together now, and more warily.

  Slowly the long day died, but still they traveled, not knowing where to stop. Finally, in a small copse of birch by the roadside, they saw the rise of a thatched roof.

  Brochael drew rein. “I’ll go and see,” he said. “Skapti, come too. The rest of you, wait here.”

  But the ravens had come karking down about Kari in a flutter of noise; they perched on the gray stones, walking and pecking over them.

  “They say it’s empty,” Kari said.

  Brochael glared at him. “Are you sure?”

  “So they say.”

  Everyone stared at the birds, but they knew better than to doubt him. Brochael urged his horse off the road. “This is going to be a very strange expedition,” he muttered.

  It was an old shepherd’s hut, long deserted. Trees had sprouted in the doorway, and the walls had gaping holes, but the roof was more or less intact, and the floor seemed dry.

  They hacked their way in and soon had a fire lit; Hakon and Jessa rubbed the horses down and let them graze tied to a long rope.

  “What about wolves?” Hakon said nervously.

  Jessa gathered up her pack. “We’ll hear them. And we can’t take the beasts in with us, can we?”

  “I suppose not,” he said, grinning.

  Later, as they ate around the fire, Brochael brought out the map. He opened it, the waxed sealskin crackling under his fingers, and spread it out on his coat. “We should add to this as we go. That stone, for instance.”

  “No ink.” Jessa swallowed a mouthful of cheese too quickly.

  “No.” He scowled.

  “Besides,” Hakon said, looking at the parchment closely, “maybe the stone we saw is this.” He put his finger on the faint ghost of a mark to the left of the red line; it was so worn it had almost gone, but now they looked closely it could once have been a rough suggestion of the stone, its carvings reduced to squiggles.

  “So whoever made it got this far,” Skapti said drily. “That cheers me.”

  “This hut”—Jessa waved her knife around—“could be the hut the old man talked about. It must have belonged to Ulf ’s people once. It’s too small for giants.”

  The fire crackled and spat over the damp kindling. Outside, the night was still, and through the doorway they could see the stars, faint and pale.

  “It’s colder up here,” Hakon muttered.

  “It’ll get colder all the time.” Brochael tapped the map. “This will be the forest.”

  Tiny scratched trees were massed about the red line of the road. In the midst of them Jessa thought she saw something else, a faint rune, but she couldn’t be sure.

  “How long before we reach it?”

  “A day. Two.” Brochael folded the skin quickly. “Now … from now on we have someone awake always. In turns. Kari first, then Jessa. We’re out of the Jarlsrealm, and these are unknown lands. We should expect wolves, bears, outlaws maybe. Keep the fire going, Kari, but low. Not too much smoke.”

  They rolled themselves in cloaks and blankets on the uncomfortable floor, and as Kari sat outside, leaning back against the wall, the gradual sounds of their breathing drifted out to him. Deep inside each of them, he could feel the terror of his mother’s spell, planted far down in their minds, ready to spread and trap them as it had trapped Signi and the boy. He knew each dream, and knew he couldn’t destroy them, but only suppress them. So that each one would wake and forget.

  Stretching out his legs he wrapped his dark cloak about him and looked up at the stars. They glinted, in their strange, spread patterns. Did the same stars shine over the land of the Snow-walkers? And was Gudrun looking up at them now? Though he ranged the night with his mind’s whole power, he could find no trace of her, or anything else either, in this strange empty land.

  Except, far to the north, a sudden smudge of sound, which held him still for a moment, listening. A low murmur, like the beat of a drum. He stood up and looked out through the still trees, but he knew already it was a ghost sound, and not in this world.

  “Did you hear that?”

  The bird shape above came down and stood beside him. “We did. But far off.”

  Together they stared out over the unknown land.

  Nine

  Death is the portion of doomed men.

  Two days later, early in the afternoon, they came to the edge of the wood.

  For hours they had been riding through its outlying fringes, the scattered trees and sparse growths of hazel and birch, but now, coming down a steep hillside, they saw the sudden thickening of the trees, a massing of greenery. Below them lay a mighty forest, its millions of treetops stirring in the soft breeze. It stretched far to the north, beyond sight into mist and low gray rain cloud, as if somewhere it merged with the sky and dissolved there, at the edge of existence.

  The road had dwindled to little more than a track, thin and muddy. It ran down among the trees and was swallowed.

  Brochael ducked his head under a branch. “Someone must still use it.”

  Silent, they gathered beside him, letting the horses graze.

  Jessa slid down and stretched stiffly. “So this is Ironwood. Easy to get lost in.”

  Hakon took a long drink and wiped his mouth. “I thought Ironwood was just a place in tales.”

  “So it is,” Skapti said promptly, “but all tales are true. They’re just the way we struggle with the world.” He folded his thin arms, looking out over the forest. “The Ironwood of the stories is a very strange place. It lies far in the northeast. A giantess lives in its heart, and many troll wives. The giantess breeds sons able to shape-shift into wolf form. All the wolves of the world are descended from her. One day, they say, there will come an enormous wolf, called Hati, or Moongarm, who will strengthen himself by drinking the blood of all who die. Then he’ll swallow the moon itself at the world’s end, in the last conflict.” He raised a thin eyebrow. “As the old man said, no place for mortals.”

  “But this isn’t that wood, is it?” Hakon asked.

  “Who knows. Perhaps every wood is that wood.”

  “If it’s not, the old man gave it a bitter name,” Brochael remarked. “And stop teasing the boy, Skapti, or he’ll be no good to any of us.”

  The skald grinned. Hakon went red.

  “But there are wolves.” Jessa got back on her horse. “We’ve heard them.”

  “And other beasts, I hope. Some fresh meat wouldn’t come amiss.”

  They picked their way down carefully. The remaining stones of the road were cracked and treacherous, poking up h
ere and there through mud and leaf litter. As the riders passed silently into the wood they felt its rich scents wrap around them; tree sap and fungi, crumbling bark, centuries of decay and growth. High above, the spindly branches of silver birch rustled, the sky blue and remote through the windblown boughs. Birds whistled here, flitting among the leaves, but gradually the wood became thicker and darker. The birches gave way to oaks, then a mass of evergreens, pine and spruce and fir, clogging the light. Soon the riders moved in a green gloom, silent except for the soft footfalls of the horses.

  Brochael rode ahead, with Kari and Jessa close behind. Skapti and Hakon came last, urging on the nervous packhorse. The wood closed in. Branches hung over the path, swishing back into their faces; far off, the dimness was split by shafts of sunlight, slanting here and there between the crowded trees.

  After only a few minutes Brochael stopped suddenly. Jessa’s horse, always nervy, snorted and skittered sideways with fright, and she tugged its head around, trying not to back into Skapti.

  Then she saw what had frightened it.

  Skulls.

  They were threaded, one above the other, hanging on long strings from the still branches, small skulls of birds and tiny animals—pine marten, stoat, rats, crows. Hundreds of them. In the faint breeze the bizarre hangings clicked and tapped against one another, the empty slits of their eyes turning. Half-rotten, green with mold and lichen, beaks and teeth and bones swung in the dimness. Feathers were knotted into bundles among them, and the stink of decay hung under the trees.

  “What is it?” Hakon whispered, appalled.

  None of them answered him. The sudden smell of decay brought terror, numbing and cold. Centuries of superstition rose in their hearts, fear of sorcery, sacrifice, unknown rites. Small flies buzzed and whined about Jessa’s face; she beat them off in disgust.

  Then Kari nudged his horse forward. He rode in under the long dangling lines of bone and caught one with his thin hands. Pulling it toward him he examined it carefully, the horse fidgeting beneath him.

  His movement broke the stillness that held them. Jessa moved up beside him; the others came too, reluctantly.