The Midgard Serpent

by James L. Nelson

  And even if they did find them, they had lost most of their weapons and all of their mail when the boat had wrecked. If Amundi and his men were well-armed, then taking them might not be as easy as Skorri had assumed.

  He heard the noise again and this time he stopped and raised his hand and the others behind him stopped as well. He stared off into the rain and cocked his ear. And there it was. A horse’s whinny.

  “Riders coming,” he said, and suddenly he saw the possibility of the horses he had been dreaming of. Now, he thought, the gods might be rewarding his bold recklessness.

  “Off the road,” he said, just loud enough to be heard. “Half of you on the far side, get down in the grass. Hide yourselves. Wait ’til you hear me yell and then you leap out at them, drag every one of the bastards down off their horse. Go!”

  The men divided up, half to one side of the road, half to the other. Skorri found a place in the high grass and lay down, feeling the mud soft under his body. He would not be seen from the road, he was quite certain, but that also meant he could not see the road himself.

  They waited and listened and soon the beating of hooves could be heard, soft and slow. The riders were not moving fast, which was lucky. They would be wet and tired and the shock of more than a dozen men bursting from the grass would throw them into confusion.

  The sound of the horses drew closer and Skorri felt his body tense, his muscles pulse, his teeth press together. He wanted desperately to look over the top of the grass and see where the horsemen were, but he resisted.

  A moment more, a moment more… Skorri thought, and then he saw the first rider, his head appearing just above the top of the grass and almost even with where Skorri lay. Skorri pushed himself to his feet, charging forward even before he was fully up, a wild cry bursting from his mouth as he raced through the twenty feet of grass to the road ahead.

  There were five horsemen but Skorri’s eyes were on the lead rider, a big man, a bearded man, his eyes wide with shock at this sudden attack. He hauled back on his reins and his horse reared and came down and the man shouted, two words, and not the words Skorri expected to hear.

  “Lord Skorri?”

  The man’s horse shook its head and half turned as the rider struggled to keep control, but his eyes remained on Skorri as Skorri burst out of the grass and came to a halt.

  “Vermund,” Skorri said. “Where have you been, you lazy bastard?”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Would it be for you both

  in battle to engage,

  and the eagles gladden,

  than with useless words

  to contend,

  even if hate

  is in chieftain's hearth.

  The Poetic Edda

  Failend sat half on the edge of the wooden bed frame, half on the straw-stuffed mattress that was doing little to support her weight, insignificant though it was. She stared at the floor and the strange zigzag patterns of the mortar between the flat stones. They stood out sharply, illuminated by the small flame of a single oil lamp, the only light in the windowless space. She wondered if this was how it looked to a bird, flying over hilly country, looking down at humps of land intercut by streams and rivers.

  This detail of the floor was pretty much all she had left to look at. The cell she was in was tiny, perhaps eight feet by ten feet. It was not a jail, she did not think. More like a monk’s cell or some such.

  She had already explored every bit of the space, walking the perimeter of the walls with the oil lamp in her hand. There was nothing much to see. Stone walls on four sides, and wooden beams supporting wooden planks for the ceiling. The door was wood as well, with a heavy iron latch. She tried it, of course, but it would not move. She recalled seeing a bar on the outside just before she had been pushed into the cell. She recalled hearing the bar drop into place.

  She knew for certain that the cell was in the king’s hall. They had taken her there from the cathedral, after they had discovered the truth of her. After the priest, on the bishop’s order, had pulled the necklace out of her shift, the necklace she had forgotten about, that physical manifestation of her divided loyalties.

  They had argued at first: the bishop and Father Conall, the priest who had heard her confession, and then several others who had arrived after. Failend could not understand a word of it, but she had an idea they were fighting over who should take charge of her, where she should go. The bishop seemed to be arguing one point, Father Conall another, and doing so with an impressive amount of vehemence, considering whom he was arguing against.

  Father Conall, of course, knew Failend’s story, her entire story, and she guessed he had sympathy for her, both as a man of God and an Irishman. But he could not tell that story to the bishop. Failend considered telling the bishop herself, but she thought in that instance it might work against her. The bishop did not seem to be a man much given to sympathy.

  In the end it was the bishop who decided what would be done with her, or perhaps the decision was made for him by the men-at-arms. They arrived in the cathedral while the discussion was still on-going, twelve men in mail and carrying spears and led by a captain who looked as if he knew his business. There was not much talk after that.

  Failend’s hands were bound behind her back and she was led off, the spearmen flanking her on either side. She looked back over her shoulder as she was marched away, back toward Father Conall, the Irish priest who had heard her confession, who had been so kind, and she could see the genuine despair on his face.

  They led her out of the cathedral and into the bright, mid-morning sun. The streets which had been waking up before were now crowded with men and women and children and carts and animals and barrows, and it seemed as if everyone was shouting and no one was listening. But as the ring of armed men passed, surrounding a woman whose hands were bound and whose head hardly reached the top of the shortest man’s shoulders, the people stopped and watched, their curiosity piqued.

  Failend wondered how different it would look if she had been wearing her mail and helmet, seax on her belt, bow and arrows over her shoulder.

  That would make them curious indeed, she thought.

  The men-at-arms led her back the way she had come, around the corner of the wall that surrounded the king’s great hall. They did not bring her through the main gate but through a smaller door flanked by two guards who held it open for them. They led her across the open ground, past the cluster of buildings that formed the royal residence within the walls of Winchester.

  They came to the east wing of the great hall, with the rest of that magnificent building stretching off to their left, the two towers rising to impressive heights above. They marched her through another door and into that wing and there was not much impressive there, save for the fact that it was made of stone. There were no tapestries or carpets or any touches of comfort or refinement, and Failend guessed it was quarters for religious, maybe the priests and monks who served in the royal chapel.

  The big open room at the entrance to the wing led to a long hall with doors lining either side. The doors were close together, suggesting that the rooms behind them were not large, and the unadorned space suggested they were not particularly comfortable. The captain led the way down the hall and stopped in front of one of the doors, nodding to one of the men to open it. There was nothing hesitant about the captain’s manner. The man had been clearly instructed as to what to do with his prisoner.

  The door swung open, the room inside dim lit with the small flame of the oil lamp, and Failend was pushed inside, a gentle push, but a push nonetheless. Someone stepped up behind her and untied her wrists, then the door was shut behind her without a word and the bar fell into place.

  For a long time she just stood, silent and unmoving, listening, but once the men-at-arms had marched off she could hear nothing through the thick stone walls. She picked up the oil lamp and examined the room, though she had no idea what she was looking for. A way out, perhaps, though she certainly did not believe she wo
uld find one. In truth she knew she was looking simply because there was nothing else to do.

  When she was done with that she sat down on the bed and stared at the floor. She let her mind wander back over the years. She had not thought much about it until that morning, really, but now the dam was broken, the memories allowed to flood out, and she could not stop them. All the twists and turns: she could see them now, as if from above, the same way she was seeing the twists and turns in the mortar between the stones.

  But it was only the turns behind her that she could see. She had come around another bend now, taken another turn, but there was no seeing what lay ahead. She had decided to abandon her sinful, pagan ways, and now she might well die because of that decision.

  She lay down on the thin mattress, aware of how uncomfortable it felt, but also aware of how exhausted she was. She had walked through much of the night, had slept briefly behind a bush before covering the rest of the distance to Winchester. It had been a trying day already, and it was not yet noon.

  And beyond the physical she felt drained spiritually. She had seen men in battle suffer from pulsing wounds, when some great vein was severed, allowing them to bleed out in minutes. Now she felt as if her soul had received such a wound, as if it was pouring out of a rent in her flesh and pooling on the floor. She didn’t know if she could die from such a thing, but she felt as if she might.

  Sleep came over her at some point, sneaking up unseen, and when she woke again she had no sense at all for how long she had been in its hold. She felt as if her body was pressed down into the mattress, as if she had not moved in a very long time, semi-permanently fixed like something cast up on the beach and half buried in the sand as tide after tide washed over it.

  She did not move, except to open her eyes, but there was nothing that she could see that gave her any idea of how much time had passed. The oil lamp was still burning with its tiny flame, still the only light in the room. It had been full daylight outside when she was put in the cell, and it might still be. Or it might be fully dark. Or twilight. Or dawn. She had no idea.

  There were sounds from down the hall, voices calling, a rustling like some struggle going on, and she guessed that was what had woken her. It was the first thing she had heard since the guards had left her. She pushed herself up onto her elbow so that both ears could be turned toward the noise.

  Are they coming for me now? she wondered.

  She had no idea what the English might do to her, an Irish girl they probably assumed was a spy for the heathens. Maybe they would just leave her in that cell to die of thirst, but she doubted that. Before they killed her they would want to hear everything she could tell them about the hated Northmen. After that, who knew? Beheaded? Burned at the stake? Drawn and quartered? Any of those seemed likely.

  So as she listened to the sound of the men coming closer she wondered if they would drag her from her cell and do whatever they had to do to extract the truth. And if so, would she tell them the truth? And if she did, would it make things better or worse? Or could she hope to lie her way out of it?

  No… she thought. That’s not it.

  She could hear struggling and shouting. It sounded as if another prisoner was being brought to a cell, one who was far less cooperative than she had been.

  A door opened in the hall, from the sound of it one of the doors near hers, and then more shouting and then the door closed again and a bar fell into place. Failend sprang to her feet and crossed over to the door of her cell and pressed her ear against it, listening to this new man pounding and shouting in words Failend could not understand.

  The voice, however, she did know. Or at least she thought she did. She waited until she heard the door at the far end of the hall slam shut and the man behind the other door fall silent. She pressed close to her own door, lips near the wood, and called as loud as she dared, “Louis?”

  There was no answer at first, and she was about to call out again when she heard the reply, across the width of the hall and through two heavy oak doors. “Failend?”

  She smiled. It was a voice she knew so well. A voice that had seduced her once, then given her the chance to embrace a savage part of life, the life of a warrior, something she had not even known she craved. A voice that had been present through every possible emotion: desire, terror, rage, love, exhilaration. Louis de Roumois. How did he happen to be there?

  “Yes, Louis, it’s me!” Failend shouted, louder this time. “How are you here?”

  “We came looking for you,” Louis said, speaking loudly in his Frankish-tainted Irish. “Thorgrim and some of the others. We were all taken. Foolishness. It wasn’t my idea,” he said, and then added, “But I came, of course.”

  Failend stared at the grain of the wood in the door and tried to understand what Louis had said.

  They came for me?

  She would not have thought that would happen. How did they know she was here?

  “Is Thorgrim there with you? Or in one of these other cells?” she called.

  “No,” Louis called back. “Just me. They’re still in the prison. I think. Somewhere on the far side of the great hall. I don’t know where, exactly. There’s nothing we can do for them.” He paused, then added, “Or for ourselves, I imagine.”

  There were a hundred things Failend wanted to ask, to understand, but it was hard to shout through the thick doors. Louis was speaking as loud as he could, she could tell, but she could still just barely hear him, and she imagined he could hardly hear her at all. She sighed and stepped away from the door. She would give her throat a rest and try again.

  She paced back and forth in the dim light of the single flame, her mind moving fast and far, though her body was confined to that tiny space. She thought of Thorgrim and the others coming for her. Which others? Harald, certainly. Godi. Starri. Starri would never stand for being left behind. And Louis, who seemed to think that the whole thing was madness, but he came anyway.

  They had come to save her. Had Thorgrim just guessed that she had gone to Winchester? How would he guess that, and how would he know she was in trouble?

  Wolf dream?

  Failend stopped as the thought came to her. Is that how he knew? At the thought of it she made the sign of the cross. She was about to call to Louis once more, to ask if that was it, when she heard another sound, the sound of the door opening at the far end of the hall. She had heard it several times now and she recognized it, and it made her stop in her pacing. She stood motionless, listening.

  Is this it now? she wondered. She heard steps in the hall, the soft footfalls of leather shoes on the unyielding stone. The steps came closer and finally stopped, not too far away. She heard a voice. “Failend?”

  “Father? Father Conall?” Failend called. “I’m here!” She banged on her door and heard the steps come closer, heard the heavy bar lifted from the door. The door swung open and in the light of the lanterns lining the hall she saw Father Conall standing there in his long brown robe, a bundle in his hands.

  “Ah, yes, you are!” Father Conall said and smiled. “You’re not hurt?”

  No,” Failend said. “No.” She stepped out into the hall. The priest had not invited her to do so, but with the door open she could not stand to remain in the cell a moment longer. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I’ve come to give you the Eucharist,” he said. “After such a confession as you made. That’s what I told the guards.”

  “Oh,” Failend said. It was something she wanted, of course, the body of Christ, but somehow she had thought there was more to the priest’s arrival.

  “And I’ve come to get you out of here,” Father Conall went on. “You have to get out. They’ll…” He shook his head. “I don’t want to think what they’ll do to you.”

  “I guessed it would not go easy for me,” Failend said. “So I’ve been thinking about how I might make it better. And I thought, what if I told them the truth? Confessed to the bishop, the way I confessed to you?”

  Father Con
all shook his head. “No,” he said. “Even if the bishop believes your story, he’ll have no sympathy for you. A fornicator. A killer. A woman who chose to join with the heathens. Chose to fight against King Æthelwulf.”

  “But I’ve been forgiven those things.”

  “Yes, in the eyes of God,” Father Conall said. “Not in the eyes of the bishop, I wouldn’t think.”

  Failend opened her mouth, ready with her next thought, but the priest cut her off. “And you can’t lie to them. They’ll know it if you do, and it will be worse for you. No, you have to run. I have to get you out of here. It’s the only way. I brought this.”

  He held up the bundle in his arms and Failend could see it was a brown robe like the one Father Conall was wearing. Failend looked at the bundle and then up at the priest. And then she remembered they were not alone.

  “Louis!” she called in a sharp whisper. “Louis, where are you?”

  “Here,” she heard his voice through the door across the hall from hers and down one. She stepped over and lifted the bar that secured the door and pulled it open. Louis was there, framed in the doorway. Failend hugged him, buried her head in his chest, and wished for that fleeting second she could just remain like that, pressed against him, with no other considerations in the world.

  “Failend, what’s this about?” Father Conall asked. Failend released Louis and turned. The priest was staring at them and Failend could see the suspicion in his eyes, the concern on his face, the fear he had made a grave misjudgment.

  “This is Louis…” Failend said. “Louis de Roumois. He’s a Frank. A Christian. He was an acolyte in the monastery at Glendalough. He was with me when the Northmen took us.”

  Father Conall nodded and seemed somewhat mollified by this explanation.