Ravens' Will

by Terry Graves

  But who could it be? Most funerals involved a corpse devoured by fire. At first, the possibilities seemed endless to Gerda, but she concluded that, whoever it was, it had to be related to her. Someone who could have whispered her name to the creature from the darkest realms of Helheim. Kai was the first possibility, but Gerda doubted that the Snow Queen had burned his body, even if he was dead. Gerda’s mother, perhaps, although she had barely known her and it made little sense.

  Then, the answer came to her mind.

  “You’re the people who died at Veraheim because of me.”

  The smoke was gone, and the stench was gone, and all that was left inside the hole was silence, the girl and the monster.

  “Yes,” said the wooden thing. “Yes I am.”

  Gerda felt the urge to apologize. But there was nothing she could say, and she knew that the creature was not really the people at Veraheim. It was all part of the riddle.

  “Now I’ve being delayed enough.” She tried to sound defiant, but her teeth chattered with fear and cold, and she failed. “You have been in the ground where all the dead are. Tell me about Kai. Is he dead and gone?”

  The figure trembled. New tendrils grew over the old roots and slid across its face. The sprouts opened as if it was flowering. Its head became full of red roses, then the roses turned into flesh and the flesh turned into Kai. His skin was yellowish and had the pallor of a corpse. His eyes seemed made of glass, his pupils were cloudy and unfocused, his black hair was full of leaves, sticks, and cobwebs.

  Gerda hugged herself, chin against kneecaps. She closed her eyes and waited for the figure to go away. But the wooden thing snorted and hissed, and waited for her to open them again. “Not dead. But gone,” it said with its blue bloated lips. “He has started to forget you already.”

  It stung, but Gerda tried to ignore the last comment. Kai was alive, that was all that mattered. “Would you leave the people of the village now?”

  The thing thought about this for a while, still wearing Kai’s face. When it answered, all resemblance to her friend was lost. The flesh had rotted and the roses had withered and had turned back to raveled roots again.

  “I want my offerings. I want a young goat at Thule and an old hog at summer’s solstice. I want to be given a name, I don’t care which one. I want a song the children will sing to scare each other to death. I want all these things and only then will I stop. Would they understand?”

  “I will make them.”

  The wooden creature seemed pleased. It closed its false eyelids and leaned back. The cloth fell onto the ground and the face was there no more.

  Gerda crawled back to the hole and climbed outside. She lay on her back, on the crunching frozen grass, and peered at the sky.

  “What did he tell you?” Runa asked her, but Gerda did not reply.

  They got lost twice on the way back. When they reached the village, the weather had worsened and flurries of snow flew at them. They opened the door of Knútr’s house and entered, brushing the snow off their shoulders and stomping their feet so the ice came out from the soles of their boots.

  “I thought you had died,” said Frída. She had fallen asleep on the floor next to the hearth and her eyes were drowsy. “I’m glad you didn’t,” she clarified, and yawned without covering her mouth.

  Sigrún did not said a word, but went to one end of the room, where the kindling was stored, picked some up and mended the fire, which was dying. They sat around trying to regain some warmth. Knútr joined them after a while.

  “Well? Did you kill the ghost?”

  “Ghosts cannot be killed,” said Sigrún, contemptuous.

  “You know what I mean.”

  Everybody looked at Gerda. She was unwilling to talk and, when she did, she found that words only came to her with great effort. She felt exhausted and no longer had sympathy for these people, who could have done the same thing she had done, but hadn’t.

  “You have to make sacrifices at the mound twice a year,” she said. “A young goat during the winter’s festivities, an old hog on the night of summer’s solstice.”

  “That’s too much.” Knútr shook his head. “We can make offerings at the beginning of Yule. And only little things, I’m afraid, because we’re simple people.”

  “It’s up to you,” said Sigrún. “But you will have to come back to the mound and discuss it directly.”

  To this, Knútr said nothing. After a brief pause, Gerda continued:

  “It also demands that a song should be composed, so its name will carry on through time, I guess.”

  “Its name? Well, what is it? We cannot read runes, we told you.”

  “You have to give it one.” Gerda remembered the ceremonial stone with runes carved and colored in dark rusty red. Whatever names were written on it, they did not matter anymore.

  Knútr frowned. “What should we call it?”

  “That’s for you to decide.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Kai found the sparrow by chance. It was in a room all by itself, frozen stiff. The door had been closed, but the window was open and the still air of the dawn came through. Dew had covered the ice on the floor and the walls glistened as if the chamber was full of stars. There were seeds and dried fruits ready for the bird in a golden bowl.

  He had spent the last few days going through room after room of Himinbjörg, studying the shapes of the ice and trying to make something out of them. He was not sure what he was looking for; a clue, an idea, a detail. It didn’t matter as long as it opened a small door into the Snow Queen’s soul.

  Kai had taken this job as seriously as he could. He had found a strange solace in Skaði’s carvings, not only because they were beautiful and unblemished — everything she built was — but because they made him feel warm inside. He used to get lost in the intricate figures for hours at a time, building a story, or a mood, learning to read the ancient tales of gods and Jötnar in the perfect geometries. Kai preferred the most candid depictions, the images where Skaði was a little girl and her straight hair fell further than her feet and dragged around. In them, she walked on skis or flew over the mountains on the back of a reindeer. Sometimes another figure appeared with her, taller and brawny, beardless and bald, that always smiled; it must have been Skaði’s father. Kai could not find her mother, nor any other child that shared any games with her, but she looked happy nonetheless.

  One of the chambers was filled with a single image. In it, Skaði had carved the night sky with all its stars. The celestial vault had been reproduced in exquisite detail, as had everything else in Himinbjörg. Kai had recognized the seven stars of Óðin’s Wagon, the twin constellation of Freyja’s Wain, Aurvandil’s Toe, and a couple of others. In one corner of the room, Skaði, as a child, had been depicted on top of a mountain, resting her head on her father’s lap. Her arm was raised and pointed to the sky.

  Kai had decided it had to mean something, but he did not know what.

  The boy leaned against the jamb of the door, not wanting to scare the bird. Finally, he took a couple of tentative steps and, when he found there was no response, he walked toward the sparrow and kneeled in front of it. Its eyes were absent and dark. He joined his hands together and picked up the little thing and felt its warmth, its heartbeats pulsating through its skin.

  Kai felt the sparrow belonged to him, but not in the same way as a toenail or a fallen tooth or a lock of hair belonged to someone, but as if there was a deeper connection, something invisible that linked one to another; as if the sparrow was a stray thought that had come out of his mind and been made flesh and bone and feathers.

  In fact, Kai knew that the bird that was now in his hands was part of him. It was a waste, or an imprint from that day when Solfrid and he had flown from one realm of the Laerad tree to the next, trying to make sense of the giant’s presence in Veraheim. He had thought that the animal would have dissolved into thin air when he woke up, but it didn’t. The bird had fallen during the snowstorm and it had remained there during
all those weeks, and Skaði had been feeding it until its wing healed.

  Kai felt a wave of sympathy that almost made him forget the cold dinners and the harsh demands and the silences that accompanied them. Despite being a Jötunn, she had saved the bird. Which proved that she still cared about the smallest, humblest things in the world.

  Rune magic had lost its effect way before Kai had been born, and nobody really understood the stone-heart’s inner workings. Solfrid had been teaching him, but she was cryptic and not of much use. Kai knew that Óðin had two ravens, named Huginn and Muninn, and that the ravens were Óðin or part of Óðin. As the story went, every morning, when the first light shone into his hall, the ravens took flight and traveled the world. They perched on the branches of the trees and pecked at the eyes of the corpses, and listened and observed. And when they came back with the sunset, they told the High One all they had witnessed. So Kai figured out that Óðin’s soul had the shape of a raven, Solfrid’s the shape of a heron, and Kai’s the shape of a sparrow.

  He treasured the little fragile creature that now lay in his hands. The sparrow was mesmerized, drowsing as if in a trance, but when Kai stroked its head with two fingers, it flapped its wings a little.

  The boy grabbed a handful of seeds from the bowl and left the chamber. He would conceal the bird in his own room and try to figure how to create a bond with it, even if it had to be without the help of a mirror shard. Perhaps there was still hope, after all. He had not worked out the details yet, but the bird might be his means of escape.

  When nightfall came, Kai sat down at the great hall’s table reluctantly. He wanted the dinner to finish as soon as possible so he could go back to his room and put his plan into action, so he started eating without waiting for Skaði. As usual, there was no meat or fish. Everything was fresh and newly picked; nothing was ever cooked.

  That night she climbed down in one of her ice-blue dresses, with a different configuration of braids, but equally complicated. She was painfully beautiful, but her eyes seemed tired, with violet rings under them. She took a seat, grabbed the pitcher, and filled both cups.

  “You know you have plenty of beehives outside, right?” he said. “And here we are, drinking water when we could be drinking mead.”

  He had planned it to be a nasty comment, so she would get angry and leave as soon as possible. But Skaði, though not smiling, seemed pleased with the question. “I’ve got mead. You would like the taste, and the effect it causes in your head, but not what will happen to you the day after. Once, the Æsir asked me to prepare a batch, and I did. I told them to drink it in small sips and enjoy the flavor. It is very strong. But of course they did not listen, and they took it as they took everything: as a challenge. Thor and Freyr started a contest to see who could drink more. Many others joined them. It was a good party, one of those they remember for ages. But the next morning, they knocked at my door and blamed me.”

  “I would not challenge Thor to drink, but perhaps a sip or two, once, would not do me harm.” Kai laughed and finish the last bits of food left on his plate. He thought about the chamber with the carved constellations, the little girl and the giant, but decided not to ask about that. Not yet. “How are they? The gods, I mean. You must have known them quite well.”

  Skaði frowned. Her fingers fidgeted over the wooden board. “I was a spoil of war, sold for marriage. I was tricked into marrying another hostage, a Vanir, against my will. I did so by looking at their feet, while they mocked me. I have no sympathy for the gods.”

  Her face grew somber. The mood of the conversation had turned bleak. You should shut up and she will go soon, Kai thought. But he wanted to lift the burden that weighed on her shoulders and he forgot about the sparrow who waited in his room upstairs.

  “Were your bees snowflakes at first?” he said tentatively, trying to move back to the old topic. It worked.

  “Who told you about the bees?”

  “I don’t remember. An old man, I suppose. Old men are always telling stories. Mountains were giants that lay dead, rivers were the tears of lovers, bees were snowdrops… that sort of things. The story said that before there were seasons, everything was winter. A giant, tired of the snow which forced him to stay at home while his fields were spoilt, turned the flakes into bees, so the snow would take care of the fields for him. But the spell only worked for nine months every year and, for the remaining three, the bees were gone and the snow came back. That’s the origin of seasons.”

  “It is old magic, older than me,” said Skaði. “The bees were created from snowflakes as a present for me long ago. The magic that puts them into motion is a mystery. It is the same spell that the Æsir used to create the humans and Ymir used to create us. The words of creation have been forgotten, but the spell that worked on the bees has not yet faded away.” She stayed silent, staring at nothing. The food tray was empty but, for the first time, she did not look as if she wanted to leave. “Do you know any more stories?”

  “About what?”

  “About whatever.” Skaði leaned her head on her arm and, for a moment, she resembled the little girl from the ice carvings.

  “I guess so,” said Kai, unsure. He knew many stories, but most of them were about the gods, and how they tricked and killed the giants, and he thought it impolite to mention them. There were a couple about talking animals, or little children that outsmarted their older brothers and ended up marrying princesses or ruling over kingdoms in faraway lands.

  “What about you?” she asked. Her cheeks blushed with the slightest shade of red, embarrassed just by saying this out loud. “Don’t you have any stories of your own?”

  “I’m not a god,” said Kai, “or a giant. I’m not even a talking animal. Regular people like me don’t have big stories to tell.”

  “Then tell me a small one.”

  Kai thought about it for a while.

  “Very well,” he said. “There was this time when Alarr thought it would be a good idea to—”

  “Who is Alarr?”

  “A person. A man, like me. Well, not like me. Much taller, wide-shouldered, with a beard. He has the kind of contagious laugh you cannot resist. When he laughs, he makes the foundations of any building shake. Anyway, we were younger then, so he was not as tall, nor had a beard yet. He was my friend.” Kai remembered he had not seen Alarr the night of the giant’s attack on Veraheim. “I hope he still is.”

  “I’m sure he is,” said Skaði. “Please, continue.”

  “So Alarr thought it would be a good idea to ride one of Hallbjorn’s hogs. Then Gerda—”

  “Another friend?”

  Kai went silent and Skaði felt that something was wrong. “I’m sorry. This was a bad idea.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” said Kai. His voice almost faded at the end, bud didn’t. He forced a smile. “The bad idea was to ride the hog in the first place. Gerda is, indeed, another friend of mine, and the daughter of a man named Hallbjorn. The hogs were her responsibility, but because she’s stubborn and she cannot let Alarr get his way with anything, she bet that she could hold on longer on top of a hog than him. So we called all the kids in Veraheim to come and look. We made them pay just to see it — this was Gerda’s idea too.”

  “What did Hallbjorn think about this?”

  “Nothing. He was unaware of the whole thing.” Kai made an effort to remember where Hallbjorn was or could have been. Probably somewhere else, too drunk to notice. “Anyway, we picked the biggest and wildest pigs in the herd and drew them apart with sticks. Gerda and Alarr climbed onto the lowest branches of an oak tree and we held the pigs below. All the kids were making bets. How much, for how long, how many bones they would break, and so on. Someone made the signal and it all started…” Kai paused briefly and smiled with the recollection “…and ended. There was no winner or loser. They both fell to the ground and the pigs ran away.”

  “That’s what I would have expected,” said Skaði. “Did they find them?”

  “You mean the pigs? Yes,
after a while. But first we all received a beating from the other kids.” He had expected the girl to laugh at the story, but she did not. “I suppose it was funnier if you were there,” he apologized.

  “I liked it,” she said, and placed her fork and her knife on the bowl, as if putting an end to the dinner. But as she stood up, she added: “There are a dozen rafts in the stables. You can pick one or two and bring them back to your room. You will also find a pile of wood and dried twigs, enough to make a thousand fires, I think, and some peat too. Put the raft on the floor and build your fire on top. That way, the ice won’t melt and the wood won’t get wet.”

  “Thank you,” Kai replied, a bit surprised by the concession.

  Skaði climbed the stairs. For the first time, she had not tried to convince him to accept his death. Whether this was part of a new strategy or a change of heart, Kai could not know. She stopped at the very end and gazed at him. “I’m sorry, Kairan,” she said. “I’m really, really sorry.”

  After she had left, Kai went to the stables where the reindeer spent the night, located the rafts and the logs, and carried them back to his room. It took him two trips to drag everything up the stairs. He had lost a lot of time already, but decided that he would look suspicious if, after asking for it every night after dinner, he failed to build a fire when finally given the chance. His room had no hole in the ceiling to let the fumes out, but it was large enough, so he left the raft right under the window. He looked around for the sparrow and found it in one corner, lost in the same dizziness it had suffered during the day. But Kai gazed at the bowl and found that at least he had pecked at the seeds.