Erlan didn’t see what became of the big warrior because Arald had recovered his wits and came on with a scream like Hel’s own spawn.
There was plenty of hate in his snarls, but his blows were ugly as his face. Erlan parried each blow, feeling a savage thrill as Wrathling danced in his hand. But he knew he had moments to win this fight. In the tail of his eye, the big man had picked himself off the ground and was coming to Arald’s aid.
Erlan fell back a pace and drew his knife. Left-handed would have to serve. He threw it hard as he could. Arald saw the flying steel, flinched away. The movement saved his life, but only for the butt to smash into his eye. Arald squealed, doubling over, clutching his face.
Wrathling scythed upwards.
Erlan felt the blade slice bone and sinew. Arald screamed louder this time and dropped his axe, staggered back, shield gone, groping at the mess where his arm had been. His forearm hung by a few scraps of flesh. He fell writhing in the shallows.
But Erlan had no time to celebrate. The big man was there, squaring up. ‘You won’t find me so easy.’ His voice rang through his helm. Through the eyepieces shone a cold glare. The man gripped his spear so tight, seemed his biceps would burst his byrnie. Aye, and the biggest bastard biceps I ever saw.
‘They call me Barth the Boulder! Ain’t no man living nor dead who’s taken a slice off me. I will crush you.’
‘Barth the Boulder?’ Erlan gave a mad laugh. ‘Is that for the rock in your head? I name you Shit-for-Brains if you do the bidding of that stinking fuck.’ The sound of Arald’s screaming still filled the air.
The Boulder came at him with a roar, spear-point darting like an adder. Erlan’s arm worked fierce to keep his guard, springing forward when he could to cut at the Boulder’s neck. But the big bastard was quick on his feet. Quicker than he ought to be.
Erlan’s mind was working as hard as his blade. He had to get past that point, had to slow those feet so he could land a killing blow. But the Boulder didn’t look like tiring.
Then he saw a way. He gave ground, edging into the shallows. Icy water filled his boots. The spearman came with him, and soon they were up to their knees. Wrathling cracked against the spear-shaft in a shower of spray. But his ruse was working. Now when he attacked, the Boulder struggled to stay clear.
He saw fear curdle the big man’s face. The lunges became erratic, the Boulder’s skill draining as he tired. But the Spear-God wasn’t done yet. The rocks under Erlan shifted. He floundered, his guard faltered. The point shot past, its cold iron slicing his side.
The cut stung like a whip. He yelped in pain. The Boulder allowed himself a laugh. But the cut wasn’t deep, and the gloating grimace under the Boulder’s helm only maddened him.
Fury tore through him like a tempest. This wasn’t how it would end. He wasn’t going to die in some strange land at the hand of stinking thieves. Suddenly it wasn’t the wound that incensed him. It was the pain inside, it was the darkness, it was the cold sea, it was the rage against the Nine Worlds and the gods that ruled them. . . it was Inga.
The Boulder must have seen something fearful because his grin vanished. Now it was his turn to retire, drawing them back into the shallows. Erlan rained down blows, muscles burning.
The water was ankle deep when the Boulder tripped. A fallen birch shimmered underwater. Barth went sprawling. Erlan leaped forward to finish him, but the Boulder swung his spear one last time, smashing the shaft against Erlan’s wound. He screamed, falling, his point jamming in the rocks, twisting away, as he crashed on his enemy. The Boulder’s face was inches from his. Instinctively, he seized his throat and began squeezing.
The warrior thrashed about, jettisoning his spear; Erlan crushed his hands tighter, rage strengthening his grip. Barth’s head writhed, fighting for breath, his helm falling away. And suddenly, there was his face.
Erlan froze in shock. The cold, blue eyes, the hair black as jet, the heavy brow – they were his father’s. They were – and yet. . . couldn’t be.
Suddenly a meaty hand shoved back his head, thumb hooking his jaw. Pain jerked Erlan back into the fight. He squeezed tighter, bit down hard, tasted blood. That face, so familiar, raged, eyes wide with fear, bubbles of air streaming in silent screams under the shallow water.
But bitter fury filled him; his whole body burned with it. ‘Die, you bastard, die!’
The Boulder’s mouth gaped not two inches beneath the surface, but it was enough. Finally his hand weakened and fell away. The muffled screaming stopped. The terror went out of those ice-blue eyes. His father’s lifeless face stared back at him.
Erlan flung himself away, gasping, arms and legs weak as a kitten. Relief enveloped him like the waters of the lake.
I must be losing my mind.
His chest heaved, and suddenly he began to sob with great lung-wrenching moans welling from the pit of his soul. He lay there, in the freezing water, weeping and weeping and weeping at how alone he really was.
You’re to be a man, my son. Not a monster. His mother’s words echoed, stark as winter. How in black Hel was he to survive this world without becoming a monster? How!
But his mother could never answer that. . . not now.
He’d always despised self-pity – yet here he was, a slave to it. For a long time, he lay staring at his shaking hands.
Murderer’s hands.
At last, his sobs faded. He wiped away his tears and lifted his head. Arald was no longer screaming. Erlan sat up, listening to his own breathing, watching its mist float away on the still air.
Somewhere in the trees a crow cawed, jolting him from his daze. He scrambled up and turned to the body beside him, a heavy dread weighing on him.
But when he looked, the Boulder’s face had changed. The dark hair and light eyes were the same, but the jaw was wider, the mouth oddly small. Erlan felt uneasy. The features were no longer his father’s. A passing similarity maybe, but that was a stranger’s face.
Slowly his anger ebbed away. He rubbed his eyes. The image was so clear. The look in those cold, blue eyes so wounded.
Yet I killed him anyway.
He shut away the thought, suddenly shivering with the cold, and turning his back, he went to retrieve his sword.
Arald lay motionless at the lake’s edge, the stones all around him slick with blood. His arm was bent double, the flesh twisted, his face ash-grey, his long tongue drooping out of his mouth.
He was dead.
Erlan found his knife nearby, washed it and returned it to its sheath.
Arald’s halfwit brother was a crumpled heap of limbs, his face smashed to a bloody maw. Erlan went over to Arik and found the merchant still breathing, but laid out cold.
‘Come on, runt – wake up.’ He gave Arik’s leg a sharp kick. The merchant began to come around, blinking groggily up at the sky. Seeing Erlan over him, his eyes grew wide with fear.
‘Seems Idun’s none too fond of her old master.’ Erlan put his boot on Arik’s chest and drew his knife.
‘Please, I beg you – don’t kill me!’ Erlan caught the acrid smell of fear leak into Arik’s breeches.
He grunted. ‘You think you deserve more of a chance than you gave me?’
‘But it wasn’t me,’ he whined. ‘I swear – Arald forced me to it.’
‘Sure didn’t look that way.’
‘No, it’s true. When you left, he asked all about you. I wouldn’t tell him nothing – I swear. But he beat it out of me anyways.’
‘I saw it in your face, liar. The moment you laid eyes on my sword, you wanted it.’ Erlan ground his boot harder.
‘No, no! Please – you’re hurting me.’ Arik tugged frantically at his tunic, trying to pull it up. ‘Look, I’ve the marks to prove it. I swear!’ Curious, Erlan relaxed his foot a little, and Arik eagerly rolled over and showed him his back. A few bruises ran purple and black under his skin. ‘See – see? They made me do it.’
Erlan thought a moment, then shoved him over again. ‘A man never knows when he migh
t need a favour back – isn’t that what you told me?’ Erlan smiled coldly. ‘I reckon you’re in need of a favour about now, aren’t you?’
‘Please. I’ll do anything. Take the horses. Take my purse.
Just don’t hurt me!’
Erlan made no reply. Only watched the little man squirming under his boot. ‘Are you – are you going to kill me?’
Erlan shook his head. ‘Those boys of yours need their father. Even if he is a rat.’ He saw relief flood Arik’s hollow cheeks. ‘Maybe you need a lesson in hospitality all the same.’ Erlan dropped his knee into Arik’s chest, and jerked his head to one side. ‘A reminder – to treat the next poor bastard who stays under your roof a sight better than you did me.’
‘What? No! What are you going to do? No – stranger! Please! NO!’
Arik’s screech split the still air as Erlan put the knife to his ear and, with a quick twist, cut half of it off. Blood leaked onto the stones. Flinging away the chunk of gristle, he hauled Arik, whimpering, to his feet.
‘Well, friend. Freyhamen’s that way.’ And he sent him on his road with a shove. The merchant scuttled off along the shoreline, clutching his ear and muttering curses.
The dead men’s horses had scattered and were nowhere to be seen. Erlan cursed. He didn’t want to linger there. Freyhamen wasn’t far away – it wouldn’t be long before someone else was along, and they weren’t like to take his part in this little altercation.
A movement in the trees caught his eye. Idun appeared from the shadows, her ears flat with suspicion. He clicked his tongue and held out his hand.
Warily, she approached. He could see a bib of dried blood down her chest where the arrow had cut her. Her muscles quivered as he bent to check it.
‘Could be worse.’ He was suddenly aware of his own wound. He pulled up his tunic and peered down at it. ‘Aye, could be a lot worse. I’ll get us cleaned up. We’ve a long road ahead.’
Above him, the crows began to circle.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Their journey led into thick forest, which shrouded the day in perpetual gloom. The trees at least gave cover from the rain, which came more often, and from the deepening cold. They skirted many lakes, on which shone shimmering reflections of silver birches, sentinels around their edge. Moss smothered everything, muffling the woodland to a brooding silence.
Of people, there were few enough, in lonely farmsteads or shabby little hamlets. Places where folk had cleared some forest and begun cultivating new land, but come harvest, it seemed to Erlan, they would reap a beggarly sort of crop from ground so thin.
At best, these inland folk offered him suspicion. The more so since his hair was dark along with his features, and darker yet was the air he carried with him, where they were blond-haired and of paler complexion. At worst, they closed their doors and shut their hearths to him and bid him move on. In his Jute homeland, custom held that folk must give a stranger shelter, vittles, some little kindness. For in welcoming a stranger from the road, some were said to have hosted even the Wanderer himself, or other lesser gods. And such visitations were said to bring great blessing on any household so fortunate in its fate, if a god was well fed and aled, and left in all ways satisfied.
But Gotar folk seemed not to share this custom. Even those that gave him shelter would give him little more than scraps to fill his shrinking belly, and those for a night at most. And he would wake to find the door propped open and Idun tethered to the frame, the sooner for him to move on.
Anyone he met, man or woman, thrall or freeman, he questioned about the kingdom to the north. Some knew of it. Others had never heard of any king. But he discovered little more than that he must continue north and east.
The homesteads became fewer, then thinned to none at all. Wilder forest closed in around them. Pathways shrank to tracks and then vanished altogether. And all the while Idun plodded north and east, north and east. The cold bit harder with each passing day. Erlan’s cloak offered meagre protection against the first frosts. Each night he did his best to find shelter for them in the lee of fallen trunks or in the crook of huge boulders breaking out of the earth, sleeping beside fires that burned out in the night, and each morning fighting off the first nips of frostbite from his fingers and toes.
The last frosts became the first snows. Light and wet at first, or sharp sleet lashed by a blinding wind, chilling him through bone and sinew; and then falling softer, heavier, smothering the forests and lakes in a white pall as silent and final as death.
Erlan was no skilled woodsman. He could hunt, of course – but with a yew-bow and finely fletched arrows, each honed to perfection by his father’s smiths. But in this endless wilderness of green and white, with nothing more than knife and axe to catch his meat, he ate frugally if he ate at all. Squirrels and rabbits were the best he hoped for and the best he got. And soon the pangs of hunger were familiar to him as the pangs of his heart and the throbbing in his wounded side and the old ache in his crippled heel. His lips cracked with the cold. His knuckles split like over-ripe berries. His backside chafed so raw he had to lead Idun for hours on end, slowing their pace to a miserable trudge.
And all the while, his ghosts rode with him. Konur. Tolla. Garik. His father – the great Vendling lord. His unborn child. . . but most of all, his beloved sister, Inga. All of them whispering, taunting, pleading, chastening. Each rebuking him in turn with their special grievances, as though in death, their only aim was to weigh him down with guilt and grief. He was lonely and yet he was not alone. He longed for an end to the bitter reproaches that voiced on and on in his head, or took on monstrous form, torturing him again and again in the tumult of his dreams. Even the sad distant cries of the wolves at night were warmer comfort than the cacophony of sorrow inside his head.
North and east, north and east, and all the while the snows fell thicker. Idun fared little better than him, with less and less to forage, shrinking to a filthy hide of sharp ribs and jutting haunches. At times, he feared he would wake to find her dead. But every day she found something more in her weary limbs. Plodding on – north and east, north and east.
More than once she baulked at scaling the shoulder of some jagged cliff face or crossing some boiling stream thundering down from the hills over splintered rocks. Then he would set to dragging her forcibly onwards, step by stubborn step, until the obstacle was overcome or they came to terrain she found more to her liking. Sometimes no amount of goading could make her hazard the path ahead, and they would have to turn back and find another way.
One day, under a steel sky when the snow was falling a little lighter, they found themselves skirting a lake. Erlan’s gaze was dragging dejectedly along the snowy rubble passing under his feet as Idun picked her way along the lakeshore when suddenly she stopped. Wearily he looked up.
Ahead of them, a sheer wall of rock, perhaps a hundred feet high, rose up out of the water, barring their progress around the shore.
He cursed, his voice now little more than a croak.
To the left, among the trees, the ground rose steeply to form a kind of bowl of land on that side of the lake, swinging round to meet the cliff-top. His heart fell as he realized he would never get Idun up ground so treacherous, not with the ice and snow and the loose stones beneath.
He looked behind. The thought of turning back again, of finding some other way onward, seemed too much to bear this time. Instead he scanned ahead for some other answer. In the near distance, the lakeshore curved around to the right. He could see through the swirls of snow that not far beyond the cliff the ground fell away again. His gaze moved out onto the white expanse of the lake.
The smaller lakes were frozen now. Only the very largest had yet to be sealed completely with their winter covering. So far he hadn’t chanced his luck on the ice, but it seemed like days, maybe weeks, since the first snows had come. And only the day before, the temperature had dropped more bitterly than ever before.
He decided to test the shallows. If the ice there held, he would
rather try his luck than be thwarted in his progress yet again. He hopped down from Idun’s back, wincing as his ankle jarred against the ground. But the pain merited little heed. Discomfort was a familiar companion now.
Cautiously, he led Idun onto the ice, their footsteps crunching the pristine blanket of snow. He listened hard for any signs of the ice cracking, but there was nothing. He moved out a little further from the shore, trailing Idun behind him. No sign of any weakness. He halted, and then jumped a couple of inches. The ice held.
‘What do you reckon, girl?’ he said, chuckling at his own nervousness. ‘You ready to get your feet wet?’
The horse looked back at him with docile eyes, her only reply a shake of the withers. This time, he jumped higher. His feet thumped in the snow.
Nothing.
He allowed himself a sigh and gazed around. The soft patter of the falling snow was barely audible. He heard wings flutter in the treetops across the lake and then settle. For one blissful moment, his mind was still, and he took in the quiet beauty of winter now that it had settled over the land. Just for a moment.
Then he looked down at his hands. They were gnarled and cracked, dried blood clogging the deep sores across his knuckles. It was only he that was ugly in this place. Only he that didn’t belong here. He was a blight that marred this small corner of the world, that robbed it of its perfection. But he would be gone soon enough, and in a few more hours all trace of him would have disappeared for ever, and the lake and the forest could go back to their silent contemplation. They could begin to forget, until the shadow of his passing might have been nothing more than a dream in the mind of whatever woodland spirit haunted this place.
He turned and led Idun further out, circling round the great looming cliff face, gazing up at the rippling cascades of ice as they poured with exquisite slowness down the jagged rocks encased beneath.
They passed the apex of the promontory and Erlan saw beyond that the cliff receded, cutting away and shrinking until the ground sank back down to the level of the lake. Another hundred yards and they would be back on solid ground. They were going to make it.
A Mighty Dawn Page 20
