by Scott Oden
“C-Captain! Wait!” But Étaín’s weak plea fell on deaf ears as the Saxon lord spurred his horse up the road. Sobbing in desperate exhaustion, she sagged back down into the straw, her limbs growing too weak to bear her. Hopelessness swept over her like a wave. Étaín should have used what time remained to her to pray for strength, for the grace to die well, or for a remission of her sins, but instead she closed her eyes and wept. She wept for her plight, for the curse of having been born a woman—an old bitterness that had haunted her since childhood. She wept, gasping, drowning in her own despair …
Beside her, the old woman tsked. “Stop this foolishness, daughter,” she said, her voice cutting through Étaín’s desolation like bright steel. “Dry your eyes. Hold your head high. If the Norns have decreed this to be the place of your end, then what use are tears? It is better to meet your fate with a curse than with a whimper.”
The crone’s reproach was like a slap to the face. Étaín blinked. Shame scalded her damp cheeks; she nodded, forcing a weak smile to her lips as she wiped her tears with the back of her bound hands. She did not look up. After a moment, she said, “You sound like someone I once knew, many years ago.”
“A good Dane?”
“A good man.”
“Count yourself lucky, then, child. A good man is worth his weight in gold. Most are like this lot: rough slag cast in the shape of a man and cunningly gilded. Pretty to look at, but not worth a tin farthing.” The old woman started to hum, then, for the benefit of the restive girl in her arms. It was a happy tune, and it conjured memories of the long journey she and Njáll had made together.
Étaín studied her clenched fists, her lips quivering as she recalled the happiness she had known, then. In Njáll, she had found the father she never knew, the brother she never had; he was her protector, her confessor, her courage, and her conscience. She had shared in his conversion, watching as a bandy-legged priest baptized him in the surf off the coast of Cornwall, and together they had sworn an oath to bring the truth of the Lord to the heathens of the Danemark ere the world’s end. It was Njáll who had shorn her copper-colored hair and taught her to carry herself like a man, so she might make that long journey unmolested. And as they enacted the simple routines of the road—rise, pray, walk, eat, pray, and sleep—Étaín had found contentment, that elusive ingredient missing from her life at Glastonbury, and later at Exeter. She could have lived such a life forever, had God not put that wretched devil, Grimnir, in their path. And that gave rise to the question: had the skrælingr served Divine Providence by authoring her return to Wessex, where she might atone for her part in the destruction of Exeter? The Almighty has a long memory, Njáll would say on those nights when his own crimes weighed heavily on him. Did God require her blood and her tears, as the folk of Exeter bled and wept? Was suffering to be her penance? Perhaps so.
A sense of calm washed away her anguish as from deep within Étaín found the strength to raise her head, to stare at the hard gray world. The old woman crinkled her eyes, signaling her approval.
The road, stone-paved and arrow-straight, ran from the bridge to the city’s gate, a league distant. It cut through a brambled wasteland as dull and monotonous as the sky above; Étaín saw no hint of spring, here. No green shoots grew among the thorn thickets, nor had the stands of oak and beech—the nearest a bowshot from the road—come into bud. Rain dripped from naked branches.
A hundred yards on, a muddy track bisected their path to create a crossroad. Here, a great stone cross stood sentinel, no doubt set in place by Saint Ealdhelm himself, who was a great raiser of crosses. Skeletal crows perched on the arms of the cross. Scores of them, blue-black and grim, iron beaks cracking on the stone like workmen’s hammers. They cr-r-rucked a warning, sinister eyes glaring as the wagon approached. The old woman shivered. “Odin’s bastard children,” she whispered, gesturing with a sharp jerk of her chin.
Étaín flinched from their baleful gaze. The hatred sloughing off them ran deeper than a mere animal’s disdain for Man. It was the hatred of an enemy, of a mortal foe bent upon the destruction of a species. The crows redoubled their attack upon the cross, chipping away at it with chisel-like beaks even as they fouled its surface with their excrement. Étaín almost cheered when, on the captain’s orders, a soldier rode up to the base of the cross and impaled one of them on the iron head of his spear. The rest took to wing, but rather than fly away, that somber-hued multitude swarmed through the column of Saxons, their harsh voices like fingernails scraped across slate tiles. They passed the wagon en masse, inches from the crown of Étaín’s head; she saw the driver—a toothless old soldier with a pox-scarred face and a fringe of gray hair—swat at them as they winged past his ears. He cursed, invoking the name of God. An instant later, one vicious-looking bird, more skeletal and bat-winged than the rest, detached itself from the flock and flew straight at the man. Étaín started, voicing a cry of alarm as the bird punched like an arrow through the driver’s chest.
No welter of blood sprayed the Danish captives. The man’s flesh appeared inviolate, but to Étaín’s horror she saw that vile bird emerge from between the driver’s shoulder blades with something clutched in its claws. Something it tore free of the old soldier with a sound like fabric ripping—something made of mist, man-shaped, pale and indistinct. Étaín watched him stiffen; she cried out again as he clutched at his chest and toppled from the wagon. The crow lifted skyward with its prize as another soldier leapt from his horse to the driver’s bench and took up the fallen traces.
The captain cantered back along the line of horsemen, sword drawn. “What goes?”
“It’s old Brand, my lord,” replied a soldier who had dismounted and now cradled his aging comrade’s corpse. “His heart must have given out.”
Étaín, though, knew differently. She cast her eyes to the cloud-girt heavens, where the crow—that ethereal burden yet clutched in its talons—had rejoined a great flock that encircled Badon like a besieging army. And amid their deathly clamor, she paled to hear the shrieking of a human soul as sharp beaks and rending claws tore it to shreds.
14
Badon was an ancient city and its stones reeked of blood. Étaín could smell it: a metallic stench like wet copper mixed with the miasma of damp rot and sulfur—a distillate of the decay and violence that diverse hands had worked into the foundations of the city. A thousand years before Alfred the Great forged the West Saxons into a race of conquerors, the legions of Caesar had come into this land and driven out the native tribes, the Britons and the enigmatic Cruithne. Roman axes laid low the tree-garth of Sulis, fierce goddess of the waters, and Roman priests extinguished the eternal flame that had burned since time out of mind in her sanctuary. Cunning in the ways of stone, these Romans had raised walls of ashlar around the sacred spaces; they had carved a forest of marble dedicated to the healing goddess Minerva, and tamed the hot springs by diverting its mineral-rich flow into artificial lakes and fountains.
But as the wagon trundled through the muddy streets, a sulfurous yellow mist pooling in the low places, what Étaín could see of the Romans’ stone-cunning was not particularly impressive. The city’s walls were as ragged as a crone’s smile. Timber baulks shored up crumbling defensive towers, with palisades of rough planking and crude brickwork plugging fissures torn in the walls from the infrequent convulsions of the earth that shook the region. Huts squatted amid the ruins of Roman villas like scavengers, their broken columns supporting roofs of wood and thatch. Underfoot, a slurry of dung, mud, and chaff covered intricate mosaics; their fanciful and half-glimpsed designs bore the heavy tread of Time, defaced by hoof and by wheel and by hobnailed boot, the spaces left by shattered cubes of glass and stone filled in with the filth of countless years. Herds of cattle meandered through the once-opulent arcades of the temple of Minerva to graze in the overgrown ruin of some nobleman’s pleasure garden. And on a hillock overlooking the city, Étaín spied a massive fortification, a walled cathedral still partially sheathed in scaffolding. Sh
e apprehended this to be their destination, the haunt of the feared Hrothmund, lord of Badon.
Across the wagon’s course wafted a jaundiced veil of mist that gave forth the throat-abrading reek of rotten eggs. Étaín shivered, though not from the cold. For, in truth, the chill did not reach deep into the heart of Badon, where the very ground itself seeped a damp warmth. No, she shivered from a creeping sense of menace that stole over her. Shapes moved with the mists, ragged-edged figures of a deeper yellow that seemed to spring forth from the ancient stones. The girl in the old woman’s lap, who had dropped into a restless slumber, moaned in the throes of some vile dream. Étaín’s first instinct wasn’t to proffer comfort, but rather to clap a hand over the poor child’s mouth as the shapes in the mist turned toward her.
“Keep her quiet,” Étaín hissed to the old woman. “Can you not see them?” The crone frowned as Étaín pulled herself to her knees. The girl moaned again, drawing the mist-figures closer. She saw them more clearly, now—like draugar, they were, the restless dead; their translucent faces sunken like the visages of plague victims. Trembling, Étaín crossed herself and clasped her bound hands in prayer. “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.” She recited the words she had learned so long ago, at Glastonbury, and with each precise syllable the ghostly shapes recoiled as though some great weapon had been leveled against them; she heard their angered hissing, their sepulchral voices. “Oathbreaker!” they said. “Give us the oathbreaker!”
Étaín did not know how to answer; instead, she closed her eyes and redoubled her efforts. “In nomine—”
The sting of hot saliva on her cheek snapped Étaín from her prayer, the spittle followed by a litany of curses. “Whore!” the old woman screamed, lashing out with one foot to shove her back. “Traitor! Crossbearer! Bitch of the White Christ!”
“No, you don’t understand, old mother! The words keep them at bay! The words—”
The boards of the wagon shifted as one of the wounded Danes, hands chained rather than bound, lurched up and caught a handful of Étaín’s hair. Savagely, he pulled her backward and slammed her down into the wagon bed. An explosion of pain blotted out the morose sky; she screamed, but the Dane’s hand, two fingers lost to the siege, wrapped around her throat and choked off her voice. His scarred face floated above her, rotting teeth bared in a thatch-bearded jaw. He muttered something. A woman cried out in alarm …
And the last thing Étaín saw before the world faded into blood-tinged darkness was the iron-bright head of a Saxon spear tearing through the Dane’s cheek.
15
With the coming of night, Grimnir stirred from his bolt-hole. He stretched his cramped limbs, rolling his shoulders and cracking the tendons in his neck. He glared at the purple sky and cursed the pissing rain. He cursed the dripping canopy of trees that gave him no shelter, the moss-clad stones that offered him no comfort; he cursed this hilltop where once a fortress had stood, now nothing more than a ring of foundation stones. He cast his net wide and cursed every village, field, farmstead, and pasture between this godforsaken place and the siege lines at Nunna’s Ford. He cursed Wessex and the lands of the English and all things under Heaven with vitriol to spare.
Grimnir hawked and spat. “Three days,” he muttered, dragging his kit out from beneath the overhang of an eroded embankment where he’d spent the last few hours hiding from Saxon hunters. For three days he had shadowed the enemy column as it left the burned-out wreck of Nunna’s Ford. Three days of belly-crawling through muddy fields and clambering through hedges thick with thorn and bramble, and for what? What did he have to show for it? Nothing! Grimnir ground his teeth as he dug around in his pack, finding a hunk of salt-dried mutton and a flask of ale—part of the spoils taken from the men he’d slain with that bastard Cynewulf.
Oh, he had laid eyes on his wayward little hymn-singer that first day, bundled and tied up in the back of a wagon like a sack of onions. But eyes were all he could lay on her. Rust-beard, the Saxon captain, had taken his mate Cynewulf’s death hard; to thwart night-skulkers like himself, he had set a cordon of horse pickets around their camp while also sending out patrols and hunters with dogs in hopes they might stumble across the trail of the raiding party that had ambushed his men. Though it made his task more difficult, that they feared him so brought a fierce twist of glee to Grimnir’s lips.
Rust-beard’s hunters had driven him far afield; in truth, he let himself be driven. He could have killed them easily enough—as easily as he’d killed Wulfric outside the ruined villa at Nunna’s Ford—but he decided the need to remain invisible to the Saxons trumped the need to split their miserable skulls. Now, though, thanks to the tenacity of those blasted hunters, he feared Étaín might have slipped beyond his reach. The Saxons’ destination lay just over the low hills, a score of miles distant; a place he’d heard one of them call Badon. Even if he could move at speed, Grimnir doubted he could reach the column and spirit her from Rust-beard’s grasp before they found refuge behind the cursed walls of this Badon. Grimnir picked a gobbet of gristle out of his teeth and flicked it away in disgust.
And if he needed something more, an added insult to the insolent theft of his hymn-singer, Grimnir’s limbs had grown weak and they trembled constantly as from great exertion. He felt … smaller than he had before. Diminished. His people knew nothing of illness, nor did poison give them cause for concern. That left only one other explanation for this lingering malaise: it was this wretched land! It bore the Nailed God’s malignant stink—like iron boiled in brine. It clung to every hill and hollow, this stench of dead veneration. The very air was rank with it. Not like the wild heart of Sjælland, where wind and water, soil and stone, yet echoed with the song of the old gods. No, England had suffered too long under the harrow of Christ. It flayed the earth, seeped into its bones, and leached from Grimnir the bitter wrath that kept his black blood flowing, rich and hot. If he stayed too long, he risked becoming like the dvergar: a caricature of himself, a goblin in truth, haunter of children’s tales who must succumb to apathy, to indolence, and to the cold hand of Death.
Was that the fate of the landvættir? He had noticed their absence in the Sallow Wood, and with each passing day that absence grew more pronounced. Most were gone for good, driven into the shadow of oblivion by the misplaced faith of Man, the spaces where they once dwelled as empty and lifeless as a corpse. Others, Grimnir sensed, had quit their accustomed haunts of root and stone of their own volition; anger had unmoored them, the heat of betrayal, and they followed now a longing for vengeance. These things Grimnir knew, for he could taste them on the night air, like the galvanic tingle that ran before a storm. But whatever had drawn the few remaining landvættir away, not even the appearance of the last of the hated orcnéas could entice them to return. Not even the last son of Bálegyr …
Cursing his own black thoughts, Grimnir bolted the final bit of mutton, washed the salty flesh down with a last long draught of ale, and tossed the now-empty flask into the undergrowth. He scrubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. He had one last chance to reclaim his foundling, and he meant to take it—Rust-beard, his wretched Saxons, and their Nailed God be damned!
Shouldering his pack, he hitched at his seax and set off into the night, still muttering a litany of oaths. Grimnir loped down the hill; at its base, he skidded off the crest of an overgrown dike—part of an old defensive earthwork, abandoned when the bloody-handed Romans brought their heel down on the necks of the Britons. He landed lightly; bent low, he snuffled at the ground like a bloodhound.
Grimnir’s lips skinned back. He smelled no Men nearby, which meant the hunters had given up—likely on account of the pissing rain. East, he spied the gleam of ruddy light against the low clouds. Badon, he reckoned. His destination. And though his arms ached and the muscles of his legs burned, his black blood sang out for a fight. He would not go quietly into any abyss.
With a pitiless laugh, Grimnir headed east; bone and sinew worked in unison, fueled by the need to kill.
He loped like a wolf across heath and moor, setting a pace for himself no mortal could have matched—not even the fabled runners of the Elder Days. Miles flashed by; soon, the wilder lands gave way to partitioned fields. He plunged through hedgerows, leapt wattle fences, and sprang over weed-choked rills. Dogs howled in fear as he ghosted past the steadings of their masters—his passage sending ripples of nightmare into the hearts of the young and the elderly; women gasped in their sleep, and men woke to feel the creeping talons of doom at their throats.
He crested a final hill and beheld the valley of the Avon River, with its ancient bridge spanning the sluggish waters; beyond, the reddish glow of Badon fired the low clouds above. Grimnir cursed at the sight of the town’s walls: though mossy with age and poorly maintained, they remained formidable. Grimnir judged them to be thrice his height and more; torches marked the defensive towers and he could see jags of ruddy light reflecting from the mail of soldiers who stood sentry duty above the closed gate. He would need to creep about the circuit of the wall and find its weakest point, that spot where he could—with luck—scale it unseen.
At least fording the river at the bridge would be no problem. He saw no sign of patrols; no eyes other than his own watched the cobbled stone road. Nor did he foresee any difficulty traversing the no-man’s-land between the river’s banks and Badon’s walls; it was overgrown, rife with thickets of beech and oak, thorn and bramble. No, it was the walls themselves, and what lay beyond, that presented the most pressing problem.
Grimnir crouched; a breeze ruffled his lank hair. On it, he could hear the moan of spectral voices. The landvættir, shrieking and screeching in anger, but not toward him. There was something else: a sense of vexation—angr in the tongue of Grimnir’s people—that clung to every ridge and glen, an ancient indignation that kept the early spring at bay. Grimnir tried to make sense of the faint cacophony. They were oblivious to him, of that he was certain. Their wrath was for another … a betrayer …
