A Gathering of Ravens

by Scott Oden

  Étaín clutched at Grimnir’s arm and fairly dragged him after her. He could sense no deceit in the old woman’s bearing; she seemed genuinely concerned for the well-being of strangers—a trait wholly alien to his people, who viewed hospitality as a burden and strangers as potential enemies. Warmth drifted from inside the cottage, and in spite of it all Grimnir’s mouth watered as he scented day-old bread and herbs and some kind of stew. The hound glared at him as he ducked under the dripping eaves; it growled, ears flattened against its shaggy skull, when his foot touched the threshold. The beast recognized him as an enemy even if its mistress could not. “Hush, Conán!” she scolded, and the hound fell silent. The crone reached out and touched Étaín’s arm, then Grimnir’s. “Don’t mind him; aye, he’s not one for company. You’re soaked to the bone, child. Get yourself by the fire. I’ll fetch a blanket so you can skin out of those wet clothes. You, too, warrior. Maeve is my name. Blind Maeve. Be welcome.”

  Grimnir slouched and scuttled into the cottage; he edged around the glowering wolfhound, not giving him his back, while Étaín sank on the hearth by the crackling fire. She sighed at the sudden warmth. Maeve retrieved a blanket from an open cupboard and shuffled to Étaín’s side.

  “Here. Give me those rags. Where you from, child?”

  “Britain,” Étaín muttered, peeling off her clothes and wrapping the blanket around her. “Glastonbury, in the heart of Wessex.”

  “Wessex, eh? A long way from home. How are you called?”

  Étaín gave a weak smile and sagged against the older woman. “I am Étaín. My companion, there, is Grimnir. And we have come farther than you could ever imagine.” She shivered despite the warmth of the crackling fire. Maeve’s brow furrowed; she laid one gnarled hand against Étaín’s cheek, then across her forehead.

  “Fever.”

  “It struck ere we left Wessex,” Étaín said. “And then again on the journey across the sea.”

  Maeve clucked. “Don’t worry, child. Blind Maeve can fix what ails you. Oh, aye. Root-wise and herb-crafty, she is. Nary a fever’s been made by the Almighty that Blind Maeve couldn’t quench. Grimnir, is it?” She glanced over her shoulder, her sightless eyes milky. “There is stew, bread, and mead on the table. Help yourself to it whilst I tend to this poor child.” Maeve rose and fetched more woolen blankets, soft cloths, a copper kettle, and a small chest like the kind carried by Moorish doctors in the streets of Córdoba.

  For his part, Grimnir remained silent as he unfastened his ragged wolf-skin cloak. He hung it and his leather satchel from a peg, on the wall by the fire. Next, he drew his seax and eyed the blade, looking for signs of rust. Satisfied, he set it aside and unbuckled his weapon belt, then shrugged out of his iron-ringed hauberk and laid it out by the fire; the padded jerkin he wore beneath it was rust-stained and sodden. He peeled this off, as well, and put it with the rest. Naked but for his kilt and sandals, Grimnir sat at the table, his seax close at hand, and fell upon a bowl of the stew, a savory concoction of winter vegetables and salted pork to which he added chunks of bread torn from a loaf.

  “How can you tell he’s a warrior?” Étaín asked quietly as the old woman returned to her side.

  Maeve tapped the side of her long nose. “I smell the leather and ironmongery. But—” She paused. “—he is no Gael, neither is he a Northman or a Briton. There is something … odd about his scent. Something I cannot place.”

  Étaín said nothing. She stared into the crackling flames as, behind her, Grimnir sniffed the mead before drinking it straight from the crockery jug. He watched from the corner of his eye as the old woman examined Étaín with only her hands, feeling out every scar, welt, bruise, laceration, and contusion from the last few weeks.

  “You’ve not had an easy time of it,” Maeve said, feeling the sharp angles of Étaín’s cheekbones and caressing her brow. She traced the scabbed wound left behind from Cynewulf’s boot heel. “And this scar, I fear, will never fade.” She palpated the younger woman’s neck, probing for swollen glands or signs of imbalanced humors. Muttering under her breath, Maeve turned to the physician’s chest and rooted through tinctures, salves, and vials of herbs by feel alone. She ground and mixed, tasted and spat, oblivious to the world around her. The wolfhound lay in the far corner of the cottage, watching his mistress work.

  Grimnir finished off a second bowl of stew, then a third, and drained the jug of mead. Warm, sated, he stretched his legs out beneath the table and leaned back, his shoulders against the rough stone of the wall. He closed his eyes and, for the first time since leaving Sjælland, he allowed himself to drift off to sleep.

  4

  Above the cottage, with its warm thatch steaming in the cold rain, a salt-heavy wind yet lashed the leaves and branches of ancient oaks. There, three shadows met in congress. Three ravens, they were, an unkindness of silent, feathered giants, weird and terrible in their sentience. Cruach was there, and another of his kin, slightly smaller than him in size; the third raven, though, was a monstrous creature, larger even than the other two. Its feathers gleamed like pale moonlight, and it watched the glade below through green and malevolent eyes …

  “Fomórach,” it croaked.

  5

  The soft touch of a hand to her brow roused Étaín from a light and dreamless slumber. She drowsed by the fire, reclined upon a bolster and wrapped in a blanket of herb-scented wool. Opening her eyes, she saw Maeve beside her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I dozed off.” Outside, the rain had slackened, becoming a soothing patter.

  “Nay, child, say nothing of it. Rest only helps the white willow and feverfew to weave its spell. Aye, fever’s broken,” the blind Irishwoman said, her voice barely rising above a whisper. Grimnir and her wolfhound, Conán, snored in unison, each seeking to outdo the other with every long, drawn-in breath. “Feel up to a bite of sup?”

  “I think so.”

  Maeve rose and bustled about the cottage. The old woman moved with well-rehearsed economy, instinct and long familiarity informing each gesture as she fetched a bit of hard cheese, a loaf of bread, a clay jar of wine, a wooden bowl, and two horn cups and put them in a woven basket.

  “When did you lose your sight?” Étaín asked.

  “Oh, long before you were born, child,” she said, bringing the basket back to the hearth. Her joints crackled as she crouched. Touch replaced vision; she fished the bowl from the basket and leaned nearer the fire, where an iron pot of bubbling stew hung suspended from a soot-blackened hook. “It was … an injury to the head. A Norseman’s axe. A rabble of them came up from Veisafjorðr seeking a bit of loot. I was a girl of ten.” The memory sent a tremble of fear through Maeve; her hand shook as she spooned broth off the stew and into the bowl. “I had an aunt, my father’s sister, who was a wise-woman. Aye, a witch some called her, but she’d studied the physician’s art in Moorish Córdoba. Even with all her herbcraft and book lore, it took a year and more to drag me back from Death’s door. My sight didn’t return with me.”

  “I am sorry,” Étaín said, taking the bowl from Maeve’s hand.

  But the older woman just shook her head as she reached for the wine jar and poured two cups with apparent ease. “Nay, Blind Maeve don’t need none of your pity, child. The Almighty has blessed me plenty. I still got my wits, two legs, two arms, and a spine. I can hear and I can smell … better, I’d wager, than that great hairy heathen snoring on yonder floor.”

  “I’m…” Étaín caught herself before she could apologize again. She sighed and gave a wistful smile. The young woman blew on the surface of the broth before taking a sip. Wind rustled the thatch on the eaves of the cottage. “This might seem like an odd question,” Étaín said after a moment, “but where in Ériu are we? We were crossing to Dubhlinn before the storm rose…”

  “Dubhlinn? So you’ll be bound for the Troubles, then? Well, you’re not too far off the mark. You’re about a mile north of Arnkell’s Lag … at Lorcan’s Wood, in the foothills of Cualu.”

 
“And Dubhlinn?”

  “Twelve leagues and a pinch, due north. Will you and your man stand with good King Brian or against him?”

  “Oh, he’s not my man,” Étaín said, her face reddening. To hear Grimnir described thus … she shuddered at the idea. “Blessed Christ, no. We merely travel together … allies, after a fashion. Though this has not always been so.”

  Maeve raised an eyebrow. “Your ally, then. Do you know his mind?”

  “That I know quite well, for he has never been shy about voicing it. Grimnir is after revenge and I suspect he will stand with the side that makes it easier for him to kill the bastard who crossed him.”

  “Some poor thegn among the Foreigner?”

  Étaín finished the broth, set the bowl aside, and tore off a chunk of bread and some cheese. These she ate slowly as she considered the weight of the name on the tip of her tongue—a name that crouched like a spider at the center of a web of deceits and betrayals, all centered on this emerald-hued land. To speak it might conjure something unwanted. Between bites and swallows Étaín regarded the blind old Irishwoman, her forehead creased and careworn and burnished by firelight. Maeve provoked a deep sense of trust in Étaín, but was that trust misplaced? She glanced over at Grimnir’s sleeping form. Grimnir, who trusted no one. No, she decided suddenly. I am not like him. “Not a thegn,” she replied, “but one of their jarls. Bjarki Half-Dane.”

  Maeve shuddered, took a long draught of wine. “He aims for a lofty target, your ally. God-cursed, that one is! A foul sorcerer of the Danes. Aye, old as Methuselah, men say, and more cunning than the Serpent. And he has a dead man who protects him! Draugen, they call him—an apostate deacon of Christ, slain in the Danemark and given foul life by his master. Ever does Half-Dane lurk behind Dubhlinn’s walls with that witch, Kormlada, weaving evil nets that snare the good-hearted and the devout.”

  Étaín smiled. “And as my companion might say if he were awake: faugh.”

  “You doubt what I say?”

  “Not in the least, good Maeve. But, as you said earlier, there is something odd about Grimnir. Such things cause him no consternation. He is … from a different time.”

  “He might be, aye, but his doom is writ in the same blood as any man’s,” Maeve said, and after a few minutes of silence she added, “You need not go with him, you know. To Dubhlinn. Stay with Blind Maeve if you like. The Troubles is no place for the likes of us, child.”

  “You would shelter me? A stranger to you, blown upon your doorstep by unnatural winds?”

  A shadow crossed the old woman’s brow. “Shelter you from him? Is that what you mean? Is he a beast among men? Would he seek to hurt you if you renounced him?” Daggers lurked in Blind Maeve’s voice; though sightless, Étaín did not doubt she’d seek to open Grimnir’s throat at the slightest provocation.

  Étaín touched the old woman’s hand in gentle benediction. “No, dear Maeve. Sheathe your knives. He does not own me. Not anymore. I go where I will, and for now I will go north with him to Dubhlinn. Not to fight, if that’s what makes you fearful of my safety.”

  “Then to what end?” Maeve sniffed.

  Étaín thought a moment, and then replied: “To bear witness.”

  “There is a tale, there, I sense.” Maeve yawned; the hour was late.

  “There is.” Étaín finished her bread and cheese, drained her wine cup, and sank back on the bolster. “Perhaps tomorrow…”

  Maeve yawned again, putting her back against the hearth. “Aye,” she muttered. “’Tis a tale I’ll want to be hearing, child. Not now, though. So … tired.”

  Outside, the rain beat a staccato rhythm; the wind played through chinks in the cottage walls, a soft and gentle whistle that caused Étaín’s mind to wander. She relaxed, closed her eyes. A scent tickled her nostrils, then—a cloyingly sweet odor, like flowers left too long on a grave.

  The wolfhound growled in his sleep, but then whimpered.

  Wood creaked as Grimnir shifted his weight.

  Étaín heard Maeve stir. “No,” she moaned, only half conscious. “Not them. Why have they come? Why…?”

  The younger woman felt a thrill of panic skate down her spine; she tried to no avail to rouse herself, to stir limbs gone heavy with the promise of slumber. And as that dark and unnatural sleep reached out to embrace her, Étaín fancied she heard the door to the cottage snick open, followed by the sinister rustle of wings …

  6

  “Up, you laggard!”

  The voice was muted, distant. Hearing it, Grimnir came awake with a start. Wood scraped stone as he lurched to his feet. His skull throbbed, as though someone had pried it apart and rifled through its contents. Darkness clung to his vision. Grimnir blinked, cursed; he knuckled his eyes in an effort to dispel the mist that obscured them. Soon, this murk resolved into a silhouette, its outline growing more familiar by the moment.

  “Who’s there?” he muttered. “Gífr?”

  “Caught you napping, little rat!” That harsh reply lifted the veil from Grimnir’s eyes. Gífr was as Grimnir recalled: tall and lean, his hard-gristle frame plaited together with ropes of muscle and sinew, and covered in a sallow hide seamed with scars. Scores of them. Hundreds, layered in a maddening suggestion of feathers. But, as Grimnir blinked, again, Gífr’s scars became what he remembered—a tapestry of flesh drawn in iron that told of the fading fortunes of the kaunar.

  “What goes?” Grimnir said, glancing about the darksome cottage. The place seemed familiar, though he could not recollect it. Had he been here before? “Why have you come?”

  “To fetch you,” Gífr replied.

  Grimnir shook his head, hissing at the jags of pain the gesture provoked. “Fetch me where, you old git? You’re dead!”

  “Aren’t you a precious sort of fool, little rat?” said Gífr, his laughter echoing about the cottage. Woven into the fringe of hair about his long ears, gray as storm wrack, were countless old bone discs and beads—of copper, silver, garnet, and malachite; they clacked and clicked as he shook his head. “Do I look dead to you?”

  No, Grimnir agreed. He did not look dead. “Fetch me where, then?”

  “To him. He has need of you.”

  Grimnir stiffened. A cold lump of dread soured his belly even as jitters of anticipation set his limbs a-tremble. “Him? He’s here?”

  “Have you gone daft, little rat?” Gífr scowled. “Swilled too much mead and took a tumble, I’ll warrant! Hit your blasted head! Where else would One-Eye be, fool?”

  “Bálegyr…” That name had been a talisman for as long as Grimnir could remember, its owner nothing short of the god in whose shadow he had dwelled; he had no memory of his sire save as the echo of a thunderous voice, a menacing shape rough-hewn from half-recalled memories and tales grown wild in the retelling. But more than anything, the name conjured for Grimnir an image of his mother, Skríkja, dark and fell-handed with arms upraised in defiance of the wretched gods of the North: “Así att-Súlfr Bálegyr skiara tar nekumanza!” she would scream in bitterness, her voice hard as the gnawing ice. “Bálegyr is the Wolf, come to devour your entrails!” The night of his death, she’d seen in the heavens a single eye, unblinking, wreathed in fire …

  “Ymir’s blood, you miserable shit-bird!” Gífr said, breaking Grimnir’s reverie by cuffing his ear with one horny fist. “He calls for you and here you stand, mooning like some cow-eyed maiden! And he’s not dead, either, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  No, Grimnir agreed. Bálegyr wasn’t dead, either.

  “Grab your kit and leg it, little rat. He’s waiting a ways to the north with what’s left of the lads, at a place called Carraig Dubh.”

  Grimnir nodded. He reached for his seax, but Gífr’s laughter brought him up short. “What?” he snarled. “What are you cackling about?”

  Gífr’s smile had all the humor of a grinding ice floe. “Only a little fool would take a scullery knife to war.”

  Grimnir looked again. He cursed under his breath, dug the heel o
f his hand into one eye then knuckled the other. What he had taken for a seax was, in fact, nothing but a rust-pitted kitchen knife. He slung it aside.

  “Your spear is yonder,” Gífr said, with a jerk of his sharp chin. Sure enough, leaning in the corner was a war spear—which at first glance he mistook for an old broom—its iron blade gray and lethal in the dim light. Grimnir snatched it up and made for the cottage door.

  “This Carraig Dubh,” he said. “How will I know it?”

  Gífr sat heavily in the chair Grimnir had quit. “Use your nose, wretch. He’s left you a trail of crumbs. Go quick like, little rat. Our precious chief needs you.”

  Grimnir gave a nod and took off without a backward glance, running full-out into the perpetual twilight. Gífr smiled and …

  … Shook, shedding the glamour of Grimnir’s dreams like a dried husk; it hopped to the table’s edge, icy white feathers rustling as it fixed the two sleeping women in its baleful gaze. For a moment it considered ending their lives. But this albino raven—no mere witch’s familiar like Cruach, who had gone back to his mistress bearing a message, but a prince of the fading Tuatha—instead took wing and followed in the fomórach’s wake, careful never to let him stray too far. With a single, deep cr-r-ruck, it wheeled away north even as the rising sun crested the eastern rim of the world.

  7

  In the oldest quarter of Dubhlinn, on the bluff overlooking the black pool that lent the town its name, the first Norse invaders had discovered a solitary ash tree growing from the stony soil. Beneath its boughs they had erected an altar, and on that altar they had offered nine captives to the Allfather in thanks for safe passage across the storm-racked Irish Sea—nine being the number most sacred to Odin. Their sacrifice found favor and under the Allfather’s auspices a city grew from the marshy shores of the pool to be a center for trade in the Viking world. So it was that nineteen times nine years had passed since then, by the reckoning of priests, and the altar of Odin on which was built the foundations of Dubhlinn lay now at the heart of a walled enclosure.