A Gathering of Ravens

by Scott Oden

  “Stand your ground,” Bjarki growled.

  “Aye, stand your ground,” Njáll said. “And if you keep standing it long enough the Irish will bury you in it! Go, I said.”

  And the reavers did. Backing away slowly, they turned and vanished into the shelter of Tomar’s Wood. Bjarki’s face flushed with rage. “Maggots! Filthy traitors! You think you can just put by your oaths to serve me? Pah! And you, you wretch, I’ll tear your spleen out!” He jabbed his broad-bladed sword at Draugen. “You’re a dead man!”

  Njáll snorted. “Better than you have tried.” He hefted his axe, his gaze sliding to where the Leinsterman stood, Étaín still hard in his grip. “I’ll take the girl.”

  “The feckin’ hell you will,” barked the Irishman. “I’m skinning out, too, and the bitch is coming with me!”

  “No!” Bjarki roared. He gestured to the Gael. “Bring her to me! Now! I want this little snake to watch while I joint her like a side of beef! You’ll take this and you’ll not take that, eh? Pah! You’ll take my leavings, you wretch! Bring her, damn your eyes!”

  In response, Njáll lowered his axe … and smiled.

  That was warning enough. With a sulfurous curse, Bjarki Half-Dane whirled around …

  … and bellowed as the handle of an axe crunched across the bridge of his nose. He staggered, blinded, blood sheeting from broken cartilage. “Daufi,” he heard Grimnir chuckle, his voice like the grinding of stones.

  Bjarki lowered his head and charged like a wounded bull; he swept his sword low, like a scythe, hoping to reap a harvest of flesh. Half-glimpsed through a haze of pain, Grimnir somehow danced aside, pivoted, and struck. The axe handle splintered on the back of Bjarki’s skull.

  And Bjarki Half-Dane, who had once made kings dance like marionettes, felt Fate’s sharp blade sever the strings of his consciousness …

  9

  As Bjarki fell, the Leinsterman panicked and ran. He hauled Étaín back by her hair and dragged her along with him. His callused hands stank of blood and sweat and the filth of battle; his eyes gleamed with fear, and it made him reckless. He did not care anything for the kinsmen he had lost, only for the spoils now denied him. That was why he had fallen in with the reavers—the gold arm rings and inlaid sword pommels spoke to his lusts. He wanted, and in wanting he died.

  Njáll crossed the interval at a run and struck the Gael with a thunderous roar. All three went down in a tangled heap. An axe hacked into bone; a man screamed. A foot caught Étaín in the hip; a body rolled over her, crushing her head into the dirt. The sharp edge of a pommel opened the skin above her eye. Snarling, she rammed her elbow into a groin. There came a wet grunt, and a spray of blood washed over her. And then …

  Silence.

  Étaín felt a gentle hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes, felt a man’s fingers wipe away the blood. She concentrated on the face staring down at her—bloodied, bruised, and much older but familiar nonetheless. “I found you,” Njáll murmured. “Almighty Christ, I found you.”

  Étaín threw her arms around his neck and sobbed like a child. “It’s been so long,” she said, gasping. “So long! I thought … I thought you’d given up!”

  “I almost had,” he said. “Come, let’s get away from here.” And cradling her to his chest, Njáll stood and limped away from the blood and the twisted corpses. He carried her across the green plain and down to the shore, where the waters of the Irish Sea foamed against the sand …

  And when the Irish came up, weary and heartsick from battle, they found their slain king. They mourned and they railed and they swore vengeance before Almighty God, but they never found a trace of his killer.

  10

  A stream of hot liquid spattered Bjarki’s face, rousing him from his stupor. He spluttered and groaned, flinching from the salt sting; a bitter stink filled his nostrils, recalling the bilges of the wolf ship where he’d spent his first years of life, scrounging through filth like a feral dog, getting pissed on by his father’s savage crew …

  Bjarki cursed; he twisted away from the gush of urine directed at him. Opening his eyes, he saw Grimnir standing over him, naked to the waist with his prick in his hand. Grimnir chuckled as he finished pissing on his brother’s bastard son. “Wake up, Daufi.” He turned away, fastening his trousers. Bjarki spat at his retreating back.

  Like Grimnir, Bjarki was stripped to the waist, clad only in blood-stiffened trousers and hobnailed boots of oxhide. He lay on his side, bound at wrist and ankle with ropes of plaited leather. “Where are we?” Bjarki muttered. His face was a mass of bruises, and the back of his skull felt like a smith had used it for an anvil. He glanced about. From the foreshortened horizon and the distant booming of the surf, he surmised they were on a headland, an upthrust spit of rock that was lifeless save for an ancient ash tree that thrived somehow on the thin soil and salt-heavy air. A scion of Yggðrasil, it had stood sentinel over the Irish shore since the Elder Days. The land around smelled of burning, and of sea spume, and of a cold wind from the North; overhead, beyond a thickening veil of clouds, the Promethean sun brought fire to the western sky.

  “Someplace quiet,” Grimnir replied. Muscles writhed and tendons cracked as he flexed his heavy arms, his apelike shoulders, and his corded neck. Sinew creaked each time he clenched and unclenched his taloned fists. “Will you not beg for your life?”

  “Why?” Defiance burned in Half-Dane’s eyes. “I still have it.”

  “Not for long.” Grimnir sat on a large stone, its surface pitted by the elements. “Bugger all, but you might have made a trusty lad if only you’d remembered your place.”

  “My place?”

  “The bilges, swine. It’s where we keep all the half-breeds and by-blows. But, no … you got so high-and-mighty by thinking you were something you’re not.”

  “And what is that, old fool?”

  “One of us,” Grimnir snapped. “Faugh! Look at you! What kaunr worth his sand would follow something that crawled from between a slave-whore’s legs? Hrungnir should have wrung your worthless neck.”

  “But he didn’t,” Bjarki said. “And look where that got him! Dead by his own son, his own blood!”

  “Aye.” Grimnir stood. He reached down, and from inside his left boot he drew forth a bone-handled dirk, its blade a foot of damascened steel with two razored edges tapering to a diamond-hard point. It was a noble weapon, snatched from the axe-riven corpse of a Norse captain on the plain of Chluain Tarbh. “Too bad for you I’m not the fool my brother was. I should tie a stone around your filthy neck and throw you over the edge of the cliff.”

  “But you’ve got something else in mind, eh?”

  Grimnir’s nostrils flared; his eyes blazed in the deepening gloom. “I want to see if you’re as good a sport as your whore of a mother was!” He tossed the dirk down; it clanged and skittered across the ground, coming to rest hard by Bjarki’s feet.

  Grimnir stepped back. His rune-etched long seax hissed from its scabbard.

  Half-Dane snatched up the dirk. He sawed through the ropes binding his feet, then reversed the blade and freed his hands. For a moment he crouched there, motionless, glaring at Grimnir through rage-slitted eyes. Then, with a wild and desperate laugh, Bjarki reeled up and hurled himself at his hated enemy.

  Grimnir sprang to meet him. Bjarki was a head taller than he, heavier and with a longer reach; nevertheless, Grimnir’s fury was the berserk rage of Fenrir, his cunning the sly craft of Jörmungandr. Under a bloodred sky the two foes crashed together, breast-to-breast, half a thousand years of poisonous hatred pouring into a bone-cracking orgy of violence. Steel flashed and grated; it darted and rang. Breath hissed and spatters of blood rained to the ground. Red blood. Human blood.

  Cursing, Bjarki stumbled back; his left arm hung useless by his side, the thick muscle of his shoulder severed by a ripping blow of Grimnir’s seax. The skrælingr raised the blade and licked a thin ribbon of gore from it. A slow serrated grin spread across his vulpine features. “Faugh! Red as that who
re who whelped you!”

  Bjarki snarled and swiped at the offending blood, glaring at it as if it were a badge of shame the Fates had saddled him with. He circled right, panting, now, and dripping sweat. Grimnir shifted, moving in unison to keep Bjarki from getting around.

  “Trying to run? Oh, but we’re not done yet, little fool! Not unless you’re ready to beg.”

  Half-Dane wrung sweat from his eyes and spat. “No,” he growled, stumbling back left; he staggered, fell to one knee. The tip of his dirk scraped the stone. Rivulets of blood streamed from the wound in his shoulder, sluicing down his arm to drip off his useless fingertips.

  Grimnir’s smile widened. “Maybe you are done, Daufi.” He stalked forward, reversing the grip on his seax. “Beg, and I’ll make it quick.”

  Faster than his twisted frame belied, Bjarki pivoted at the hip and slung his dirk in a desperate underhand throw. Any other knife would have gone hilt-over-tip, or wobbled like a useless chunk of metal, but not this one. A master had forged it, and its weight and balance were as precise as that of a Frankish axe. It struck his foe in the face, point-on; Bjarki heard Grimnir grunt in surprise, and watched as his kinsman reeled and crashed to the earth.

  “Ha!” Bjarki thrust himself upright. “Who’s so high-and-mighty, now, son of Bálegyr? Piss on me? By Odin! I’ll piss on you, you dunghill rat!” Grimnir lay facedown on the cold stone of the headland; a puddle of black and stinking blood spread out from the left side of his head. Half-Dane staggered up and planted one hobnailed boot in his ribs. “Black-blooded son of a whore!”

  Nothing.

  Bjarki laughed. He bent over Grimnir and seized him by his left arm, rolling him onto his back. “Where’s that fancy blade of yours, eh? That’ll make a fine—”

  Grimnir came around hard, hissing like a snake; his right eye burned like a seething ember of hate while his left was nothing but a blood-leaking ruin. The hurled dirk had gouged a furrow from the bridge of his nose, across his eye socket, and to his left temple.

  The rune-etched blade of Grimnir’s seax flashed up; driven by iron muscle, it thudded into Bjarki’s right side, sliding under the ribs to pierce his vitals. Bjarki Half-Dane’s eyes registered shock.

  “Got you, Daufi,” Grimnir cried, shoving Half-Dane aside. He snarled at the pain in his skull as he got to his feet. “Nár! Not as dead as I looked, was I?”

  Bjarki writhed; he curled around the blade in his belly, unable to draw breath. Red arterial blood foamed in his throat. Grimnir snatched a handful of his hair and dragged him to the base of the ancient ash tree. He slammed Bjarki upright against the gnarled trunk.

  Bjarki Half-Dane gasped for breath. Grimnir took hold of the gore-slimed hilt of his seax. “Hear me, Sly One, Father Loki! Bear witness, O Ymir, sire of giants and lord of the frost! By this blood, I fulfill my oath!” A cold wind rose from the north.

  With a howl of savage fury, Grimnir carved the blade across Bjarki’s belly and ripped him open from right to left. Viscera tumbled out, loops of red and purple intestine, sacks of organs; blood splashed the roots of the tree, and the stench of bowel rose from the cavernous wound. Bjarki staggered, dragging his guts along. His mouth worked soundlessly.

  Grimnir caught him by the scruff of the neck. “Look here, Hrungnir! You are avenged!” Grunting, he hurled Bjarki Half-Dane over the edge of the cliff.

  Tall rolling clouds sailed like titans before the rising gale, and the purple skies erupted in jags of savage lightning, the clean white light striving against the rage of darkness; thunder roared like the crash of war drums. Yggðrasil trembled, and Grimnir, who was the last son of Bálegyr left to plague the hollows of Miðgarðr, sat with his back to the bole of that ancient ash tree … and laughed as the heavens erupted in endless strife.

  11

  At the far eastern tip of the Howth Peninsula, on a rocky headland three hundred feet above the crashing surf, Étaín stood beneath the boughs of the gnarled ash tree and watched the sun rise through a veil of storm clouds. Days before, this had been a green and pleasant land where the wealthy jarls of Dubhlinn made estates and built mead halls, where slaves tilled the soil and thegns hunted for pleasure. All that was before Murrough’s raid. Now, Howth was a wasteland of scorched fields and burned-out groves; the estates were heaps of ash, and the mead halls of the Danes were gutted skeletons that clung to hilltops. The green land would return, she knew. She could feel it.

  With one pale hand, Étaín reached out and caressed the rough skin of the ash. Deep in its heartwood she heard the voice of its spirit. It was faint, but it sang … and she knew its song:

  Away sprang Bálegyr’s son, | across the Ash-Road

  With shoulders cloaked | in the skin of the wolf-father;

  The Æsir gave chase, | goaded by Alfaðir,

  And with him | came the Twilight of the Gods.

  Nodding, Étaín turned away. She had given her word that she would make an ending to his tale, but in her marrow she knew it could only be the ending of a stanza, part of a larger song …

  Epilogue

  In the days after the Battle on the Plain of Chluain Tarbh (known today as the Battle of Clontarf), Étaín of Wessex returned to the tiny cottage on the coast of Leinster where Blind Maeve lived and learned the healer’s art; Njáll son of Hjálmarr joined her there, and with his help she composed a saga in both her native Anglo-Saxon and the tongue of the Danes. After Njáll’s death, in AD 1017, she traveled the breadth of Ireland, healing the sick and bringing succor to the victims of war. She settled, finally, in the valley of the River Shannon, where the O’Brien kings of Kincora founded a nunnery in her honor. Étaín died in AD 1084.

  During her long life, Étaín amended and added to the saga she had written with Njáll; at least two other hands added to the manuscript after her death and canonization. Eventually, it became part of a manuscript whose official designation is “British Library, Cotton Vespasian D.VI,” commonly referred to as The Rathmore Codex.

  Though Saint Étaín never gave her work a title, scholars today refer to it as the Kaunumál—though it is better known in lay circles as The Death-Song of Grimnir son of Bálegyr.

  Author’s Note

  Every writer has that book. One born from the same soup of half-formed ideas and underexposed imagery as any other, but once conceived it digs in its heels and fights for life. It knuckles its way through your crowded subconscious, squalling in the din—it wants you to hear what it has to say, and it wants you to act upon it. That book doesn’t care that it might be unworkable, or trite, or done to the point of cliché. It simply wants to be, and it leaves the details of how to the writer. For me, this was that book.

  Since young adulthood, I’ve wanted to write a book about Orcs—those foot soldiers of evil first revealed to us in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. I wanted to write it from the Orcs’ point of view. And I wanted to redeem them. This was not a new idea, either. British fantasist Stan Nicholls had realized the same idea in 1999, with the publication of Bodyguard of Lightning; before that, in ’92, Mary Gentle wrote the gallows-comical Grunts, wherein a company of Orcs discover a cache of modern weapons. Indeed, so common was this notion of the redemption of the Orc that before I ever put fingers to keyboard on the earliest drafts of A Gathering of Ravens there were already dozens of books out there featuring Orcs as protagonists—from Noble Savages to hulking Greenskins to classic Tolkien-inspired goblins. But, damn it all, I had an idea for a book and it just wouldn’t go away.

  Alas, such are the vicissitudes of the writing life that what I called simply “The Orc Book” got pushed onto the back burner as I wrote The Lion of Cairo; it fell by the wayside again in order for me to work on an ancient Greek tale called Serpent of Hellas (which was never realized), and it was finally put aside with the rest of my writing so I might become caregiver to my terminally ill parents. And yet, because it was that book I kept tinkering with it, creating a secondary-world Orc culture in terms and equivalences my history-w
ired brain understood: “… one part Vandal, one part Afghan tribesman, and one part Mameluke; none of the usual attributes: not inherently evil or blighted, no aversion to sunlight, and don’t require a powerful non-Orc Will to guide them. They are not green, simple-minded, or piggish.” More importantly, however, this gave me something creative to do. It kept me sane, more or less.

  My parents both passed away in 2011; when I returned to writing in 2012 I decided to do that book the honor of finally getting it written. But when I went back over my notes, my synopses, and my fragments of prose I discovered the whole thing had a decidedly pastiche air about it—a Frankenstein’s Monster scavenged from the notebooks of Tolkien and his literary descendants.

  I used to blog quite frequently, so I can look back and see that at least since 2008 I had questioned my ability to create a distinctive enough take on Orcs in the framework of a secondary world. It wasn’t my forte. All my previous books were either pure historical fiction or historical fantasy (with an emphasis on the historical); did I dare try to chisel Orcs out of their accustomed milieu and mortar them into our own world—mixing history and myth à la Robert E. Howard’s “Worms of the Earth”? That question elicited a great deal of conversation online, some pro but mostly con. It was the late Steve Tompkins of the online journal The Cimmerian who best elucidated the problem of taking Orcs out of their accustomed haunts. He wrote:

  To reconfigure them as an unlovely-but-arguably-racially-profiled warrior-race, unrestricted free agents looking for a destiny of their own is to risk losing the plot. It’s precisely the fact that they were gengineered in the hells beneath the halls of a Dark Lord—‘And deep in their dark hearts the Orcs loathed the Master whom they served in fear, the maker only of their misery’—the tension between slavery and sentience that characters like Gorbag and Shagrat evince, that renders them so compelling.1