Strangely out of place was the lovely golden image of Fand, dancing ever farther into that bleak realm.
Now at last the boat came to a place where a broad rough slope cut down from a mountain so vast its top seemed crowned with stars. A glacier ran along that slope, glimmering in the weird uneasy light, down to the water. ‘This seems to be our only landing spot,’ quoth Mananaan.
Something hissed from the great tumbled blocks of ice at the glacier’s foot.
‘Methinks there is a guard to get by,’ said Skafloc. He and his companion busked themselves, putting on helm and byrnie, with furs above against the tearing fangs of cold. Each took a shield on his arm, and girded a sword at his waist. Skafloc had yet another sword in his hand, while Mananaan bore his great spear whose bright head gave back the light in a gleam of rippling lightnings.
Now the boat grounded gently on the ice and shale. Skafloc drew her ashore and made fast while Mananaan stood guard, peering into the gloom between the huge ice-boulders heaped just beyond. Thence came a grinding, rustling sound as of something monstrous in weight dragging slowly over the rough ground.
‘It is dark ahead of us,’ said Mananaan, ‘and there is an evil smell. But come, the peril grows no less by our waiting.’
He led the way between and over the enormous chunks of ice and stone. The darkness thickened until the warriors groped their way, only a few ragged patches of stars showing above the misshapen crags. A foul stink assailed them, with something of utter cold about it, and the hungry stirring and hissing grew louder.
Now they came into a narrow ravine leading up toward the glacier. Dimly Skafloc saw the great white form that waited, and his hand tightened on his sword haft.
The thing swayed toward them. Mananaan shouted a war-cry that rang glassily between the ice cliffs, and drove his spear into the looming shape. ‘Out of the way, white worm!’ he shouted.
The beast hissed and struck at him, its coils scraping over rock and snow. He darted aside, and as the evil head smote near, Skafloc hewed mightily. The shock of the blow rammed up into his shoulders, and the worm turned gape-jawed on him. Barely could he see the creature in the dark, but he knew the mouth was wide enough to swallow him whole.
Mananaan thrust his spear into the white neck, and Skafloc smote again at the nose. The snaky smell made his head whirl, he gasped for air and struck a rain of blows. A drop of blood or venom splashed on him, ate through his furs, and seared his arm.
He cursed, and hewed again at the weaving head. Even as his sword sank in, he felt it crumple, consumed by the icy blood. He heard Mananaan’s spear-shaft break as it went in.
Drawing their scabbarded blades, he and the sea king pressed forward anew. The worm withdrew before them, and they came out on the glacier.
Terrible to see was the thing. Its writhing coils reached halfway up the mountainside, white as snow and thicker than a horse. The flat serpent head swayed high above them, dripping blood and poison. Mananaan’s broken spear was in one eye, the other glittered balefully down. Its tongue flickered in and out, faster than vision could follow, and it hissed like a sleeting gale.
Skafloc slipped on the ice. Blinding swift, the worm struck down at him. Even swifter was Mananaan, holding his shield above the fallen man and smiting mightily with his sword. The screaming blade gashed open the puffed throat. Skafloc scrambled to his feet and swung likewise.
The worm brought its huge coils lashing around. Skafloc rolled aside into a snowdrift. Mananaan was swept off his feet and enclosed in a loop, but ere it could smash him his glaive had flayed open the pulsing side.
The worm fled then, plunging past them like a snowslide into the bitter sea. Gasping and trembling, the two warriors sat for a long while under the aurora ere taking up their journey anew.
‘Its blood has pitted our swords,’ said Skafloc. ‘We had best go back for new weapons.’
‘Nay – the worm may be waiting for us by the shore, or if not that then sight of us may waken its wrath again,’ answered Mananaan. ‘These blades will serve for a while, till we have the rune sword.’
They climbed slowly up the slick, mysteriously shimmering glacier. The mountain loomed blackly ahead, blotting out half the sky. Dimly, the keening wind brought sounds of a beating hammer. It was cruelly cold and lonely.
Up and up they climbed, until their hearts fluttered and their lungs gasped. Often they had to rest, even sleep, there on the enormous back of the glacier, and it was well they had brought some little food along. Slowly went the climb over the treacherous ice, a struggle into heights of darkness such as might have daunted even the stoutest heart.
Naught stirred, naught seemed to live in the tremendous desolation, but nearer and louder came the ringing of the hammer.
Until at last Skafloc and Mananaan stood at the head of the glacier, halfway up the mountain crowned with stars. A narrow trail, broken and icy, scarce to be seen in the murk, led off to one side. Sheer cliffs dropped from it to depths of windy gloom dizzyingly far down. The warriors roped themselves together and made their creeping way along it.
They came at last, after many falls where one saved the other by clawing himself to the rock, out on a ledge fronting a huge black cave-mouth. From the deeps of the cavern rolled the sounds of hammering.
A great dog was chained at the entrance. It howled and flung itself at them with slaverous jaws agape. Skafloc half raised his sword to kill it.
‘No,’ said Mananaan. ‘I have the feeling that seeking to slay this beast would bring the worst of luck. We had best try to slip by it.’
They held their shields close together and their backs to the rock as they entered. The hound’s mighty weight slammed against them and its teeth sought to rip them open. Its howling rang up to the coldly seething sky. Barely could they press off that furious attack and win past the reach of the chain.
Now they came into utter lightlessness. They held hands and groped along the downward-slanting tunnel, feeling ahead for pits and often crashing into fanged stalagmites. The air was dank and bitter cold. They heard the noise of mighty waters rushing through the dark, and they thought that this must be one of the sounding rivers that flow through hell. Louder and nearer clamored the beat of the hammer.
Twice there came a howling, and they stood braced for battle. Once they were set upon by something huge and heavy, with teeth that bit chunks out of the iron shields. Blind in the dark, they yet made shift to slay the thing. But they never knew what shape it had had.
In the end they saw a red glow far ahead, and when they hastened forward they came, more slowly than they would have thought, to a vast frosty chamber. And into this they stepped.
Dimly was it lit by the sullen coals of a low fire, but by that light, the color of clotting blood, they could discern vague gigantic shapes which might have belonged in a smithy, and at the anvil was a Jötun.
Huge he was, so tall they could scarce see his head in the gloom, and so broad that even with his height he seemed squat. He wore only a dragon-skin apron on his hairy dark body, which was muscled and gnarled like a tree bole, and his matted black hair and beard hung to his waist. His legs were short and bowed, one of them lame, and he was hunchbacked, bent over so that his monstrously long arms touched the stony ground.
As the warriors entered, he turned a terrible face on them, broad-nosed, wide-mouthed, scarred and seamed, with black hollows under the heavy eyebrow ridges. Skafloc saw that his eyes had been plucked from the sockets.
His voice roared out with sound of the rushing underground rivers that flow through the hollow caves of hell. ‘Oho, oho!’ he cried. ‘Someone comes, light-foot in the dark. For three hundred years has Bölverk worked alone in the night of his eyes. Now the blade must be hammered out.’ And he took the huge sword on which he had been working and flung it across the room. The metal roar when it struck flew in jeering echoes around the frosty walls.
Skafloc stood boldly forth, meeting the empty glare of the sightless giant, and said: ‘I br
ing an old, broken work of yours to be forged again.’
‘Who are you?’ cried Bölverk. ‘Mortal man I can smell, but there is more than a little of faerie about him. Another I can smell who is more than half god, but he is not of Aesir or Vanir.’ He groped around him. ‘I am not easy about either of you. Come closer so I can tear you apart.’
‘We come on a mission you will not dare hinder,’ said Mananaan.
‘What is it?’ Bölverk’s somber voice rolled between the walls and down the tunnel.
Skafloc quoth:
Asa-Loki,
angry, weary
with his prison,
wishes sword-play.
Here is weapon
which gives victory.
Bölverk, take the
bane of heroes.
And he opened his wolfskin bundle and flung the broken sword clanging at the giant’s feet.
Bölverk’s hands fumbled over it. ‘Aye,’ he breathed. ‘Aye, well I remember this blade. I forged the powers of ice and death and storm into it, mighty runes and spells, a living will to work evil.’ He grinned. ‘Many heroes have owned this sword, because it brings victory to the wielder. There is naught on which it does not bite, nor does it ever grow dull of edge. Venom is in the steel, and the wounds it gives cannot be healed by leechcraft or magic or prayer. Yet this is the curse on it: that every time it is drawn it must drink blood, and that in the end, somehow, it brings the bane of him who uses it.’
He leaned forward. ‘For that reason,’ he said slowly, ‘Thor broke it, long ago, and it has lain forgotten in the earth ever since. But now – now, if as you say Loki calls to arms, there will be need of it.’
‘I did not say that,’ muttered Skafloc, ‘but I meant you to think I did.’
Bölverk did not hear him. The Jötun was staring sightlessly ahead of him, rapt in his thoughts. ‘So it is to end,’ he whispered. ‘Now comes the last evening of the world, when gods and giants meet in sundering battle and lay waste the earth, as they slay each other, when Surt scatters flame which leaps up to the cracking walls of heaven, when earth sinks in the sea and the hot stars fall and the sun turns black. It ends – my long and weary thralldom, blind beneath the mountain, ends in a blaze of fire! Aye – aye, well will I forge the sword, mortal!’
Now he went mightily to work, the clamor of it filling the cave, sparks flying and bellows roaring, and as he worked he sang spells which made the walls shudder. Skafloc and Mananaan took shelter in the tunnel outside.
‘I like this not, and now I am sorry I came,’ said the sea king. ‘There is a frightful evil being awakened to life again. None have called me coward, yet I will not touch that sword – nor will you, if you are wise. It will bring your weird on you.’
‘What of that?’ asked Skafloc moodily.
They heard the hissing as the blade was quenched in venom. The fumes stung where they touched bare skin. Bölverk’s doom-song roared through the cave.
‘Throw not your life away for a lost love,’ pleaded Mananaan. ‘You are young yet.’
‘All men are born fey,’ quoth Skafloc, and there the matter ended.
Time dragged its slow way. At last came Bölverk’s shout: ‘Enter, warriors!’
They came into the bloody light. The giant held forth the sword. Brightly gleamed the blade, a blue tongue about whose edges little flames seemed to waver. The eyes of the dragon carved on the haft glittered.
‘Take it!’ cried the giant.
Skafloc seized the sword two-handed. Heavy it was, but strength to swing it seemed to flow into him. So wondrous was the balance that the weapon was like a part of his own body.
He swept the glaive in a yelling arc, down on a rock. The stone split asunder. He shouted and whirled the hissing blade about his head. It shone like a baleful lightning bolt, flickering in the gloom. Cold blue fire seemed to stream from it.
‘Ha, halloo!’ Skafloc’s fierce war-cry rang triumphant through the cave. He shouted forth:
Swiftly goes the sword-play!
Soon the foe shall hear the
wailing song of weapons.
Warlock blade is thirsty!
Howling in its hunger,
hews it through the iron,
sings in cloven skull-bones,
slakes itself in blood-streams.
Bölverk’s laughter bellowed forth. ‘Aye, wield it, wield it, warrior!’ he roared. ‘Smite your foemen – gods, giants, mortals, it matters not. The sword is loose and the end of the world draws nigh!’
He gave the man a scabbard. ‘Best you sheathed it now,’ he said. ‘And draw it not save when you wish to slay.’ He grinned. ‘But the sword has a habit of getting drawn at evil moments – and in the end, fear not, it will turn on you.’
‘Let it but hew down my foes first,’ replied Skafloc. ‘Then I care not overly much what it does.’
‘You may – then,’ muttered Mananaan. And aloud: ‘Now let us be away. This is an ill place to bide.’
They left, with Bölverk’s eyeless face staring after them.
When they had won out – this time the hound shrank whimpering aside – they set swiftly down the glacier. But as they neared the bottom they heard a rumble as of thunder, and turned about to look.
Black against the sky, towering up higher than the mountains, loomed three monstrous forms striding down on them. Mananaan said, as he scrambled for the boat: ‘I think Utgard-Loki has somehow learned of our trick and wishes not that we should carry out whatever plans the Aesir have. Hard will it be to escape this land alive.’
23
The war which Mananaan Mac Lir and Skafloc Elf’s-Foster waged on Jötunheim was well worth the telling. One should sing of the long cruel struggle with windless mist and berserk gale, with skerry and surf and looming iceberg, of the weariness which grew so great that only the image of Fand, bright and lovely against the undying night, gave cheer. That best of boats should have been honored with golden trim and a song.
Many were the enchantments with which the Jötuns sought to destroy their visitors, and evil luck did the two warriors suffer on that account. But they wrought mightily in return, not alone warding off the worst of the giant magic but also turning storms loose to scourge the land and singing mountainsides down on Jötun garths.
They could hardly hope to stand in open fight against the giants, though twice when one giant alone fell on them they killed him, but they fought monsters of land and sea raised against them, and they outran or hid from enemy pursuit. Often were their escapes narrow, especially when they went foraging inland during the long time of contrary winds, and each would make a story in itself.
It should be told of their raid on one of the greatest garths, to steal horses. In the end they left the place ablaze and made off with a good booty of which the animals were not all. The beasts they took were the smallest of ponies in that land, but huge and heavy, shaggy big-boned monsters with fiery eyes and devil hearts, in the outer world – and they feared not iron, or bearing Skafloc’s dreadful sword, nor did they ever weary.
Not all the Jötuns were hideous giants. Some of the women, in particular, were of human size and well favored. Mananaan found the outlaw life not all a grim struggle. But Skafloc did not look twice at any woman.
There is much else to tell, of the dragon and his gold hoard, of the burning mountain and the bottomless chasm and the quern of the elemental giantesses. It should be told of their fishing in the river that ran from hell, and of what they caught there. The story of the everlasting battle and of the witch in Iron Forest and of the song they once heard the aurora hissing to itself in the secret night – all were worth telling, and each would almost make a saga in itself. But since they do not concern the main thread of the story, they must be left among the annals of faerie.
Thus suffice it to say that Skafloc and Mananaan won out of Jötunheim and sailed south to the lands of men and faerie.
‘How long have we been gone?’ wondered the man.
‘I know n
ot.’ The sea god smelled the fresh breeze and looked up into a clear blue sky. ‘But it is spring.’
Presently he went on: ‘Now that you have the sword – and have already blooded it well in Jötunheim – what will you do?’
‘I will seek to join the Erlking, if he still lives.’ Skafloc looked grimly ahead, over the racing waves to the dim line of horizon. ‘Set me on shore south of the channel and I will find him. And let the trolls dare try to stop me! When we have cleared southern Alfheim of them, we will land in England and regain that – finally, we will go to their homelands and make an end of their cursed race.’
‘If you can.’ Mananaan scowled. ‘I wonder if a weary remnant of a beaten people can ever throw off their conquerors. But you must try, of course.’
‘And will the Sidhe not help at all?’
‘That is a matter for the great council. Certainly we cannot help ere the elves are in England, lest our own home be ravaged while its warriors are away. But it may well be we will strike then, for the battle and glory as well as to clear a menace from our flank.’ The sea god’s proud head lifted. ‘But however that may be – for the sake of blood shed together, toil and suffering and peril in common, and lives often owed each to the other, Mananaan Mac Lir and all his hosts will be with you when you enter England!’
They clasped hands, wordlessly. And presently Mananaan set Skafloc and his Jötun horse off, and sailed for Ireland and Fand.
Skafloc rode his black stallion toward the distant Erlking. The horse was gaunt and shaggy, still stepping proudly but with hunger in his belly. Skafloc did not look rich himself, his clothes were ragged and faded, his helm and byrnie and shield battered and rust-streaked, the cloak he wrapped around himself worn thin. He had lost weight in the winter, the great muscles lay just under the skin and the skin was drawn tightly over the big bones. But he was still arrogantly erect, leonine in litheness and power, the swift steely mind flashing in the metallic blue of his eyes. There were lines graven deeply in his face, it had lost its youth and grown harsh and remote and grim, the face of an outlaw god – its only emotion a faint one of mockery, its strength solitary and aloof. Only the fair wind-tossed hair was young. So might Loki look, riding to Vigrid plain on the last evening of the world.
The Broken Sword Page 18
