The Heart of What Was Lost

by Tad Williams

  “One more time!” shouted Brindur hoarsely. “One more time and they’re ours!”

  Isgrimnur rode closer, but still held his distance, keeping his eyes on more than that one spot: Brindur and even the usually cautious Vigri seemed blind to anything but the stretch of wall before them. Isgrimnur looked up to the three protruding beaks of the tower as a few arrows came hissing down from the battlements. Although some of these shots found their way between the soldiers’ upturned shields, the rest of the ramparts were still all but empty of defenders. Surely the Norns realized that their damaged wall could not hold much longer. Had they turned from their defensive positions and fled toward Stormspike? Or was something else going on?

  The ram was pulled back again, the groans of its handlers and the pounding drums mixed with the battle-chants of the waiting Rimmersmen, but the bloodthirsty excitement of his countrymen no longer touched Isgrimnur. Something truly did seem wrong. His men had driven hundreds of Norns to this spot, and although a few of them had been killed on the walls by Vigri’s Tungoldyr archers, Isgrimnur knew those had only been a fraction of the enemies that should be fighting to keep mortals from crossing into their lands. By the Holy Ransomer, the duke thought, if Sludig is right, what are they planning?

  The chains creaked as the ram reached its farthest backward point. A moment later the drum fell silent, then the overseer cried, “Now!” The ram swung forward and the bear took another crunching bite.

  A goodly chunk fell from the middle of the wall where the iron head of the ram had struck; a moment later another piece fell from above it. Then, with a rumble like thunder directly overhead, the great stones began to tip and slide. The troops around the ram, arrested in mid-cheer, scrambled back—some of the stones were bigger than a man.

  Once it began, the cascade of black stone could not be stopped. The whole center of the wall before the ram tottered and then fell in on itself with a grinding crash. Huge stones began to cascade on either side, throwing flurries of snow and mud into the air, scattering men in all directions. A moment later the collapse was over: all but the bottom few cubits in the wall’s center had toppled, leaving a gaping wound in the great structure like an upturned horseshoe. The Rimmersmen quickly reformed their ranks and began to surge through this opening, climbing over the remaining stones like ants swarming a fallen loaf of bread, screeching and bellowing in their gleeful frenzy to get at the enemy who had evaded them so long.

  A moment later the attackers discovered that another wall stood behind the first. It was only barely taller than a man, obviously hasty work by the defenders behind the great wall’s weakest spot, but as the first Rimmersmen made their way over the rubble, they found themselves climbing into a hornet’s nest of arrows: most of the rest of the castle’s defenders were hidden there, waiting patiently for the chance to fight back that had now arrived.

  “No fear! They are only a few!” shouted Vigri, his short legs straight in the stirrups as he waved to his troops. “On, now, Northmen! Show them what iron tastes like!”

  But even as the jarl’s Enggidalers and Brindur’s Skoggeymen forged into the gap, Isgrimnur heard another cry. It was only another voice in the chaos of many, but this one caught his attention because it came from a different direction.

  To his left and behind him, a good distance back from the breach, stood the catapults that had been pelting the walls with large stones to divert any remaining defenders from the ram. These siege engines were mostly guarded by the mercenaries from the south, men of unknown quality that Isgrimnur had not trusted in his front lines, and now he saw one of these southerners waving his arms and shouting, trying to get the attention of the Rimmersmen fighting near the ram. Isgrimnur could not make out what the man was saying through the noise of the assault, but he followed his wild hand gestures and looked up to the high peaks that framed the wall on either side of the pass. His heart lurched. About halfway up the slope on Isgrimnur’s left hand a huge boulder had somehow worked its way loose from the soil and was beginning to move ponderously downward. The massive chunk of stone seemed to be alternately skidding and rolling right toward the Rimmersmen as they fought to get over the collapsed wall through the flurry of Norn arrows.

  Isgrimnur shouted a warning, but of course no one could hear him. High above, the irregular boulder slowed for a moment, its flattest side down, and the duke felt a moment of hope that it had stopped; an instant later the great chunk of stone slid over the small level spot that had slowed it and began to roll, big as a three story house in the wealthy merchant’s quarter of Elvritshalla, careening toward the base of the hill.

  Isgrimnur spurred his horse forward, shouting a warning as he headed toward the hole in the wall the ram had made.

  “Forward!” he bellowed with all the strength he had in his great lungs, trying to drive the rest of the waiting troops through the gap. “Forward or be crushed! ’Ware! ’Ware!”

  The huge stone smashed the corner of the wall as it scraped past, sending monstrous black shards flying like pebbles but slowing the stone not at all.

  The collapsed section of wall lay before him, then his horse was leaping and sliding on the piled stones as men threw themselves out of his way.

  “No, forward!” he cried. “Forward if you want to live!”

  And then a powerful wind nearly blew the duke out of his saddle as the great boulder struck just behind him, grinding men and stones and the mighty bear-headed ram itself into an unrecognizable clutter, with a noise like the end of the world.

  Porto, from his position beside the catapult known as the Donkey, had been watching the Rimmersmen waiting to attack with a mixture of admiration and disbelief. As the wall wavered he thought they looked like a pack of dogs, their beards bristling, teeth bared, howling and even singing as they waited, and all he could think was, Are they really going to charge through that hole into the teeth of whatever defenders are left? Because surely the Norns were aware of the widening cracks spreading between the great stones. Even a blind man could hear the shifting of tons of rock as the wall slowly began to give way.

  Although the catapult had been loaded and wound again, it had not been fired: two of its crewmen lay on the snowy ground with Norn arrows in them and their hammers lying beside them, one man already dead and the other shrieking for God to help him. Several of the long iron stakes that held down the front of the war engine had worked their way loose on its last shot, but Hjortur the catapult master did not seem to have noticed in the confusion of battle. Porto knew that if the front was not anchored the release would not just miss the target, but might throw its stone into the Rimmersmen’s own ranks, so he hurried around the wooden frame. As he lifted the heavy maul the dead man had dropped, he heard a sharp, excited cry from the soldiers at the wall as the great Bear was released again and crashed into the heavy stones.

  “Endri!” he shouted. “Damn it, man, grab the other hammer and help me knock these stakes in!” Even as he said it, Porto lifted his own maul and swung it, but as he brought it down he was almost knocked from his feet by a tremendous rumbling impact as the great wall that sealed the valley finally collapsed.

  He turned and saw the Rimmersgard soldiers scrambling forward over the tumbled stones of the wall. They were bellowing like wild things, and he was so taken by the sound of it, the way it murmured in his bones and made his heart race even faster, that for long instants he did not hear Endri’s warning. The young man was leaping up and down, shouting at him and pointing upward; Porto saw a movement at the corner of his eye and turned away from the spectacle of Isgrimnur’s soldiers charging the gap just as the first of them began to fall back, sprouting arrows.

  Something was tumbling toward him down the slope at the side of the valley. Something very big.

  For a brief instant, as Porto tried to understand the size of the shadowy mass skidding downward toward them, he thought, “Dragon!” his mind ready for any kind of madness the
Norns might be able to summon. Then he saw it for what it was, a slab of rock the size of a village church. Even as he watched, it tipped and began to tumble.

  Porto dropped his heavy maul to run, but because he was still looking back at the huge stone as it grew bigger by the instant, he tripped over the dead man he’d taken the hammer from. The man’s face was right below him, mouth sagging open, and for an instant as Porto fell it looked as though the corpse was warning him. Or perhaps taunting him: You think staying alive is easy?

  Porto hit the icy ground hard, felt a brief spray of cold snow, then struck his head so roughly that his thoughts shrank to a narrow tunnel of light in a field of black emptiness. Even the boulder that was about to crush him seemed far away, without meaning, though its thunderous approach seemed to drown all other noise. No matter, he thought absently. Everything was over. Over.

  And then he was yanked away, scraped face-first across the rough, stony soil and its layer of snow, heat and chill and bright white pain all battling for his attention—but Porto had no attention to give.

  It had not been the great stone that had hit him he realized an instant later, floating in dreamy detachment. He saw its shadow slide past and heard it smash the Donkey into splinters, then he watched the great catapult arm bounce away, end over end like a spoon thrown by an ogre’s child, until it finally stopped, leaning upright against the base of Three Ravens Tower.

  Endri stood over him now, the sky a swirl of pearl bright light and dark clouds. Porto could only stare up at his friend in wonder. He knew something had happened, but his thoughts seemed to be at the end of a long string, and although he pulled at it, all he was doing was reeling in more and more string.

  “The catapult is gone!” Endri cried, as if that should mean something.

  The young man’s eyes were so wide Porto thought it must be painful.

  “Now the ram, too. I think the Norns found a way to push that rock down on . . .” Endri paused with a look of confusion. Still puzzled, he turned to look behind him, as though someone had tapped him on the shoulder while he stood in a deserted place. A moment later the youth dropped to his knees, far more slowly than the great stone had traveled down the mountain. Then, equally slowly, he toppled forward onto his face. His chain mail gave a single soft clash as he hit the ground, then Endri lay still and silent, a black arrow quivering in his back.

  Duke Isgrimnur did not want to look back at the damage the monstrous stone had caused in its fall, but he could not help himself. The head of the iron ram was intact beneath the rubble but the great log, a single trimmed pine trunk more than thirty paces long, had been crushed to splinters, and he could see broken bodies in the pile of shattered stone and wood. Then an arrow whickered past his helmet, and he hurriedly turned back to what lay before him.

  Fewer Norns had been lying in wait behind the small, hastily built second wall than Isgrimnur had feared at first; the fairies had saved their arrows and put them to deadly use, although most of his men had been shot in the first instants of surprise. Though many Rimmersmen fell in the first charge, their comrades had pushed forward after them, climbing over the dead to reach the second wall. Brindur himself had led his Skoggey kinsmen over the top, shouting the name of his dead son Floki, and within moments was among the Norns on the other side, howling with mad glee as he hacked at his enemies. Vigri’s men quickly followed. The Norns were deadly fighters, but they were outnumbered by more than a dozen to one, swarmed as though beset by hunting hounds. Within an hour Isgrimnur’s forces had taken control of the wall.

  A few more White Foxes tried to hold the tower, but its portals had not been fairy-magicked and Rimmersgard axes soon splintered the doors and knocked them from their hinges. Terrible fights took place in the darkened stairwells and in the uppermost chamber between the great beaks, but at last the final Norn died, pinned against a wall by several spears. The besiegers dragged the pale creature’s body to the hole in the bottom of the beak and shoved it through. It spun slowly down the long drop to the ground and bounced when it struck, like a discarded fish head.

  Thane Brindur had sustained many wounds but none of them were mortal. He licked his lips and grinned as one of the barber-surgeons cleaned and stitched the worst of them. “I told you,” he growled. “Fairies can die like anyone else once you shove a yard of iron into them.”

  Isgrimnur, who in his time had killed more than his share of Norns, did not bother to reply to Brindur’s comment. “The rest of the White Foxes are gone. That was but a token force. I counted only a few score corpses. The rest have fled back to their city.”

  “So?” Brindur rubbed his finger along a freshly sewn cut that extended from his wrist to beyond his elbow, then he examined the blood. “That is only another hundred that we will kill later rather than sooner.”

  Jarl Vigri approached with several of his thanes. “The scouts are back from atop the cliffs, Your Grace. Yes, that boulder was the Norns’ work—the tools are still there where they dropped them. But looking out across the lands beyond the wall, the scouts say it is still several days’ march to Stormspike from here. Those who escaped may be waiting for us in ambush along the way.”

  Brindur wiped his bloody finger on his already muddy, blood-spattered surcoat. “Slaughter them in droves like the beasts they are or kill them one by one—it makes no difference to me as long as we destroy that foul nest in the mountain.”

  Isgrimnur frowned and tugged at his beard. “We are already in territory that no mortal armies have entered in centuries. We have lost a quarter of our army in two or three small skirmishes on the outskirts of the enemy’s lands—what makes you think they will not fight even harder to defend their home? The Bear is smashed, as well as two of our catapults, so how do you propose we enter Stormspike, Brindur, even if the Norns are too few to defend it? Which is by no damn means certain.”

  “It is certain,” Brindur said. “If they had reinforcements a day or two away, do you think they would have let us break down their wall and walk into the Nornfells without a fight?”

  “I do not call it ‘without a fight’ when more than a hundred of my men are killed,” Isgrimnur growled.

  Brindur spat on the floor. “This is war, not the squabbling politics of court. If we do not destroy these creatures in their final hole we have wasted those dead.”

  Vigri cleared his throat. “I do not say that Brindur is right, my lord, but I do not say he is wrong, either. We came to finish with these corpse-skins once and for all. If you set out to burn the wasp’s nest, you must finish the job or they will just make more wasps.”

  Isgrimnur snorted. “These are not wasps. These are not beasts. These are ancient creatures more cunning than we are, and they are certainly not cowards. Do you think we have seen all their tricks?”

  “They are running out of feints,” Brindur said as flatly as he might have said “the sky is blue,” or “blood is red.” “We saw no faces in the fires this time, no shadows or ghostly voices. Just arrows and stone walls.”

  “And a very large rock which destroyed our catapults and our ram,” said Isgrimnur. “As well as killing a dozen or more of our men. But we will miss the ram more than any of the rest.”

  “The Bear is not dead,” Brindur declared. “His iron head still wants to bite. There are plenty of trees here. We will build him a new body and knock down the fairies’ front door.”

  Isgrimnur turned to Vigri, since it seemed as if the jarl and Sludig were the only sane voices left. “What do you think?”

  Vigri looked weary. His armor was almost as bloody as Brindur’s. “What do I think? That this is a dreadful chore, my lord. But we have taken it on and we cannot leave off yet. That is what I think.”

  Isgrimnur sighed. “I suppose you are right.” He reached for the bowl of ale one of his carls had set out on top of a wooden chest and felt the letter that he had thrust into his belt earlier, now scratching against
his belly. “Ah! Of course! I have some news that slipped my mind in the clamor. Good news, at that.”

  “Praise Usires!” said the jarl. “Pray do not keep it to yourself, my lord. That is something we need more than food or drink.”

  Isgrimnur nodded. “When first I heard from you, Vigri, telling of the siege you had begun, I sent out messengers to the nearest thanes, Alfwer of Heitskeld, Helgrimnur Stonehand, and several others, asking help from everyone within a fortnight’s march.”

  “Alfwer,” said Brindur, and although he did not spit again, he might as well have.

  “Never mind Alfwer,” said Isgrimnur with a tight smile. “I have not heard back from him anyway—doubtless he is busy counting his cattle. But the messenger to Helgrimnur came back just this morning.” He paused to take a drink.

  “Please, Your Grace!” said Vigri. “What good news? You are tormenting me.”

  Isgrimnur could manage only the weariest of smiles. “I beg your pardon, my friend. Helgrimnur writes to say that he had already mustered men to send to Erkynland, but when they were not called for, he released them for the spring planting—or such as it was this year, with the fields all frozen.” He opened the letter, smoothing it on his knee. “Yes, here. But when the Norns began to make their way through the nearby lands, he summoned his warriors back, clever fellow. He has half a thousand men under arms, ten score of them experienced fighters. Now, the happiest part—he is sending them with his sister-son, Helvnur, who also leads nearly a hundred mounted men. The messenger said Helvnur and his men are only a few days behind him. They did not expect to find us already so far north.”