Icefall
Page 21
CHAPTER 22
THE BREAKING OF THE WORLD
The ground trembles. Whether from fear or anticipation, I cannot tell. But through my boots I feel it quiver with the flex and slide of muscle under skin. The cave billows a pungent steam into the ravine, filling it with a fog that obscures the glacier above us. The boulders and slopes of shale to either side are coated in rime, a pale frost-skin gathered from the air. I move forward in awe and fear, as though crossing the boundary into Niflheim, the mist-world of ice and death.
The others appear to be as overwhelmed as I am, for no one speaks, and it seems that for each of us, a single step is an act of will. Even if there were words I could summon, I am certain the fog and cold would freeze them to my lips as I spoke them.
Up around the mouth of the cave, the rocks are bare and wet. They glisten in the heat that churns from the mountain, from the dragon breathing in its lair. I remember the warmth I felt in that cave before, and fear that to hide there will be impossible now.
“Keep moving,” Hake says, some life restored to his voice.
We pick our way forward, and soon the glacier looms out of the fog. At first I suspect my vision of betrayal, for the ice appears alive. Through the haze, the glacier’s face writhes. I blink and peer up at it as we draw closer, and before long we stand at its feet.
“By the gods,” Hake whispers. “There’s a whole lake trapped in there.”
Bera’s question coming up the ravine is now answered. The glacier, it seems, has been hoarding itself, refusing to let go of its melted, watery flesh. It has somehow bound itself with the twin chains of warmth from the mountain and the cold from the air, and now it thunders and cracks and moans under the strain.
“A story must be told of this,” Alric says.
Glacial water moves behind a transparent layer of ice in great ropes and coils, twisting on itself like the great serpent holding the floods at bay. I feel so small standing at the feet of this uprighted fjord, so insignificant. On my shoulder, even Muninn has stilled.
“Gunnlaug will be upon us soon,” Bera says. “We should decide what to do.”
No one responds.
“Please,” Bera says.
Hake looks at her, then up at the cave. “The mountain burns inside. You must try for the pass.”
Not this again. “We must try for the pass,” I say.
Hake limps over to Harald and holds out his hand. My brother looks up at him and then gives the berserker his war hammer.
“Thank you for carrying my weapon,” Hake says. “You are already a fine warrior. Little in body, but not in heart.”
My brother bows.
“Harald,” I say. “What are you doing? He still needs you to carry that.”
Hake turns to me. “No, I don’t.” He twists his hands on the haft of his weapon. “I will hold the enemy here. And as I die, so will Gunnlaug.” He smiles at the war hammer as he says it.
I roll my eyes and walk right up to the berserker. I take hold of his war hammer, and as I do it, I realize how unthinkable it would have been for me to do such a thing only months ago. “Give it to me, Hake. We already decided we go together.”
Hake lifts his weapon out of my reach with his good hand and nods to Alric. The skald comes up and takes my shoulders in a firm but gentle grip, sending Muninn fluttering to the ground.
“Come, Solveig,” the skald says.
I twist him off. “Hake, I command you to give me your weapon.”
The berserker shakes his head. “Forgive me. But I cannot obey you.” He points up the mountain, up the path that skirts the glacier’s edge to the pass. “Bera, take your son and Harald. Your only chance now lies that way.”
Bera takes Harald by the hand. “Thank you, Hake. Thank you.”
Hake nods. “Alric, take Solveig —”
“No!” I shout. He cannot abandon me. He cannot leave me. I can’t bear to lose anyone else, especially not Hake. Not Hake. I’m shaking. I grab his free hand. I tug on him, toward the direction of the path. “You’re coming with us!” I’m sobbing. But he doesn’t move, and I yank harder, but it’s like pulling on a tree. He says nothing, but he winces, and I realize I’m holding his wounded arm. I let him go.
And in tears, I beg. “Please, don’t do this. Don’t do this. I need you.”
The firmness and determination remain on his face, but his eyes soften. “Twice now you have refused to leave me behind, but now you must.” He sets his war hammer on the ground. Then he lifts his massive hands and lays them against each side of my face. He closes his eyes, and then he bends at the waist until his forehead touches mine. He holds it there for a moment and sighs. “I would be honored to have a daughter such as you.”
Then he pulls away and wipes a thumb under one of his eyes. He picks up his war hammer and turns his back on me.
“Hake,” I whisper.
He doesn’t turn around. Alric rests a hand on my shoulder.
I step out of the skald’s reach. “Hake,” I say, but now Raudi is here, helping Alric lead me away.
“Come, Solveig,” Raudi says. They force me toward the path.
“Hake!”
The berserker never looks back.
My feet slide on the rocks as Alric and Raudi haul me up the side of the mountain toward the pass. Harald is with us, glancing over his shoulder. Muninn follows, too, but he appears reluctant, hanging back and then catching up in bursts of flapping. He knows we’re leaving someone behind. Does he remember that it was Hake who caught him and gave him to me?
I fight to tear free of them. “How can you do this?”
“He is Hake,” Bera says. “And he is not only doing this for you.”
That stops my thrashing. She is willing to let Hake die for her and her son. I fall silent, but look back, hoping to see my berserker loping up the trail after us. Instead, he stands alone before the glacier, war hammer hanging at his side, waiting in the mist. And then he moves. In spite of his injury, he stomps, leaps, and spins.
“Wait,” I say. “Look.”
They pause with me and watch as Hake begins to dance. At least that is what it seems to be, but it is nothing I have seen before. It is ferocious. It is wild. It is power and rage and bravery in motion. Even from where we are, we can hear his prayer-roar, his call to Odin. The raw beauty of it frightens me, and we cannot help but linger to watch him.
“He is trying to bring on the battle rage,” Alric says.
“Can he stop all of Gunnlaug’s men?” Harald asks.
None of us gives him the answer. No, he can’t. Not even with the berserkergang upon him could Hake kill them all. Some will get by him, and they will come after us. And I think the others must know it, too.
“He can’t save us this way,” I say. “We’re going to be caught, and his sacrifice will have been in vain.”
Alric stares at me. Hake chants below us, and Alric swallows.
“Hake wants to die with honor,” Bera says. “Would you take that from him?”
I narrow my eyes at her. “Do not pretend you leave him for his sake.”
“Be quiet,” Raudi says. “Listen.”
Then I hear them through the fog, an extra chill in the air. Gunnlaug’s men are almost here. They climb, shouting and cursing, vile voices from my dream. But instead of terrifying me as they have before, they enrage me, even more than when I told the tale to Gunnlaug.
I want to be the wolf. I want to be Fenrir, let loose from my chain so that I might swallow Gunnlaug whole. I want the serpent to release its tail, for the floods to rise and drown our enemies. I would break the world to save us. But those are just stories.
Or are they? I look at the glacier, ready to shatter. I look at Hake, at the war hammer in his hand. Though a story may begin as a lie, perhaps it can be made true. Perhaps their ultimate power is found in how they inspire us to action. I tear free of the others and race down the hill.
“Solveig!” I hear Raudi call.
But I ignore him.
“Stay back!” I scream. “All of you.”
Raudi reaches toward me. “Solveig —”
“No, Raudi,” I say, and pull away from him.
“What are you doing?” Alric asks.
“I am making your story true!”
The sounds of Gunnlaug’s force are closer now. Alric cocks his head toward them. He listens a moment, looks at me, and something flashes in his eyes.
He extends a hand toward me. “Solveig, listen to me now. Everything I have told you. Everything I have taught you. You must forget it all.”
“What?”
“Last night, as I watched you tell your tale, I realized I was in the presence of legend itself, and I have been a fool.”
The war hammer slips a little in my hand.
Alric takes a step closer to me. “You have the strength to break every dusty rule and tradition I have hidden myself behind. You have in your voice the power to shape the world. You are more than a skald, and you will shake the earth by its foundations. Not even your father can stop you. I only wish that I could see what you will become.”
“Alric, I —”
He lunges at me and easily wrestles the hammer from my hands. I stagger away from him, and Raudi gathers me into a hold that is more of a hug. The skald looks up at the ice and pauses for one brief moment.
“Raudi,” he says. “Get her up the mountain. You, too, Captain.”
“What are you doing?” I ask.
Alric lifts the war hammer over his head. “Choosing a side.” Then he swings the weapon, bashing it against the ice. The sound of the impact echoes through the ravine.
“Now, Raudi!” Alric says, and swings again.
Movement in the fog catches my eye, dark man-shapes advancing. An army of trolls and frost giants. Over the top of their voices, I hear Gunnlaug driving them on.
“Kill everyone but the boy!”
Alric swings again. And this time, the ice shudders, a rumble that disrupts the roiling of the trapped water, as though the great serpent inside has become aware of us.
“Go!” Alric shouts.
Gunnlaug and his men emerge from the mist. Hake leaps toward me. He pushes me and Raudi up the path, though I keep looking back at Alric. The skald swings again and again, leaving a gaping white crater in the ice. The ravine is filled with the sound of his striking, a god-anvil ringing through the mountains. Alric sweats. He laughs as Gunnlaug barrels down on him. And then I hear a cracking. A shifting in the ground as though the serpent’s grip has slipped, its strength giving out.
Hake, Raudi, and I pause a distance up the mountain. Gunnlaug has almost reached Alric, his blade drawn. The skald looks up at us. At me. He is smiling, but it is not the lie-smile he has always worn. It is a truth-smile. A torch-smile. His deep-self burning through all his layers.
Alric swings again. The war hammer lodges in the ice, and the world breaks apart
The force from the exploding glacier knocks me to the ground, and Hake falls with me. A surging white ocean erupts from the ice. It scours the ravine, deep enough to claw at the path just a few feet below us. Millstones of ice tumble through the water, grinding and cracking. The water leaps over itself, stampeding down the mountain, annihilating every thing in its path.
Alric is gone.
Gunnlaug and his men are gone. All of them.
And still the water flows. But it slows as the glacier sheds its burden, the source of its being and also its death. Hake and I rise to our feet, and he puts his arm around me as though afraid to let me go. I hold him up and embrace him. Within moments, Bera and Harald come down the path.
“Oh, mercy, you’re alive,” Bera says, barely holding on to Muninn. “We thought the water took you.”
My raven caws and flaps and bursts from her arms. He flutters right over to me, and I lift him to my shoulder. “Alric saved us.”
“Where is Alric?” Harald asks.
My eyes take in the devastated ravine, the walls, and the water running down every crack and fold. My throat feels tight. I clear it, and swallow. None of this seems real. Alric’s death cannot be real. Right now, it feels as though we could all just be inside one of his tales, and he will soon tell us out of it, and we will be sitting with him by the fire in the hall.
“Alric is dead, Harald,” Hake says, but the berserker is looking at me.
Everyone is looking at me.
“His story isn’t finished,” I say, but I don’t know how it is supposed to end. It cannot end like this.
The sun is fully up, and the fog has been swept away. The water flowing out of the glacier weakens from a flood to a river. We wait until the ice has sloughed off all it can, until the strength of the falling stream is right with the season. Then we descend, slowly, until we stand before the glacier’s empty belly.
Where once stood a monumental face now yawns a crystal cave to which there seems to be no end. Water-sounds fill the vaulted space, sigh-drips and gurgle-whispers. Spears and columns of ice the size of trees jut in all directions, while openings in the ceiling let in rays of sunlight.
“What a hall this would make,” Raudi says. “Fit for giants and gods.”
“We must see if the boats have survived,” Hake says.
I nod. “And our own hall.” And we must try to find Per and Asa. I hope they were out of the water’s path as it fell.
We turn away from the ice cave to the ravine. The way down is even more difficult than the way up. The water has left the rocks wet and scraped bare. Hake slips more often, but we all help support him. Before long, we come to where we can look down on the field and the hall.
But there is no field. Only a shallow, black lake scattered with islands of ice. And beyond it, we see the path of the serpent, the long, wide swath of snow-stripped ground stretching to the ocean.
“Let’s keep moving,” Hake says.
We reach the base of the ravine, the edge of the lake-field, where ragged stumps are all that is left of the trees. But the woods up against the mountains to either side have been spared. It seems that as the water spread out over the open ground, it lost some of its strength.
Harald takes my hand. I look down at him and find him staring at the water. I follow his gaze.
There ahead of us, amidst the branches, mud, and ice, floats the ruined body of a man. And then I see another. And another. They are every where, tangled and broken, eyes open. This is where the torrent left some of its cargo of flesh. I turn Harald into me, and I avert my eyes. I do not want to see the faces.
We decide without speaking to avoid the field, the bodies, and the water. Instead we choose the long way around and head toward the standing woods, our procession hushed with reverence as we traverse a drowned world.
In the forest we find higher, dry ground, and before long we come to the clearing with the old larder. I cannot help leaving the others to go lift the trapdoor and call down for Asa. Or Per. But there is no answer.
“We’ll find them,” Bera says. “I’m sure they are alive.”
They might be alive, but that does not mean we will find them. I do not think they would want to be found, even by us.
We reach the hall, which still stands, though sodden and damaged. The whole structure leans to one side as though favoring an injured leg. It might be livable, if necessary. For now, we continue over the corpse-strewn, puddled yard, past the charred remains of the other buildings, and through the broken steading gate. We follow the path down through the woods. The water-swept grass and underbrush lie flat, pointing toward the sea. I try to ignore the few bodies tucked and snagged in the tree roots. And then we reach the shore.<
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The ships are in decent condition, though sitting a little low in the water. They will need to be bailed out. But there are only two. The boat that first brought me and my siblings here, the smallest of the vessels, is gone. I wonder if perhaps the water ripped it free of its anchor, but if that was the case, I think we would see it floating out in the fjord. Unless someone sailed away with it before the flood.
“Could it … could it have sunk?” I ask.
Hake shakes his head.
“Could the three of them have sailed it alone?” Bera asks.
“No,” the berserker says. “Ole and Per must have persuaded or bribed some of Gunnlaug’s men.”
Raudi grits his teeth. “The bodies were on that boat. Our men.”
Hake closes his eyes. His arms drop to his sides, and his head hangs. His warrior-brothers, our fallen ones, have died a second death, for now we cannot bury them. Asa and Per have robbed us even of our chance to mourn. It is unthinkable, and yet the boat is gone. I listen to the waves lapping the rocks, the wind through the trees.
“What will they do with them?” Raudi asks.
Bera whispers, a catch in her voice, “Probably throw them overboard.”
Hake lifts his head. “We must see to the hall. Bera, take stock of our provisions. We cannot sail these war vessels by ourselves, and we do not know how long until the king comes for us. Hopefully, it shall be soon. Go, now.”
“Let us help you back up the path,” Raudi says.
Hake looks up into the trees. “I’ll be along on my own. I just need to rest a moment.”
Bera and Raudi look doubtful, but they nod and lead Harald back up the path. I wonder if I should go with them or stay here. Hake lingers at the water’s edge, his back to me. I don’t know whether he wants to be left alone, or if he would let me try to comfort him, but a moment later he starts to wobble on his leg. I rush to his side before he falls. He tries to smile as I lead him over to a large rock, and he sits down with a grunt. I take the spot next to him. Together, we stare down the length of the fjord.
A moment later, he clears his throat. “I hope they at least said a prayer before they gave their bodies to the sea.”