“In case you were wondering,” Urdr said in smug satisfaction, “my Sister has frozen you in time. Pinned you to this page of your life. You can’t move, so don’t even try.”
Verdandi was suddenly standing on the other side of her. “Don’t you get it?” she whispered in Astrid’s ear. “It is Dane’s own nature—his daring heroics—that decides it. His own behavior is the thing that dictates his fate. The risks he takes. His insistence on going on these ridiculous quests! Climbing mountains, falling down ice crevasses, fighting to save his mother! It’s his own fault!”
Astrid wanted to protest that it was Godrek who had pushed him down the ice crevasse and that one’s mother is an honorable thing to fight for—but she couldn’t move. She couldn’t speak. And it crossed her mind that she might be nearing the end of her own life. Despite her fear, she marveled at the wonder of it all. To be here in this godly realm, interacting with the Goddesses of Time themselves! She only wished that she knew more about the mysterious inner workings of the Book and the nature of time itself. And just as this thought went through her mind, the Norns all suddenly turned their heads and looked at each other.
“She wants to know how it works!” said Urdr.
“So let’s show her!” said Verdandi.
They shrugged and both looked at Sister Skuld.
“Behold, the Book of Life!” she cried, and rising up over the open book, she pointed the outstretched fingers of her right hand directly over it. Astrid heard an eerie hum. A sudden wind came up—a tiny storm, Astrid noted, that blew only around Skuld herself—ruffling the Norn’s headdress and the folds of her robe. Amid the whistle of the wind, Astrid heard a flapping sound and saw that the pages of the book had begun to turn all by themselves! Faster and faster they flew, pages turning at whip speed, until all at once they stopped. Awakening from her trance, and without even looking down, Skuld stabbed her finger down on a particular spot on the open page. And as soon as she did, Astrid instantly felt free—she could move again. A feeling of ease swept through her and she began to giggle like a child. And then, looking down into the pool, she saw that she was a child. She had magically been transformed into a little girl of seven years, her yellow hair falling over her shoulder. Oh, how light and happy she felt.
“Well, how does it feel?” asked Urdr with a knowing smile.
“It’s wonderful,” Astrid heard herself say in a voice so girlish, it took her breath away.
“Sister Skuld has paged you back into your past.”
In the pool Astrid saw herself with Dane at the same age, sitting side by side on a tree branch. She saw Dane impulsively give her a kiss on the cheek, and saw herself slug Dane in the side of the head, knocking him off the branch.
“The first kiss!” Urdr mocked. “How precious!”
Astrid smiled at the memory. “What do you expect from seven-year-olds?”
Skuld again closed her eyes, raised her finger above the book. Again the wind blew and the pages turned and suddenly stopped. In the pool Astrid saw herself as she had been just six months before, walking in the forest with Dane and holding hands. This made her happier still.
“But don’t get too comfortable,” Verdandi said with an oily smile. “Time has a way of getting away from us all.”
Catching a look from Verdandi, Skuld made the pages move once more, but this time they went the other way, from front to back, fast-forwarding into the future. And moments later the pages stopped. The wind died. And Skuld’s finger fell onto the page. And just as before, Astrid felt a sudden transformation, mind and body all at once slipping into new feelings altogether. An ache was the first thing she felt, a pain in her back, and a general feeling of fatigue. At first hesitating, she braved a look down into the waters of the pool. Old! She’d become a doddering old woman! Her hair white, her back stooped, her eyes watery, and her face a mass of wrinkles. Worse, she saw Dane’s body too, a dried-up corpse long dead and withered, lying beside her.
She shut her eyes and turned away, and when next she opened them, Skuld was once more over her Book and pages were starting to fly. And in a blink Astrid found herself returned to the present, every bit herself again.
“As you have seen, the red-haired one’s fate has been written,” Verdandi said. “And you have wasted our time enough with your petty mewlings. Mist, take her back, and this time do not fail to return with the boy!” The Norns turned their backs on Astrid with finality.
“But I was told a human can fool his fate!” Astrid cried, not giving up. “That his own acts can determine his life and his death!”
Skuld turned back, wearing a mocking grin. “Who told you this, girl?”
“Our village soothsayer, Lut the Bent. He is a very wise man, and I believe him.”
Skuld traded calculating looks with the others, as if they were hatching some plot. “I suppose there has been a time or two when we have allowed fate to be—how shall we say—rewritten? Played out by chance.”
“Of course,” cautioned Verdandi, “chance has its own perils, and certainly no guarantees. Say we let the boy live for the present. Tomorrow, he still might die of his own doing anyway.”
“What our Sister is saying,” continued Urdr, “given that he is young and inexperienced and going on a dangerous journey to retrieve an item of immeasurable value, it is quite likely he will perish. These so-called quests he keeps going on aren’t exactly bettering his odds for survival.”
“That’s what I keep telling him,” Mist said, forgetting she was on thin ice with her superiors already. “But, no, he has to keep plunging headlong into danger—” She caught a fierce look from Urdr and fell silent.
“Yes, he’s headstrong, impulsive,” agreed Astrid, “but he’s only trying to do what’s right. Surely you can see that. There must be something you can do—some deal that can be struck to give him another chance.” At this the Sisters suddenly bent their heads together and began whispering in earnest, every so often sneaking looks back at Astrid. Astrid sensed that they were on the verge of some kind of decision. Had she swayed them?
“You brazenly come here and ask us to make—” At a loss for the word, Skuld looked to Urdr for help.
“Concessions.”
“Concessions, yes,” said Skuld, “in the usual way we mold time. But if we are to let chance take its course regarding his fate, we require…a little something in return.”
“Anything,” Astrid said.
“Anything?” asked Skuld.
At the desperation of her plea, the eyes of the Norns shone with animal desire. And despite the ominous chill she felt, Astrid managed to say, “What is it you want of me?”
The chill night air felt good to Lut the Bent as he stepped from his tent and began his walk through the camp. The embers of the evening’s fire still glowed a dull amber, and the smell of woodsmoke on the air stirred his appetite. He’d been awakened by something—a bad dream or a bad case of indigestion, he wasn’t sure which—and now he had resorted to fresh air to calm the disturbance he felt in his spirit. The moon, he noticed, was half shrouded in mist, a sign, he often thought, of an omen in the offing. Climbing the slight ridge toward the river, he looked back for a moment at the silent tents, all still in the moonlight, and it gave him comfort to know that his comrades all seemed in safe repose.
As he turned to crest the hill, something came crashing through the brush just ahead—and before he could react, a body collided right into him. He was knocked backward for a moment and gave a frightened gasp—until he saw it was only Astrid. But etched on her face was a look of extreme distress.
“What is it, child?” Lut asked in concern. “Have you seen a ghost?”
Astrid flinched, her face growing paler than the moon. “Three of them,” she said to him. And then, quickly excusing herself, she brushed past him and strode down the hill, returning to her tent. Lut stood there a long moment. What was that about? That look in her eyes—he’d never seen that before. Astrid was no tender flower; she was tougher than m
ost of the men he knew. Whatever had spooked her was very out of the ordinary. But what? Back in his tent, he thought of her haunted look until at last he was overtaken by sleep.
The next morning, watching her carefully across the fire, he tried to read what it was that might be troubling her. She seemed to be staring off into some other realm entirely. And when Dane greeted her that morning, the look she gave him was a strange one indeed, full of longing and dread. Still later, after they had packed up and were on their way again, Lut observed that Astrid insisted on riding right alongside Dane, never letting him leave her sight. Strange, Lut thought. Three ghosts? What could it mean? He tried to convince himself that she must have had a bad dream, but something kept telling him otherwise, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever it was would be worse than he wanted it to be.
14
GODREK UNCLOAKED
The ride northward had been long and arduous, across a steeply pitched ridge line, but Godrek had scarcely noticed. He had been riding beside Geldrun, relaying his knowledge of the many herbs and plants they passed and eliciting her laughter as well. What a joy to once again hear the voice and see the smile of the only woman he had ever loved. Such was his pleasure, in fact, that for short periods of time he actually forgot that her days were numbered. And whenever it came to him that she was doomed to die by his own sword, he felt a pinprick of remorse, but the moment passed quickly. This is what great men must do, he told himself, to gain their ultimate desire. The life of a loved one was a small price to pay to at last have his emptiness filled, to have his soul made whole. After a lifetime of killing, it would hardly matter to add one more to his score. He would gladly kill tenfold the women, queens even, if this would gain him entrance to Draupnir’s lair, for such were the bottomless desires of one born a slave. And as the long ride wore on, he thought of these things, the dark and ugly things that had formed him, the things he had told no one….
His mother had been a thrall, a lowly servant girl owned by King Volund, a powerful warlord in a land far to the south. Although born into slavery, as a child Godrek had been anything but submissive. He had endured daily thrashings meant to beat the insolence out of him; the beatings, however, had only hardened his resolve for revenge against his masters. At age ten he had been put to work on one of the king’s warships as an ash boy—an askeladden—or fire keeper. He was told that if he let the cook fire die, even in a raging storm, he would be thrown overboard, as had been the boy before him and the boy before that. Such was the fate of the ash boys, for there was always another boy to be pressed into service in the next port, especially for an all-powerful king like Volund.
But the toughened-up ten-year-old had done his job well and—yearning to one day escape thralldom and become a warrior himself—had even found time to study the warriors on board and the way they used their weapons. One night in his twelfth year, as his ship fortuitously came to land near his home village, he got his chance. He stole a sword and jumped ship, with plans to escape north. Before he left, he went to find his mother to say good-bye, for she was the only person to ever have loved him.
To his great shock and sorrow, he had found her on her deathbed, her body but a stick, wasted by disease; and that very night, from trembling lips, she had whispered to him the name of his father. It was King Volund, she said. He was the son of a king!
Instantly all his plans for escape changed. He would go to the royal lodge hall and present himself. Once Volund saw what a fine boy he had sired, the king would surely embrace him as his own. No longer a thrall, he would thenceforth be called Prince Godrek, with all the royal property and privileges his birthright bestowed.
But his fantasies were soon dashed. The king had no desire to admit his blood flowed in the veins of a dirty, rough-hewn slave. Instead of accepting the boy as his own, to dodge disgrace he ordered that Godrek that very night be killed. The boy narrowly escaped into the frigid, snowbound countryside, stealing a white cloak from the king’s court to keep himself warm. The king’s men rode hard in pursuit, a dozen liegemen on horseback hunting him. And they most certainly would have caught him—no doubt drawn and quartered him as well—had it not been for the royal cloak. For, hearing the approach of horses as he crossed a treeless moor, Godrek had lain down in the snow and hidden himself beneath the cloak, the white leather seamlessly blending with the snow, rendering him invisible. The horses had thundered past, just steps from where he lay hiding, and thus he had escaped.
From then on he lived alone, befriending few, trusting no one, learning to kill for his living, and in time he grew to be a cold and cunning warrior, a king’s liegeman but never a king. And ever after, he wore the white cloak to remind him of his true destiny, the just rewards of his birthright, the gloried summit he one day would reach. Now, with Odin’s Draupnir within his sights, he would soon possess the wealth and might to be a king ten—nay, a hundred—times over. And then he would return to Volund’s kingdom—and any other kingdom he liked—to seize what was rightfully his.
Ragnar the Ripper stood with the horses at the mouth of the mountain cave, awaiting his lord’s return. At this elevation the wind was biting cold, and he drew his furred coat tighter round his shoulders, contemplating Whitecloak’s devilish scheme. They had left the boy’s mother, Geldrun, with two men in a thicket of pines a league or so ahead. Godrek had kissed her and lied, saying that while she rested, he would bring back fresh game for náttmál. But as Ragnar had ridden back in this direction with his lordship, toward the cave mouth, he knew it was not meat they were after, but the very cave writ on the rune blade; therein Godrek hoped he would find the clue as to where to go next.
Ragnar had been surprised to find himself feeling sorry for the woman. It had made him uneasy to watch Godrek chatting with the mother of the boy he had killed, unbeknownst to her, just days before. Believing they were journeying to Godrek’s birth village for their marriage ceremony, she had no notion of the real truth: that Godrek had stolen her son’s rune sword and was following its message on a quest to find the most magnificent treasure on earth.
Why, Ragnar wondered, did Godrek, a man capable of monstrous cruelty, keep up the ruse with her? Perhaps because if she learned the truth, she would be a prisoner and no longer such pleasant company? All too soon she would discover Godrek’s cruel intentions—that she was but a pawn in his grand scheme—and what then would he do?
At that moment Godrek emerged from the cave, the rapturous look on his face telling Ragnar that they had found it. Indeed, Godrek was talking excitedly about having found “the next piece of the map,” as he called it, and he brandished a vellum scroll onto which he had copied rows of runic figures.
“It’s here!” he uttered, barely able to contain his excitement. But before he could speak another sentence, the sound of horse hooves was heard approaching from the south. Everyone quickly drew their weapon, tensing for a fight. But then they spied the dark gray stallion, slick with sweat, as it rounded a giant outcropping of rock, the rider none other than Svein One Brow. Wisely, Godrek had stationed him a day behind to guard their rear flank and scout for any pursuers. Ragnar held his friend’s steed as Svein dismounted and moved immediately to his lordship to deliver his news.
“A party a day back, m’lord,” One Brow said. “I counted eleven.” After an apprehensive pause, he added, “Voldar’s son is with them.”
Ragnar saw Godrek stiffen. “How can it be?” Godrek said in disbelief. “He could not have survived the fall!” One Brow said he was certain that the party was led by Dane the Defiant; he had made sure to get close enough to see. Godrek fell silent, and everyone waited to see what their lord’s next move would be. A moment later Ragnar saw the grin re-forming on his master’s face and the usual glint return to his eyes.
“Shall we ambush them, my lord?” asked Thorfinn, one of the younger liegemen, eager for blood. “Lie in wait and kill them all?”
“Or poison their horses and let them freeze to death?” asked another man.
“No, that takes too much of our time,” Godrek said, his grin growing broader. “I have a more…amusing way to stop them.” And after Godrek had explained his plan to the men, Ragnar had to admit it was ingenious.
15
A LIGHT AT THE END OF DARKNESS
A day and a half later Dane’s party stood uneasily at the cave mouth, staring into the maw. That morning they had reached the river’s end, the “Serpent’s Mouth” writ on the rune blade. From there they picked up the tracks of horses, followed them into the ridge line of mountains to the north, and found the cave entrance.
Examining the ground, Lut saw traces of fresh footprints going in and out of the cave. “They did not try to cover their tracks,” Lut said, “which means they want us to enter.”
Was it a trap? Dane saw the apprehension on the faces of his friends. Sharpening their dread was the cave mouth itself, which resembled the gaping jaws of some savage beast ready to swallow whoever dared to enter.
“Why is it,” asked Drott, “these journeys always lead into dark, frightening places? Couldn’t we once just end up in some sunny meadow somewhere?”
“Not likely,” said Ulf.
“Because a quest,” Lut said, “is a test to see whose bravery is best.”
“Yeah. If it was easy, everyone would do it,” Fulnir said.
Princess Kára stared into the dark mouth of the cave. “Will it be dangerous?”
“What?” Jarl asked mockingly. “Afraid it might muss your hair, your highness?”
“You’re the one afraid to muss his hair.”
“I am not!”
“You comb it every half hour, you preening ass!”
“Oh, and who’s the one staring at herself in her hand mirror every five seconds?”
“I do not!”
“Do too!”
Dane broke in. “The question of who cares most for their hair can be settled later. For now the cave awaits us.” Jarl petulantly ran his fingers through his golden mane, caught himself, and stopped. Dane turned to the princess and said, “It’s likely danger lies within, so I think it best you stay outside.”
Sword of Doom Page 12
