by Ruth Eastham
Vekell? Where is my brother? Monks don’t fight back!
Gasping, Tor runs on, half blinded, the bleeding crust tightening over his face. The sky is streaked with red and against it he sees a tower, a narrow cylinder of stone, set apart from the monastery. Two birds circling.
He is at the base of a tower. Has he lost the monk? He darts through the door. Rushes down the spiral steps.
Down?
But it is too late to think of dead ends.
Down and down and down…
11
AFTERMATH
The good sons … on the gallows hang.
THE LAY OF HAMDIR
Cold air stung Jack’s face. He felt himself floating. He opened his eyes … and looked straight down into the plunging chasm.
His feet thrashed in panic, but there was nothing except air between him and the harness and the jagged collapse of ice far below. The rope creaked, turning him in a slow circle like a hanged man. He struggled for breath as the blur of images sparked through his mind again. Tor … the monastery…
“Jack?” He strained towards Skuli’s shouts, but saw only a bulging wall of ice, the rope running over it like a trickle of blood. He imagined Skuli on the edge of the granite platform, exhausted after pulling out Tor. The strap of the ice axe bit into his wrist. He swallowed hard and heard his own voice fierce in his head. “Get to the wall and climb!”
Jack tightened his grip on the axe handle. He kicked his legs to get a movement in the rope, then jolted his body to increase the sway. As he came close to the wall he swiped his boots forward and, with a grunt, drove their spiky crampons at the ice. Again. Again.
Finally he got a toe-hold. He lashed out with the axe in one hand, hoisting himself up the rope, stepping jerkily up the cliff. Agonizingly slow. His muscles formed fiery knots. Needles of pain shunted through his legs and arms.
He rounded the overhang and – so close – saw Skuli reaching down over the edge. Jack strained an arm towards him and their fingertips brushed.
“More!” gasped Skuli, his face shining with sweat.
Their fingers locked together and Jack swung himself up. He slithered on to the granite platform, panting, and Skuli gripped him with a laugh, wiping away grubby tears. Jack smiled back weakly. His whole body hurt. He couldn’t speak. He just wanted to lie there. Lie there and rest, jaw against stone, looking at Tor.
Not a hair on Jack’s head stirred. There was even a bit of sun on his face.
Skuli rummaged in the rucksack and they nibbled on chocolate bars and sipped at cartons of juice.
“I hate ice!” said Jack. He picked up a lump and threw it feebly, smashing it against the platform and spraying them in tinkling shards.
Skuli gave a snort, and then the two of them lay there, screeching with hysterics.
“It’s not funny!” said Jack, laughing and wincing. He wiped his eyes. “We did it, Skuli,” he said, feeling a warmth going through him. He touched his forehead experimentally, getting flakes of dried blood on his fingertips.
“Got a nasty cut there.” Skuli gave him a sideways grin and nodded towards the body stretcher. “Now you look even more like Tor.”
Tor. Jack sighed. We got you out.
Then he shivered. He’d seen Tor’s memories. Now he knew exactly how he had got that scar.
“I think you were knocked out a while,” said Skuli.
Jack scrambled to his feet. “How long for?”
“Twenty minutes, maybe more…”
Jack tugged at his sleeve to see his watch. “That long?” Three ten a.m. “And you were trying to pull me all that time? In that gale and everything?”
“The wind stopped,” said Skuli. He pulled off his gloves and inspected the sores on his hands. “It was weird. Almost exactly when Tor was pulled out. Like someone flipped a switch.”
The plague of air. Scenes from the standing stone came tumbling into Jack’s mind. The screaming people. The crushed man. How much damage might the windstorm have done to Isdal? What about Mum and Gran and Gramps?
And Sno! What about Sno? “We have to go down!” gasped Jack, limping over to the stretcher. “Hide Tor by the standing stone, then check what’s happened in town.”
Skuli caught his mood and hurried to attach another rope system to the stretcher, and they lowered it over the rocks to river level.
Jack saw now that a whole section of the glacier had collapsed. A huge shaft of ice had split and fallen from the face into the jumble of vast slabs below. The ice cave was completely buried.
The stretcher touched the coarse gravel of the river edge and slid to a stop, and Jack and Skuli clambered down after it.
Jack saw Sno wriggle out from a rocky alcove and bound towards them, barking. He leapt up at Jack, whining and licking at his face, then did the same to Skuli as they each got hold of an end of the stretcher.
“Good, boy. It’s all right. Lift, Skuli!”
Jack tried to concentrate on the path, carry the stretcherwithout stumbling. But his heart was pounding. Tor’s words kept coming back to him: Beware my brother. Beware my brother. He had the uncomfortable idea that they were bringing a lot more than just Tor down from the mountain with them.
“Look at that!” said Skuli.
From their vantage point Jack could see the Pass road, the only way out of Isdal, blocked with a collapsed pylon. In the distance, strange grey clouds were massing, lightning flickering through them in weirdly shifting colours.
They picked up speed. Skuli walked in silence; Jack too, worrying about his family. They made it to the standing stone and quickly laid Tor in the hollow behind it, covering him with the torn-off branches that were strewn all around them.
They ran back through the graveyard and down Church Lane. They dodged the debris covering the street: overturned bins and scattered rubbish; ripped-off roof planks and smashed glass. The bell tower struck once. Half past four. The sky was ominously dark, the sun obscured. Somewhere high up, Jack thought he glimpsed a dark bird.
As they got on the main street, he saw with surprise that the kafé was open. Through the window he saw a mass of people hunched around the tables, which were lit by candles.
“Sent the kids wild, the storm did!” Gran was saying as Jack and Skuli slipped in. “Dancing around in the wind they were. It’s a miracle none of them were killed.”
“Someone was killed?” Skuli asked.
The room went quiet. Only the droning crackle of the television: Isdal… Where there’s always a friendly face… Everyone stared at Skuli like he was personally to blame. There were none of the usual smiles of welcome.
“Where have you been?” Gran snorted. “And you, Jack? Slept through it, did you? I’m the one who’s had to keep this place open all night to take in hysterical people.” She clattered a pile of plates into the sink. “Why I’m bothering, I don’t know.”
“But people have been killed, Gran?” asked Jack uneasily. He knew he must look a sight, but Gran seemed oblivious. Why was she acting like that? There was a horrible hostility in the air. Only Gramps looked confused by it.
Jack struggled to keep the panic from his voice. “Is Mum OK?”
Gramps nodded vaguely in his direction.
“At least three dead,” said Gran matter-of-factly.
Jack stared. Gran seemed to have a sort of bluish tinge to her lips.
“A woman blown off her balcony,” she said. “A man hit by a tree…”
Jack stared at Skuli. Just like I saw on the standing stone.
“One smashed skull,” finished Gran with a satisfied flourish.
“Should have known better than to be outside in a gale,” said Petter, the museum curator, slurping his coffee.
There were murmurs of agreement.
“Isdal’s cut off,” someone said. “No boats in or out till further
notice. Sea’s too rough. Aircraft grounded too. And the Pass is blocked. The bodies are being taken to the church until the coroner can get here.”
Jack and Skuli crept close to the stove, Jack pinching a couple of warm hardboiled eggs from a bowl on the counter as they passed. They sat out of the way with Sno, eyeing the room.
“Everyone’s going mental!” Skuli whispered, cracking an egg and peeling the shell.
“Look at their lips,” Jack said in a low whisper. “Do you see it?”
Skuli gazed around with a frown, then nodded. “That blue colour? All of them have it. What’s going on?”
Jack shook his head, eating his food. They had to keep their nerve and work out what to do next; they only had until midnight… But a tiredness weighed him down. Gran tossed another log on the fire and the air throbbed with a harsh heat, making the cut on his head prickle. He saw Skuli’s eyelids dropping closed.
Did something just go past the window? A dark shape swooping low past the glass?
“A night of global terror…” crackled the television.
Jack’s eyes shot open and he elbowed Skuli awake. The pictures were a fuzzy mess; the words came out in snatches. “Freak storms … thousands dead worldwide … emergency services stretched thin … reports of spreading violence…” The telly died completely.
Petter cackled. “People are saying it’s Ragnorak! The end of the world!”
Thousands dead? Breathing quickly, Jack pulled out his phone and tried to message Vinnie.
NO SIGNAL
He tried again.
NO SIGNAL
He gave Skuli a shaky smile. “I’m sure your dad’ll be OK.” But Skuli just frowned and didn’t answer.
“Don’t bother with the phone,” Gramps growled at Jack. “The power’s off. No signals. Gas pipe fractured. We only had electricity because of our emergency generator. It’s like going back a thousand years in one night!”
Gran craned forward like a bird ready to peck. “Get more generators hooked up then, husband!” she snapped.
Petter sneezed and wiped his nose with a tissue. “Yes, you’d better get things sorted out by midnight. We can’t have the festival getting messed up by power cuts. There’ll be hell to pay!”
“Three people are dead, Petter!” Gramps said. His speech was slurred slightly, as if he was fighting against himself to get the words out. “A festival’s the least of our worries and the worries of the families.”
“Better off out of it!” A blob of spit flew from Petter’s mouth as he spoke. Candle smoke coiled over his head in a weird draught, making a grey wreath. “Two stupid old men and a good-for-nothing woman. They should have stayed indoors!”
Jack stared at Skuli in shock.
“People die all the time,” said Gran savagely from the sink. She swung round with a soapy pan so that bubbles dripped down her arm and gathered at her elbow. “I lost my son in England. Went straight through the ice and drowned to death in freezing water. Get over it!”
Jack’s chest tightened painfully and he saw Skuli pale and still. It couldn’t be his real gran, talking like that, could it?
“The Festival of the Midnight Sun must go ahead!” insisted Petter. “No matter what! The tradition goes back centuries!”
Jack felt a dangerous tension stretching across the room. He felt the arrowhead in his chest pocket, heavy and warm.
“It’s part of our heritage,” Petter ranted on. “Our birthright!” He took another swig from his cup.
“That’s my coffee!” A man sprang up and pulled Petter to his feet by the collar, a twist of fury on his face. It reminded him of Lukas Brudvik, the raised rock in his fist. He remembered the standing stone; people hurting each other with clubs and axes…
The room went silent, watching. Nobody tried to step in. Jack saw Petter’s fingers reach back and slowly tighten round the handle of a knife… “Odin’s vengeance,” he said, very quietly.
There was a movement outside. Black wings brushed the glass and seemed to spread over it. Claws scratched the pane. Two pairs of glinting eyes looked keenly in.
Like someone had flicked a switch, the man doubled over, coughing, releasing Petter from his grip. In an unnerving ripple effect, scowls fixed themselves on the faces of the other adults in the room, their shoulders slumping.
Jack stared round in alarm. He noticed sweat on the foreheads of his grandparents, their bloodshot eyes, their faces sagging pale and greyish… All the adults had it. They sat in subdued menace, then pulled themselves up and staggered out of the kafé like zombies, mumbling about feeling unwell and having to get home.
Gran and Gramps hardly protested when Jack and Skuli helped them out of the kafé and into their house next door, guiding them up the stairs to their room to lie down.“What’s going on, Jack?”
Jack heard Skuli’s voice wobble as they crouched tensely on the landing, listening to the fitful breathing of Gran and Gramps.
“Let’s go to yours,” said Jack. “Have a look at this ballad you’ve been telling me about. See if it can give us any clues.”
Skuli nodded.
“Just let me check on Mum first. I’ll only be two minutes.”
Skuli leant against the banister. “I’ll wait here.”
Jack slipped quietly up the second flight of stairs to Mum’s pottery studio. “Mum?” he called quietly at the door.
No reply.
He pushed the door open and stepped in. Mum was lying on the sofa under a ruffled blanket. She was asleep and muttering. Her face was pale and there was clay on her cheek. Jack thought suddenly how fragile the murky light made her look, as if the shadows on her face were bruises. He spread the blanket over her.
“Mum,” he said gently.
“Jack?” She reached towards the sound of his voice. He saw clay under her fingernails. “You were gone so long…” Her face creased with concern. “Oh, what did you do to your head, love?”
Then her eyes went wide, and she was staring past him, and Jack turned and saw what she was looking at.
They were all around him. Distorted clay sculptures. Lining the display shelves, in rows along the walls. Twisted shapes of people screaming; being crushed by trees, by rocks… Scenes from the plagues… Kids killing kids… A raven with its wings spread wide… A boy hanging from a tree by a rope…
“Mum?” Jack clenched his hands into balls. “Why did you—”
“We’ve no choice,” Mum whispered. “It’s our bloodline, Jack.”
What did she mean “it’s our bloodline”? Why had she made those horrible things?
His mum strained forward. Her forehead was clammy and she was breathing strangely. Her lips were tinged with blue as she spoke, quickly, eyes drifting. She drew herself towards him with a gasp and gripped him tight. “You can’t escape your blood.”
“What do you mean? Mum?” Her nails were digging right into his neck. “Mum!”
But she sank back against her pillow with a shudder. She closed her eyes and was back in a fitful sleep.
Jack covered her with the blanket again and stumbled out. Sno nuzzled his fingers as he went down the stairs in a daze with Skuli. Once outside he had to steady himself against the wall of his house.
Skuli held his arm. “Jack?”
But Jack shook his head, unable to explain. “Let’s get to yours,” he said, his jaw tight. “Look at the ballad.”
They set off, seeing again those unearthly storm clouds to the north. Though there was no wind now, the clouds were moving quickly closer, as if swept along by some other force.
And they’d almost got to Skuli’s when they were stopped in their tracks. Stopped in their tracks by a terrible scream.
12
CHILDREN MURDERERS BE
Here is our land sorely blemished. Here there are murderers of kinsmen and killers of children.
Sermon of the Wolf to the English, 1014
The thin, high-pitched wail came again, like someone being murdered.
“It’s coming from the harbour.” Jack pelted down the long stretch of steps that led towards the water, Skuli following. He could hear shouts now. Laughter. Another screech of pain.
Sno gave a sharp bark and the boys skidded to a stop at the bottom of the steps. Jack grabbed his collar and clipped on his lead, then held the dog’s muzzle as they edged round a parked car, then Gran’s van, and crouched behind one of the wooden buildings by the water’s edge. Figures materialized from the mist only a little way in front of them – seven or eight kids on the pier, half hidden under hoods – and now they saw where the shrieks were coming from.
Lukas had a cat by the scruff of its neck – a grey scraggy thing. It twisted to get free, its legs thrashing, its paws swiping the air, its fur in stiff peaks. It hissed and scratched, but Lukas held it tight, hardly flinching. He started winding thick string round its legs as the other kids sniggered and jostled.
“Odin’s vengeance!” one shouted.
Jack felt Skuli grip his shoulder. Weren’t those the exact words Petter had used in the kafé?
Jack saw the girl from his class, Emma, hovering at the edge of the group, as if she was deciding whether to join in or not. He remembered how she’d tried to stop them hurting Skuli on the playground. But now she just stood there, saying nothing.
When the hands of children murderers be. The words of Skuli’s ballad thudded into Jack’s memory.
Three tiny kittens peered out from some nearby bushes, mewing.
Lukas pulled the cord tighter. The exhausted cat spat and gave a low, desperate growl. Its legs were bound tight. “Stray cats are vermin,” Lukas announced. “They need hanging up!” And with one deft movement he wound the loose end round a post and hauled the cat in the air.
It swung there like a pendulum, eyes horribly wide. Lukas peered at it for a moment, as if surprised by what he’d done. Then he started laughing until the others joined in. He prodded it with a stick. Other kids started picking up sticks. Emma had one too.
