High above the city, at the place that was once called the Drop, the Lord of the Black Tor looked down on his conquest, but his attention was elsewhere:
Far away, figures moved, numerous beyond count. They marched like shadows but they were not shadows. They marched in rows. They marched upon the World.
He saw them conquer cities, he saw them burn down temples, bring down gods, for gods and sorcery meant nothing to these soulless things. What they were, he didn’t know. They moved like automata. They were a wizardry of a sort he’d never known. Something ancient, and deadly, and newly awakened.
They came from the desert. They brought with them the smell of burnt cardamoms.
And as they moved, they spoke.
It was a roar, a cry of triumph, and despair.
A single word.
—
Goliris.
⬩ ⬩ ⬩
Cecelia Holland is one of the world’s most highly acclaimed and respected historical novelists, ranked by many alongside other giants in that field such as Mary Renault and Larry McMurtry. Over the span of her thirty-year career, she’s written more than thirty historical novels, including The Firedrake, Rakóssy, Two Ravens, Ghost on the Steppe, The Death of Attila, Hammer for Princes, The King’s Road, Pillar of the Sky, The Lords of Vaumartin, Pacific Street, The Sea Beggars, The Earl, The Kings in Winter, The Belt of Gold, and more than a dozen others. She also wrote the well-known science-fiction novel Floating Worlds, which was nominated for a Locus Award in 1975, and of late has been working on a series of fantasy novels, including The Soul Thief, The Witches’ Kitchen, The Serpent Dreamer, Varanger, The King’s Witch, The High City, Kings of the North, and The Secret Eleanor. Her most recent novel is Dragon Heart.
Here a shipwrecked voyager finds himself in a situation dangerous enough that he might have been better off taking his chances with the raging sea—but a situation in which he must remain if he has any chance to satisfy the thirst for vengeance burning in his heart.
⬩ ⬩ ⬩
From the first blow, the iron sang under the hammer. Tvalin sang along with it, pounding out the blade, long and straight and keen. He knew already this would be a noble sword, and it tore his heart to think who would own it.
He thrust the iron back into the forge, and said to his nephew, “Heat it up.”
Tulinn worked the bellows. Tvalin wiped his hands on his apron. His shoulders ached. He went to the back of the cave and got a stoop of ale. Galdor at least kept them well fed. Tvalin was soaked with sweat from the work, which felt good, and he loved the smell of the iron heating and the sound of the bellows.
He called the sword Tyraste, darling of the god of battles, but he never said the name aloud, to keep it strong. He said it in his mind often. He drank another long draught of the ale, and going back to the forge, he drew the white-hot blade from the coals. Lifting the hammer in his hand, he beat against the iron, and even through the tongs, the blade’s high voice rang true.
High overhead, a door creaked. Tulinn said, “He comes,” and backed away into the shadows. Tulinn was afraid of Galdor. Tvalin laid the sword across the anvil, between him and the stairs, and down the steps came the king, massive in his bearskins, his feet scraping on the stone, and his eyes like a snake’s. On his forefinger was a red jewel, and he carried a weight of gold around his neck.
The two dwarfs bowed down. Tvalin was cursing himself for allowing them to fall into Galdor’s hands. He said, “We are doing the work, King Galdor. We are keeping our end of the bargain.” Straightening, he gestured toward the sword on the anvil.
Galdor caught sight of it, and his face flushed red; his eyes gleamed. He said, “Ah, yes.” He put out his hand toward it, but the ungripped sword was still hot, and he drew back. Tvalin let out his breath between his teeth. Galdor faced him, narrow-eyed again.
“Finish it. And I will keep you no longer. Is that the bargain?” He looked from one dwarf to the other. Tvalin nodded. Galdor went back up the stair, heavy stepping.
Tvalin went back to the sword, cooling on the anvil, and laid it into the coals again. His chest felt too tight. He knew Galdor was treacherous and the king’s last words rang with lies. He turned the sword again in the coals, and drew it out, and worked the fore edge.
With each stroke he thought, Tyraste, be evil. Tyraste, do evil. Tyraste, kill Galdor.
They quenched the blade and honed it, fit on wooden grips and a pommel of a piece of ocean-blood. Galdor would change those anyway to something gaudier. Tvalin lifted the sword in his hand, the balance perfect, the blade eager, and his maker’s heart leapt at what he had done. Then the king came down again.
Tvalin laid the sword across the anvil and stepped back. Tulinn hovered next to him, wanting to be gone from here. Galdor threw back his cloak; he took the sword into his hand, and cocking it from side to side, he murmured under his breath.
“A prince of blades,” he said. “Tvalin, you are better even than your name.”
Tvalin swelled, pleased, and glanced at Tulinn to make sure he had noted that. Galdor said, “Now let’s test the edge.”
Too late, Tvalin saw what was happening. Galdor swung the sword around and in a single stroke sliced off Tvalin’s head and that of his nephew.
“See,” Galdor said, up there above them. “Now I don’t have to keep you. I’ll board this room up, so nobody bothers you.” With the sword in his hand, he went back up the stairs.
—
With his full strength Vagn hauled his oar again through the water. Night was falling, they should have made landfall long ago, and now they were deep into the narrows, here, between two coasts they didn’t know, with a storm bearing down on them. Around him his brothers and his friends were rowing as hard as he was, shouting the rhythm. A current fought them, the knarr jerking and bucking. Back over the stern he could see the rain blowing toward them, a shadow over the water. Above them a craggy headland loomed. The first rain struck him in the face. The light was bleeding out of the sky.
At the steerboard, his oldest brother suddenly called out and pointed. Vagn cast a quick glance over his shoulder and saw a light bobbing, in the dark below the headland, a signal, a buoy. His brother was already steering them that way. Vagn flung his body against the oar. The wind helped them, heaved them forward. The rain pounded his cheeks and his wet hair got in his eyes. He bent to his oar and the blade struck something, and just behind his bench he felt the hull shudder. The light had lured them into the rocks.
His brother yelled, “Hold on! Hold on!” Vagn cast his oar overboard and jumped after it.
He went feetfirst into the water, his hands out to fend off the rocks, and sank deep in over his head. When he came up a wave hurled him over, and with him the oar and a piece of a strake. In the murky darkness he could make out nothing but the waves’ slap and churn. Then something huge loomed up before him, and his feet touched bottom and he scrambled up onto the side of a rock. The storm wind battered him. He was shivering and he clutched his shirt around him.
Even through the wind and the sea, a scream reached his ears, and shouting. The torch on the shore cast a glow out onto the surging water. He leaned around the side of the rock and saw, against the uncertain light, bare hands raised against swords. He heard his oldest brother calling out, “No, no,” over and over. Then nothing. Men thrashed around in the shallows. A sharp voice rose, once, giving orders, directions—they were looking for pieces of the cargo. A keg bobbed in the slack water behind his rock. They would come to get that. He slid down into the rocking waves, in over his head, and waited there. Legs thrashed by him, close enough almost to touch, lifted the keg away, and moved on.
He raised his head above the surface and listened. He could hear voices, in there on the beach, but now they were moving off. He dragged himself up out of the water onto the rock, found a crevice out of the rain, and pulled his shirt around him as well as he could, and waited to die.
He did not die; the woolen shirt, which
his mother had made, kept him warm, and this being midsummer, the sun was soon up again. The fierce waves of the night before had passed with the storm. He waded in through little ruffles to the beach. As he came in the seagulls rose in a cloud from his brothers and his friends. The robbers had taken even their clothes away.
He went from one to the other of the dead men, saying each name, noticing the wounds, and pulled them all together on the beach, as they had been on the knarr together. He sat for a while beside his oldest brother, who should have gotten them in to shore sooner, and should not have believed the light. His brother’s body was hacked and battered, he had fought hardest of any of them.
Vagn piled up rocks over the bodies, making a boat shape, and putting in what bits and pieces of the knarr had drifted in to the shore. There was nothing left of the cargo, the furs, the salted fish, the casks of honey and wax. As he went around, he stamped on crabs and ate them, ate seaweed, dug up clams, and drank water that seeped out of the cliff.
He did not, for a long while, look up at the top of the cliff.
When he was done, he sat down on the sand, and thought about his brothers and his friends and what had been done to them. Only he was left alive, which put a hard charge on him. Now he stood up, and looked up, at the top of the headland, and the tower there, looming behind its wall. He rinsed the salt out of his shirt, slept a little in the sun while it dried, and in the afternoon, he walked around the back of the headland and made his way up.
—
King Galdor, lord of the Vedrborg, walked out to his high seat and laid the sword on the table before him. Standing there, he looked out over the hall at his men, all on their feet, all their faces turned toward him, and he was still a moment, to feel his power, before he sat, and they could all sit. The slaves brought in the bread and the ale and they fell to feasting.
Galdor thought of his enemies. He wished like Odin he had no use for meat, and did not have to waste time in eating. A great dish came onto the table before him, a mess of fish, likely from the ship they had taken the night before. Peasants’ food. He laid his hands instead on the sword in its sheath, with its pommel and grips of chased gold.
The midsummer was on them, when Hjeldric the Dane had sworn to challenge him, to run the strait against his will, and Galdor meant to turn that to advantage. The Vedrborg grew too small for him. He wanted more than mere piracy. He pressed the sword under his hands. A man with his power should have a kingdom and not a rock and a handful of men. He longed to take the sword into his hand, to loose the strength he felt in it, on some cause great enough for him.
In the hall a stirring caught his eye. Someone had come in from outside. He talked to someone, who talked to someone else, the little passage of the words going up the hall along the outside of the table. At his place just below Galdor, his man Gifr heard it, nodded, and stood.
“There is a stranger here who asks to see you.”
“A stranger. A messenger?”
“No—just a wayfarer.”
Galdor lifted his eyes. In the middle of the hall, a half-grown gawky beardless boy stood, broad-shouldered, with curly black hair, startling blue eyes, in a filthy shirt.
Galdor said, “Come up in front of me. Who are you?”
The boy walked up to stand below the high seat, and spoke out, “My name is Vagn Akason. I have come over the sea because I have heard such of your power, King, that I would join you.”
Galdor leaned back in the high seat. He knew at once that this was both true and untrue. In this he sensed some witchwork: the boy was both a danger and an opportunity. He laid his hands on the sword again.
“Vagn: what kind of name is that?” An outlander. Galdor thought again of Hjeldric. He could always use another fighter if this one was apt.
“Well, perhaps you would prove your mettle?” He looked around the table. “Thorulf Grimsson, stand.”
At once, they all began to move. Thorulf got to his feet, a bear of a man, all hair and muscle. The others pulled the tables back to make room in the middle of the hall. The boy Vagn stood there looking around him, and when Thorulf lumbered toward him, drawing his sword, the boy wheeled toward Galdor.
“I have no sword.”
Among the men now grouped along the wall there gusted some laughter. Galdor said, “What then do you offer me?” He smiled, thinking, for all his big talk, the boy was trying to back out of this. “But there are other ways—bring out staffs, let them fight that way.” He nodded to the black-haired boy. “You still have your chance, see?”
He leaned on the arm of his high seat. He thought this could be amusing. Thorulf was a slacker and a stirpot. The boy was brawny and should have one good fight in him anyway. Galdor beckoned to the slave, who came quickly over to fill his cup again.
—
Vagn stood in the middle of the room, now a much wider space, and gripped the staff in both hands, his knuckles up. He had fought often with sticks with his brothers.
He knew the men who had killed his brothers were all around him.
The lumpy, shaggy man tramping across the floor toward him held the staff crosswise. They batted at each other a few times, shuffling around, and Thorulf didn’t change his grip. The men watching began to hoot and call out, spurring them on. Thorulf was already sweating. Vagn took a step to one side and struck, going high, over the upside-down grip, and Thorolf blocked it, and with his counterstroke knocked Vagn flat.
The breath went out of him, but even dazed he knew to keep moving. He rolled. The following blow cracked on the rush-strewn floor beside him. He staggered to his feet. He had dropped his staff. He had made a mistake. He had to be keener. Thorulf was strong and knew how to do this. The big man plunged toward him, jabbing his stick at Vagn’s belly, at his face, and Vagn dodged, ducked, jumped, flailing his arms out. The staff whipped past his ear and over his head. In the laughing, jeering crowd someone whistled. Thorulf was red-faced, panting, and his little eyes popped. Big as he was, he was already tired. He lunged around, swinging broad at Vagn’s head, and Vagn dove past him into the middle of the room, rolled, and coming to his feet grabbed his own staff up off the floor.
The crowd roared. Thorulf plodded after him, out of breath, and Vagn danced around him, luring him into another rush. When the big man charged Vagn stepped sideways and thrust his staff in between Thorulf’s knees and felled him like an ox.
A thundering yell went up from those watching. Thorulf sprawled across the rush-strewn floor, and Vagn bounded after him and battered at him until he crouched down, his knees to his chest, and covered his head with his arms.
Vagn swung the staff up. He knew Thorulf had been there the night before on the beach. He wanted to drive the staff straight through him. The men howling and stamping around him were ready for a death. But then he heard Galdor say, up there, “See if you can kill him.”
At that, he lowered the staff. His blood cooled. They were all around him, he couldn’t kill them all, now, anyway. He put out his hand to Thorulf to help him up. The other men yelled, disappointed, derisive, and Thorulf swatted away his hand and got to his feet and went off.
The other men were already moving the tables back into place, and the slaves were bringing in more food. Vagn stood watching all this. The others ignored him. He saw how they sorted themselves out, top to bottom, with Galdor up on the highest place. When everybody else had sat down again, he went to the lowest end of the table and sat on the end of the bench. The bread came to him and he ate. The ale came to him and he drank. Nobody paid him much attention.
He thought about what he had to do here. All these men were guilty of his brothers’ blood, but it was Galdor who was the head. He looked up at the high seat, where the king sat fondling the sword. Wait, Vagn thought to himself.
—
He slept the short night on some straw in a corner of the hall. In the morning, he expected someone to come to him with work, as would have happened at home, but nobody was doing much of anything. Men came and went in t
he hall, rolling up their blankets, talking together, and sitting down at the tables to play chess, and drinking. Galdor did not appear. A slave brought in some bread.
Vagn went off around the place, seeing what was there. As he had marked the day before, on his way here, the tower rose on the high point of the headland. A stout stone wall fenced off a wide half circle of space around the foot of it, running from cliff edge to cliff edge. One high gate, braced and hinged with iron, pierced the wall, closed and barred.
He went around the inside of the wall and found a little stable and some storerooms built along it. In the yard some of the men were pitching axes; they paid no heed to him. Firewood stood in stacks along the foot of the tower and tools lay around the yard. In the far corner, where the wall bent to meet the cliff, he came on the kitchen.
In his experience the three things he needed most, bread, clean clothes, and a warm look, all came from women, and women were usually found in kitchens. This one was a narrow room under a turf roof, with two ovens set in the stone wall and a row of split tree trunks for tables. People came and went through it steadily, and he found a corner at the top of a passageway, at the back of it all, where he lurked around until a wan, sullen girl noticed him.
He wheedled her into giving him some bread; he was glad to see that girls were the same everywhere. Like cats, they loved to be stroked. He stroked her more, and she smiled, and then was pretty. He said so. She flustered and fluttered and went off to her work, kneading dough, her hands dusty white and her cheeks bright red, but a few minutes later she brought him mead in a little flagon.
As he took this, thinking he could kiss her, a rattling sound came up from the passageway behind him. The girl gave a violent start, her hands flying up. He looked around, into the dark throat of a corridor, stacked high with wood for the ovens.
“Where does that go?”
She turned her wide eyes on him. “Nowhere. Stay away from there.” She leaned closer. “It’s haunted,” she whispered, and he kissed her.
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