Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  Who rules this land.

  Volund shook his head, as if it pained him to say this next, and spoke as if to a child:

  This is not a quarrel you may win

  And you prove your folly yet again.

  For his name is not ‘Jörmungandr’

  But something like what your priests call ‘the Dragon’,

  In the tongue they call old.

  A name you’re not fit to hear

  And even He is not most low beneath the waves.

  You will bow, or this place shall fall

  And I –

  But none could hear the end of Volund’s boast, for Hilde, prettiest of Ansgar’s daughters, struck Volund a blow with the tankard she held. She was a wild girl when angered, fearless as her father, but given to the old ways – unbeknownst to all those wise, assembled men, she herself bowed low before heathen altars, but not those favoured by Volund and his people. She was a seeress and, in an earlier age, should have been heeded for her second sight instead of considered only for the bride-price her beauty would command. She spat on Volund, who crouched low where he had been knocked from the honour seat and, as the council roared with laughter and approval to see this villain struck down, and by a girl at that, she spoke harsh truths to Volund:

  ‘Deep-Friend’ they call you,

  But who should desire such friendship?

  You are a coward and a devil,

  You who blaspheme all gods.

  Long have you been laughed at

  And short will you live in our memories.

  You and your wretched island-dwellers,

  Living in sea-caves like rooks,

  All so horrid of visage that children,

  When they seek to quarrel, tell each other

  That one has the Hymirbjarg look.

  Volund spoke something else, then, but not in a tongue of men, and before he could be properly taken to task for it, he fled and the thingman who tried to stop him fell, with his neck running red. At this, the council realized Volund had brought a weapon into the hall and, if for nothing else, they leapt up as one and followed him in pursuit, each man thinking to be the one to bring the captured wretch before Ansgar, and Ansgar thinking to strike down Volund himself. Under the light of the full moon, they saw Volund rushing down the path to the fjord and gave chase as one. Yet, for all their speed and rage, Volund was too quick and gained the beach. He had no boat awaiting him, instead plunging into the chill cove as if it were the Sun month and not Hay-time. A few men swore there were other shapes in the water with Volund Deep-Friend as he swam out into the night, but none were willing to paddle after and find out.

  2

  The Doom that came to Grænland was fast in coming, and cruel when it came, for not a fish was landed from Cape Farewell all the way to Dyrnes Church after the night Volund Deep-Friend was chased from Ansgar’s hall. It was as if the sea-crop had quit those waters altogether. The only walrus that was caught from Hay-time to Slaughtering month was a terrible black brute that had human teeth in its mouth and writhing cuttlefish arms instead of tusks. It killed Biôrnólfr Snorrason, the man who speared it, and those hunters who came close enough to slay the walrus in turn swore it cried like a child as they cut it down. The meat was black and oily and rank as its hide, and it was agreed upon that no good would come of keeping it. They returned its corpse to the sea and rowed home, and no more walrus hunts were raised.

  After Volund Deep-Friend had invaded Ansgar Grímsson’s Althing, Ansgar and his council waited only so long as the dictates of custom required before suiting up for war and rowing to Hymirbjarg. Yet, when they arrived, they found the coward Volund and all his fellows absent, their longboats flipped and fled, the island abandoned save for heaps of waste and countless bones, many of which were the skulls of men. When they departed, Snorri Ketilsson, a friend of Ansgar’s from childhood, discovered what appeared to be altars nestled down in the flood pools, but even at that low tide, the carven stone statuary was too deep beneath the icy water to extract and demolish.

  One pool in particular seemed to give way to a cave and, squatting down for a look, Ansgar clearly saw a great wooden door set into the side of the tidepool. This door was carved with runes and icons that seemed to shimmer and move like the scrimshawed necklace Volund had shown him. Vowing to return in the Lamb-fold-time when there was heat enough in the water to dive down and explore the sunken mystery, Ansgar returned home to Brattahlíð.

  The news of Volund Deep-Friend and his people fleeing their island cheered all, save Hilde Ansgardóttir, who thought more and more that it boded ill. She was clever as her father, no slouch himself, and more than he, she knew the danger of scoffing at the old ways, for her mother and her mother’s mother and her mother’s mother’s mother, and so on, had been seeresses of no small renown, before they were forced to hide their talents, and of no small prowess, both before and after their husbands forbade them from sitting on graves and praying at crossroads for hints of the future. Hilde did not assume Volund had come to the council and then fled with his men simply out of folly or madness. As it became clear that the sea would provide no provender that winter, she wondered more and more at what secrets the Deep-Friend knew and what counsel he kept.

  Hilde could find no answer in the scudding grey clouds, or the murder of ravens that sometimes hung above her like a small thunderhead as she wandered the high places, and she sat at each crossroad without answer. When she served the ale for her father one night, she heard him and Snorri Ketilsson discuss returning to the old countries if the fish and walrus did not return. To hear them speak of the sea-roads gave her such pause that she almost spilled the drink. Knowing what must be done, she waited until the morn and then instructed her most trusted slave to keep word of her departure hidden from her father as long as possible. She then set out in a small boat, pausing on the cold, stony shore only long enough to smear herself with seal fat, lest she tumble into the water, for there was talk that the sea was rougher than it had ever been.

  She rowed out the length of Eiriksfjord, which should have taken some time indeed, yet a current took her and she scarcely needed to dip wood in water to propel herself along the wide, rocky canal. As the sun set, she saw the bay yielded to the emptiness and so, moored herself on a spit of rock long anchored against for that purpose. She ate dried reindeer and drank from her waterskin, and slept on the cold, wet floor of her boat. That night, sights came to her. She knew even in her fear that she was right to seek the crossroads of the flood and surf.

  A man was sitting above her on the seat of the rowboat when she opened her eyes, the year-counter full and casting its wan light upon the fishing ground. She did not know him at once, for without his scars, the Deep-Friend seemed as any man, hale and fierce-bearded. Then he bared his teeth at her as he spoke. Seeing the white saw-blades of the mackerel shark shining behind his lips in the lune-light, she knew him for Volund.

  You slandered me, child

  And called me mad.

  Yet, here you sit amidst the tempest,

  Alone upon the Engulfer.

  I should accept this sacrifice,

  If that was your father’s purpose

  In letting you come.

  Yet, I am gone from this place

  And while I walk the sea-roads,

  Instead of sailing them,

  And walk the dream-roads

  Like my Lord Beneath,

  I find you beyond the cut of my teeth.

  At this, Hilde grew bold, for she had long trafficked in the sleeping places and knew she could not be harmed by such as he while she slept. Thinking to have her answer, she demanded then of Volund,

  Where have you fled, fiend

  And why, if you be so kingly,

  Do you run

  Instead of making the Raven god’s sport

  With my father and his men?

  You chose a quarrel at the Althing

  And now, the sea-fields lie fallow.

  How might this curse be
lifted?

  Heed my word, oh grey sea-beast,

  Watcher from the tarn heath,

  And answer, or risk my wrath.

  The laugh of Volund Deep-Friend was the sound of a cog scraping its belly on a gravel shoal. He winked at Hilde as he stood, revealing his nakedness.

  I am bound by your weird

  To answer, it is true.

  And so know, O daughter of Christmen

  And Giant-bane alike,

  That I sailed for the Markland.

  When you and your father would not hear me,

  I sought to save this place.

  But only through peace could I stave off

  The Encircler of All Lands.

  And now He shall have his due.

  Unless you row further, look deeper,

  The last hope of dying Grænland

  Dies along with you.

  3

  Hilde Ansgardóttir awoke to see the day-star already hoisted to the top of the fjord and wasted no time in unhitching the rope lashing her to the mooring stone. She looked from the ever-lying fluid-and-expanse before her to the mouth of Eiriksfjord behind her, and set her mind on a course. She had seen many sights and felt many portents, but never before had she found herself so sure that she was indeed a seeress and not a madwoman. If any hope at all was to be found for her homeland, she must take it, no matter the risk. Even still, braving the sea-fences in a rowboat was folly and she knew it. She offered prayers to Æsir and Ægir, wondering if they could hear her, even as she rowed into the sea-fences.

  Almost at once, she found herself swept along on some current and, try as she might to steer her little vessel, the current ignored her. She almost lost an oar trying to slow herself. Soon, the sea was widening around her and the land falling away to her back and she became truly concerned. Then, as quickly as it had taken her, the current slowed and released her. The waves calmed and vanished, until no sea-fence rose as far as she could see and the whole of the ocean was as flat as a frozen pond.

  Here she knew must be the intersection of the sea-roads. She sat in her boat and closed her eyes and did as she had so often done in the crossroads of Grænland, letting her mind go where it might. In her hand she held the necklace Volund had brought and left on her father’s table, the jewelry she had taken while the council pursued Volund away from the hall. She sat and she waited. Soon enough, it came to her, the vision making her boat rock and spray drench her. She did not flinch, transfixed by what she saw.

  She again beheld Volund Deep-Friend. He was in the Markland, that western realm Hilde’s ancestors had inspected and found wanting before returning to Grænland. There Volund and his men were waging battle in a dark forest, their enemy a strange people who resembled the northmen the Grænlanders sometimes traded with for white bear pelts. These beardless foes of Volund carried no swords, but fought like berserkers. Hilde somehow knew these foreign men worshiped some hungry thing in the sky, of the sky, and they hated Volund and his deep god. Before she could see who would conquer, she was rushing back across the waves, under the waves, and then she saw the bottom of a little boat bobbing in an endless black sea. She came back to herself with the dread certainty that something watched her from below.

  Her boat began to move again, but Hilde did not open her eyes, for she knew to do so would be to lose herself forever – the sound of much water sloughing off in the cold air was sign that something greater than any horse-whale had surfaced. She had seen enough that taxed her mind without adding to the iron weight of madness that already pressed down upon her skull, seeking to leave a crack wherever it could. Her boat moved quicker and quicker, until it skipped over the breakers like a giant-cast stone, but still she would not look. Then she heard the sound of water parting, as if to accept a falling ice floe. A pause, a silence, and then the nose of her boat dipped down, its bed scratching and sticking on something hard. She felt her stomach churn as she fell forward and, much as she wanted to keep blind, her eyes fluttered open.

  It was sunset. A great island of rock reared up before her. Her boat was beached on the edge of a large tidepool, the rear of the craft bobbing in the air, the nose angled down into the water. Peering closer, she saw there was a cave in the rear of the pool. To her confusion, a door seemed to be set in the rock. Upon this door were images that she could clearly see, despite the depth and distance. What she saw there chilled her marrow, more than any night visit or second sight, and she would have turned away were she a child of lesser blood.

  She had little time to wonder at her delivery to such a place, for the door suddenly opened inward, pulling the water with it in one greedy gulp. Before she could scream in fear or bellow in challenge, Hilde’s boat rocked forward, tipped fully into the pool, and shot downward like a leaf rushing along a mill sluice. The boat skidded again onto something hard and dry as she passed through the doorway. She only had time to marvel that it was so much brighter on the other side of the door before it slammed shut behind her.

  4

  Ansgar Grímsson mourned his daughter when she did not return, and had the slave who had seen her row out that fateful morning hanged for not reporting it sooner, though such punishments were rarely doled out in that learned age save for murder. Ansgar grieved as few fathers have, for some part of him suspected that he was to blame for her disappearance. Even in a good year, that winter would have been grim for her passing, but as the sea raged ever rougher and the game grew ever scarcer, all upon the island felt the pinch of a father’s sorrow for the failing of his family. Then the dead of winter arrived and there in the Ram month, Hilde Ansgardóttir returned to her father’s hall at Brattahlíð.

  There are two tales told of what fate Hilde brought with her for the people of Grænland, but both accounts agree she came, not from the sea as a corpse, nor from the sky as an angel, but instead from the very rock of the fjord, like a dwarf in the old songs. Upon her breast and back, a byrnie of lustrous green mail shone even in the dark of the night. A helm of similar make sat heavy upon her golden brow. In her hand, she held a sword unlike any seen since the time of legend, a great, end-scored blood-waker emblazoned with runes as black and twisting as the fresh scars striping round her arms and legs. Quitting the cave she had sprung from, she went straight to her father’s hall, but would not place her worm-borer in the weapons cache, a dangerous, golden glint to her eye when the thingmen made to take it from her. It is here that the tales spring in twain. We shall follow that daughter of necklace-throwers to the worthy end the song-singers grant her, with this boast given to the thingmen of Brattahlíð:

  I have cut my way through Hells beyond ken

  And walked where I ought to have swum.

  I have seen the dark of the Deep

  And that which Volund calls ‘Friend’.

  To tarry enough to council is to tarry too long,

  For They come, both by the caves I wandered

  And the sea that has betrayed us.

  To arms, to armour, to row and tumult.

  To the snowfall of bows

  And the spear’s vicious thrust.

  Ansgar Grímsson and his friend from childhood, Snorri Ketilsson, took Hilde at her word, for woman or no, the battle fire in her face and the scars scoring armour and flesh alike bespoke a great champion. So, they readied for the fray as best they could. The moon, that hastener in the sky, would not be still, however, and the Enemy had moved faster through the waves than Hilde had through the tunnels under the sea. Thus the men of Brattahlíð were warned and ready when the slippery horde came forth from the sea, yet there was no time to warn Hvalsey or Vatnahverfi or Herjolfnes. In those places, no trace was left of hall nor ship. What bits of men and children remained strewn upon the battle-places would not be touched by eagle nor wolf even in that hungry season.

  In Brattahlíð, the steel torrent did not slack, even as night became day and then night again. The men who could not stand the sight of their foes were the first to fall as they sought shelter in flight or prayer, l
ong bristly stingers of the Enemy sprouting from chest and back in dark mockery of the spears of men. Bench-mates made hero and corpse before one another’s eyes. The tide of foes would not recede or break, but pushed ever up the steep slope of Brattahlíð. One by one, the men of Grænland failed as the Deep rose up to take that place. In the end, Hilde and Ansgar fought shoulder to shoulder, then back to back, atop a mountain of their fallen kith and kin, slave and landed man equal in that cruel night as the moon again sank. The only light came from Hilde’s sword and armor, and the green irons of the Enemy.

  Yet, against all odds, the second dawn found the strife-and-clamour failing. By midday, daughter and father had fought the Enemy back to the sea-cliffs. As night fell, the last of the things that were not men, nor trolls, nor even elves, had fled back into their deep lairs. At this, Ansgar at last dropped to the earth, bleeding from twenty dozen wounds. He begged his daughter to take what food she could and flee into the high places before the Enemy could issue forth another campaign. Instead, Hilde Ansgardóttir laid her father and all the men of Brattahlíð upon a pyre. As the third night’s gloaming fell, the last living Grænlander descended back into the cave from whence she had so recently risen, intent on bringing doom to that sunken temple of the Deep. None remained to tell if she ever returned.

  5

  Another people sing another song of Hilde Ansgardóttir. It is not one to know, except that, by its telling, you may know the Enemy despite his human face, his golden hair. The Enemy tells that Hilde had different words for the guards of her father’s hall, when she came with edge-sharp green sword held in hand:

  Once this hall has failed,

  And I shall not allow it to fail again,

  We shall take the paths of the sea.

  And the first to step against me

  Shall fall without breath to wail.

  I have wandered through heavens beyond ken

  And walked where I ought to have swum.

  I have seen the dark of the Deep.

  And beyond that great circling son, lies a father,

  The dreaming Lord,

  Who shapes the world in His sleep.