Meanwhile two other thralls had unharnessed the horses from the wagon, mounted them and ridden them over to an open patch of ground. There they cantered them back and forth till the beasts were lathered in sweat, and with their lungs still blowing, the boys rode them to the same bloody spot.
Within moments, both horses were dead, throats slit, pools of scarlet staining their white coats. The thralls went to work butchering them into smaller pieces, tossing each chunk of flesh into the bows after the dogs.
‘Grisly business, eh?’ Kai’s tiredness was entirely forgotten. Instead he watched with morbid fascination as the thralls flung in the final pieces.
Suddenly, a murmur rose among the crowd. Faces were turning, craning back towards the halls.
‘She’s here,’ said someone.
‘Look – there she comes,’ cried another.
‘Who are they talking about?’ Kai asked Einar, trying to see over the heads obscuring his view.
‘There.’ Einar pointed north. Kai heard the rattle of wheels, then suddenly he could see... a chariot, drawn by a huge black horse.
‘Dauðans goðin.’
The priestess of death.
Holding the reins was a tall woman, swathed in dark robes that billowed in the dissolving mist. A black veil obscured her face. Behind her was another figure, as different from her as day from night. Another woman, this one clad head to toe in white, her dress a simple linen shift. She too wore a veil, which hung like a spider’s web over her face.
The driver stood erect, commanding. But the woman in white seemed limp, almost dazed. Then Kai noticed two thrall-boys holding her arms, perhaps even holding her upright. As the chariot passed he saw her hands were bound.
‘Who’s the one in white?’
‘One of the king’s thralls. A brave one.’
‘Why?’
‘She’s chosen to accompany him to the realm of the dead.’
‘She’s going to die with him?’ asked Kai, taken aback.
‘That’s the idea.’
‘Another offering to the gods?’ Erlan asked acidly.
Einar sucked his teeth. ‘More like a companion, really. To warm the old bugger’s bed...’
‘Sounds more daft than brave to me,’ said Kai.
‘It’s a great honour.’
‘One I could live without. What about the other? The priestess of death, was it?’
‘I don’t know who she is. I never saw a king’s burial before now, only heard the talk. When they buried the Yngling kings, she was said to be some old hag, trained in the arts of the other worlds.’
‘Seiðr magic,’ said Erlan darkly.
This priestess of death had halted the chariot beside the ship. The party climbed down and the priestess led the woman in white to the gunwale. Two of the clan-fathers came to the side and lifted them on board in turn.
The thrall-boys clambered in after them while the woman in white was placed fore of the canopy. There they stood, facing the prow. One of the boys was handed a broad shield. He lay it at the women’s feet, then positioned the thrall-girl on it, facing south, over the fjord’s misty waters.
At the priestess’s signal they hoisted her level with their shoulders. She wobbled as if she might fall, but the priestess steadied her. For a long while, the girl gazed away down the fjord.
‘What’s she doing?’ Kai whispered. Still the woman was silent, the white veil lolling to one side. ‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘Probably drugged,’ Einar murmured, as engrossed as anyone else.
She still hadn’t spoken, but when she was lowered, the woman in black leaned closer. The girl must have murmured something because suddenly, in a sharp, loud voice, the priestess cried out, ‘She says, “Behold! I have looked into the world of the dead and have seen my father.”’
The thralls lifted her a second time. She gazed down the fjord a second time, was lowered a second time. More mumbling. This time the dark woman cried, ‘“Behold!” she says. “I see now the line of my forefathers, my own blood gone over into shadow.”’
A third time she was raised and lowered. A third time she murmured into the priestess’s ear. This time the black-robed woman called, ‘“Behold!” she says. “I see my master and my king. He calls to me from the realm of shadow. Send me to him.”’ She turned to the crowd, arms aloft, her robes slipping to reveal slender white wrists. There was something striking about the contrast between her pale skin and the dark shadow of her veil. ‘We must honour her wish.’
She seized the girl and spun her round. The boys pulled her under the canopy. ‘She must carry with her the seed of the Sveär blood,’ declared the priestess. ‘The seal of their allegiance to him.’
The clan-fathers formed a circle around the girl. Each carried a long-shield, which they now joined to form a screen around her. Gaps between the shield-edges remained, however, and Kai felt himself drawn through the crowd, curious to see, until he found a spot where the girl’s veiled face was just visible through one of the cracks.
From their cloaks, the clan-fathers produced sticks and began beating their shields. The sound jarred the air – rhythmic, relentless, like the panting of some wight risen from the grave.
One of the clan-fathers stepped forward. The girl lay still. The man dropped out of sight, his head coming into view a moment later through the gap between the shields. He was on top of her. Their heads started moving.
It took a moment for Kai to comprehend.
Gods – he’s screwing her!
Maybe nothing should have surprised him by now. He felt like he should look away, but somehow couldn’t... Didn’t. And there was something about the woman’s listless profile that plucked at his mind. The clan-father continued humping away, and her head flopped to one side. The veil shifted, then began to slip over the girl’s face, slowly, slowly... until at last, it fell away completely, spilling out a rich fall of thick red curls.
Kai’s blood froze.
It was Bara.
Her eyes seemed to stare straight at him through the gap, half-dead. Empty and cold.
In a second his body had gone rigid with white-hot rage, his mouth twisting into a snarl. Bastards, bastards! His hand was on his knife. He didn’t know what he was doing. Had to do something. Bastards! Had the blade half-drawn when a stabbing pain snared his wrist.
‘Easy, little brother, easy.’ Erlan was there beside him. Kai tried to extract the rest of the blade, but Erlan only gripped tighter.
‘Not here, brother. Not now.’
Kai was almost blind with fury. ‘Don’t you see her?’
‘I see her. There’s nothing you can do for her now.’
‘Horseshit! I’m going to fucking try!’ He pulled harder, trying to overcome Erlan’s strength but getting nowhere.
‘You wouldn’t even reach her before twenty men had split you like a log. There’s no use both of you dying.’
Kai’s head was whirling. But somewhere deep down, he knew Erlan was right. The king would have his sacrifice no matter what Kai did. These folk would have their blood.
‘This isn’t our place,’ Erlan was whispering. ‘It never was.’ But Kai was hardly listening. He was watching, reaching out with his very soul to meet her gaze. But there was no spark in her eyes. Nothing of the Bara he knew.
He had let this happen.
The horror of it twisted in his heart. He tried to tell himself he didn’t love her. But with each brutish thrust of the clan-father’s body, the pain only drove deeper.
The first man finished. Now it was another’s turn and the beating shields went on. Kai’s gaze was fixed on Bara. When the second man mounted her, some spark flickered in her eyes that was stranger almost than her stupor. And he saw that, suddenly, she was fully conscious – looking straight at him.
An imploring look, a look smothered in despair. And then a fearful scream split the sky, on and on, towering above the crowd, filling their ears, scraping at their souls.
But no one lifted a fing
er. Not even him. And he felt ashamed.
All at once her body, till then limp and lifeless, became taut. She began writhing, trying to fight off the man on top of her. In answer, the clan-fathers beat their shields harder, trying to smother her screams. But she was conscious now. Whatever drug they’d given her hadn’t been enough, and now there would be no silencing her.
The priestess motioned to the two thralls, who squeezed their way inside the ring of shields and each seized an arm. But even restrained, she thrashed around until the man on her lost patience and hit her hard across the face. She fell back inert, her face dropped, and again she was looking through the gap at Kai. Her eyes were no longer vacant, but lost, adrift in a storm, searching in his eyes for answers he didn’t have. ‘Look at me,’ he mouthed, pointing at his eyes. ‘Only at me.’ She gave the faintest of nods. A tear of anger rose and rolled down his cheek onto his lips. He licked it away, tasting salt. Perhaps there was magic in it, because he found words forming. ‘I – I love you,’ he said noiselessly. For a second, the corners of her eyes creased and he knew he mustn’t look away.
Another and another and another lay in her, each one filling her with the seed of his clan in honour of their dead king. Finally the ninth and last was done. The man resumed his place and at a signal, the ring of shields opened and the priestess of death went in.
The ring closed behind her. The shields fell silent. At a word from her, four of them lifted Bara onto the pallet beside Sviggar. Another scream tore from her lips, so savage the crowd sucked its breath, but they forced her down. She was visible to the mourners now, her skin fresh and white against the grey pallor of the king’s corpse.
The four clan-fathers pulled her limbs taut while the priestess produced a rope from her robes. She wound it once around Bara’s neck. The girl was babbling with fear now. Two other clan-fathers stepped forward and each took an end of the rope.
Slowly, as if savouring the crowd’s gaze, the dark woman drew from her robes a long, curved blade. When Bara saw it, she began to struggle. But the men held her tight. The priestess said something. The rope went taut. Bara’s body stiffened. She began bucking in desperation, her spine thudding against the pallet with a sickening clatter. The men pulled harder, biceps bulging with the strain, throttling her.
Kai thought of the many kisses he had landed just there on that slender neck. Such a delicate thing. A thing so far from violence and anger...
He covered his mouth and moaned with anguish. Deep inside him something else began to well – something animal and wild, like the howl of a wolf, rising higher and higher till he felt it would split his heart and tear his throat apart. He squeezed his own neck hard, holding in the cry, feeling its power.
The priestess raised her knife. It flashed a moment under the bright rays of the sun, then plunged down, again and again – four, five, six times, each blow rising more bloody than the last, until the priestess’s black robes were soaked with Bara’s blood.
She had long stopped screaming. Instead, the only sounds were the grunts of the clan-fathers holding her body and the gasps of the dark woman. And soon, at last, Bara ceased shuddering.
The priestess was shaking, her head stooped, the black veil hanging limp over Bara’s body. And when she turned back to the crowd, the flimsy material caught, pulling the veil from her face.
Suddenly she stood there for all to see.
Saldas.
The Queen of Sveäland. The priestess of death.
Her chest was heaving, her hands quivered, her arms were steeped in blood. And her face – that face so renowned for its beauty – was twisted into a wild, mad mask, her green eyes aflame, her mouth gaping like a ravenous wolf.
The crowd was silent, waiting. But Saldas said nothing, only gazed down on them with the scorn of a vengeful goddess.
The clan-fathers moved away while the thrall-boys slipped the rope from Bara’s neck and closed her eyelids in a mockery of peace. Finally, they covered her with a fine white cloth.
‘Odin!’ Saldas screamed, sending a jolt through Kai. ‘Odin!’ She lifted high her bloodstained hands. ‘The dead are coming to you. They come on roads of fire and blood! Receive them, Father of All – receive your children! Ride forth to welcome this mighty king to your Heroes’ Hall. Sviggar son of Ívar, King over all Sveärs, pledges you the seed of his people, to stand with your host at the Ragnarök, when the giant’s flames will destroy all things. Receive our king, O Heaven-Ruler, and give us in return victory and power!’
With that, she flung the bloodied knife into the hold of the ship. Then, her gruesome work complete, she went to the gunwale and was lifted down.
Kai watched her, hatred writhing in his guts. He knew what he had just seen was no sacrifice. It was murder, stark and cruel. He knew the secret Saldas meant to protect, knew the folly Bara had stumbled into, saw the vengeance burning in the queen’s hard glare.
He looked at Bara’s broken body, blood soaked through her white dress like a crimson tide.
Poor, sweet, bloody fool.
His gaze returned to Saldas as she wrapped a dark cloak around her blood-spattered robes.
‘One day,’ he whispered. ‘One day...’
Erlan gripped his arm. ‘There’s a time for all things, little brother. This isn’t it.’
He looked up at Erlan, stone-faced. ‘But it will be... soon.’
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Any doubt in Erlan’s mind that they were doing the right thing clearing out of Uppsala had vanished with that look on Saldas’s face. One thing was clear: Saldas was tying up her loose ends.
Erlan had been marking every flicker on Kai’s face, ready to seize him at the slightest sign he was about to do something they would both regret. But the lad seemed to have a hold over himself for now. Somehow.
Surely now they would burn the old man and the crowd could break up and drift back to the halls? Afterwards there would have to be a lull, whatever else was coming. That’s when they would be away.
Around the ship the flame-bearers stood in a ring, their torches now pale in the growing sunlight. Then a single flame stepped out of the fire-ring and approached the ship.
Sigurd.
Erlan supposed that it must fall to the eldest of Sviggar’s line to light the ship and send him on his way.
The fire-road.
He remembered the songs and burning pyres of his own people, and the lonely barrow on the hill behind Vendlagard where his mother lay. It seemed far simpler than these Sveär customs. He felt a sudden pang, because someone else would put the torch to his own father’s pyre now.
Sigurd flung his torch high. It spun, end over end, landing just aft of the canopy under which Sviggar and his butchered bed-companion lay. Sigurd bowed low and backed away. When he reached the ring of flame-bearers they all swept forward as one, and put their torches to the kindling under the hull.
At once the flames began to lick the timber, slowly at first, then more hungrily, along the planking, up the ropes, at the canopy. Sigurd’s torch flared, catching the cloth draped over the funeral plinth, and soon the bodies were engulfed in a roar of heat – gold and oak and iron, flesh and bone and blood – all swallowed up in the crackling smoke and flame.
Erlan watched the face of his lord burn, watched the grizzled beard vanishing in wreaths of smoke. And with it, he felt the weight of his oath lift. This man had been good to him – surely better than he deserved and for reasons he didn’t understand. But he was gone now, and old though he’d been, Erlan couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had sped him on his way.
The wailing took up again. A thrall was handing Sigurd his cloak. His face was stone. Beside him, Saldas was clutching the hands of her two children, her own still bloody from her butchery.
Somewhere, a drum sounded.
Heads turned, distracted. That was when Erlan noticed a line of karls that had taken up position, surrounding the whole gathering, each one conspicuously armed.
‘A bit overdressed, aren
’t they?’ he muttered to Kai.
But before Kai could answer, a voice cried, ‘Nobles of Sveäland! Worthy folk of these halls!’ Sigurd was standing near the burning ship, his sloped figure silhouetted against the backdrop of roaring flames. ‘By mourning my father, you honour me!’
‘What he’s on about?’ Kai hissed.
‘Valhöll has gained a great son of Frey today...’
Erlan scoffed. He knew Sigurd didn’t believe that.
‘Now I stand in his place. Head of the house of Fafnung and lord of these halls. His work is mine now. And I will do it, safeguarding what was good... correcting what was wrong.’ He paused, his close-set eyes ranging over the crowd of faces. ‘Today I offer myself as your king.’
No one spoke.
‘Do you accept me, or would you choose another?’
If the nobles or clan-fathers had anything to say, still no one said it. They had been wrong-footed, that was clear. There was no other to choose. At least, not yet. These high folk had gathered for the Summer Throng, not to bury one king and choose another. But before anyone had gathered their wits enough to object, another voice cried out from the ring of warriors, ‘Hail King Sigurd! Hail Sigurd, King of the Sveärs!’
‘King Sigurd!’ went up the cry around the ring of karls. And soon it rolled inward through the crowd – ‘King Sigurd! King Sigurd!’ – spreading from voice to voice like sparks from a fire.
Sigurd raised his hands to quiet the crowd, his face grave. The shouts fell silent. ‘You have spoken. I accept your call! So the gods have willed it. So will it be.’
A loud cheer erupted, mainly from the encircling karls. Spear-points punched the air, although Erlan noted in the rest of the crowd many troubled faces.
‘I shall hold my first assembly today in the Great Hall,’ Sigurd declared when the cheer subsided. ‘All nobles and their thanes will attend.’
‘Is that it?’ asked Kai, confused. ‘Is Sigurd king? Just like that?’
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