Harald Fairhair raised these monuments in memory of Eyvindr the Valiant.
His pulse stilled in his veins, a curse withering on his tongue. He’d come to Freiøya’s long barrows. Far from where his fellow víkingr had come aground, the burial site was a grim landmark, and one he had prayed never to visit; still, for all its sanctity, there lurked hope within its hallowed fields.
Who but a fool would seek life in a barrow?
Bard had heard stories some years prior of Eyvindr’s exploits in the west, as well as his hand in slaying one of Harald Fairhair’s own brothers at the behest of the Norse king himself. Bard snorted, but he did not linger – he needed shelter with more substance than these accursed stones, some sanctuary before Haakon’s völur called back their mist and revealed him.
The ghosts of his enemy’s forefathers lingered in the air. Bard could feel their presence bearing down upon him as he crossed the stone boundary. With a willowy breath he muttered apologies, despite his lineage, for his trespass. He’d no intention of befouling this resting place, but it was what the living Bard had to contend with for now. The dead would have their turn with him soon enough.
It seemed an impossible task. The barrow stretched out before him in desolation, but just when he’d begun to despair he might be trapped there forever his outstretched hand struck something solid. A reverberating thump resounded and his hand throbbed at the impact. The cold sent the pain bone deep, but he ignored it and examined the object. Smooth marble greeted his touch. He inched closer and the towering form of a warrior slipped loose of the fog, looming above. Bard’s heart threatened to burst but reason took hold before it could beat its way free of his ribs. The monument of a Víkingr king stood bold in his path. Might this be the monument of Harald himself?
Bard let out a slow breath, choking back a nervous laugh only to go rigid at a muffled susurrus in the wet grass behind him. He ducked as a whirl of smoke and steel hurtled over his head, crashing into the statue with a clang and sending chips of stone flying.
The vague shape of boots appeared and Bard lashed out, driving the point of his ax toward where he believed the enemy came at him. Metal sang out. A sharp gasp followed as needling stabs reverberated up his forearms. His blow had done its work. The boots toppled backward, barely visible, and Bard scudded forward to keep on the move. A pained grunt slipped loose of his assailant as he struck hard earth. Bard closed without hesitation, his left hand seizing the warmth of his opponent’s throat. He growled and hefted his ax to rain down a blow but then his arm went stiff as a familiar face formed beneath him.
“Gods, Hilde,” he cursed. “I nearly killed you.” He released the woman’s neck and lowered his weapon.
“Don’t be so certain,” she answered, grim humor in her voice as two slivers of steel crept from the gloom and wavered before his face.
He grinned as twin shadows took shape – brothers he’d thought dead coalesced from the fog, their own smiles a radiant sight to behold.
“We found her smirking atop the bloodied remains of a great, horned mare, its head split asunder and its brains gouged from its skull,” Devin boasted, gesturing to the woman. “If ol’ Hrimgerd herself couldn’t bring down Hilde, I doubt a fifl like you could.”
“At least that’s how she’d tell it,” Arndt said with a chuckle.
Relieved laughter spilled from Bard’s throat and he rose, pulling Hilde to her feet. He embraced her quickly and did the same to the others in turn.
“We’d thought you dead,” Arndt told him with a clap to the shoulder, his plaited red beard darkened and congealed with blood. His helm boasted a respectable dent, and a shallow cut ran across the bridge of his broad nose but Bard had seen the warrior worse off.
“As did I.” Bard slapped a hand over the warrior’s meaty shoulder and gave a reassuring squeeze. “As did I.” He let his gaze wander over the others; having been separated rather quickly on the battlefield, he reveled in their unexpected presence and found his mettle buttressed by their good company.
Hilde looked much as she had when they’d disembarked: her long blonde hair pulled so tight against her scalp as to appear untouched by chill wind or her wretched battle against the strange beast. Her big blue eyes stared back at him as he appraised her. Her buckler hung on her arm, and her breastplate was painted with the crimson stains of those who’d dared stand before her – only the slight indentation from his own ax marred the steel of it – but no visible wounds other than a shallow cut or two proved she had given more than she got. A subtle flicker of amusement played at her pale lips and a hint of rose colored her freckly cheeks, then she bent and retrieved the sword Bard had knocked from her grasp.
He watched her, grateful he’d not buried his ax in that fair skull of hers, for he was sure that would provoke the goddess not to mention her aunt, Queen Gunnhild. Bard’s gaze flickered to Devin, a wiry Thuringian who stood blade in hand, and gave Bard a solemn nod. The man’s frame made Hilde look almost masculine, but Bard knew deceptive strength lurked within the warrior from his long years as a galley slave pulling oars on a Byzantine dromon before his liberation at the hands of Bloodax’s longships. Dev’s sharp features peered from the gloom like an eagle’s, barely shadowed by the growth of fuzz at his chin. He’d lost his shield somewhere along the way but he looked no less fierce for it.
“If we don’t find sanctuary Óðinn might yet catch us in his hall,” Hilde said, the ghost of her smile having passed on. Thunder rumbled somewhere above as if to punctuate her point.
Bard nodded, the pleasure at finding his companions alive fading at the return of their unfortunate reality. For all their company, they were no less safe from Haakon’s witches than when they’d been divided.
“The ships?” Arndt asked.
“Likely put to the torch or set adrift by now,” Bard said. “We’re a long way from shore.”
“Then north is all we have, brothers. North to the far shore where we might stumble across those who slipped away…should there be any, that is.” Devin spun in a slow circle, eyes growing narrow as he surveyed their surroundings. “Of course, it might help to know which way that is first.”
Hilde grunted agreement, and Bard peered through the fog after Devin, eyes settling at last on the hazy statue that hovered nearby. He let out a quiet laugh, drawing the attention of the others. “Were you a monument to a king of old, would you stare at the land behind you or the way your spirit pushed on?”
Hilde stood quiet a moment and followed his gaze, her eyes gleaming crystalline in the murk. “To the sea,” she answered with a grin.
Bard nodded. “Then let us pray Haakon’s forefathers had some sense in their skulls the day they set this stone.” He trailed down the statue’s right arm and pointed the direction it led.
“We’ve our path, it seems,” Devin said.
Arndt shrugged. “The Valkyr will find us no matter where our carcasses collapse, so lead on, my friends.”
“Such optimism, brother.” Hilde chuckled low in her throat, yet didn’t hesitate scything through the fog as she marched on. “Stay close,” she warned, though she need not have wasted her breath. Bard and the others hounded her heels, near to tripping over her. For all their bluster, the trepidation that wafted from his companions soured Bard’s tongue, but his own fear tasted no less bitter.
Every step was plagued by thoughts of the corpses beneath their feet, and time slipped past unknown as they made their way through the crowded necropolis. Thunder rattled the heavens, a somber serenade to their uneasy flight. Bard had lost all sense of direction not twenty paces after the statue had faded behind them, and he prayed Hilde steered them true, but he could not tamp his growing nerves that festered with each step. Bard expected draugar – the animated bones of those long accursed – to step out from the fog, and his nostrils flared as he strove for even a hint of the unmistakable stench of decay. He glanced about wildly, certain he felt more than just the virulence of the dead upon them, only then realizing he coul
d see his brothers without having to strain to do so.
“Wait,” he whispered, raising a closed fist. The others slowed and gathered about him, expressions uncertain.
Hilde grasped his concern first. “The mist lifts.”
Her proclamation seemed to rally the fading tendrils of gray as they drifted toward the lightening sky, the clouds thinning. A frigid wind crept in as if to fill the wound left by the departing fog. It sent a chill scurrying along Bard’s arms.
“They’ll be coming for us.” No sooner had the words left his mouth than a gargled hiss cleaved the air. A dozen more followed it. He tightened his grip on his ax as recognition of what wended toward them sunk home.
The first of Haakon’s beasts cleared the edges of the retreating fog. Bard held his ground despite the terror that urged him to flee. With a crazed howl it charged at them. Sleek like serpents, Haakon’s creatures were preternatural; nidhoggr, they were called – the name given them springing to Bard’s mind of its own accord – summoned from the bowels of Hel, and though they came only up to the víkingr’s knees, their bodies slithered out for yards behind, while feral, bear-like mouths with row upon row of jagged shards comprised their ill-shapen snouts. Four milky-white eyes glared at them with malevolence, deformed lumps of hate bubbling from the hairless skull of the closest beast. Their multitudinous legs scrabbled while their sharpened claws clacked a dirge along the packed earth.
An instant later, the beasts were on them.
Hilde was first to draw blood. She slammed her buckler into the mouth of the nearest nidhogg and drove her blade beneath its slathering chin. The sword broke through the hardened bone and pierced its skull, severing its unnatural ties to this world. Hilde booted its corpse aside and met the next, but Bard could watch no longer; he had his own to contend with.
The nearest nidhogg crouched as if it might go for his legs, but Bard had seen the creatures’ tricks. He ducked low as the creature changed tack and leapt high. It sailed overhead and Bard thrust the point of his ax into the beast’s belly, spun it about, and drove it back to earth with a sickening crunch. Its ribs shattered within its chest and it shrieked in agony, a dozen claws slashing at empty air, but there was no time to revel in one monster’s defeat.
Bard drew back a few paces and swung his ax as another serpent-beast flew at him. Steel and bone collided and the creature fell away, its head cleaved in twain. A third beast caught the haft upside its skull on the backswing and thumped senseless to the grass with a muffled whimper. Bard took rapid breaths and glanced from its twitching form to see Devin cutting a swathe through a trio of nidhoggr, their rancid blood and severed limbs cavorted in the air about him like some knife juggler’s morbid finale.
Arndt lacked Devin’s grace. He grunted and frothed as he swept his greatsword two-handed in wide, arcing swings. Muscles bunched beneath his sun-scarred skin as the warrior put the whole of his strength into every blow. Nidhoggr flopped at his feet in pieces, howls and ragged grunts slipping from their foul mouths as they curled in on themselves and died. Yet more came, as if they knew Arndt’s ferocity would prove his undoing when the warrior’s strength flagged.
One found truth in that presumption.
Arndt batted aside a nidhogg that had gotten too close, but the movement sent him stumbling backward, off balance. Before he’d the chance to right his feet, the squirming front half of a beast he’d left to die latched onto his ankle. Bone crunched like a dry branch and Arndt screamed. He screamed again as his foot ripped free of his leg and he landed flush on the squirting stump. The warrior crumpled, his eyes rolling white.
Bard leapt across the intervening distance, but for all his effort, he was too late.
Arndt snapped to alertness as a monster buried its muzzle in his armpit. A wet rasp spilled from the warrior’s throat as the creature feasted, tearing at sinew and bones as it likely had worried at the very roots of Yggdrasil in its earlier days. Blood sprayed from the wound and rained crimson on the ground, as a black pool formed beneath Arndt.
Hilde reached his side first, driving her sword into the nidhogg’s gnashing maw, killing it before it could gorge further. Devin came up behind her, clearing the space of the dying beasts that thrashed in the grass. Bard did the same on the other side, facing off against the last of the monsters that had yet to be put down. He cut through their ranks, grinding his blade into their corpses until he was sure they were dead. He turned back to check on Arndt.
The fallen warrior trembled, gasped like a landed fish, stared off at nothing. Hilde held him to her breast, but it was clear he knew nothing of her presence. She shook her head at Bard’s unspoken question, meeting his gaze. “He’s done.”
Before Bard could think to reply, Hilde dragged the edge of her blade across Arndt’s throat, spilling the last of his life between the limp braids of his beard. He shuddered and slipped away without a sound.
Even with all the death surrounding them, Bard felt the warrior’s spirit writhe. This was a warrior worthy of the Golden Halls, and he cast about for a sign of the coming of the Valkyr.
Hilde laid Arndt’s head on the ground with careful reverence and climbed to her feet. Though there was little time left to them before the rest of Haakon’s minions found them, Bard knew they could not leave their brother with nothing. Perhaps the Shield Maidens would come soon, perhaps not. They could not return him to the womb of the goddess, but…
“Lo, jeg ser her min far og mor,” Devin started, making the decision for them.
Bard drew a breath and nodded. They could honor Arndt in this way, and so his tongue wove the rest of the prayer in little more than a whisper: “Lo, nå ser jeg all min død slektningsbordsetning. Lo, det er mitt hoved, som er å sitte i Paradis. Paradis er slik vakkert, så grønn. Med ham er hans menn og gutter.”
“Han kaller til meg, så fører meg til ham.” The last of the words danced from Hilde’s lips, and Bard repeated them in his head.
He calls to me, so bring me to him.
As the prayer faded, Bard collected Arndt’s sword and placed it in the dead man’s hand, laying the blade across his massive chest should his brother need it on his journey. Then, without another word, the survivors marched on, leaving their companion behind as the ominous gray slowly melted into the violet tones of the failing sun. Bard shivered, though not from the cold. He stared into the distance, watching the clouds devour the light and knew they’d only traded one horror for another.
The others seemed of similar mind. Their pace quickened, milking the last vestiges of illumination to see them free of the boneyard before the darkness returned. They’d only just made it to the barrier of stones when the sun slipped from sight, shadows dancing a tribute to its demise.
“This way.” Hilde’s whisper was the mooring upon which Bard cinched his hope.
They huddled close while the blackness leeched the color from the world, the gods’ twinkling eyes yet to awaken. Distant howls were met with savage rejoinders, the song of predators growing closer as Bard and the others shuffled on. For all his earlier desire to die in battle rather than the firestorms born of the witches’ loathsome galdrar, he found himself craving life above all. He did not wish to perish on this foreboding isle, its taint so wretched as to profane the spirit of any who struck upon its shore. He gnashed his teeth and cast a prayer to the heavens in Arndt’s name before marching on with renewed vigor in his step, vowing to scrape the mud of this place from his boots.
Strange, guttural sounds dogged their heels as the party trudged north, the hours rolling by in a leaden crawl, fear clawing at their feet. It wasn’t until the stars alighted that Bard spied the deeper darkness of something looming ahead. He brought his companions to a halt, motioning to the shape that sat along their path. They waited in silence for several long moments, willing their vision to resolve.
“Another barrow?” Devin asked.
Bard shook his head, though the warrior couldn’t see the gesture, standing before Bard as he was. “It’s a hut.
”
“Aye,” Hilde confirmed, not waiting for the others before she started off again, Bard and Devin following.
Shortly after, they stood hunched outside a rocky pit house, ears pressed against its cold wall. Nothing stirred within. Bard pulled away and circled the home to find its door left open. He peered inside, heart aflutter, only to find the tiny hut empty.
“There are others,” Hilde said at his back, drawing his eyes to where she pointed. And, true enough, a dozen or more similar homes were spread out behind the first, each separated by a few horse-lengths of open space and little more but weeds and thorns. No lights or sounds greeted the trespass of the three Norse warriors.
Bard drew in a lungful of brisk air and crept to the nearest of the huts to find it, too, deserted. He went to each in turn, Hilde and Devin at his back, but there was no one to be found. When the last of them also proved empty, Bard turned to his companions. “We’ve a choice.”
“Live or die?” Devin answered, a crooked smile on his lips, but no light reached his eyes.
Hilde ignored them and stared off, her thoughts tormenting her features. Bard followed her gaze to see the hazy flutter of trees a distance further north. Their leaves danced serpentine in the gloomy starlight, the barest whisper of a rustle reaching Bard’s ears.
“The woods are one of our choices, eh?” Devin said. “I’d much rather dig a hole and wait for morning.”
Bard agreed. He looked back to the nearest of the huts and was made wary by its emptiness, but the lure of shelter, after battle and wind had pecked at his marrow since he’d set foot upon the isle, was undeniable. He caught Hilde’s stare as he scanned slowly about.
“If you had a choice...?” he started.
She sighed. “If nidhoggr roam the land in the open like sheep, I’d prefer sunlight on our necks before setting foot in yonder woods.”
SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest Page 7
