by Angels
“It’s nothing against you, brother. You’re beyond blame, with your blue eyes, and your spotless clothes with all their buttons. I can’t blame our father for having you, or Ormolf, or Oddr. It’s just that it’s hell being a bastard, you know?”
He turned to the rest of the hall, waving his mug around. The sloshing of liquid within the thin cylinder made him thirsty, and he downed another swig of ale. His throat glowed with the alcohol and kindled his voice even louder.
“You don’t know what it’s like, none of you know! You’re all jealous of me ’cause I’m here at the head table, with an ancestor’s mask; what the fuck good is it when you don’t even know who you’re supposed to be? I’m just a god-damned afterthought, that’s what I am to you all. You’ll load the scales against me at my adjudgement, you won’t give me an even chance ’cause you all wish you could be me and you all hate me. . . .”
“That’s enough, boy.” The hetman’s voice was dripping with contempt.
“That’s all I ever hear from you, old man,” Dagr raved on, his heart breaking, “can’t even look at me with a smile, can you?”
Hradulf rose to his feet, his face dark with fury; but Pater Kolgrim was at Dagr’s side, gently wrestling the mug from his hand and leading him away.
“The ancestors have eaten and drunk amongst us,” the priest said loudly, “they have honoured us with their presence! Now they must return to their long sleep. Come, revered ancestors, come with me.”
Impelled by the priest’s urgings, the six other youths rose and followed him back out the door, along the corridor, and to the chamber of masks. None of them went willingly; Ormolf most of all, whose eyes were wide with disbelief at this turn of events.
In the secluded room, Pater Kolgrim removed Dagr’s mask and placed it back in its former spot. The moment this was done Dagr’s drunkenness evaporated; still dizzy, he leaned against the wall and watched the priest removing the masks of the others, each time thanking the ancestor by name before putting the mask back. Now Dagr saw the ancestor’s faces in the glow from the masks, saw them vanish into nothingness as the visor was pulled away from living flesh, until all that was left were six youths, their emotions ranging from disappointment to fury.
Ormolf made an abortive move toward Dagr; Pater Kolgrim interposed himself. “We’re all overwrought,” he said. “Some of us have had too much to drink, and they’re not used to alcohol. The Lord frowns on His children fighting over trifles, you know. Much better if you all returned to the feast, wouldn’t it? There will be much more entertainment to come. Of course, those who are too tired should go rest instead.”
Ormolf sneered at the words, but eventually turned away and strode through the door, along with the others. Dagr remained alone with the priest, who looked at him with a sad smile on his lips.
“I heard you, Pater,” mumbled Dagr before the priest could offer him any more solace. “I’m going to my pallet.”
Outside the chamber, he navigated the twisting passages swiftly, intent on reaching the tiny room he had claimed for his own in a seldom-frequented corner of the Hold. He needed peace and quiet, time to settle his nerves, to make sense of what had happened.
Just before reaching a juncture, he heard a scrape of metal against stone and came to a sudden halt. Footsteps, a measured tread. His stomach tightened to a painful knot. He no longer believed Ormolf had gone back to the wedding feast with the others.
Dagr turned on his heels and fled back. Someone was running behind him; one glimpse over his shoulder confirmed his worst fears.
Ormolf ran faster than he could; very soon Dagr heard the youth’s breath almost in his ears. He panicked, turned left instead of right, became lost as he ran into corridors less and less lit, into near darkness. Eventually, Dagr saw a door in the side wall. He opened it, ran through, hoping to close it behind him—but Ormolf had already rushed in. Dagr fled a few steps onward, then stopped in dismay.
The room was a dead end. A tight row of pillars closed off one side, and the light came from a lone eternal lamp set in the facing wall, its sizzling arc of radiance weaving slowly behind the glass dome. Blades of metal half-immersed in rectangular tanks of fluid gleamed in the light.
The door slammed shut. Dagr turned to face Ormolf, holding his hands out at his sides, palms open. He began to speak, apologies and entreaties mixed, as Ormolf stepped forward slowly, a leer on his face. Dagr was on the point of begging when Ormolf finally hit him. Ormolf’s foot caught Dagr in the stomach; Dagr crashed to the ground, bent double.
“Little fuck,” said Ormolf, “can’t even behave yourself at your brother’s wedding! You want to dishonour our family, is that it, little fuck? Is that it, eh?”
Each question came with another kick. Dagr cried out in pain, unable to keep silent. He tried to answer the questions, but of course this only excited Ormolf further. Soon Dagr made no more effort at answering and only took the rain of blows. He forced himself to breathe as the metal-shod heel of Ormolf’s boot slammed into his shoulders and back, his shins and knees, and finally his head, three massive impacts. At the last he felt a ringing filling his ears and screamed out with what little air was in his lungs.
Then there came a lull, a blessed space of quietness. No more blows came; his pain ebbed, and the torment in his chest vanished. His ears felt wadded with gum; he thought the final blow might have deafened him. Yet when, after an indefinite time, he unfolded himself a trifle, he heard his sleeve scrape against the flagstone well enough.
He opened his eyes, fighting against the urge to keep them squinted shut. The room was empty now, Ormolf nowhere to be seen. When he raised a hand and waved it, he saw its enormous shadow cast onto the tightly set pillars and dance about.
Dagr rolled himself onto his knees, wincing at the pain, though it was hardly the crippling agony he’d feared. He managed to stand up at his second attempt.
This had been by far the worst beating he’d ever received from Ormolf. And it was all too clear to him that it had been meant as a harbinger of things to come. By law, until a formal adjudgement had taken place, Dagr’s life was protected. But the law might be relaxed for the legitimate son of the hetman removing a weakling from the Hold prematurely. Had Ormolf killed Dagr in his rage, could there be any doubt that Hradulf would have protected his legitimate son? Next time, Ormolf might well decide to take the chance and render judgement on Dagr’s fitness by his own sole authority.
Dagr had to flee. Yet he could not leave the Hold; the Fimbulwinter reigned outside and would take his life far surer than Ormolf would. Hide, then. So much of the Hold was empty of human presence. Dagr went to the door on legs already firmer, gritted his teeth as he opened it, afraid to see Ormolf revealed on the other side. But the corridor beyond was empty, lit only by yellow and green flickers from above. Dagr crept down its length to a narrow opening in the left-hand wall that gave onto a dark passageway, which he followed until it doglegged. Already he felt concealed here, but this was hardly a place where he could stay. He reached into the pockets of his house coat, sorting through his meagre possessions, until his hand closed on the portable lamp he sought. Unlike the fixed lamps of the Hold, it did not burn endlessly. Instead, it was crank powered: turning the handle for a minute or two yielded up to half an hour of light.
The crank made a loud noise, so he only turned it once before flicking on the lamp. The amber beam pushed the darkness away in front of him. He used it to check the length of the passageway up ahead, then flicked off the lamp and strode forward cautiously.
The passageway gave onto a wider corridor, still sunk in darkness, though pinprick lights gleamed here and there, amber and red and one or two green, like counterfeit stars. Dagr chose the direction that most likely led into the depths of the Hold, away from its beating heart. The brief flashes of his lamp illuminated bundles and sheaves of cables snaking the length of the corridor above his head, stone walls broken by eye-slits on either side o
f him, with no other openings, no doors to a convenient room or closet where he could huddle and recuperate and plan his new furtive existence.
He went on, following the corridor, where now the lights grew fewer and fewer until they were all gone and he found himself in utter darkness. He shivered. The outer regions of the Hold were terribly cold. He had heard, in his youth, stories about people going to sleep in remote rooms and freezing to death. It felt now as if he’d always known that one day he would find himself in one of those stories. The darkness had swallowed him up; he kept his right hand on the wall, the skin of the glove rasping softly against the stone, interrupted every so often when it came to an eye-slit. He breathed through his open mouth, knowing his heat was rushing out with every breath, but every time he reminded himself of the fact and shut his mouth, his nose began to hurt from the cold of the air, and within a few seconds he would open his mouth again.
He counted his steps; every half-hundred, he flicked on his light and glanced around him, then shut it off. To any predator, he would be all too visible; but with any luck, he wasn’t hunted yet. Would Ormolf stalk him, intent on finishing the job he’d started? Not Ormolf, he told himself. Not yet, anyway. To take him into a quiet corner and savage him, yes. To hunt him down in the dark outer regions of the Hold—surely Ormolf wasn’t that far along.
At last Dagr came to a T junction. To his left lights blinked in constellations that grew thicker in the distance. The beam of his lamp showed stone walls splashed here and there with white paint, forming a crude arrow aimed at a trio of stick figures. The signpost of civilization. Dagr turned right, into darkness.
Presently the floor dropped under his foot: stairs descending. By the brief amber glow of his lamp, he saw there was no option to continue on the same level, since a massive grooved metal shaft filled the corridor.
He went down fifteen steps to a small landing, then ten more, then another landing. . . . The stairs corkscrewed down along the shaft. Two more landings and he reached the bottom. He flicked on his light: the stairs gave onto a wide square room that surrounded the shaft. Here the grooves were interrupted by uneven horizontal lips. At the end of some grooves, a round hole was bored into the metal, and deep within each hole, something like glass, like ice, glinted in the light. A metal collar sealed the openings that allowed the shaft passage at floor and ceiling. There was a finger-wide gap between the shaft and the collar, as if the shaft were intended to rotate.
Each wall was marked with a dozen eye-slits. Around the curve of the shaft, Dagr saw a narrow opening leading into further darkness. He felt his legs tremble and leaned against the wall, acutely conscious of the eye-slit closest to his right shoulder. He wanted to let himself sink to the floor, but the stone would be so cold, and he might not ever find the energy to stand up. . . . It came to him that this was the limit of his flight, that he would lack the courage to burrow any further into the frozen Hold, that he would die here, surrounded by the bones of ancestors in the walls, and that he might never be found, that he would never see the sun again. He whined deep in his throat, a babyish sound. The dead all around him were listening, their souls tethered to the jumble of their bones, peering out through the eye-slits. He had to go back, face the risks of the Hold; anything was preferable to this lonely death. But he couldn’t stand the thought of turning his back on the dead. He pushed himself against the wall, sliding to a blank section; here at least there were no bones in the wall.
There were stories, of course, of dead who had been buried without any opening to the outside world. Wicked men, those who deserved an eternity of torment, were sealed into a compartment devoid of an eye-slit, their bones drowned in mortar, to remain forever deaf and blind. . . . Dagr thought he could sense someone dead behind him; not just bones but an entire body, that of Sartog himself, his flesh too unclean to consume, whole and untouched in its sheath of stone. A shiver ran down his back like claws stroking his ribs, and with a cry of terror he wrenched himself from the wall.
He turned around and of course saw nothing but plain wall, the glimmers of frost scuffed away where he had rested his shoulders. His panting breath made a cloud before his face; his lungs hurt from the cold and he coughed, salty phlegm filling his mouth until he made himself swallow it down. The lamp was dimming further; Dagr grabbed the handle and turned it vigorously. After two turns, there was a snap, and suddenly the crank turned without any resistance.
Against all logic, the light from the lamp immediately flickered and reddened. Dagr was about to be caught in the outer regions without light of any sort. You must shut off the light, came a thought in his mind. Shut it off and conserve what power is left for when you really need it. Shut it off now, climb up the stairs.
He couldn’t make himself do it; already it was too late, as darkness washed over him, drowning out the red-black ember of the lamp. Dark light, a black glory, unshining from the centre of the room, as if it came from the great shaft. Within the darkness a winged shape moved. It turned its face to him. A smell was filling his nostrils, like the memory of flames, and the air was almost painfully warm.
Her voice came, louder than before, closer, as if she merely spoke from the other side of a wall. “It is so hard to reach you, beloved” she said, every word muffled yet trailed by sharp echoes, the scuttling of insects on dead leaves. “Can you not hear me? We wait for you, yet you have not opened the gate; you have not cast your voice across the abyss to our ears; you have not welcomed us. Do not be afraid, beloved; embrace me and let us come to you.”
She was naked, the black wings opened at her sides, revealing a body hairless, epicene, a clean triangle of flesh at her crotch, her nipples spots of black on black on her boyish breasts. Gleams of starlight reflected in her eyes, cold points of whiteness it hurt him to glimpse. She did not stand, for her feet hung down loosely from her ankles; rather, she floated in the night, her every movement slow as dreams.
Dagr stood motionless and mute before the apparition as she extended a beseeching hand toward him. Her gaze wasn’t aimed precisely at him, as if her black eyes were blind. For ten or twenty frenzied heartbeats she hung in the void before him, then the darkness retreated like the tide and vanished. Dagr’s lamp was shining a pale yellow in his gloved hands. The air of the room was biting cold, but all traces of frost on the walls had gone. And the shaft turned, imperceptibly. From far below his feet came a deep clanging and creaking, the sound unoiled door hinges shaped by a titan would make. In the light of his lamp, deep within the holes drilled at the ends of the grooves, something glowed, like glass, like eyes.
Dagr moved his thumb on the switch, and flicked off the lamp. Then he turned, in a frenzy of panic, and ran up the stairs, moaning and gasping. Once his feet had left the steps, he fled blindly along the corridor, slamming into the right-hand wall and then the left, his arms extended before him. The air reached fingers of chill into his throat and gouged it raw.
He scraped the heel of his left hand on a doorjamb, tearing a hole in the glove, then he was inside a small room. There was a wall in front of him, with an opening to his right, which he took. At the edge of the opening, just above his head, a pair of tiny lights, narrow-set eyes, glowed a steady red. He found himself in a long corridor, which he thought he might even recognize; but he had dropped the broken lamp somewhere and the sparse constellations on the ceiling shed no illumination. No need; his hearing had gone so acute he sensed the walls and ceiling about him. He ran flawlessly now, avoiding all obstacles, turning a quarter-turn right, then left, following the corridor. His feet flew on the floor, the scuffing of his boots loud in the darkness. It would alert anyone, but he would rather be found and killed than remain alone any longer. . . .
Then he collided at full speed with a wooden door, bloodying his nose and setting off explosions of false light in his eyes. When he had recovered from the impact, he reached out cautiously, found a handle which yielded to his touch. Beyond the door was heat and light, the noise of pe
ople moving about. Dagr staggered a few yards farther down the corridor, entered the hunters’ hall through a disused curtained doorway.
Three men were lounging in the hall, the living counterparts of the three stick figures painted on the walls in the outer Hold. One of them was sunk in his cups, another appeared intent on joining him. Neither paid more than cursory attention to Dagr. Dagr knew the third man, Björnkarl, who had been kind to him in the past. The hunter was so again this time, rising to his feet and helping the youth lie down on one of the couches, fetching water and a cloth to clean up his bloody nose.
“What the hell have you been playing at, kid?” the hunter asked, his tone both annoyed and concerned. Dagr shook his head and remained silent.
Björnkarl looked at the back of Dagr’s head, then dabbed at it with his cloth. Dagr sensed a hard crust between the cloth and his scalp, that did not yield no matter how much water was applied. After a minute, the hunter gave up on his ministrations.
“What were you doing in that corridor?” he asked. “Did someone take you there, or were you stupid enough to go by yourself? . . . All right, you don’t have to say anything. Here’s some advice: go see the priest. Him you’ll talk to, if you have any sense. I’ll take you there myself. No way I can shelter a bastard in the hunters’ hall, not even if you were mine.”
Dagr allowed the hunter to pull him to his feet and drag him along. They took a circuitous route and avoided meeting anyone else, twice by dint of a sudden stop before an intersection. The hunter matched Dagr’s silence the whole time. Finally they stood at a narrow door, a secondary access to the chapel. Björnkarl put his hand on Dagr’s shoulder and whispered.
“I’m sorry for what happened. I can understand you’re upset. But you should try to mend things with your father. You’re the hetman’s flesh; it counts for more than you realize.”
