“No time,” I sigh. “I have to attend the Thing.”
Rota mocks me with a bow. “Certainly, Jarl Hladgertha.” And with that, as Rota turns, I feel a sharp smack on my bum.
“Brat!” I shout, laughing.
Gods. When you are not hauling fate and love around as though they were toys, what must you do?
We’re just sailing.
How many mils under the hulls of boats have I known in my seventeen years? And all together with my crew, the Swanfleet? Back to the dawn of the gods. Back to Ginungagap.
There’s a voice rising in the back of my throat. Maybe my mother’s voice. Maybe Kara’s. Maybe my own. But it rings out to the crew.
“It sates itself on the life-blood of fated men, paints the homes of the gods crimson with blood, and the sun’s beams grow black. All the summers that follow become winter. Do you still seek to know?”
And there are cheers, or nods, at the old story. The Darkening of the Gods.
“Brothers will fight and slay one another, and sister’s children will deny kinship. A harshness in the world, of axes and swords and shields riven. An age of wind and wolf, before the world goes headlong without mercy.”
“Yggdrasil the Tree of All Worlds shudders, and Jormungaddr, the Serpent Under the World, roils and thrashes, with great waves across all the seas. The giants of Jotunheim walk again, their dwarf-servants opening the doors to Asgard. Odinn himself falls before the jaws of the great wolf, Fenrir. But Vidthar, Odinn’s son, takes revenge and splits the jaws of the wolf open, even as Thor falls in battle over the slain serpent. The age of the gods is over, and the sea covers all Midgard, with every fire from every hearth hissing into the air.”
In my mind I draw the runes upon them. R for raiding and riding and reigning, the spokes of a chariot wheel. A is the ash-tree, Yggdrasil itself, upon whose branches all worlds hang. G the gift, or that which is given, granted. N for need. An A again, returning to the tree and back to R for symmetry. But then O for owning, for owing, and finally K for kindling, the burning brand of fire and fear and finality, charring all that remains.
Ragnarok.
The crew are grim. As the words are meant to make them. Forge them. Sharpen them.
“And this fate, this orleg, we bring to Harald!” I’m shouting now, the growl of the audience rising as their blood comes up.
“His false kingdom is that of the black sun and dying powers. His jaws crack open and hang limp as Vidthar’s spears shall make them!”
They’re roaring now, men and women and boys, banging fists against shields, boots agains the hull, and the sea is a reverberation.
A warning to the dead, and those who will soon join them.
At first, it’s an island. And then it isn’t.
Some thirty, forty ships, lashed tightly together in the middle of the Kattegat Sea. Harald’s kingdom, then, with no land beneath him. He’s made his own.
Ragnar’s ship doesn’t signal, it just rows like Hel eastward into the midst of it, and the rest are expected to follow. I’m not so sure.
I signal to my flank to break away. There’s little wind, but such as it is it would take us south, so sails are lowered and we row hard north. I want to see this thing before we attack it.
We can make out the crew, and there are fifteen hundred warriors at once, on any flank we choose to attack. Clever. The first boat to attack would be overwhelmed. And the second. Ragnar and those immediately behind him run headlong. The sea begins to be peppered with the arrows of the impatient.
But to the south, another flotilla. Faster, smaller ships. Not the busse which make up the bulk of the island but skeiths with a rigging I’ve never seen before.
Not rigging. Some kind of device. Twenty? No, thirty of them. Half Harald’s fleet, looking to trap us between the device-ships and the floating island.
And now I see the reason of it. The timbers from the smaller ships, all with their sails down, seem to explode in action of beam and rope and fire. Great arcs of flaming balls reach out almost lazily to Ragnar’s ships, hissing and choking in the ocean.
Greek fire.
Should even one of these missiles strike a target, each boat is lost, and forty rowers clad in mail will be dragged to the green of the Kattegat Sea.
Ragnar has stopped short. He’s matching Harald’s tactics of lashing boats together, so that a boarding party might have not forty warriors but a hundred. But this slows them down, and each second brings them an oar stroke closer to the reach of Harald’s fire-ships.
The first screams of those felled by arrows. Fire-arrows lance out from Harald’s island, though none are returned. Ragnar means to board, and there is nothing to be gained from boarding a burning ship, let alone thirty.
We’re already out of range of the fire ships, so our only course is south and east, to come around behind the island and open a second flank.
The sky itself seems to catch fire. The boats in behind Ragnar’s train are hit, and crews try desperately to chop away flaming boards just as they’re drenched with seawater. The rowboats in tow are dragged in, the more experienced already thinking of an escape from the flames that doesn’t involve drowning.
But another erupts, and another.
The wind takes barked commands and the screams of the burning to our ears.
“Hold!” I yell. “Oars up!”
The crew obeys, but they’re confused. It looks like hesitation. Like fear, maybe, and I can’t deny the fear that claws at my gut and makes my throat ache to retching. But I wait.
“Harald,” I address the great raft quietly, “Pretender. Unclean thing reviled by the gods, I come for you. Like fish guts left for gulls, I shall leave you. From every wind in Midgard, I curse you.”
In the air I trace the runes for need, for hail. Cursing chaos against the foe.
Ragnar has some six or seven ships lashed together, and this ungainly creature is rowing one side only to get a boarding angle onto Harald’s ships. The wooden island lurches as hundreds of waiting warriors scramble ship to ship to form a disciplined shield wall: archers, shields and axes, spears at the back.
“Harald,” I chant, louder this time. “Fro has fallen before my curses, and so I curse you. No hall shall welcome you. The drowned call to you. Your spear shaft breaks and your manhood withers. Your shield shatters as you piss down your leg in fear. I curse you. I curse you. I curse you!”
I throw something, out of intuition, some invisible ball of malice and spite and hatred, borne by wind and my own need, my own hunger, to see Harald’s men fall.
“Now!” I cry and our archers can just barely take out a few of their spears from behind. We’re only a few lengths away from the enemy, and their lines are starting to form against us. But still, there is confusion. They expected us to either surround them first, or to bet everything on a single front. Not a concentrated attack on two fronts.
Closer and closer. The ships groan. The blades of the oars in the water, and I think of my father carving such oars, almost idly, lost in the scent of the wood and its beauty, the shavings curling away from the tool-blade making little spiraling waves of their own.
A loud chunk shakes me from this, brings me back to the present. A throwing axe, well below its target, which I realize was me. I don’t bother to pluck it from my shield.
I hold up my fist. This signals half the rowers to reverse, pulling my drakkar alongside, so close their spear tips are over our gunwales. But none move until I give the order. A few spears are teased by the longer of our axes.
And then they board us.
They roar and howl and curse and leap; their shield wall pushes against our own as they clamber over the sides, blinded by their own hunger for our deaths.
What they don’t do is think.
Another signal, and our oars push us off, trapping some twenty of their warriors aboard, suddenly outnumbered, as another dozen of their fellows are dragged into the gap between boats, already racing to the sea-floor, still alive but simpl
y waiting in their horror to drown.
My warriors cut down the panicking enemy first, those who look back or dart around for a way to escape. There is none. Those who remain are determined to die killing as many as possible, and the solution is patience, restraint, withdrawal.
We have none of this, so the whole thing is a gory mess of a fight, fists and axes and shield-rims crashing and crunching and butchering. But the thing is over, and I signal and scream over the sounds of battle to return to the oars. We go again.
There are no arrows at all from them now, all their archers at the west end of the battle, keeping Ragnar at bay. My fist up, our oars up, and again we wait until they board, we push off, their men once more encircled and trapped, the clumsy falling into the ravenous, insatiable sea. And we slaughter them.
I look up, and one of Harald’s own fireships is itself engulfed in glorious flame, whatever cursed fuel the thing needs having exploded and devouring crew and hull and sky. The fire rumbles like an avalanche, and I see a giant in the flames. A thing from Muspelheim, the eldjotnr; the fire giants. Only at Ragnarok, at the end of all worlds, are such things meant to walk in Midgard. Yet here they are.
And they are marching upon us.
The fire-boat, adrift, meanders towards us with each bob of what’s left of its hull.
“Prepare to board!” I yell, and I don’t know who can hear me over all of this, but a single raised sword seems to do the trick. Bows are stowed under seats, long boarding axes grabbed, shields up, oars down, and may the gods be with us, or blind to us.
Half Harald’s men are in panic either due to the oncoming fire-giants or to the collapsing shield wall under Ragnar’s attack. And we are coming, two hundred of us, near-tripping over the churning platform of boats right behind their line. My shield fowls on the rigging of the next boat, and I drop it, not taking my eyes off the battle. I don’t care. I think we’ll all die when the eldjotnr come for us, and I have work to do yet.
My sword is its own thing now, made only for this. Exposed backs, and the backs of necks, the soft hollow of the knee. The joint of a wrist so soon gone from an arm, and a weapon with it. And as their line turns to us, now in the thick of it their spearmen are targets for Ragnar’s own spears, so we hammer them between us, every slice and spatter and gasp bringing us closer not to victory but to the immolation that waits for us.
And then everyone is gone.
Simply gone.
I’m alone, on a tightly-bound island of close-woven ships. Not a blood-drop for all my efforts. No enemy, no crew, no soul in all of Midgard. The fire ship seems to have halted in its progress but not in its burning. The light, I realize, is strangely beautiful.
A shadow flashes over my face—a single white swan flying between me and the sun. I watch her arc slowly, elegantly, with minimal effort, around and to the south, where her wings begin to beat steadily, carrying her towards Sjeland.
In the boat-lengths between the raft and the fire-ship, she stands on the sea-foam.
“Do you expect me to kneel?” I call to the goddess.
“Never,” says Skathi.
She steps toward the flames, reaches out to touch them gently, like flowers. They are almost solid to her, tangible as rushing water, and they do not burn her. Her hand reaches along the keel lovingly—yes, that makes sense, I think, the tide goddess must feel the kiss of every keel on the ocean—and pushes it up, so that the whole ship arches up and back, its stern taking on water in a thundering hiss of steam.
“Just remember: I am the tide. I give you this gift,” she gestures to the drowning ship, “and I take. I always take. It is what I am.”
“What are you taking from me? Am I dying?”
“You’re not drowning. That much I know.”
“So what are you taking from me?” I repeat in frustration, and fear.
“I already have him.”
Eindr.
I know it’s Eindr. And something else, too, something I can’t see in the rush of my rage and grief.
“What? Why? Why would you drown Eindr? How has he… how have I ever done anything that you didn’t ask of me?”
“It’s I who have done what you asked, Ladda. I’m still doing it,” says the goddess.
She turns to me.
“Ladda?” she says, and then there are thousands of us, dying, killing, wounded and wounding, on a wooden island that seems almost silly now, the weight of us pushing the boats down, down into the sea, the water merely a palm’s width beneath the sides.
Reflexively I parry an axe with my sword, step back and swipe at a nose that comes off almost accidentally. A warrior steps back into me and we both stumble and fall, his weight knocking the wind from me and I’m gasping, the small of my back into something hard, bruising, cold. I try to yell at him to get off me, but I have no voice in my lungs and besides the man is dead with not much skull remaining to hear me with.
I try to untwist my left arm from beneath me, but the shoulder is either broken or the nerve severed; it won’t move. I notice the corpse’s mail, and it is unusually fine. A treasure, in fact, I could claim if I can ever get the damn weight off me. And beneath the mail a tunic, not the coarse wool of a rower, but a thing of linen and silk. A tunic for a king, or a pretender king.
Harald. Dead here across my gasping chest. He weighs the same as a barn, pinning me to the deck, immobile.
It’s all I can do to turn my head and watch the fire ship slip backwards into the Kattegat Sea, harmless and well clear of us.
The killing lasts another hour. No one gets around to killing me.
The pain in my shoulder is trying to, however. And I need to pee. This fact would get me laughing if I had the air for it, but it’s all I can do to gasp enough to stay alive.
I’m found, or rather, Harald is found, and the woman with the gore-choked axe is as delighted by her prize as she is startled to find me alive under it. Every other warrior joins in the finding, until Harald’s name is an echo that hangs snagged in the columns of masts.
I am hauled to my feet, an act that nearly causes me to black out. The woman who finds me is practical enough to know that I’ll vouch for her discovery, the reward hers by right, and she sees to my shoulder by moving me away from the shield boss on which I’ve been lying, placing me on the flat deck, and putting her foot in my armpit. She pulls my wrist with strength and certainty, and on releasing it my arm is once again in its socket, though it sings a little song of crunching flesh that the day has found popular and got stuck in its head.
I scream and nearly vomit. I’m not sure why I don’t.
She takes my belt, a fine thing of Kara’s weaving, and binds my wrist between my breasts. Another quick sash under my elbow and the weight of the arm is off altogether. I’m too dizzy, too much in shock to thank her when she hands me my sword.
“Jarl Ladda,” she nods, and turns to drag Harald’s body in Ragnar’s direction.
On Ragnar’s confirmation, there is a cheer almost as loud as the roaring of fire giants. He seeks me out.
“Are you all right?” His face is elation.
“I’ve been lying under your friend there for an hour,” I tell him. “And I need to pee.”
He laughs. “I’ll find you a bucket.”
“Over the gunwales for me,” I say sickly. “I am the boatbuilder’s daughter.”
“Ladda,” says Ragnar, serious now, “I could not have taken this without you.”
“I know, Goat Pants,” I answer. “I know.”
Ashore at Sjeland, there is a familiar knowing, here among the joyous, the arguing, the trading. Among the dead.
Rota.
Rota’s leather cap is still atop ragged hair, now red, now brown and matted with blood in the sun. Freckles I used to count each summer, contrasted against a skin the green-grey of fish. Of the drowned.
Of Eindr’s, too, I remember.
“You went off to war, as you said you would,” I tell Rota’s body. I would cry, but there is nothing in me.
Nothing at all. I want to fall to my knees in rage and mourning, but instead I kneel beside the corpse purposefully, slowly.
“And you took Skathi for your bride, just as Gudrun said you would take a wife. Young as you are.”
Were, part of me corrected. She warned she would take you.
Where in Hel are the Valkyries? I want them here, demand them. Not in fever-dream, but real, their wings beating the fading blue of the sky. I want to hear them singing as they carry my kin to the halls of our ancestors. I’m in no mood for poetry. I want the meat of these flying women before me. Something real I can touch, or weep upon, or strike out in rage.
They owe me enough to be real.
My right hand wants to move, to touch the cold face, to brush the salt-wet hair. But I don’t move. I’m not sad. Not angry. I’m just hollow at the sight of Rota.
Blank. Accepting. Like that day on the beach.
All done.
All done.
Except for the singing.
It comes from a great distance, muffled by the wind, so that I can’t place the tune, though it’s familiar. Increasingly and hauntingly so. Something my mother used to sing, in a language I only half know.
A song in my own voice.
And the song gives my hand movement, so that I can close Rota’s mouth and feel the cool skin against my fingertips; so that I can lean down and kiss the forehead, which stops the song for just an instant, but it resumes as I come up and set the body just so.
And by sunset I am still singing this song, though now I stand on a hilltop on an island well south of any home I have claim to, as warriors light pyres to a sky growing dark pink in the west.
“Wait,” I whisper, and it’s enough for the honour guard to hear me. “Wait.”
I step closer to Rota, laying across the stout beams, strong as the arms that protected me, shielded me, even when I was the older sister. I draw my sword, beautiful and lithe, and place it lengthwise along the unbreathing chest. And I want Eindr here with me, even though he’s down there in the sea watching us in in the grey-green light and not holding my hand, and I want to kiss Kara’s forehead and tell her everything will be all right forever now, that we will survive and our people will not fade and our runes will last and no winter can erase us now.
Winter by Winter Page 15
