Swan's Path

by Asotir

  * * *

  SHE STOOD ATOP a moss-knoll and looked down off the fell. She seemed unaware of him yet; Skarphedin halted and watched her.

  She had unbound her wimple, and the wind caught at her hair and tugged it round her shoulders and long white throat. Her arms were raised. Night was coming down: she, the tall thin woman, seemed to beckon it. Something had come over her. It seemed as though she listened. She did not look back. Out beyond the fell the green fields were spread, and the flat black Skeidar sands; and far, far off, there might be seen a small silver line a-gleaming: and that line was the sea, the Swans’-Path.

  ‘Skarphedin,’ she asked, ‘for what did you come back to Iceland?’

  He went to her and set the flower-necklet round her throat like a torque, over the black, black hair. ‘For you,’ he said. ‘But I looked for a redheaded girl.’ She drew in closer to him. All their bickering was done then.

  Nine

  SWANHILD AWOKE. She was cold. No-one lay beside her.

  The fire had fallen to blue coals buried in the ash. All the shieling was dark: night’s blackness and cold had come in by the smoke-hole. Swanhild drew her hair from her eyes and sat up in her bed-shift. She listened, but she heard no more than the rush of the wind from far away up on the ice. She was alone.

  She lighted a lamp with a straw. Orange-red gleamings danced about the wooden walls, floor and rafters, roof-tree and bed. The shadow of her nakedness showed through the thin bed-shift. All the weapons abided in their places; the fair Greek shirt, his trousers and cloak were gone.

  Swanhild slung a cloak across her shoulders and went out. For a moment the door stuck as she opened it, and the old waraxe stirred above the frame.

  That was a night of portents. The sky was mostly clear, but ragged clouds went across the stars, silver and gray, thrown on by the winds. The fell rose up and up and went into the black night. White was the Skeidar: Swanhild heard it now. White stars fell across the sky, flashed and were gone.

  The wind came down off the ice and snatched the flame from the lamp. In the darkness, Swanhild peered into the night.

  Between the clouds the stars shone fairly in the black blue of Ymir’s skull.

  There was a shape on the rocks above the shieling. Dark and huge it was, troll-like; then all at once Swanhild was minded of Hallgerd’s words and said aloud,

  ‘What are you, and what do you want of me?’

  The shape shifted somewhat, and seemed to look down at her from a great height. Then it surged upward and stepped off the rock. She knew him then.

  ‘It was the cross-boy,’ Skarphedin said. ‘Did his pony wake you?’

  ‘Erik?’ she asked. There seemed no sense in it. She wondered if she dreamed.

  ‘Aye. At first he would not give his word but to you. I said you slept and lay naked: then he waxed red as a grape. He would not stay.’

  ‘But for what did Erik ride here in the middle night?’

  Had it been another man, it might have been said he wavered.

  ‘Swan, your father lies dead this night.’

  She asked, ‘Was he set upon, then?’

  ‘No. It was that sickness.’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘I see why Erik must hasten and give me the tidings straightway. Skarphedin, are you not cold out here?’

  ‘I am better-garbed than you.’ He took her shoulders in his hands. ‘You are cold as ice,’ he said. ‘And your feet are bare.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Colder than ice.’

  ‘Come in then,’ he said, ‘and I will put branches on the coals and make you warm before the fire.’

  ‘No, you will not do that,’ she answered. ‘I will need that wood later this winter.’

  Ten

  NOW THOSE TWO go in, and now that night is left alone to the sea and stars and ice.

  Well-named was the Skaftafell: for very like a shaft it rose up between two great bergs of the glacier, darkly a-gleam a’nights. Through Skaftafell’s wooded waist wound the white Skeidar. Below the fell the stream split, curled and shifted across the low land, and at length lost its way in the choking, sandy marshes of the Skeidar sands, where the skuas nested. But there among the fell-rocks the river’s road was steady and fast. Woods of willow, birch and mountain-ash girded it: and they were deemed good growth for Iceland. Then in the trees’ night-shadows were goodly flower-fields: Balder’s Brow, pansies, pink and white cow parsnips; sticky butterwort too. Above the shieling was the sheep-mead, dark, dotted cloudlike by those slumbering sheep.

  On up, on up ran the Skeidar, up to Svartifoss the Black Falls, where smoky meltwater poured through those black masts of frozen lava.

  Beyond the Svartifoss the fell’s crown stood naked in the sky. The land there was dry and chill. Bitter heath took the place of grass. Sparser waxed that heath, and clumps of rock and sand got bigger: then the fell ended in a great wall of the glacier. Wall seamed and shattered, the lip of a great ice-sea bowled and penned among those upswept alpine peaks, as if stilled by time, but slowly, slowly, spilling down. There a ridge of black rocks broke out of the ice like jagged teeth gaping, wherefore was it well-named by some men, Fenris’ Jaw. But that was beyond the sight of most men, and only scant few had beheld it.

  And even there, and even beyond there, deep in boundless Vatnajokull, hidden lakes steamed and bubbled beneath their lids of age-old ice. And among them was the only open one: and that was Grimsvotn, Grim’s Lake, where the mask of Odin lay. And there, at last, the waters of the Skeidar had their beginning.

  Valkyrie

  One

  ICE HIGH OVER grass-fields, past the heath upon the hills, the glacier Vatnajokull bent the fells beneath it.

  Ice upon ice had built Vatnajokull; for ages had Vatnajokull grown. Now it was higher than the fells and deep as a sea, unfathomable. And Vatnajokull was still growing. Winter by winter the ice crept a little farther down the hills, swallowing heath and grass.

  In the summer sun, Vatnajokull was blinding; in the winter nights, when the air was sharp and the stars burned cold, then Vatnajokull seemed to give off its own light, blue and baleful. But very often Vatnajokull went behind clouds, and those clouds waxed gray and ice-flecked: then mists fell on the dales, and drizzling rain, and that was the bitterest weather: even the sheep waxed cold and suffered, and men and old women fell sick and died. That weather might come even on summer days. Then the hay went moldy and there was little of it; men toted up their cattle and sheep, and it was in their minds that they must slaughter more than they had wished: and even then the long winter looked unsure. But Vatnajokull fattened in the wintertimes, and fed upon the storms.

  Now and then the lads tending to the sheep would hear a sound as of a branch snapping from far away: then they knew the ice had riven and cracked, somewhere miles away up on Vatnajokull. Or else an ice-cliff would crash down onto an ice-field there, up beyond the highest fells: and then the sound would be of thunder.

  Few birds flew over Vatnajokull; no foxes ran that way; men did no more than skirt its lowest stretches, leading their ponies by the bridle, leaving tracks across the snow. They did not last long.

  The first Icelanders that went along those trails thought they saw in the ice huge faces, man-long noses, eyes and great rippling beards half-swallowed in the crags. These they deemed ice-giants felled by Thor. Did like shapes break slumbering from the vast fields of ice higher up, or were those shapes there yet greater and more ghastly? There were stretches on Vatnajokull where no man had ever walked: no man had seen them: no man ever would, not for a thousand years until the world’s end. There were many tales told of the glacier and they grew with the years. No man knew the truth. What cannot be seen must then be dreamed.

  Now the snow and ice glint gray and blue in the dawn’s light. The cold mists part and the clouds rise unwillingly. Day reaches the glacier, long hours after it comes to the green-blue dales below.

  Deep beneath the ice lurk those volcanoes that have built up the fells and all the land.
When one of them erupts, then even this vast ice, in part, must melt; and then the gush of meltwater floods the dales and pastures southaways, leaving twisting streams and fields buried beneath black sand, muck and stones. Even sleeping, these volcanoes boil their hotwater lakes in caverns deep-hollowed beneath the ice. And the greatest of these is called Grimsvotn, where the mask of Odin lies: a ghastly place and an ill for any wanderers.

  The length and breadth of that ice is great as many a King’s rule, and all unchallenged save by one stretch of sharp and lonely peaks: Hvannadalshnukur. And that is the highest spot in all Iceland, and rises more than one thousand, one hundred fathoms above the waves of the faroff sea.

  All else is ice. Ice, and snow, and wind: wind like spears, snow hard as stone, ice stepped and waved like blue rivers, pools and firths. And now and again groans sound thereabouts, shrieks and squeals from no living throats: for the glacial ice does move, though it be slower than any mortal man’s eye might tell. Slowly and dreadfully the ice crushes itself and grinds downhill beneath its own undreamt-of weight: down the fell-sides, down out over the hills of men.

  And the sun rises, and in the strong light the snows glint, though not as though they melt: even the sunlight here is unwarm. And the sun wheels round and falls. Then clouds come, for they are never far off here: on the northern slopes mist-clouds roll over the black cliffs and spill into the valleys: the water-droplets stiffen into ice and fall like gems onto the bed-snow. Only now, in the gathering twilight, do those ice ramparts and towers seem to come into their own, alone, lifeless, unseen, daunting even to ravens. The ice stretches on all sides farther than the eye might see, melting only into darkness. For miles and miles it runs beneath the night, rising, falling; rippled, cracked and rounded; in spires, in broken cliffs and in sluggish, bowl-like vales.

  That is Vatnajokull, the Water-Glacier, and that is Vatnajokull’s world; and in the stars’ cold light with winter’s onset not far off, Vatnajokull sits, spellbinding and ill, waiting, waiting.