Authors: Giles Kristian
‘I’m not going to die, Uncle,’ Sigurd had said.
And neither was he.
But that first night was hard. The flesh in his arms prickled and numbed and all he could do was clench his fists over and over to try to keep some life in them. The rope over his chest made breathing difficult and knowing that he couldn’t move made him desperate to. But the worst thing that first night was the insects that fed on him wherever his skin was exposed and especially on his wrists and neck. The canopy around him seemed alive with tiny creatures who must have thought some god had laid on a feast for them, if they thought at all.
The others slept on the peat mound around him albeit fitfully because any sound at all out there in the fen had them touching spears or sword hilts or Thór’s hammer amulets and mumbling invocations to the gods to guard them from fen spirits or some bloody-minded draugr venturing from his grave. Though none of them, other than Sigurd himself, slept less than Alvi. If the lad’s eyes were not scouring the gloom they were riveted on Sigurd and wide as oar ports, so that Sigurd thought that maybe he had never heard the story of Óðin hanging on the great ash where the Æsir hold their daily courts. Perhaps the young man thought the men he had led into the fen were moon mad. Or perhaps Alvi knew the story well enough and was waiting for the Allfather himself to appear spear in hand, his one eye blazing beneath his broad-brimmed hat.
Despite his discomfort Sigurd felt a grim smile on his lips at that thought. What would Olaf say then, he wondered.
In the morning Alvi led the others back to the farmstead, but for Asgot who said he would stay until the end. Svein had wanted to stay too but Sigurd told him there was nothing he could do and that he would be better off making himself useful to Roldar and Sigyn around the farm.
Olaf had needed no such encouragement to leave, though he muttered something about his time being better spent keeping an eye on Alvi’s kin to make sure none of them went off anywhere running their mouths about the men who had come to Tau. Sigurd had rarely seen the man in such a black mood, not even when he had returned from a hunting trip to find that Svein’s father Styrbiorn, Slagfid and Harald had drunk Eik-hjálmr dry of mead and Styrbiorn had even used Olaf’s horn doing it.
‘I’ll bring you some ale tomorrow, Sigurd,’ Aslak promised, rubbing his ear, barely able to meet Sigurd’s eye because he felt guilty leaving his friend there.
‘No ale,’ Asgot said. ‘Nothing must pass his lips but that which I give him.’
‘Then he really is a dead man,’ Olaf had barked, already trudging off, for the godi was not known as a good man to have in charge of the cook pot.
Sigurd watched them until they had disappeared from view and then began to feel more uneasy than he had since setting off from Roldar’s farm the previous dawn.
‘Do you fear me, Sigurd?’ Asgot asked. The godi had been collecting plants from the fen before sunrise and now he sat on the mound below Sigurd, sniffing them, crushing and rolling leaves between finger and thumb or slicing them into small pieces with his eating knife.
‘Why would I fear you?’ Sigurd managed, his tongue feeling like a sliver of dried cracked leather in his mouth. But the truth was he did fear Asgot. The godi was like the sinkholes out there in the fen, part of neither this world nor the next. Asgot was a doorway between men and the gods and though he had always been loyal to Sigurd’s father, how could you fully trust a man you believed would slit his own mother’s throat – if he had a mother – if some capricious god had laid out the runes telling him to.
‘Your father had feared hirðmen around him. Men like Slagfid and Olaf and even your brother Thorvard who had the makings of a great champion. But they could not save him in the end.’
Sigurd felt himself bristle at this, or perhaps it was the needles pricking his flesh because he could barely move his limbs. ‘You did not save him either,’ he said, fixing his eyes on the godi which sometimes was like looking at any man but sometimes like staring into the heart of a flame. Now it was the latter.
‘No, I did not save him,’ Asgot admitted. ‘Though I had warned him not to take his ships out to fight Jarl Randver. For I had dreamt that Karmsundet was a sea of blood and I told Harald of it. He would not listen.’
‘He was oath-tied to King Gorm and would not stay at home because of a dream,’ Sigurd said. ‘Besides, you always talk of blood.’
‘Still, Sigurd, he is a fool who does not try to untangle the knot of his dreams.’ He sniffed at a leaf which he had rolled into a ball and stretched out his other hand as though grabbing at the air. ‘Dreams are nothing. And everything.’ Then he glared back at Sigurd. ‘I could not save your father but I will see that he has his revenge. You, Sigurd, will be Harald’s sword from beyond the grave. You will be the fire that consumes our enemies.’ He grinned then and it was a grim sight on his wolf-thin face. ‘If you do not die up there on that tree,’ he said.
Sigurd did not give that a reply. His mouth was so dry that he would not waste the spit. And he did not speak to Asgot again until the long dusk began to stretch out before them and the biting flies came out in hateful clouds again. And then he only spoke because he needed the godi to climb up with the shit bowl.
The next day Alvi, Svein and Aslak returned. He did not see them arrive but by now he was slipping in and out of consciousness and his vision was as blurry as if he had his eyes open underwater, so that it had taken him a long while to work out who was there and who wasn’t.
He heard one of them telling Asgot that he thought Sigurd had died for his face had turned the colour of a dead man’s, but Asgot had told whoever it was that it was none of their concern now. There had been more conversation but to Sigurd it was like the murmur of the sea and his ears could not fish the words out of it. Perhaps Svein and Aslak slept on the peat mound with Asgot that night, but perhaps not. At one point Sigurd thought he saw tongues of flame out there among the sedges and spike rushes and his guts twisted like Jörmungand because he thought it must be King Gorm’s men or even Jarl Randver’s. That somehow they had found him and now he would die without lifting a finger because he was a fool, weak and starving and lashed to a tree as helpless as a hen strung up by its legs. But no blades pierced his flesh and the flames came no closer, so that in his stupor Sigurd realized they must be corpse candles held by unseen spirits.
He tried to ask Asgot about these flames but the words left his mouth in a slew of sound, like snow sliding off a roof, and nor could he be sure which bleary shape below him was the godi and so he closed his eyes again. He did not fear the fen spirits, because they must surely have thought he was dead, if they saw him at all. For Sigurd felt as though he were becoming part of the tree now, as though the alder’s limbs were folding him into its embrace.
Besides which, what could the dead do to him that was worse than what he was doing to himself? He felt himself laugh at that thought. Then pain flooded back in and for a heartbeat he knew one of the hateful draugar had put a flame to his side to punish him. Until he remembered the cut in his side, felt the sting of it and knew it was done by steel not fire, and with that thought panic rose in him again. How could he have been so stupid? Had he not seen Asgot’s knife at work a thousand times before? Had he not watched that blood-hungry blade reap lives for the gods ever since he could walk on his own legs?
Asgot has tricked me, his mind screamed. I am his sacrifice. I am the price they are paying to lift the gods’ curse. He struggled and screamed and yet there was no movement and no sound. It was as if the fen were swallowing him and this horrifying truth churned a pool of despair deep in Sigurd’s soul.
And then he knew he was drowning, thought he must have fallen into the fen and that rotten water was pouring into his throat and killing him and he could do nothing about it.
‘Drink, Sigurd.’ The voice was close. ‘Drink, boy. It will help.’
And so Sigurd drank.
The beat of the drum was slow at first, like the ebb and flow of the tide. Sigurd noticed his own heart aligning with its beat and then it got faster, sounding like the hooves of a running reindeer striking the earth and Sigurd was riding that beast, being borne across worlds. The rhythm was hoof-beats and the beating of a bird’s wings. It was sunrise and sunset, rain and wind, sleeping and waking. Life and death. It was the in and out of the act between a man and a woman.
It was the Norns, Urd, Verdandi and Skuld weaving the wyrds of men’s lives, and Sigurd began to see the warp of the threads as what is, what was, and what will be, and the weft as what he would choose to do. But then he saw that the great loom was strung with intestines and weighted with skulls. The three Spinners were weaving with the blood and guts of men’s lives and he felt the horror of this shiver through his own tortured flesh.
Then he saw the yellow eyes set like polished amber in a great head. He heard the deep guttural growl coming from the creature’s throat and saw the hackles raised on its thickly muscled neck.
The fool’s drumming has brought wolves, Sigurd thought. Or else they smelt the cut in my side.
He waited for the beast’s teeth to puncture his flesh. And yet wasn’t Asgot still beating his drum? Surely the godi would not stand by and watch the wolf devour him.
Darkness swallowed him again like a cold ocean wave.
Then he was in an oak forest, crouching behind a thicket because there was a creature near by snuffling and snorting and coming closer. He held his breath and the boar emerged from the undergrowth, a mass of stiff bristling black fur and muscle, those great gut-ripping upper tusks having been ground to sharp edges against the bottom ones.
Moving through the undergrowth, its hide too thick for the biting insects to penetrate, the boar searches for its treats. Even those which are undergound are not safe and will be rooted up. All the world is to be plundered and feasted upon and now the beast sniffed the air and turned its massive head towards Sigurd. Its eyes flamed and it charged, snapping branches, flying across the earth, fearless and fast, and Sigurd knew that nothing could turn it aside. That bristling fury would hit him like a forge hammer, those tusks ripping into the big muscles of his legs. But the boar blurred past him, the wind from it stinging his side below the ribs, and the creature flew into the scrub beside him and was gone.
He let out his breath and looked up and saw through a gap in the canopy a shape soaring against the blue, its barn-door wings from tip to tip longer than a spear, its tail feathers white as snow. He felt the bird’s shadow pass across his face like a cold sea breeze and heard its plaintive call of
kli kli kli
piercing the sky. Then it too was gone, but Sigurd knew it had been a great sea-eagle, whose talons could snatch fish from the fjord or even a goat or a deer from the hillside.
And then he sank into oblivion again.
He was woken by rain. Cold, fresh, fat drops falling from the leaves and branches above and splashing on his upturned face and into his open mouth. In the distance, far to the east, thunder cracked and rumbled across the sky and seemed to be coming his way.
‘What did you see, Haraldarson?’
Sigurd’s neck was as stiff as a fire iron and he did not try to look down at Asgot. Nor could his mouth form a reply or any shape but the ring which caught the rain that tasted of iron as it mixed with the blood from his cracked lips. For he was bound more by the dreams now than the ropes. They were all over him still, heavy as a brynja and as real as the living tree to which he was lashed. But neither did he want to shrug them off.
‘What did you see, boy?’
He did not want the dreams or visions or whatever they were to dissipate now that he was back with the living again. He wanted them to seep into his bones and marrow, like hearth smoke staining the grain of Eik-hjálmr’s roof beams, because he knew they were important. That they were god-given.
Then the boughs and leaves and the fen were disappearing again, like a boat drifting off into the mist, and Sigurd tried to shout, tried to raise an arm as though he could grasp on to consciousness itself, but his limbs might as well have belonged to the alder for all the mastery he had of them.
His heart was beating fast now. He could feel that well enough. And then there were fingers in his mouth and he thought he was choking but he swallowed what he could and fought for breath. Then came that bitter draught again, scalding his throat, making him retch.
I am going to die, he thought. I will never meet with my father and my brothers and my ancestors in Valhöll. They had good deaths. In the steel-storm. They would have been chosen. I will die here like a fox in a trap and my name will be less than a shadow. To my enemies I will be less than a starling flying through the door of their hall and out through the smoke hole.
The drum again. Beating slowly. It was the stroking of a lover’s hand. It was the pulsing of Sigurd’s blood in his ears. It was his mother stroking his hair when he was a boy and the lullaby she would sing him to sleep.
Mother.
He dreamt of the king of the beasts then, the bear, who the elder folk believed was their older brother because it could stand upright and walk short distances on two legs like a man. Gods but this bear was a proud beast! It had ranged far from its cave on the hunt for honey but when at last it came to the place, the bear saw that the hive was protected by a swarm of raging bees. The noise from them filled the world, the beating of ten thousand little wings making the blood in his veins tremble.
‘Will you endure the swarm for that sweet plunder?’ Sigurd asked the bear. ‘You know that they will sting you terribly. Perhaps they will kill you.’
The bear turned to Sigurd and laughed like a man and it was the sound of thunder.
A breeze against his temple, running between his braids and through his beard to cool his scalp and face. The wind from a great raven beating the air with its wings so close to Sigurd’s head that his eyes were full of its purple, green and black gloss and its thick beak.