Authors: Matthew J. Kirby
Hake looks down and fingers the rope in his hands.
“She has done much to heal your men,” Alric says. “To ease their suffering. Would you not like her to continue in these duties? It would be quite difficult for her while bound to that pillar.”
Hake stares at Alric like the glacier, a wall of ice. Alric manages to smile, the way he does, so mild, and I wonder at his ability to summon it. Moments pass, and gradually Hake melts. I see his shoulders relax, his arms lower. He unties Bera and lets her go.
“You are free for now,” he says. “You will make it your sole mission to heal my men. I will be watching you, and if I see any dereliction of these duties, I will tie you in the cowshed to freeze instead of the hall. Is that understood?”
Bera brushes off her hands. “I’ll do what I can for your men. But not for you, Captain. I care not what you command.
I do it for them, because I do not want to see a single one of them die.” She tries to step past him, but he blocks her with his arm.
“Your larder key,” he says and holds out his hand.
She snatches it from her brooch and slaps it into his palm. Then she storms by him and goes to her hearth.
Raudi fixes Hake and Per with a hate-glare and hurries over to her.
“She is still under my arrest,” Hake says, and rumbles away.
I turn to Alric. “Thank you, sir.”
“She isn’t cleared of suspicion,” Alric says.
“She will be cleared,” I say.
Per leads Asa away into a corner. She appears agitated, whispering and pointing her finger at him. I watch them go, angry at Per for failing us again, angry at my sister for saying nothing to defend Bera.
Alric sighs. “Let us just hope that none of these men die. The captain is not in his right mind. And looking around at this nightmare, I cannot say I entirely blame him.”
“You don’t really suspect Bera, do you?” I ask.
“I have to. I also must suspect Ole, and Per, and even Hake. And you should suspect me.”
I swallow down a skip in my heartbeat. “Why?”
“Because I doubt the venomous traitor ate his or her own poison. The enemy is very likely one of us who did not partake of your goat.”
I’m speechless. He is right.
Alric smiles his bland smile and walks away, just as Raudi approaches me.
“Thank you,” he says, and his voice catches.
“For what?”
“For defending my mother. But now I don’t know what will happen when we leave this place.”
“It will be all right,” I say. “No one but Hake believes it.”
He shakes his head. “But it’s Hake. That is enough for the Thing to find her guilty.”
“Hake will see the truth on his own before long.” I nod toward Bera as she bends over one of the men, adjusting his blankets. “Look at your mother, how she tries to save them.”
“You’re a true friend, Solveig.”
He grabs me into a tight hug that squeezes the air out of me, then he lets me go and walks away without looking back. Surprise renders me silent. I am grateful that Raudi and I have restored some of our old closeness, but I feel guilty that it has come at such a high price.
The hall is very quiet after that, and everyone keeps away from Hake. Now that we know it was poison, no one is afraid of catching this plague. I am allowed to tend to the sick. I wipe their dry lips with a wet rag to keep them from splitting. I change soiled bedding. I whisper encouraging and comforting things to them. And when I am not helping, I sit next to Alric by the fire. Asa has gone to bed, red-eyed from crying about something, and Per sulks in the shadows.
I am unsettled by thoughts of enemy ships, and clouds in the shape of wolves, and falling glaciers. “What is on your mind?” Alric asks. “My dream,” I say.
He nods. “That has been on my mind as well.” Later that night, one of the berserkers dies.
Asa later wore our mother’s dress, the one she had tried on, to a feast. She came out, and Father beamed with pride while those gathered in the hall murmured in appreciation and wonder. She passed the mead-horn, and I think it felt to everyone as if they had a queen again. And you were beautiful, Asa. With Mother’s dress, and your hair braided like a woman, and your jewelry. Everyone loved you.
I stood off to the side, next to a pillar, and Per, you came up beside me.
And even as you talked to me, you stared at Asa.
I did not mind. Everyone was staring at Asa.
“That will be you, one day,” you said to me.
“Not me,” I said.
You then said to me, “Beauty isn’t all that matters. Wisdom and kindness, these are important, too. And you have them.”
“Do you think so?” I asked.
“I do,” you said, looking up at my sister, and even in that moment, you had never looked so handsome to me.
“My father doesn’t think so,” I said.
That’s when your eyes met mine. “Perhaps not yet. And that is why you must show him.”
T
he ground is frozen, cemented with ice and snow, so we cannot bury the body. Hake and Per trudge across the yard, carrying the berserker between them, and lay him in the cowshed. No one else goes with them, but I don’t think any of us want to treat this as a funeral. The time for burial will come after we have returned home, where we and his kinsmen can honor him properly. For now, I turn my attention back to the suffering of the living.
Bera has assigned me to a group of warriors. One of them is the thrall, the fallen berserker who was banished and taken back in as a slave. I kneel down next to him with a bowl of cold water and a rag. He moans, but it isn’t the sound of someone in pain. It is how I would imagine a distant ghost would
sound, something lost and wandering in the night. It reaches deep into my chest, and I ache for him. I cry for him as I dab his forehead and squeeze drops of water into his mouth. He is weak, but he swallows.
Then he exhales a raspy breath that carries a single word. “Story.”
“You want me to tell you a story?” I ask.
He closes his eyes, and a shiver rattles him. I pull the blanket up to his chin and feel him quivering beneath my hands. How can such a man, once a powerful berserker, feel so weak and frail? And in this moment, how can he want a story from me?
I don’t know what story to tell. I try to think of a tale of healing, but I can’t remember any. But perhaps it doesn’t have to be a true story. Perhaps, as Alric says, it is more important what the story does, and I can tell a new story of my own. I take a moment to gather the words about me, piling them up in my mind, and I begin.
“High up in Asgard, there grows a tree on the Hill of Healing. And surrounding the tree are nine shield-maidens, nine Valkyrie. When our heroes are slain in battle, it is the Valkyrie who escort their spirits up to Odin’s hall.”
I notice that there are others listening to me now. Those men that can open their eyes watch me, so I stand and continue my tale as I walk among them.
“One of the nine Valkyrie, Eir, who was gifted in the healing arts, grew curious about our mortal world. So she with-drew
from the Hill of Healing, passed through the gates of Asgard, and came down to our world, where she spied a frozen fjord. And there in the fjord she found a hall, small and heaped with snow that rose almost to the roofline.”
Our fjord. Our little hall.
“She drew near to it,” I say. “And she wondered what manner of men would dwell there. She decided to enter, and inside, Eir found Odin’s finest warriors….”
Our warriors. My voice threatens to break with grief. I look into the faces of the fallen men around me and tears fill my eyes. But I continue.
“All of them brave, all of them honorable, all of them strong. They had been felled by treachery, struck down by a coward’s poison. And the greatness of the men moved Eir in her heart. She leaned and touched the tips of her fingers to their lips, lit upon them snowflake-soft, and left a drop of dew from the leaves of the tree that grows on the Hill of Healing.”
I kneel by the nearest berserker and wipe the tears from my cheek. I kiss my fingertips and press them to his lips. Then I do the same for the next. I go to each man in turn as I speak.
“And one by one,” I whisper, “the warriors wakened from the poison-sleep. Bodies purified. They strapped on their armor and took up their spears and their swords. They stood tall and proud under the winter sun. Eir smiled upon them, and then she climbed back up the cloud-paths, back to the Hill of Healing. There, she spoke to the other shield-maidens of the healing she had wrought in the finest of Odin’s men.”
I touch the lips of the last berserker, stand up, and look around the hall. Bera and Asa have tears in their eyes. Per hangs his head as though he cannot look at me, while Alric’s wide eyes stare at me almost without blinking. Ole nods from a corner of the room.
I hear heavy footsteps and turn to see Hake rushing toward me. I take a step back as he falls and kneels at my feet.
“My princess,” he says. He takes my hand, kisses it, and touches it to his forehead. “You are no skald. You are Eir, herself.”
“I am not, Captain,” I say. “But I wish that she were here.”
“She was here,” Alric says. “If only for a moment.”
I bow and go back to the thrall I was attending before, the one who asked for the tale. He is smiling instead of moaning, and when I touch him, I find he is no longer shivering. I begin to let myself believe my own story, that my words can summon shield-maidens. That my stories can shape the world. The thought of so much power is exhilarating and terrifying.
I ask Alric about it later.
“I know what you are feeling,” he says. “You realize that you now have the power to create gods and goddesses, warriors and dragons.”
“Yes,” I say. “But if they are not real before, can a story make them so?”
“Real to whom?”
“To everyone.”
He sharpens the point of his beard with his fingers. “I can barely decide what is real for myself, let alone what is real to everyone else.”
“Alric.” I shake my head. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re really saying anything at all, or if you just make it sound that way.”
“Never trust a storyteller,” he says. “We’re all of us liars.”
The mood in the hall is a little lighter for the rest of the afternoon. The warriors seem to be resting a little easier from the pains of the poison. We attend to them as we have done for the last few days, but my story has stoked the room with optimism. Later that evening, I take some food to Muninn. I have been neglecting him and decide to let him out of his cage. But instead of perching on my shoulder, he flies up into the rafters and glares at me.
“I’m sorry I haven’t had you out,” I say. “But you can sulk if you want to.”
He squawks at me.
For the rest of the evening, as I move about the hall, I notice that he’s usually perched on the rafters just over my head. I don’t know if he’s trying to put more droppings in my hair, or if he’s just reminding me that he’s not on my shoulder where I want him. But he’s there, and it makes me smile.
But then he’s not there, and I hear Hake’s voice bellowing.
“Who took the key?”
Everyone looks around in confusion, and I search the rafters for Muninn.
“The larder key?” Per asks.
Hake charges right up to Bera and looms over her. “Yes, the larder key. Where is it, woman?”
She puts her hands on her hips. “I have no idea.”
And then I see my raven, strutting toward his open cage, eyes glittering, the key in his beak.
“Muninn!” I rush toward him. He flaps away from me, racing for his cage as though he’s hoping to hide the key before I reach him. But I grab his tail feathers and snatch it from him. “Bad bird!” I say.
Everyone in the room starts laughing, including Hake.
Muninn caws at me and ruffles his feathers in fury before hopping into a corner of his cage. Then he actually turns his back to me, and I can’t believe how like a person he is.
“Your bird thinks he should be running the steading?” Hake says as I hand him the key.
I close the door to Muninn’s cage. “I think he just likes the metal for his nest.”
“Well, I told you he was a smart one.” Hake stands over Muninn with a look of pride. “I’ll just have to be more careful around this little thief.” He chuckles and walks away.
Muninn jerks his head toward me.
“I’ll try to let you out more often,” I say.
Not long after that, I climb into the bedcloset with Asa. She
lies awake on her side, facing me. I could touch her if I wanted to, without even needing to reach. But I don’t want to. I still cannot believe she did not defend Bera, nor can I believe she continues her relationship with Per. I have never felt further away from her than I do right now, our faces inches apart. These months spent trapped together have made my sister a stranger to me, and I feel a loneliness I haven’t ever felt before.
“I loved your story,” she says.
I want to roll away from her. “Thank you.”
“You brought the men comfort.”
I nod.
“It was beautiful,” she says.
“Why did you keep silent?”
She frowns. “When?”
“When Hake accused Bera. You said nothing in her defense.”
“How do you know she didn’t do it?”
“What?” I sit up in bed. “How can you say that?”
“You never know what a person is capable of, Solveig. Who knows what’s in Bera’s heart?”
There is something wrong in her voice. I hear it now that I have learned how to lie. But even though the story I told tonight may not have been true, I didn’t tell it to deceive. Not like Asa’s words.
“You’re right.” I lie back down. “You never know what a person is capable of.”
“Exactly.”
“I would never have thought Per capable of such cowardice.”
She is silent. I refuse to look at her.
“Per is no coward.” Her voice is hard.
“He did nothing to defend Bera, either. He wanted to, but he was afraid to stand up to Hake.”
“He wasn’t afraid.”
“Yes, he was. And you were angry with him for it. I saw you.”
She turns away from me. “That’s not what I was angry about.”
“Then what were you angry about?”
“Good night, Solveig.”
The next day, I go to my thrall. He is sleeping, and I sit beside him to help him eat some oats that Bera has mashed and thinned to a slurry. But when I touch him, he is cold. Rigid. I drop the bowl and scurry backward.
“What is it?” Bera asks from nearby.
I say nothing, simply stare at his face. The corners of his mouth are still smiling.
Bera sweeps over to me. She bends and touches the back of her hand to his cheek. Then she closes her eyes and bows her head. “I’m sorry, child.”
“He’s dead?” I ask.
“Yes. I’ll get Hake and Per to take him out.”
She leaves me with him. I stare, wanting to run, but also feel the urge to touch him again, touch his cheek the way Bera did. To feel the absence of whatever it is that once made him alive. Instead, I take a deep breath and cover his face with the blanket, and I cry over him until Hake and Per come to carry him away.
This time, I follow them out of the hall, across the yard, and into the shed. They lay him on the ground, their breath-clouds above him as though his spirit is lingering over his body. There are two in here now. Two dead warriors. How many more will die?
“I’ll be right back,” Hake says. Per and I wait without speaking.
When the berserker captain returns, he is carrying the sword he took from the thrall three nights ago. Hake kneels and places the weapon on the body. Then he folds the man’s arms across his chest, over the hilt.
Hake stands and turns to Per and me. Then he is gone.
Per clears his throat. “I’m sorry.”
“About what?” I ask.
He sighs. “Everything. This is not how I … I have not fulfilled my duty to protect you.”
“Nor my sister.”
“Solveig, believe me when I tell you that I have done nothing that would dishonor her. But I respect you too much to lie
to you. Yes, I love her. I loved her even before we came here. I have done many things out of love for her.”
The way he says it needles me with a painful doubt. My throat is dry as I ask, “Have you been my friend out of love for her? Just because I’m her sister?”
“What?” He holds up his hands. “No, no. I am your friend because I admire you. Surely you know that.”
I bow my head. I want to believe him. I want to see him as I used to, but it is difficult to forget the ways he has disappointed me.
“Solveig, I —”
Hake walks back through the door. “Come, Per.” He frowns. “Another has died.”
Per closes his eyes, defeated. “Who?”
“One of your men. The wounded one, Egill.”
Per places a hand on my shoulder. “We must finish talking later.”
I nod, and he nods, and he and Hake leave. I look around me. In my mind, I see a cowshed full of bodies. Bodies covering the frozen ground, bodies stacked beside and on top of one another. And in that moment, I know that my stories cannot heal, or create, or shape. They are nothing more than words, dead as soon as they’re born, lost as soon as I’ve spoken them. I don’t feel powerful anymore. I feel weak.
On my way across the yard, I see Hake and Per coming toward me, death-laden. I step aside and let them pass. They
make the trip many times through the evening and night. Five before I go to sleep, and then the hall doors open four times during the night, waking me. By morning, there are only nine berserkers still living, and Gunnarr. But we lose him right after we have served the morning meal.