The Broken Sword (23 page)

Slowly the boat won around the many twists and out-thrusts of the fjord, on into the stark land. Once Skafloc heard a slithering inshore, that kept pace. The wind yowled over the clifftops, so high that it might almost have been blowing between the stars.

Strange was it to see the image of Fand, dancing ever farther into Jotunheim.

At last the boat came to a place where a broad rough slope cut down from a mountain whose top was crowned with the Lodestar. A glacier ran along that slope, glimmering in the uneasy half-light, to end at the water. “This looks to be our landing spot,” said Mananaan.

Something hissed from the tumbled blocks of ice piled beneath the glacier’s side.

“Methinks first is a guard to get by,” said Skafloc. He and his companion busked themselves, putting on helm and byrnie, with furs above against the tearing cold. Each took a shield on his arm and girded a sword at his waist. Skafloc had yet another sword in his gloved hand, while Mananaan bore his great spear whose head gave back what light there was in a ripple like moonglade.

The boat grounded gently on ice and shale. Skafloc could jump ashore without going into the slurried water. He drew the hull up and made fast while Mananaan stood watch, straining into the gloom beyond. Thence came a grinding sound, as of a heavy weight dragging over stones.

“Our way is dark and has an evil smell,” remarked the sea king; “however, we grow no safer by dawdling.”

He started off between and over the house-sized chunks of ice and rock. Blackness thickened until the seekers must grope ahead by what few ragged patches of stars showed between the heights. The stench waxed around them, with something altogether cold about it, and the stirring and hissing got louder.

Passing a ravine that led toward the glacier, Skafloc saw the long pale shape within. His grip tightened on the haft.

The thing slid out and towards them. Mananaan’s battle-cry rang between the steeps. He drove his spear into the looming form. “Out of the way, white worm!” he shouted.

The thing hissed and struck at him. Its coils scraped on the stones and sent them rattling. He darted aside, and as the flat head smote near, Skafloc hewed. The shock of the blow rammed back into his shoulders, and the worm turned gape-jawed on him. Barely could he see the creature in this dark, but he knew that mouth could swallow him whole.

Mananaan thrust his spear into the pallid neck. Skafloc cut again at the snout. The charnel smell made his throat seize up; he gasped for air and rained blows. A drop of blood or venom splashed on him, ate through his coat, and seared his arm.

He cursed, and hewed more strongly at the weaving head. Then he felt his sword crumple, corroded by that blood. He heard Mananaan’s spearshaft break as it went in.

Drawing their sheathed blades, he and the sea king pressed forward afresh. The worm withdrew, and they followed it up onto the glacier.

Grisly to see was the thing. Its coils writhed halfway to the peak, leprous white and thicker than a horse. The snake head swayed high above, drooling blood and poison. Mananaan’s broken spear was in one eye; the other glittered balefully down. Its tongue flickered in and out, a blur to the sight, and it hissed like sleeting gale.

Skafloc slipped on the ice. The worm hacked down at him. Yet swifter was Mananaan, to hold his shield above the fallen man and smite with his sword. That blade gashed open the puffed throat. Skafloc scrambled to his feet and swung likewise.

The worm brought a coil lashing around. Skafloc rolled aside into a snowdrift. Mananaan was caught in a loop, but ere it could crush him his glaive had slotted between two ribs.

At that the worm fled, plunged past them like a snowslide into the sea. Gasping and trembling, the wayfarers sat for a long while under the northlights before they took up their journey anew.

“Our second blades are pitted,” said Skafloc. “Best we go back for new weapons.”

“Nay, the worm might be lurking for us by the shore, or if not that, then sight of us may re-awaken its wrath,” answered Mananaan. “These arms will serve till we have the rune sword.”

They climbed slowly along the slick, mysteriously shimmering glacier. Black ahead, the mountain blotted out half the sky. Dimly, the wind brought noise of a beating hammer.

Onward they went, until hearts fluttered and lungs gasped. Often they must rest, even sleep a little, there on the back of the glacier, and it was well they had brought food along; for the ice was sharply canted and treacherous.

Naught stirred, naught seemed to live in the cold, but always louder came the ringing of the hammer.

Until in the end Skafloc and Mananaan stood at the head of the glacier, halfway to the top of the mountain crowned with the Lodestar. A narrow trail, broken and boulder-strewn, hardly to be seen in the murk, went off leftward. Sheer cliffs dropped from it to whittering depths. The travellers roped themselves together and crept along it.

They came, after many falls where one saved his partner by clawing himself to the rock, out on a ledge that fronted a cave mouth. From the deeps behind rolled the sound of iron.

A great red dog was chained in the opening. It howled and flung itself at them. Skafloc half raised his sword to kill it.

“No,” said Mananaan. “I have the feeling that seeking to slay this beast would bring the worst of luck. We had best try to slip by it.”

They held their shields overlapping and went in crabwise, right arms to the rock. The hound’s weight slammed against them and its teeth dented the rims. The howling shook their skulls. Barely could they win past the reach of the chain. Now they came into lightlessness. They held hands and groped along a downward-slanting tunnel, feeling ahead for pits and often crashing into fanged stalagmites. The air was less cold than outside, but its dankness made it seem more so. They heard the noise of mighty waters and thought that this must be one of the sounding rivers that flow through hell. Louder and nearer clamoured the beat of the hammer.

Twice came a yelping that made echoes fly, and they stood braced for battle. Once they were set upon by something big and heavy, that bit chunks out of their shields. Blind in the dark, they yet made shift to slay the thing. But they never knew what shape it had had.

Soon afterwards they saw a red glow, like that star which is in the Hunter. They hastened forward and came, more slowly than they would have thought, to a vast frosty chamber. And into this they stepped.

Dimly was it lit by a wide but low forge-fire. In that light, the hue of half-clotted blood, they could make out vague gigantic things that might belong in a smithy. And at the anvil was a Jotun.

Huge he was, so tall they could scarce see his head in the reeky gloom, and so broad that he nonetheless was squat. He wore only a dragonskin apron on his hairy body, which was gnarled like an old tree bole and muscled like a snake-pit. Black hair and beard hung matted to his waist. His legs were short and bowed, the right one lame, and he was hunchbacked, bent over till his arms touched the ground.

As the seekers entered, he turned a terrible face on them, broad-nosed, wide-mouthed, scarred and seamed. Under the heavy brow ridges were twin hollownesses; his eyes had been plucked from the sockets.

His voice carried the boom and hiss of those rivers that flow through hell. “Oho, oho! For three hundred years has Bolverk toiled alone. Now the blade must be hammered out.” And he took that on which he had been working and flung it across the room. The clang when it struck flew back and forth between the walls for a long while.

Skafloc stood boldly forth, met the empty glare, and said: “I bring new work that is also old for you, Bolverk.”

“Who are you?” cried the Jotun. “Mortal man can I smell, but there is more than a little of Faerie about him. Another I can smell who is half a god, but he is not of Aisir or Vanir.” He groped around him. “I am not easy about either of you. Come closer so I can tear you apart.”

“We are on a mission you will not dare hinder,” said Mananaan.

“What is it?” Bolverk’s question rolled through the caverns until it was lost in the inner earth. Quoth Skafloc:

Asa-Loki, angry, weary with his prison, wishes sword-play

Here the weapon for his wielding: Bolverk, take the bane of heroes.

And he opened his wolfskin bundle and flung the broken sword clashing at the giant’s feet.

Bolverk’s hands fumbled over the pieces. “Aye,” he breathed. “Well I remember this blade. Me it was whose help Dyrin and Dvalin besought, when they must make such a sword as this to ransom themselves from Svaftlami but would also have that it be their revenge on him. We forged ice and death and storm into it, mighty runes and spells, a living will to harm.” He grinned. “Many warriors have owned this sword, because it brings victory. Naught is there on which it does not bite, nor does it ever grow dull of edge. Venom is in the steel, and wounds it gives cannot be healed by leechcraft or magic or prayer. Yet this is the curse on it: that every time it is drawn it must drink blood, and in the end, somehow, it will be the bane of him who wields it.”

He leaned forward. “Therefore,” he said slowly, “Thor broke it, long ago, which none but he in the Nine Worlds had strength to do; and it has lain forgotten in the earth ever since. But now-now, if Loki calls to arms as you say, there will be need of it.”

“I did not say that,” muttered Skafloc, “though I meant you to think I did.”

Bolverk heard him not. The Jotun stared sightlessly ahead, rapt, while his fingers stroked the sword. “So it is to end,” he whispered. “Now comes the last evening of the world, when gods and giants lay waste creation as they slay each other, when Surt scatters flame which leaps to the cracking walls of heaven, the sun blackens, earth sinks undersea, the stars fall down. It ends-my thralldom, blind beneath the mountain, ends in a blaze of fire! Aye, well will I forge the sword, mortal!”

He went to work. The clamour of it filled the cave, sparks flew and bellows gusted, and as he worked he called out spells which made the walls shudder. Skafloc and Mananaan took shelter in the tunnel beyond.

“I like this not, and wish I had never come,” said the sea king. “An evil is being waked to new life. None have named me coward, yet I will not touch that sword; nor will you, if you are wise. It will bring your weird on you.”

“What of that?” answered Skafloc moodily.

They heard the seething as the blade was quenched in venom. The fumes stung where they touched bare skin. Bolverk’s doom-song bellowed through the caverns.

“Throw not your life away for a lost love,” pleaded Mananaan. “You are young yet.”

“All men are born fey,” said Skafloc, and there the matter stood.

Time dragged-though they did not understand how the giant could be done as soon as he was, blind and without help-until he shouted: “Enter, warriors!”

They came into the bloody light. Bolverk held forth the sword. Brightly gleamed the blade, a blue tongue about whose edges little flames seemed to waver. The eyes of the dragon on the haft glittered, the gold glowed as with a shiningness of its own.

“Take it!” cried the giant.

Skafloc seized the weapon. Heavy it was, but strength to swing it flowed into him. So wondrous was the balance that it became like a part of himself.

He swept it in a yelling arc, down on a rock. The stone split asunder. He shouted and whirled the blade about his head. It shone in the murk like a lightning flash.

“Ha, halloo!” Skafloc yelled. And he chanted:

Swiftly goes the sword-play!

 Soon the foe shall hear the wailing song of weapons.

 Warlock blade is thirsty!

 Howling in its hunger, hews it through the iron,

 sings in cloven skullbones, slakes itself in bloodstreams.

Bolverk’s laughter joined his. “Aye, wield it in glee,” said the Jotun. “Smite your foemen-gods, giants, mortals, it matters not. The sword is loose and the end of the world comes nigh!”

He gave the man a scabbard bedight with gold leaf. “Best you sheathe it now,” he said, “and draw it not hereafter unless you wish to kill.” He grinned. “But the sword has a way of getting drawn at the wrong time-and in the end, never fear, it will turn on you.”

“Let it strike down my enemies first,” Skafloc answered, “and I care not overly much what it does later.”

“You may … then,” said Mananaan under his breath. Aloud: “Let us be off. Here is no place to bide.”

They left. Bolverk’s eyeless face stared after them.

When they had won out-the hound on the chain shrank whimpering aside-they set swiftly down the glacier. As they neared the bottom they heard a loud rumble and looked back. ,

Black against the stars, higher than the mountain, loomed three who strode down upon them. Mananaan said, scrambling for the boat: “I think Utgard-Loki has somehow learned of your trick and wishes not that you should fulfill whatever plans the Aisir have. Hard will it be to get quit of this land.”

The war which Mananaan Mac Lir and Skafloc Elven-Fosterling waged on Jotunheim would be well worth the telling. One should speak too of the struggle with berserk gale and windless mist, with surf and skerry and ice floe, with a weariness which grew so deep that only the image of Fand, bright against the undying night, gave cheer. That best of boats should have been honoured with golden trim and a song.

Many were the enchantments whereby the Jotuns sought to do away with their visitors, and hard luck did these two suffer on that account. But they worked out spells they could use here and wrought mightily in return, not alone warding off the worst of the giant magic but also turning storms loose to scourge the land and singing mountainsides down on Jotun garths.

They never sought to stand in open fight against the giants, though twice when one alone fell on them they killed him; but they coped with monsters of land and sea raised against them. Often their escapes from pursuit were narrow, especially when they went foraging inland during the long times of foul winds, and each would make a story in itself.

It should be told of their raid on a great steading to steal horses. In the end they left it ablaze and made off with a booty of which the steeds were not all. The beasts they took were the smallest of ponies in that land, but in the outer world would be reckoned the hugest and heaviest among stallions, shaggy black hulks with fiery eyes and devil hearts. Yet they took well to their new masters and stood quietly in the boat, which barely had room for them. And they feared neither daylight nor iron, even Skafloc’s sword, nor did they ever grow tired.