Crowbone (38 page)

‘Who will come?’ he demanded, knowing none of them would, for they were followers of false gods and their hearts knew it even if their heads did not. They did not have the power of God to keep Satan’s imps away – Martin did not doubt for a moment that he would meet the denizens of hell and slaves of the Fallen Angel inside that hole in the mountain.

The wind sighed out of the gash and men backed away from it, crouching down. Hromund looked round and saw that none of them would go; he wanted to say that he would, but had persuasive arguments with himself that his place was outside, with his men.

Eindride saw the scornful look on the priest’s face and felt anger surge in him, stoked it with more indignation that this twisted, hirpling follower of a coward’s godlet would dare the place while good northers squatted and looked at the ice and rocks rather than each other.

As good as courage, it welled up and burned the words out of him.

‘I will go.’

Men offered up ‘heya’ to the courage of the archer – then blinked in astonishment as Tormod shouldered through them.

‘You have a wee son at home – I will go instead.’

He and Eindride looked at each other and the archer smiled at what had not been said – a thrall would not be much missed, even a king’s favourite. He turned to Hromund.

‘If things go badly,’ he said, ‘you will see that my wife and son are safe?’

Hromund nodded and Eindride split his ice-clotted beard with a grin that burst blood on to his cold-chapped lips, then clapped Tormod on the back.

‘Together, then,’ he said.

Two men, not about to be outdone by a thrall, king’s favourite or not, sprang up and announced their names – Kjartan and Arnkel – and their intention not to be shamed. The rest, too afraid even to worry about the shame, offered up no sound at all.

Martin, staff in his cold gnarled hands, shuffled towards the dark opening; the more practical Tormod organised torches, food and water.

‘
Gloria Patri, et Fili, et Spiritui Sancto
,’ Martin intoned at the entrance, raising the staff up as if to strike down an enemy. ‘
Sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper, et in saeccula saeculorum, Amén
.’

Eindride gave a sound, half way between cough and grunt, then pushed the priest scornfully to one side and strode into the maw of the place, one hand clutching the Thor amulet at his throat. Martin hirpled after him. Kjartan licked spit on to his lips, Arnkel took a deep breath and they both ducked after Martin, as if plunging under freezing water. At the entrance, Tormod turned once and met Hromund’s eyes, smiled wryly and then was gone.

Hromund and the men sat for a moment, as if waiting for something cataclysmic, but nothing happened at all. The smoke stopped pouring from the hole, the wind in it moaned a little, there was a pause, then it began again. From somewhere came a distant rumble, as if a storm brewed and Hromund shifted.

‘Make fires and a camp,’ he ordered, cramped and stiff with cold. ‘We will wait here.’

He did not say how long they would wait and the scores of rimed men did not want to ask. They did not have long, as it turned out, for the short day was sliding to death when Gudrod’s men wolfed out of the shadows, led by a Tyr-howling boy.

Not far inside, pausing to tie cloths round their mouths to help them breathe in the foul reek of the place, Martin and the others heard the shrieks and crouched. Kjartan whimpered, sure that the Sami animal-men were coming; Tormod snarled him to silence and they waited, blinking in the guttering light of the torch, the sweat stinging their eyes. Nothing changed.

Martin grew impatient, wanting to move on, but no-one shifted and the reek swirled round them. Nothing changed.

Except …

‘Someone is coming,’ Eindride said and they all turned to where the faint iced light from the entrance had been a comfort, a thread leading back to the world of men.

Now, they saw the red-gold of a bobbing torch and Eindride nocked an arrow, growling. Martin crouched, wary as a rat and looking over his shoulder; there was screaming down there, a moaning shriek that shaved the skin from the back of his neck.

Then a voice from behind the red-gold torch whispered out like the wings of bats. A woman’s voice, old and soft as sealskin.

‘My son bids me tell you that it would be better if you turned over your King piece. You have lost this game.’

Finnmark, the mountain of Surman Suuhun …

THE WITCH-QUEEN’S CREW

WHEN she thought of ravens at all, which was not often or with any regard, she thought always of the white one. They said the worst winters were when AllFather let loose the third of his ravens, the white one. While his black brothers, Thought and Memory, stuck their heads under one hunched wing, the white raven trailed frosted pinfeathers over the world, teased clouds with talons, drawing out the long, slow tumble of soft white, silent as sleep that fell on high peaks, was razored by thin crags, sifted softly into the deep soul of the world.

Once, long ago, beyond this place, she had been a girl in a fire-warmed home who looked out to a world softening to curves of drifting landscape, looked out in wonder at how the world could come to such a whispering end. She was young and hugged herself then, wishing for warmer winds and the kiss of sun on her skin.

It was not to be. She had been brought here not much later and ever since the only world that existed was the one of short, blazing-passionate summers and long winters full of dancing night fires that skeined the dark with green and red.

There had been travellers, the curious and brave who tried to seek her out. The ones who came for riches seldom arrived, but those who sought wisdom were allowed and sometimes stayed long enough to tell her their own secrets and some of the workings of the world beyond the fire mountain. There had even been two Greeks and a Serkland Arab who all professed to know the secrets of snow and other matters, speaking loftily of winds and tides and clouds.

Once, she had travelled out of the mountain, out of the Finnmark, hoping to learn more of this strange new god, the Christ. In the cut of cold, folk struggled to badly-heated eggshells of stone where Christ prayers smoked; some who shivered there secretly went home to bind their hearth with an older invoking. Those she smiled at, for there was hope for them – then she came home to the smouldering mountain and left them to their world.

Yet she envied all of them, for they all crouched by fires, succoured by the light as much as the heat, sharing a hope as old as dark that the flames would not fail. It was no longer a part of her life, to be with them, to have ones she loved and who loved her.

So here she was at the end of days, pushed by obligation and if any saw her they fastened their lips on it. Ajatar’s handmaiden, they called her, which made her smile. It had pained her, that name from her own Sami folk, but she knew what made them liken her to the favourite of a goddess of pestilence and disease, who could strike you with a look and who suckled serpents. They reflected their own twists of ugly suspicion on her, making her monstrous.

Yet even some of them came to her, struggling up the fire mountain for the power they believed she had. Wise woman some called her and she liked that name, though it was plain and there was pride enough left in her to resent it; all women were wise, long before her age and certainly by it, for they had learned the feel of the world. Younger folk were not for listening and so missed a deal of life, for you fished more meat out of that cauldron by just looking and remembering.

It was all about Hugin and Munin, the black brothers of the white raven, all about Thinking and Remembering and there was enough of the norther in her to appreciate that. The north god, AllFather, knew this, had learned this through hanging pain and spear-thrust, nine nights on the World Tree for the whisper of runes, the mystery she knew well as a result.

Those northers who feared her called her a silly auld wummin, only half believing it was true, hoping that she was diminished by them making her seem small. Some, who knew a little better, called her ‘cunning’ and that never bothered her, although she doubted it meant what they thought. She did not mind the scathing
wyrd-rider
either and was as likely to tell folk that she had wyrd needed riding as ‘farewell’ when she had decided to close the door on herself.

Only a few called her by her true name, a name older even than the dancing lights that split the long north dark.
Spaekona.
Witch-Queen. It was the name they used when they came with heads lowered and eyes resting everywhere but on her own, twisting their hands in their lap and looking for daftness they should not be seeking.

She did not hear it from those who wanted a leech wort release from pain, or root potion to help with a sad loss, or relief from the sickness of the long dark. She only heard it from those wanting to snare an unwilling man, or curse a rival, or lose a bairn. When she refused them, that was when they hissed ‘
spaekona
’ under their breath and for those whose hate made them bold, she had her hunters, with their skin cloaks and spears. Those hunters knew her true worth, knew she belonged to the north mountains and them and understood the wordless bargain that went back before the first handsealed contract, beyond even the blood oath.

Now they watched her closely, hunkered round fires that were near yet far enough away and wearing the full masks of the beasts they killed, though she only half understood why. She did not mind being worshipped for it was the least due to her, latest in a long line who were chosen for this. Last in a long line, she thought suddenly, unless a new goddess is found to learn from me.

The one who had gone before her – she could not remember her name now – had sent men to her village and stolen her, such was her desperation. There had been a long time of fear and hate, then a moment when she saw what was being taught to her and, finally, a too-brief time when the pair of them worked in tandem. Then, suddenly, she was alone with the burden of waiting, for the axe and her own successor, the first to be returned to the stone kist until someone brave came to claim it, the second to sit at her fire and begin the task of shouldering the burden of all the long years of old knowing. So it had always been, so it would always be.

Well, the first had come, passed hand to hand through blood and danger, for the axe had claimed its cursed victims – she remembered being told that the axe had failed to return only once, when a true
spaekona
, a full-cunning woman of the north had tricked the Sami carrying it into revealing their powers and those of the Bloodaxe. That
spaekona
had given it to her husband, for the power in it and hoped to pass it to all of her sons in turn – but the curse of the axe tainted all her sons, according to the man who had last brought it back to the fire mountain.

Svein he had called himself, a man bitter with defeat and death, she had seen, twisted from his faith by the betrayal of that axe. His king and master had commanded him to take it here, he said. He did not want his sons to get it, she learned, even the worst of them, for none were worthy and all would be betrayed, like him. She had watched this Svein stumble off and thought it likely he would die in the Finnmark cold, for he was so uncaring of life.

The second had not come and she was beginning to wonder if it would ever happen. There was always the raid on a village – but she remembered the fear and the hate of it and balked at doing it.

Now, she thought, it might be too late. There were many folk plootering over her fire mountain to claim the Bloodaxe and her hunters had suffered for it. It had come to her, just recently, that perhaps she was the last of her kind and the thought troubled her.

She found a nice spot by the clawed hand of tree, while the wind hissed down the bowl of the valley and drew the reeking white smoke out of the entrance to it. She knew the swirl of it sucked the smoke from the strange hot, bubbling pits in the Cleft, then roared it out through the mountain beyond, as if the place breathed.

She had made fires here before and liked the place, for it reminded the air about true cold. It took a hard winter to make this sheltered, eldritch-heated valley clog with snow and she was used to the warmth, so that stepping out beyond it ached her bones these days; she preferred to wait until folk came to her.

She found her ring of old stones, coned a few sticks together and sparked up a fire. Her hunting men settled down to watch. They were hurting and sick and too many of them had died and she was sorry she had asked them to. They thought they had been fighting to keep the northers away from this place, the home of their wise-woman goddess and that they were failing; they did not know that they were meant to fail if one wyrd was to prove a success.

The soft flames spilled red-gold into another long night of white and bruise-blue. A good fat moon, crisp air and a warm hue dancing in a hearth. Grandma was another name she didn’t mind, though only children, the ache of her lost heart, called her that. She had not seen one for some time, but remembered how they had liked her stories, in the days when she had gone abroad more.

She liked to tell stories to herself – at least, that is what she said when she caught herself mumbling into the straggles of her hair. Sometimes she let the fur-masks listen, but even those hunters preferred to creep away, ducking away from an old-young, shapeless, mumbling woman hung about with odd weavings and difference.

She knew one or two stopped to listen and would have been surprised at the few, the very few, who wondered if what she muttered needed some other name than ‘story’ – but they only wondered that sort of thing when they could not hear it being told.

While they were listening they felt lifted up into a cloud of dusted age, where there was nevertheless something firm and strong, like finding a good pass through the mountains. There were some who said she spoke of their own home, but long ago, where their people must have lived forever. No-one who listened went away unmoved and some were woken to wondering who the stories were for.