“Lady,” Skapti said graciously, “we’ll do our best.”
The bear did not come. As night fell they lay listening, wrapped warm in furs. Brochael and Skapti discussed tactics; Hakon sharpened his sword. His hands shook a little, but Jessa knew he would forget his nerves if it came to a fight.
Moongarm said, “What do you want me to do in this?”
“Go to sleep!”
The gray man did not smile. “This is a bear, Brochael. You’ll need all the help you can get.”
“Not yours!”
“Brochael…,” Skapti muttered.
“No!” The big man thumped a fist stubbornly. He glared at the werebeast. “I won’t fight alongside a man I don’t trust. My friends, yes, but not you. You stay here.”
For a moment Moongarm gazed at him calmly, his strange eyes unblinking. “You’re a shortsighted man, Brochael.”
“I see far enough. I see through you.”
Moongarm’s eyes narrowed, but he said nothing. He turned and lay down, a huddle in the dark. Jessa glanced at Hakon, who shrugged. They both hated this.
The night gathered slowly. After the bitter journey Jessa found it hard to stay awake; without knowing, she drifted into sleep. The others must have done so too, because a great snarling and roaring woke them all in sudden terror.
She grabbed her knives and heaved the furs off. Moongarm’s blanket was empty.
“The fool!” Brochael raged.
He flung the door wide; Jessa stared under his arm.
The sky was black; ablaze with stars. The wolf and the bear, each glinting with frost, circled each other warily, the tethered goat bleating and squealing with terror.
The bear was huge, its pelt creamy white, splashed with mud. It bared long teeth, snarling with hunger.
“Moongarm!” Kari’s voice was sharp. “Not yet!”
The wolf slavered at him, its eyes cunning. It crouched in the snow, its tongue hanging over wide jaws. Ignoring it, Kari came out of the house, Brochael close behind him.
Kari came forward over the snow. A little way from the bear he too crouched, still.
The bear did not move. Neither did the Snow-walker. None of the others heard their conversation.
For Kari the bear’s mind was a white cave, a swirl of sharp scents, cold, the tang of blood. He reached in deeper, fascinated by the stream of instinct that drifted around him. In a place beyond words and speech, the bear’s thoughts moved.
The bear was winter, it was white, it was huge. Wherever winter is, it said, there is terror, there is cold. The cold comes from inside me. I am the ice; I am the vast frozen plains; they are all here, deep inside me, and yet I walk on them, cracking my thoughts with the weight of my wet fur.
I am winter, said the bear. How can you kill the cold, the frost, the wide, empty wind? I am all these. I am the stars, the aurora, the pain in your fingers and ears. I am the world’s edge.
The bridge, Kari asked, struggling to keep his thoughts clear. What is the bridge? Is the bridge a rainbow?
But the bear answered no questions; its mind did not move that way. Its long chant began again, endless, as if its mind revolved on the same matter hour by hour. It snarled at him. Kari felt Brochael’s anxiety; he dragged his mind out of the cold, reasonless hollows.
Standing up, he said, “It won’t leave; it can’t. Animals have no reason but their hungers. And this is a beast of myth. You’ll have to do what you must.”
As he spoke, as if it had waited for this, the wolf leaped. It seized the bear’s loose throat and dragged at it, snarling.
With a yell Brochael ran out, Hakon behind him. Claws slashed; blood splattered the snow. The big man heaved his ax up and sliced at the bear’s thick pelt; it roared in rage and tried to turn on him, but the wolf jaws held it.
Then the bear shook the wolf off like a piece of rag; it turned and lumbered toward the men.
The wolf that was Moongarm staggered up, snarling, head low. Brochael, Hakon, and Skapti stood, shoulder to shoulder. The bear paced toward them, growling.
“Ready,” Brochael muttered.
The wolf yelped; the bear swung clumsily. The men yelled; they attacked together, defending one another, an ax and two swords, avoiding the fearsome claws and teeth, the great muscular limbs. In an uproar of fury the bear swung back; again the wolf leaped at its throat.
Hakon’s sword slashed down.
The bear crumpled, dragging the wolf with it, striking at it, rolling on it, crushing it.
“It’ll kill him!” Skapti gasped.
Breathless, Brochael gave a hiss of frustration and swung the ax high over his head. It caught the bear full in the neck; the beast shuddered; bones snapped under the blow.
It twitched and made a small, low rattle.
Then it lay still.
Silent, they all looked at it. Its fur lifted in the faint breeze. The wolf struggled out, gasping and wheezing; it stood, eyes blazing, blood dripping from its jaws.
It stepped toward them.
Brochael raised his ax.
For a long moment the tension hung. The wolf was battle worn, savage; there was nothing human about it. Jessa felt her fingers clench; she wanted to shout, to warn Brochael to step back.
Then the wolf turned, as if with a great, silent effort. It loped into the smoke and mist.
“Moongarm!” Brochael snarled.
“I think,” the skraeling woman said quietly, “it would be better to let him be. These shape-shifters carry the wildness in them for hours after a kill. They are not safe.”
“I’d be happy if we never saw him again,” Brochael muttered.
The skraeling looked down at the bear. “This one and I have long been enemies.” Kneeling, she touched its muzzle. Perhaps she saw, as Kari did, the way its soul gathered on the snow, the white ghost-bear that wandered away into the frost. “I honor you, bear,” she whispered. “Your memory will not be lost.”
Later she showed them the loom. It was dim, until the woman held the tallow dip over it. Then they saw the cloth was colored with brilliant dyes. There were battles woven in it, and voyages over blue seas, and great death struggles against the trolls of the dark. An old hero made the earth from an eggshell, made a kantele of pike bones and sang the trees and clouds and mountains into being. And as Jessa looked closely the hanging moved before her, and she smelled the salt of the sea and heard the leaves rustle. She saw herself and the others, and all their journey was there, all its fears and doubts, and now they were walking into the white, unwoven spaces. But the candle guttered, and she knew she had imagined that, and that none of them were there yet.
The woman turned to the poet. “You will recognize this.”
He nodded, his sharp, lean face alight with pleasure. “All poets weave this web, lady.”
They smiled at each other.
Moongarm did not come back. When they were ready to leave, the travelers gathered, looking across the snow to the horizon.
“We can’t wait for him,” Brochael said grimly. He turned to the woman. “I hope we haven’t left you with a greater enemy.”
“We can’t just go,” Jessa murmured.
“We can and we are.”
Skapti shouldered Moongarm’s pack. “I’ll take this.”
“Leave it here.”
The skald shook his head. “It’s not heavy. He may catch us up.”
“I hope so,” Jessa said.
“I don’t. We’re well rid of him.”
“He may be hurt, Brochael!”
Brochael snorted. “That one!”
The woman looked at him then. “There are all sorts of pain, Brochael. Maybe there are some you do not recognize.”
He turned away.
They said good-bye, and the skraeling woman watched them go, the wind lifting the ends of her black hair. She folded her arms and called, “If you come back, I’ll be pleased.”
“We’ll come back,” Jessa said.
The woman shook her head. “You walk
into the whiteness now. Into dreams. Only wraiths and sorcerers can live there.”
She turned and went back into the low house.
Jessa turned away. “We never even asked her name,” she said.
Twenty-One
On Hel’s road all men tremble.
All day there was no sign of Moongarm.
The travelers walked through a perpetual twilight; for the first time the sun never rose above the horizon. Over them the icy stars swung in a great wheel, the polar star bright overhead. They walked on ice, immense tilted slabs of it, smashed here and there into jagged spars and shards that jutted up and had to be climbed and scrambled over.
A light snow fell on them, dusted them white with its touch. They saw nothing. No animals, no trace of anything alive in the long, pale blue shadows of the ice cap.
“He’s staying behind,” Hakon joked. “He’s wise.”
After long hours they were frozen with cold; they ate the skraeling woman’s food, and it put some heart back into them. Kari made a white rune fire spark and crackle on the bare ice, but it had no warmth; there was nothing here to burn. They seemed to have lost all idea of time; the perpetual twilight confused them, as if time was something they were walking away from, leaving behind.
They tried to sleep there but the cold was too bitter.
“We’ll carry on,” Brochael mumbled, scraping ice from his beard. “If we stay here we’ll freeze. Come on.”
They staggered up and walked, almost uncaring. The wind rose, roaring from somewhere ahead over the empty miles and crashing against them. They were no longer a group; each one dwindled deep within himself, daydreamed and imagined and sang silent songs. Speech died; their lips were too numb to shape words. At last, bone weary, they dug a snow hole and risked a short sleep there, out of the wind, but even that was dangerous. Blue and shivering, Jessa could hardly lift the food to her mouth.
Later, as they trudged on, she imagined that they were walking into the great white spaces at the top of the map, walking into blank parchment that no skald had ever written on, that held no words to make itself known.
Stumbling, ears throbbing, the skin under her scarves seared with the wind, she thought of Signi in that room, lying still on the bed with its silken hangings. She felt those furs and blankets now; she was walking over them, up to Signi’s mind, and they were warm, and all she had to do was lie down among them, like Signi, and sleep and sleep. But some nagging part of herself wouldn’t let her; it ordered her, angrily, to shut up and keep walking.
Then Brochael murmured something in awe.
Jessa stumbled, opened her eyes. Sleet stung her face like grit. And through her blurred eyes she saw, rising in a great arch against the dark sky, a bridge, glinting white. It was breathtaking; already it towered high above them, and she saw it glittered as if made of millions of crystals fused to a solid mass. Rainbows glinted deep within it; it shone against the snow squalls.
The sight of it brought them back to themselves; they stood still, their breath ragged in the wind.
Then Skapti said, “This will be my best song yet.”
“If you ever get to sing it,” Hakon muttered.
The skald wiped snow from his eyes. “You’re getting cynical, Hakon. Like me.”
They approached slowly, bent against the wind that tore at them. The ravens flew above, dim shapes against the stars, knocked sideways, squawking.
The ice here at the edge of the world was pitted with great cracks; they had to help one another over, scrambling and climbing, and all the time the scream of the wind increased; it raged in the terrible gap ahead of them, sending storms of snow and cloud churning high against the stars.
With an effort they gathered together, steadying one another. They had reached the foot of the bridge.
It was a fantastic, trembling structure, solid ice hanging in pinnacles and icicles of every thickness and length, frozen droplets bright as stars. The roadway itself was smooth as glass and looked slippery. On each side a delicate rail rose up, made of thin spines of ice spun in a fine paling, knotted with glassy balls.
Somewhere under the bridge, hidden in the falling snow, was the gap. The edge must be within feet of them, Jessa thought. Out of it there rose a howling and raging of wind; a stir of snow that twisted and burst.
The bridge rose into the storm and vanished. Of the other side they could see nothing.
“Right.” Brochael gathered them round him and spoke loudly. “I’ll go first. Keep your heads down or the wind will blow you clean off. Hands and knees might be best.”
Skapti slapped him on the back, nodding.
Brochael put his hands to the slope and began to pull himself up. At each step he slid back a little, his boots scrabbling for toeholds on the smooth glassy floor.
“It’s possible.” He gasped. “Barely.”
“Go on,” Skapti called. “We’re behind you.” He pulled Hakon over. “You next, swordsman. Take your time.”
Hakon settled his sword hilt and smiled at Jessa.
“Be careful with your hand,” she said.
“I will. Good luck.”
He stepped up behind Brochael, bent low against the screaming wind. They both climbed slowly, gripping onto anything they could. Under their feet the bridge was a glass hill, treacherous, beautiful. The others watched, the wind flapping their hoods and hair, until Brochael was a fair way up, the snow squalls hiding him now and then.
Dragging his knees up under him he squirmed round and looked down at Hakon. “Keep in the middle!” he roared. “In the middle!”
But Hakon’s foot had slipped; he slid sideways with a yell, sending a shower of crystals into the air, and began to slither, slowly, unstoppably, toward the frail ice uprights.
“Hakon!” Jessa screamed.
He scrabbled with his hands, with feet, with fingers, but nothing held. Brochael, scrambling down to him, cursed in the raging wind.
Hakon’s foot met the ice pinnacles; for a moment they held him, but as all his weight slid down on them they splintered; one snapped with a great crack, and with nightmare slowness he felt his legs sliding through the gap. Squirming, he grabbed at an icicle and heaved his sword out of the sheath, slamming it down flat on the wet surface. Then he drew himself up, and with all the strength of his terror he stabbed the blade down hard, ramming it into the ice.
It held, and he clung on, the sword grip so close to his face that the tiny red dragons blurred and moved in his wet eyes.
The wind tore at him. Below him was nothing; he hung over the edge of the world, swinging, clinging desperately to the sword that held him.
“Brochael!” he whispered.
“I’m coming. Hold on!”
Birds flew above him; the ravens. The glossy ends of feathers brushed his face, but they were wraiths, they couldn’t help. No one could. Numb, he knew he had been here before, long ago, in his dreams. He knew how it ended. And his hand, his weak right hand, was aching to the bone, unclenching on the leather hilt, the fingers opening, loosening.
“Brochael!” he screamed.
Closing his eyes, he felt the gale drag at him. Suddenly the sword slewed sideways; he yelled, grabbed at nothing, at a hand, a sleeve, warm fingers.
“Got you!”
Brochael’s whisper was close, his face, huge, taut, the sweat freezing to crystals on his beard. He began to squirm back, and Hakon felt himself move. He was hauled up over the wet ice, swinging, until his knee came up and found the solid edge, and he heaved himself over and collapsed against Brochael, all breath knocked out of him.
For long seconds they lay there, dizzy, the sky glittering above them.
Only Jessa’s desperate shouts stirred them.
Brochael waved. At this distance his words were lost, but the others saw he was safe.
“Thorsteeth!” Jessa breathed. She unclenched her gloves, felt the ache loosen between her shoulders. “I thought they were gone.”
“So did I.” Skapti looked white. “
You next.”
She scrambled up quickly.
“Keep your head down.”
She struggled up the glassy slope. It was very difficult. The wind forced against her; she crouched low, feeling for every treacherous, sliding step.
“Kari?” Skapti said.
But the boy had turned; he was looking back into the snow. Something moved in the squall, a great gray shape that leaped by him; with a snarl it had Skapti down and was standing over him, paws splayed, slavering at his throat with white teeth.
“Moongarm!” Jessa yelled. She stopped, looking back. Above her on the bridge Brochael roared with rage.
The wolf turned its head and looked at Kari, and there was something deep in those eyes that Kari knew, but it was lost, almost lost.
“All right,” Kari said. “Let him up.”
The creature backed, snarling. Skapti scrambled to his feet, shaking.
“He wants me to go with him!” Kari yelled. He moved away, a small dark figure on the snow.
“You can’t!”
“Go with the others. I’ll be close behind.”
“Kari!” Brochael thundered.
Kari looked up at him; too far to hear, Brochael heard the words clearly, sharp with pain. “Cross the bridge, Brochael. You must get them across the bridge.”
The squall blinded them for a moment; when they could see again, the ice was empty.
“Kari!” Jessa yelled furiously. “Don’t do this to us!”
But in all the miles of snow, there was no one to answer her.
Twenty-Two
A third I see, that no sunlight reaches,
the doors faced northward,
Through its smoke vent venom drips
serpent skins enskein that hall.
They crouched in a snow hole, the blizzard lashing them. Shards of snow stung Kari’s face; he tugged the scarves tighter.
The wolf had brought him here, leading him through the snow. Now it dissolved; became gray rags of mist that the wind whirled away. The man’s body lay half-buried; Kari scraped snow from the eyes and mouth, and lifted the head.
“Moongarm!”
He was cold, almost lost. Putting his thin fingers on the man’s wrist, Kari searched desperately within him for the frail soul, dragging it to the surface. Ravens descended around him.