He made it easier for the others, asking a respite for himself, though he undermined that somewhat by offering to take the first watch by the pool they found. They filled their flasks. Water was important. Food would become a problem when his small supply ran out. They hadn’t decided if they would hunt here; probably they’d have to, though Thorkell knew what his grandmother would have said about killing in a spirit wood.
All three of them drank deeply; the horses did the same. The water was cool and sweet. There was no thought of making a fire. Athelbert hadn’t eaten at all; Thorkell gave him bread in the darkness, some of the cold meat. They tethered the horses. Then both princes, Anglcyn and Cyngael, fell asleep almost immediately. Thorkell approved. You needed to be able to do that; it was a skill, a task, your turn on watch would come soon enough.
He stretched out his legs, leaned back against a tree, his hammer across his lap. He was weary but not sleepy. It was very black, sight was next to useless. He would have to listen, mostly. The dog came over, sank down beside him, head on paws. He could see the faint gleam of its eyes. He didn’t actually like this dog, but he had a sense that there would be no hope of achieving this journey without Alun ab Owyn’s hound.
He made his muscles relax. Shifted his neck from side to side, to ease the pain there. So many years, so many times he’d done this: night watch in a dangerous place. He’d thought he was through with it. No need to be on guard behind an oak door on Rabady Isle. Life twisted on you—or you twisted it for yourself. No man knew his ending, or even the next branching of his path.
Branching paths. In the quiet of the wood, his mind went back. That often happened when you were awake alone at night.
Once, in fog, on a raid in Ferrieres, he and Siggur and a small band of others had found themselves separated from the main party on a retreat to the coast. They’d gone too far inland for safety, but Siggur had been drinking steadily on that raid (so had Thorkell, truth be told) and they’d been reckless with it. They’d also been young.
They literally stumbled upon a sanctuary they hadn’t even known about: a chapel and outbuildings hidden in a knife of a valley east of Champieres. They saw the chapel lights through mist. A sanctuary of the Sleepless Ones, at their endless vigil. There’d have been no lights to see them by, otherwise.
They attacked, screaming Ingavin’s name, in the dense, blurred dark. Foolish beyond any words it was, for they were being pursued by the young Prince Carloman, who’d already proven himself a warrior, and it was not a time to be staying to raid, let alone with a dozen men.
But that branching path that had separated them from the body of their company made Thorkell Einarson’s fortune. They killed twenty clerics and their cudgel-bearing servants in that isolated valley, seeing terror flare whitely in men’s eyes before they fled from the northmen.
Laughing, blood-soaked and blood-drunk, they set fire to the outbuildings and took away all the sanctuary treasure they could carry. Those treasures were astonishing. That hidden complex turned out to be a burial place of royalty, and what they discovered in the recesses of side chapels and surrounding tombs was dazzling.
Siggur had found his sword there.
Being Siggur, he decreed, when they made their way back to the ships and found the others, that this portion of the raid’s plunder belonged only to those who had been there. And being Siggur, he had no trouble enforcing his will. Every young man in Vinmark wanted to be one of the Volgan’s shipmates in those days. They’d already begun using that name for him.
Thorkell supposed, sitting in darkness, entirely sober, that it could be fairly said that that friendship had shaped his life. Siggur had been very young when they’d started raiding, and Thorkell had been even younger, in awe that such a man seemed to consider him a companion, want him at his side, on a battlefield or tavern bench.
Siggur had never been a thoughtful, considering sort. He’d led by leading, by being at the front of every assault: faster, stronger, a little bit wilder than anyone else—except perhaps for the occasional berserkir who’d join them at times. He’d drunk more than any of them, awake and upright after the rest were snoring at benches or sprawled among the rushes of an ale-room floor.
Thorkell remembered—it was a well-known tale—the morning Siggur had come out of an inn with another raider, a man named Leif, after a full night of drinking, and challenged the other to a race—along the oars of their ships, moored side by each in the harbour.
Nothing like it had ever been done before. No one had ever thought of such a thing. Amid laughter and wagers flying, they roused and assembled their bleary-eyed men, had them take their places on board and level their oars straight out. Then, as the sun came up, the two leaders began a race, up one side of their ships, leaping from oar to oar, and back down the other side, swinging across by using the dragon-prows.
Leif Fenrikson didn’t even make it to the prow.
Siggur went around his ship twice, at speed. That was Siggur at his best: blazoning his own prowess, and also showing that of his chosen companions, for a wobbling or uneven oar would have made him fall, no doubting it. Twice around he ran that course, with Thorkell and every other man on board holding steady for him as he raced alone, bare-chested, around and around them, laughing for the joy of being young and what he was, in morning’s first light.
It changed over the years, for so much of youth cannot linger, and ale can bring rage and bitterness as easily as laughter and fellowship. Thorkell realized at some point that Siggur Volganson was never going to stop drinking and raiding, that he couldn’t. That there was nothing in Ingavin’s offered middle-world for him but cresting white foam waves in sunlight or storm, appearing out of the sea to beach the ships and ride or run inland to burn and kill. It was the doing that mattered. Gold, silver, gems, women, the slaves they took—these were only the world’s reasons. Access to glory.
Salt spray and lit fires and testing himself again and again, endlessly, those were the things that drove him all his too-short life.
Never saying a word about these thoughts, Thorkell rowed and fought beside him until the end, which came in Llywerth, as everyone knew. Siggur had heard that the Cyngael were gathering a force to meet his ships, and had led them ashore regardless, for the joy of battling what might be there.
They were outnumbered there by the sea, a host assembled from each of the Cyngael’s warring provinces. He offered single combat to them, a challenge hurled at all three princes of the Cyngael but taken up by a young man who was no prince at all. And Brynn ap Hywll, big and hard and sober as a Jad-mad cleric on a fasting retreat, had altered the northlands entirely by killing Siggur Volganson on that strand—and taking the sword he’d carried since the raid by Champieres.
It was the death Siggur had always sought. Thorkell knew it, even then, that same day. The only ending Siggur could have imagined. The infirmities of age, sober governing, kingship … could not even be conceived. But by then Thorkell already knew it was not his own idea of a life and its iron-swift ending. He’d yielded to the Cyngael, in a sudden stunned emptiness. In time he made his escape, for servitude wasn’t his vision of existence either. He crossed the Wall and the Anglcyn lands and then autumn seas home. And then he made a home. It was his share of the gems and gold carried away from that chanced-upon valley in Ferrieres that bought him land and a farm on Rabady, in the year he decided it was time.
Rabady Isle was as good a place as any, and better than most, to shape a second life. He found a wife (and no man, living or dead, ever heard him say a word against her), had the two daughters, then his boy. Married the girls off when they were of age, and well enough, across on the mainland. Watched the boy—clever and with some spirit—as he grew. He did some more raiding in those years, chose ships and companions and landings. Salt got in the blood, the Erlings said. The sea was hard to leave behind you. But no wintering over for him, no grand designs of conquest. Sober captains, neatly planned journeys.
Siggur was dead; Thorkell w
asn’t going back to that time. He crossed the seas for what there was in it, for what he could bring home. No man would have said he was other than prosperous, Thorkell Einarson of Rabady Isle, once a companion of the Volgan himself. A good-enough life, with a hearth and a bed at the end, it seemed, not a blade-death on a distant shore.
No man living knew his end.
Here he was, overseas again, in a wood where no man should be. And how had that come to pass? The oath sworn to ap Hywll’s wife, yes, but he’d broken oaths over the years. He’d done so when he first escaped the Cyngael, hadn’t he, after surrendering?
He could have found a way to do the same thing here. Could do it right now. Kill these two sleeping princes—in a place where they’d be expected to die, where no one would ever find them—make his way back out of the wood, wait for the fyrd to go north, as they surely would, start across country to Erlond, where his own people had settled. In a still-forming colony like that one there would be many men with stories they didn’t want told. That was how a people’s boundaries expanded, how they moved on from starting points. Questions didn’t get asked. You could make a new life. Again.
He shook his head, to clear it, order his mind. He was tired, not thinking well. He didn’t have to kill the other two. Could just rise up now, while they slept, start back east. He snorted softly, amused at himself. That still wasn’t right. He didn’t even need to sneak away. Could wake them, bid farewell, invoke Jad’s blessing on the two of them (and Ingavin’s, inwardly). Alun ab Owyn had told him to leave. He didn’t have to be here at all. Except for the one thing. The awareness that lay under the folly of this night like a seed in hard spring ground.
His son was on those dragon-ships, and he was there because Thorkell had killed a man in a tavern a little more than a year ago.
If you were a particular kind of man (Thorkell wasn’t) you could probably throw away a good deal of time thinking about fathers and sons; time better spent with an ale flask and honest dice. He couldn’t truthfully say he’d put his mind very often to the boy over the years on Rabady. He’d taught him something of fighting, a father owed that duty. If pressed he’d have pointed to a house, land, a position on the isle. Bern was to have had all those when his father died, and wasn’t that enough? Wasn’t it more than Thorkell had ever had?
He didn’t carry many memories of the two of them together as the boy grew up. Some men liked to talk, spin tales at their own hearth or a tavern’s—spin them so far from truth you could laugh. His first tavern killing had come about because he had laughed at someone doing that. Thorkell wasn’t a tale-spinner, never had been. A man’s tongue could bring him trouble more quickly than anything else. He kept his counsel, guarded memories. If others in Rabady told the boy tales about his father—truth or lies—well, Bern would learn to sort those for himself, or he wouldn’t. No one had taken Thorkell in hand as a boy and taught him how you handled yourself when you came ashore in a thunderstorm on rocks and found armed men waiting for you.
Sitting in that wood that lay like a locked barrier between Cyngael lands and Anglcyn, awake while two young men slept, he did find himself recalling—unexpectedly—an evening long ago. A summer’s twilight, mild as a maiden. The boy—eight summers old, ten?—had come out with him while he repaired a door on the barn. Bern had carried his father’s tools, Thorkell seemed to remember, had been amusingly proud to do so. He’d fixed the door then they’d walked somewhere—he didn’t remember where, the boundaries of their land—and for some reason he’d told Bern the story of the raid when the Anglcyn royal guard had trapped them too far from the sea.
He really didn’t tell many of the old tales. Maybe that’s why the evening was with him. The scent of the summer flowers, a breeze, the rock—he remembered now, he’d been leaning against the rock at their northern boundary, the boy looking up at him as he listened, so intent it could make you smile. One evening, one story. They’d walked back to the house, after. No more to it than that. Bern wouldn’t even recall the evening, he knew. Nothing of any meaning had taken place.
Bern was bearded and grown. Their land was gone; an exile’s house always went to someone else. You could say the boy had made his own choice, but you could also say Thorkell had taken choices away from him, put him in a circumstance where a poisonous serpent like Ivarr Ragnarson might think through whose son this was and take vengeance for what had happened at Brynnfell. You could say his father had put him on that branching path.
Even so, you might even find a reason to chuckle about all of this tonight, if that was the way your humour worked. All you needed to do was think about it. Consider the three of them in this wood. Alun ab Owyn was really here, more than a little maddened, because of a dead brother. Athelbert had come because of his father—the need to make proof of himself in Aeldred’s eyes and his own. And Thorkell Einarson, exiled from Rabady, was—truthfully—in this forest for his son.
Someone should make a song of it, he thought, shaking his head. He spat into the darkness. He was too tired to laugh, but felt like it, a little.
A small sound. The grey dog had lifted his head, seemed to be watching him. He really was weary, but it almost seemed as if the dog were tracking his thoughts. An unsettling animal, more to it than you’d expect.
He had no idea which way the Jormsvik ships were going, none of them did. This desperate, foolish journey might be entirely unnecessary. You had to come to terms with that. You could be dying for no reason at all. Well, what of that? Reason or no reason, you were just as dead. He’d already lived longer than he’d expected to.
He heard a different sound.
The dog again; Cafall had risen, was standing rigidly, head lifted. Thorkell blinked in surprise. Then the animal whimpered.
And that sound, from that source, frightened him beyond words. He scrambled to his feet. His heart was pounding even before he, too, caught the smell.
That smell first, then sounds, he never saw a thing. The other two men rose, jerked from sleep at the first loud crashing, as if pulled upright like toys on a string. Athelbert began swearing; both unsheathed their swords.
None of them could see anything at all. It was black beyond power of sight to penetrate, stars and moon blocked by the encircling trees and their green-black summer leaves. The pool beside them dark, utterly still.
Such pools, Thorkell thought, rather too late, were where the creatures that ruled the night came to drink, or hunt.
“Jad’s holy blood,” whispered Athelbert, “what is that?”
Thorkell, had he been less afraid, might have made the easy, profane jest. Because it was blood they smelled. And flesh: pungent, rotting, like a kill left in the sun. A smell of earth, too, underneath, heavy, loamy, an animal odour with all of these.
Another sound, sharp in the black, something cracking: a small tree, a branch. Athelbert swore again. Alun had not yet spoken. The dog whimpered again, and Thorkell’s hand on his hammer began to shake. One of the horses tossed its head and whinnied loudly. No secret to their presence now, if ever there had been.
“Stand close,” he snapped, under his breath, though there was hardly a reason to be quiet now.
The other two came over. Alun still had his sword out. Athelbert sheathed his now, took his bow, notched an arrow. There was nothing to be seen, nowhere to shoot. Something fell heavily, north of them. Whatever this was, it was large enough to knock over trees.
And it was in that moment that Thorkell had an image burst within his mind and lodge there, as if rooted. His jaw clenched, to stop himself from crying out.
He had been a fighter almost all his life, had seen brain matter and entrails spilled to lie slippery on sodden ground, had watched a woman’s face burn away, melting to bone. He’d seen blood-eaglings, a Karchite hostage torn apart between whipped horses, and never flinched, even when he was sober. These were the northlands, life was what it was. Hard things happened. But his hands were trembling now like an old man’s. He actually wondered if he was going to f
all. He thought of his grandmother, these long years dead, who had known of such things as the creature out there in the night must be, perhaps even its name.
“Ingavin’s blind eye! Kneel!” he rasped, the words forming themselves, forced from him. But when he looked over he saw that the other two were already kneeling on that dark ground by the pool. The smell from beyond the glade was overpowering, you could gag or retch; Thorkell apprehended something hideous and immense, ancient, not to be in any way confronted by three men, frail with mortality, in a place where they should not be.
In terror then, weariness entirely gone, Thorkell looked at the shapes of the two men kneeling beside him, and he made a decision, a choice, took a path. The gods called you to themselves—wherever and whatever the gods might be—as it pleased them to do so. Men lived and died, knowing this.
He stayed on his feet.
IN ALL OF US, fear and memory interweave in complex, changing ways. Sometimes it is the thing unseen that will linger and appall long afterwards. Sliding into dreams from the blurred borders of awareness, or emerging, perhaps, when we stand alone, on first waking, at the fence of a farmyard or the perimeter of an encampment in that misty hour when the idea of morning is not quite incarnate in the east. Or it can assail us like a blow in the bright shimmer of a crowded market at midday. We do not ever move entirely beyond what has brought us mortal terror.
Alun would never know it, for it was not a thing that could be shared in words, but the image, the aura he had in his mind as he sank to his knees, was exactly what Thorkell Einarson apprehended within himself, and Athelbert was aware of the same thing in the blackness of that glade.
The smell, to Alun, was death. Decay, corruption, that which had been living and was no longer so, not for a long time, and yet was moving as it rotted, crashing in some vast bulk through trees. He had a sense of a creature larger than the woods should, by rights, have held. His heart hammered. Blessed Jad of Light, the god behind the sun: was he not to defend his children from terrors such as this, whatever it was?