Few wander here, just the occasional soul bent around its purpose, and twice a troll-kin, hunched and moving swiftly through the scatter of rocks. In places monoliths stand, towers of black basalt, each carved with an eye as if to suggest the goddess watches even in the margins of her lands.
With Jal’s departure the Hel that Snorri crosses has grown closer and closer to the tales the skáld would sing in the long night around the dying fire of the mead hall. Snorri knows that Hel herself sits enthroned at the heart of these lands, split like night and day, as if Baraqel and Aslaug had been sliced head to groin and half of each bound into one being. Snorri, despite the depth of his conviction, can’t help but be glad his path has led him to the margins rather than to Hel’s court. He means to break Hel’s law, but he would rather not attempt it with her standing behind him.
In the distance hills rise from the blood-dust, dark with menace. The plain before them lies scattered with dead and twisted trees, ancient wind-stunted things, not one with a leaf on it, nor any hint of green across the whole swathe of the forest. Snorri sets off walking.
‘Ccraaaawk!’
Snorri spins toward the sudden cry, axe ready. He sees nothing. Blood-dust rises around his feet, reaching his knees.
‘Crawwk!’ A raven, black and glossy, perched on a tree some yards back, long toes curled around a dry twig. ‘Here’s an odd thing. A living man in Hel.’ The raven tilts its head first one way, then the other, sizing Snorri up.
‘Odder than a raven that can speak?’
‘Perhaps all ravens can, but most don’t choose to.’
‘What do you want with me, spirit?’
‘No spirit, just a raven, wanting what we all want: to watch, to learn, to fly back and whisper our secrets to the All-father. And perhaps a juicy worm.’
‘Truly?’ Snorri lowers his axe, amazed. ‘You are Muninn?… or Huginn?’ He recalls the names of Odin’s two ravens from the priests’ tales. Appropriately he recalled Muninn – memory – first, and Huginn – thought – took a little more thought.
The raven crawks, shakes its feathers, and settles. ‘Mother and father to us all. We all fly in their wake.’
‘Oh.’ Snorri’s disappointment colours the word. ‘You don’t speak to Odin then?’
‘Everything that speaks speaks to Odin, Snorri son of Snaga, son of Olaaf.’ The bird wipes its beak on the branch beside it. ‘Why are you here? Why heading out into the wilds?’
Snorri knows his destination – he hasn’t thought to question his path. ‘I’m here for my wife and children. It was wrong how they were taken from me.’
‘Wrong?’
‘I failed them.’
‘We all fail, Snorri. In the end we all fail. Often sooner.’
Snorri finds his hand pressed to his face, a weight of memory pushing him down, emotion choking him. ‘What was I supposed to do? Leave them? I could not let this stand. Win or lose, my fight is here. What else could I do?’
The raven shakes again, a stray feather floating down between dead branches. ‘Don’t ask me for counsel. I’m just a bird. Just memory.’
Snorri sniffs, ashamed of the tears he thought himself too dry for, feeling stupid and hurt. ‘I thought they would have gone before the goddess. I thought they would have gone before Hel and that she would have seen their goodness with her white eye and seen no evil with her black eye. They should be at Helgafell…’ The holy mountain waited for the little ones and for those not slain in battle … though gods knew Freja must have fought to save her children. But Hel wouldn’t separate her from Emy and Egil … surely that couldn’t be the reward for her valour? Snorri’s head spins and it seems that Hel rotates about him so that he and the raven become the centre of all things, all pivoting on this one question. ‘Why are they out here?’
Snorri wipes his forearm across his eyes and draws breath to repeat the question, but the tree is empty, the branch bare. For a long moment he wonders if the bird was ever there. Then he kneels and retrieves a lone feather from the rust-coloured dust. Standing, he slips the feather into his coin pouch, and continues through the dead forest toward the distant hills.
The sky seems closer here, and although it remains monotone somehow it bears the threat of a storm. The whole region does, as if it holds its breath, waiting. The Northman sets his gaze upon a high ridge and, with teeth gritted, he begins the long ascent.
Snorri climbs, scrambling up rough slopes, clambering over rocks that hurt for no reason other than that he touches them – as if they are made of pain itself. Visions of Eight Quays fill his mind as he reaches, grips, hauls himself up, and repeats the process. His village rising above the Uulisk, above the quays that give its name, the scatter of huts that he knows well enough to navigate around in the blind night, sometimes blind drunk. He sees his own home, Freja at the door, golden hair all around her shoulders, blue eyes smiling, small crinkles at the corners, one hand on Emy’s shoulder, the other ruffling Egil’s hair, red about her fingers. Coming up behind her, looming head and shoulders above his stepmother, Karl, white-blonde like his true mother and promising to be as tall as his father. Even at fifteen he overtops most men.
How would Egil have grown from the scrawny energetic child, eager to investigate everything the world had to offer or to hide? Always into mischief of one sort or another. The boy had worshipped Snorri…
‘I let him die.’ Another hold. A snarl of effort. Another few feet of elevation gained. ‘I let them all die.’
Snorri looks up, blinking his vision clear. No pain he has suffered in Hel comes close to the ache that lodged in his chest the day he found Emy in the snow, mutilated by the ghouls that Sven Broke-Oar had brought to Eight Quays. That ache has grown around his heart – grown larger and tighter with each of their deaths, undiminished by passing time, an armour against what the world might offer, a prison too. It will end though. Here in Hel, it will end.
How long the climb takes him Snorri can’t say. Without night or day, without food or water, with no living thing close enough that its distance might be measured in so slight a thing as miles, time runs its own strange paths. Snorri couldn’t say how long the climb took but he feels, as he crests the ridge, that he has grown old somewhere along the way.
The ridge offers a view across a folded topography where a labyrinth of dry valleys, box canyons and deep rifts stretches away toward a dark horizon. The sky lies tainted with shadow, as if faint streamers of cloud have been strewn across it, clinging to the underside of the world above Hel. Each line of shadow forms some part of a pattern, a great gyre, its rotation too slow for the eye and centred on some vertex miles out, above the labyrinth.
‘I see it.’ Snorri sets his axe down for a moment, drawing a deep breath. ‘I’m coming for you, Freja.’ He wipes the blood from his hands. ‘I’m coming for all of you.’ He has a goal. Freja will be there with his children. All of Hel cannot stop him now.
Murder missed his footing on a loose rock and for a moment it jolted me from Snorri’s story. We’d come deep into the Wheel-lands, perhaps almost as far as on our first incursion. Standing stones, each taller than a man, ran in five close and parallel lines, radiating like a spoke, passing close by us and rushing on ahead toward a convergence at infinity. Heather grew over-tall in sickly and twisted clumps. I heard my name called among the stones … a pale long-fingered hand reached around the side of one close by, ancient with lichen. I closed my eyes and the story caught around me once more, swirling me along a different path.
A pale long-fingered hand creeps around the rock. The motion draws Snorri’s eye, turning his gaze from the dusty floor of the gorge to the steep and craggy side. He’s penetrated several miles into the labyrinth and overhead the shadow-stained gyre lies more pronounced than when he first saw it. And in all those dusty miles he hasn’t seen so much as a stray soul.
‘Best come out and show yourself,’ he calls, hefting his axe.
A narrow head peers over the edge of the jagged ledge, some thirty
yards above the valley floor. At first Snorri takes it for a lichkin and his blood runs cold, but the thing is a sickly yellow rather than white, and its head is more like a bird’s, an unhealthy fusion of beak and head, rather than the eyeless wedge of a lichkin. It hauls itself into view with a screech like nails on slate, revealing small triangular teeth in its fleshy beak, and a gangling skeletal body with a crest of barbs running along its spine.
‘A demon.’ Snorri grins. ‘About time. Let’s see what you’ve got.’ Behind the smile he knows this thing may make an end of him. The lichkin was overwhelming. He’s fought trolls in the living world and barely survived – their strength many times that of a man and their speed startling. Even so, the red song of war rises in him and the pain flees his limbs as if in fear.
The thing raises its head and utters a cry that echoes down the gorge, the sound of a scream terminated by a cut throat. It clambers down the cliff-like wall, dropping a few yards here and there, catching on with claws as long as fingers and as white as malice, loose stones rattling down with it, striking the ground only moments before its two three-toed and broad-splayed feet.
As the demon closes on him, cautious, hopping from side to side like a bird of prey, Snorri hears its call returned in several voices, distant but not distant enough.
It rushes him and his axe takes it on an upswing, sinking home where neck meets head, carving through its windpipe and up into its brain. The demon falls, convulsing, and Snorri lets go his axe to keep clear of flailing limbs. Moments later he advances on the corpse through the cloud of dust raised in its death throes, takes hold of the axe haft, sets a foot over one side of the demon’s face, and wrenches the blade free. Milky blood oozes from the wound with reluctance, stinking of corruption.
The first of the demons to answer their comrade’s call come boiling around a sharp turn in the gorge several hundred yards away. The leaders, three of them, hold small similarities with the one that Snorri has slain, but no two are the same. Others can be seen dimly in the dust cloud raised behind the swiftest of them. Many others.
Lacking a bow, Snorri moves only to set his back to a boulder, then watches their approach, knowing their numbers will defeat him. The demons howl as they come, a motley bunch varying in hue from charcoal-grey to the white of curdled milk, some troll-tall and gangly, others squat and heavy, still others no larger than children and sporting vestigial wings.
Snorri rolls his shoulders and prepares to meet them all. It saddens him to die alone, at the hands of such ill-formed horrors, but he never expected to return from Hel, and an end in battle is perhaps the best he could have expected.
‘Undoreth, we. Battle-born. Raise hammer, raise axe, at our war-shout let demons tremble.’
In the last moments before the enemy closes Snorri knows a moment of peace. No parent should outlive their child. No hurt is greater than having sons and daughters die knowing that, at the last, you failed them. Snorri will die fighting to save them – this is as close as he can come to righting that wrong.
The first demon loses its raised forearm, and an instant later it loses its head to the same blow. The second demon, heavy-set and wolf-like, stops Hel’s blade by bedding it in brain and skull. Snorri follows the swing down into a crouch and the third demon, leaping for him, sails over his head into the boulder behind. Then they are upon him, in their dozens and in their scores.
Snorri leaves the protection of the boulder almost immediately. With massed attackers it is important not to get pinned against anything. A whirling axe makes a good deterrent, but if it gets stuck in an opponent’s body, even for a moment, then the wielder can go down under a wave of attackers. The Viking spins his way back across the uneven floor of the gorge, leaving severed demon limbs twitching in the dust. Their blood reeks of decay, making him retch as he retreats.
Snorri reaches the steep wall and fights close enough to it to keep his attackers to one side whilst still being able to swing, backing all the while. The dust cloud hides him from the bulk of his enemies, though they remain close, seeking him blindly, their hoots and howls filling the gorge.
Some huge creature with gangling arms, lumpen skin, and a boulder-like head strikes a blow that tears furrows down Snorri’s chest, missing the veins and tendons in his neck by inches. Snorri catches it on a rising swing, slicing its chest in return and hewing away the lower portion of its jaw. He skips back, hammering the butt of his axe haft into the fang-filled face of another demon on his right. The larger one falls away, becoming a shadow lumbering through the dust cloud.
A clubbed hand punches toward Snorri’s face, the owner black and well-muscled with hard shiny plates across its body and limbs. The Viking moves too slowly and a glancing blow sends him reeling toward the rock wall, vision doubled, blood running down his neck. More shapes crowd out of the dust, the noise and stink of them overwhelming.
A disembowelling swing opens two demons’ bellies, a third, brown and scabrous leaps for him and fouls his axe as he tries to ward it off. A demon-child covered in thorns grapples his legs and Snorri falls back against the rocks, roaring defiance. He loses his footing, legs torn by the thorn-child and falls on his side in the loose stone. A dark shape looms above him, a creature of trollish proportions, flame guttering from its empty eye-sockets and spilling from its open mouth. This one hefts a dead-wood club studded with sharp pieces of flint. The scab-covered demon still wrestles with Snorri’s axe and he hasn’t the strength to tear the weapon free.
‘Undoreth!’ A last cry as the burning troll lifts its club to finish him.
A bright sword takes its head, the body starting to fall, flame gouting from the stump of its neck. A figure in shining armour moves by, sturdy boot stamping on the back of the thorn-demon’s neck, sword reversing down in the scabbed demon’s chest. A moment later the figure is gone, swallowed by the cloud, but from the changing tone of the demonic blares and barks Snorri knows that the newcomer is wreaking havoc out there.
Snorri tugs his axe free and kicks off the thorn-demon, just in time to meet a new foe blundering into view. For seconds, or hours, Snorri fights on. Faced by two opponents, the demons come at Snorri less frequently and in smaller groups. Even so, they almost take him down on several occasions. He continues to back away, hewing heads and limbs, whirling his axe before him in a figure of eight, swift and razor-edged. He is bleeding from half a dozen wounds now and his breath comes ragged, a weariness in his limbs, blood and sweat in his eyes.
Twice he almost falls, once tripped by a rock, the second time by a skull, black bone, fangs protruding. Within a few more yards bones are crunching under his feet every second or third step back.
The ground changes character slowly, step by step, becoming more stony, the dust cloud thinning. Snorri catches glimpses of the warrior who has joined him. A giant of a man, a Viking, long white hair streaming out beneath his helm. He looks to have stepped from the sagas, his armour finer than that of any jarl, scroll-worked, runed, the iron faceguard of his helm fearsome to behold, the many iron scales of his mailed shirt each chased with silver.
Snorri cuts down a pair of identical demons, both as gaunt as old trees, with gnarled hands and skin like bark. He spits blood and heaves in a breath. He can see the remaining demons now, a shadowy horde, perhaps a dozen in total.
‘Come, Hel-spawn!’ He meant to shout it but it escapes in a gasp. ‘Let’s have you!’ A glance at his shoulder reveals a ragged wound deep into the meat, pouring blood. He raises his father’s axe, preparing to charge. ‘I said, let’s—’ But somehow his legs fail him and Snorri finds himself on his knees.
The demons send up a cacophony of roars, hoots, screams and barks, surging forward for the kill. And the armoured Viking runs to intercept them. He spins into their midst, body-checking one, beheading the next, destroying a face with an armoured elbow, drawing the next into a devastating head-butt. Then somehow he is clear, in space, swinging his blade again. It takes a minute, and for that minute Snorri remains on his knees, sla
ck-jawed, held by the sight. It’s a dance, a violent, beautiful dance of steel, life taken at each beat, the warrior’s victory as inevitable as it is perfect. Sixty killing seconds.
At the last the warrior stands, gore-splattered, stained with the blood of his enemies, their corpses strewn about him, his sword sheathed, and behind him the dust settles. It’s like a fur drawn back from the bed, revealing three hundred yards, every step of the way littered with the dead, dozens, scores, many and more.
‘What a tale we’ve woven here, brother.’ Snorri stands to meet the warrior as he returns. It takes all his strength but he’s damned if he’ll meet such a man on his knees. ‘Who are you? Did the gods send you?’
‘The gods forbade me from coming.’ A deep voice, speaking Old Norse. Something in it familiar. Perhaps the accent or the tone.
Snorri looks down at his axe. His father’s father’s father had named it Hel. Perhaps some völva had seen its fate and suggested the title. Perhaps it was Skilfar, old even then. He looks up at the warrior, a man his own height, an inch taller, possibly. Snorri’s father stood as tall, had the same hair. ‘You … can’t be…’ The hairs on the back of Snorri’s arms stand up and a cold chill commands his spine, his mouth too dry to say the words. ‘Father?’ Tears fill his eyes.
The man reaches up with both hands and removes his helmet, shaking the hair from his face. It is not his father, though he has the same look.
‘They’re waiting for you.’ The warrior nods back up the gorge. Demon bones litter the rocky ground as far as the eye can see, drifts of them in places, skulls rolled to the walls, shattered, broken. ‘I’ve been keeping them safe as best I can. I knew you would come.’