The witch’s thoughts floated free of reason and into the realm of magical thinking, beyond logic and sanity but with the strongest possible connection to reality - the connection of death.
She clasped the rune to her, the one she had etched on the piece of leather. She held it to her lips, touched it with her tongue and breathed in its aroma. The smell was something beyond animal skin. It tasted of tears, funeral pyres and of the staleness of waiting. Loss.
The wolf was coming but needed something to take the final step, a suffering to propel it into flesh and chase the human out. There was something living in the upper caves, the warmth of the air on the witch’s skin told her. It wasn’t a rat and it wasn’t a bird. She looked at the rune on the leather, its meanings spilling into her mind - storm, werewolf, wolf trap. The girl, she knew, had come and now the queen sensed her importance. She was the trap to draw the brothers in. The pieces of the magical puzzle were falling into place. The girl was there, the brother would come, only the wolf was missing. The rune seemed to pulse in her hand. Three in one, a knot of misery, denial and slaughter. Odin was very near. It was time to summon her protector, the dead god’s enemy. It would not be easy. The wolf had grown, she could sense, and was close to his full power. A creature that could stand in front of the master of magic and snap off his head would not respond to a witch’s call. Something more was required to compel his attendance. The witch, whose mind was so linked to the caves that she could feel every movement within them, knew the girl had entered the hoard cave. She would go to her. She touched her tongue to the rune again. This time it tasted of blood.
50 Alone
What if there is no air? What if this leads nowhere?
Adisla tugged at the rope with increasing desperation, able to see nothing at all. The passage from the bottom of the pool was long, dark and entirely underwater, and she had gone too far down to turn back. She pulled and pulled, hand over hand, hand over hand, fighting down panic. The ceiling of the tunnel was smooth rock but she kept hitting her head, which forced her to bend her neck down so her shoulders took the impact instead.
She struggled against the urge to breathe in or give up, to hammer at the ceiling and waste energy. Then, abruptly, the passage rose. Air hit her face and she swallowed it down. She opened her eyes to blackness. She could see nothing at all but crawled out onto the rough and potholed floor of a cave. She pulled herself up to sitting and felt something between her fingers, cold like autumn grass.
‘Hello.’
The dead air of the cave seemed to cling to her skin. Dead air. That was the smell - something was rotting. Adisla composed herself and reached for the pouch at her side for the flint, steel and tinder Feileg had taken from the Noaidi. The tinder was useless - she could feel it was soaked - but the flint and steel would work. She took them out, struck them together and the corpses were upon her, rotten faces looming from the dark. In the awful instant of the flint’s flash she saw three dead boys. It was not grass she had touched but hair. Adisla offered a prayer to Freya. She was almost glad of the dark now and shrank back against a wall.
She waited for Feileg to come, holding her knees into herself for the small comfort she could take from hugging something. But Feileg didn’t appear. She had thought her example would encourage him. Had she been wrong? She forced herself to listen to her breathing to make sure time was really passing, that the eternity she felt was in reality no more than a few heartbeats. Feileg still did not come.
She tried to think what to do. Return to the surface, she decided. Adisla felt for the rope and prepared herself for the haul back. It would be easier, she told herself - she knew how long the tunnel was. She took the rope in her hands and tested it. Yes, it was secured at the other end. She could pull herself through. Then she thought of Vali, enchanted and forsaken in that pit. If Feileg was incapable of coming through the tunnel, there was no guarantee another entrance to the witch caves could be found.
A terrible thought struck her. What if Feileg had drowned in the tunnel? Would she find his body blocking her way? Trembling and terrified, she forced herself to think. This was the Troll Wall and the witches had been the death of countless heroes. Who was to say that Feileg would be any different? For Vali’s sake, she had to go on without him.
Adisla steeled herself and searched the boys’ bodies, hoping to find a lamp. She found only the amulets at their necks. She took one. It had done the child no good, but who was to say it wouldn’t help her? Crawling past the boys, she cut her knees on the floor. Never mind, she was going to have to get used to that. When she was sure the corpses were behind her, she struck the flint again. In the brief flash she saw the passage going on and down, and went ahead before striking once more to check her way. She didn’t expect to see anything much, but thought she might at least get some warnings of drops, low ceilings or falls. Nevertheless, she proceeded cautiously, feeling her way forward. It was painful progress and it was slow.
She hoped she would find Feileg again. He had told her that he had a great treasure in the hills. Feileg was naive and didn’t have the guile to lie about something like that. If he said he had treasure, he had treasure. It would be something she could use to bargain with the witches to get them to use their magic to bring Vali back to human form. She could offer her word she would deliver it. But what was the word of a woman? Perhaps Feileg would have been useful: they would more readily accept the oath of a warrior.
She tried to smother her deeper thoughts. For as long as she could remember she had loved only Vali. Now she was terrified of him, and Feileg, with his honesty and kindness, offered her the chance of a simple life away from the affairs of kings and sorcerers. Adisla’s love for Vali had devoured her, Feileg, her mother, everything it touched. But for that love, the Danes would never have come for her and her mother would still be alive, little Manni too. She couldn’t abandon the prince, though, no matter what.
Questions of the heart were for the sunshine and the open air. In the tunnels of the Troll Wall she had more pressing concerns. Adisla had never known such dark. It seemed like a beast smothering her, her flint a little thorn that she jabbed into its belly, forcing a momentary retreat, before its dead weight came down on her again.
How would she call a witch? What would she say? Adisla didn’t know. First, she thought, she needed light. There was plenty of detritus on the tunnel floors. Surely she would come across a lamp eventually? It was impossible to believe that the dead children she had found had spent their whole lives in the dark.
She crawled on and on, her fingers numb from striking the flint. At the end of one cramped fissure the ceiling and the floor came together into a narrow slash in the rock. She crawled forward and pushed her head and arms into it. Then she struck her flint and nearly dropped it in awe.
She did not notice the cavern, the spears of white that dropped from the ceiling, nor the folds in the rock where dead witches seemed to peer out at you. She saw only the blazing gold piled high to the ceiling, splendid as a bonfire. She struck again and again, and among the swords, the byrnies, the goblets and the plate, the jewels and the coins taken in tribute from nightmare-tormented kings for twenty generations, she saw something far more precious - a fish-oil lamp.
It was quite a drop to the floor from where her tunnel came in and she knew there would be no turning back once she had gone down. Adisla withdrew her head, wriggled round and lowered herself down feet first then dropped into blackness. Agony shot through her leg as she landed and she let out a cry that echoed back at her. She had twisted her ankle - the same leg that the arrow had struck. Even as she held it she could feel it begin to swell. No matter. She needed light. She struck the flint and crawled to where the lamp was. Her fingers curled around it and she shook it. It was nearly full. Again she hit the flint. Five, maybe six, tries and she located what she was looking for - something that would burn, a tattered cloak in some rich material she had never felt before. She found the edge of the cloak, teased off some threads and st
ruck the flint. Adisla had made a fire this way thousands of times at home but now it seemed impossibly difficult. Her fingers were bleeding from catching them on the edge of the steel by the time an ember took. But then she had the lamp alight and looked around at the glory of the witch queen’s hoard.
Her fear did not subside as the dark shrank back but it changed in nature. Before, the tunnels had seemed full of unseen eyes, invisible and hungry mouths. Now, in the silence of the huge cavern, she was afraid that she might be alone. Adisla realised that she might well die in these caves, witches or no witches. In some ways, to be alone was the worst monster of all. The gold was incredible but, she realised, useless. She couldn’t drink it, she couldn’t eat it, and it almost mocked her.
The pain in her ankle was growing. Was it sprained or was it broken?
There was a distant noise, a stirring like a breath but much louder. She told herself it was the wind, but the air was still. She wanted to extinguish the light and hide but knew that she had chosen to face whatever was in those tunnels. There it was again. What was it? Adisla’s throat was dry and she had to struggle with herself not to snuff out the lamp.
Cold prickled her skin and she began to shake. The lamp was guttering, or was that her imagination? Panic gripped her. Adisla scrambled up but had forgotten her ankle. She screamed and fell to her knees, nearly dropping the lamp. The flame guttered and nearly died. She forced her hands to pick it up and held it high to look around.
A terrible child stood over her, haggard, filthy, with the face of a woman and the eyes of the drowned.
And then Adisla was calm. She realised that she had not seen the lady properly in the dark. This was no cave-dwelling hag, this was a queen. The lady extended her hand and her kind smile told Adisla to forget about all pain, the anguish she felt for Vali, her desire to find Feileg, even the agony of her ankle. It would all be all right, thought Adisla. She knew that this lady had suffered torments beyond imagining and could take all those that Adisla felt and wash them away. The lady was dressed in a fine robe embroidered with gold; a beautiful necklace burned at her throat and a crown of sapphires shone like ice in the sun upon her head. Even the dark seemed to peel away around this lovely woman.
‘I need you to help my Vali,’ said Adisla. The lady smiled and Adisla understood that she knew that and was already working to free him. From the lady’s demeanour, Adisla felt certain that even now Vali was on his way to meet her and that soon everything would be settled. This lady had great powers and could break any enchantment that Vali had suffered.
Yes, everything was going to be all right. The lady had looked into her mind and sent her a vision to bring her peace. Adisla saw herself on a farmstead in the sun, children about her who ran giggling from old Bragi as he staggered around pretending to be a bear. There was someone else next to her, Feileg or Vali, she couldn’t be sure which. She felt secure, though, loving and loved among the people she valued most in all the world. The lady had shown her that future and she was grateful to her.
Adisla took the witch’s hand and Gullveig led her to the lower caves.
51 Reward
In the north, though the wind was a knife and the sky black with snow, Veles Libor was not cold, he was sweating. Underground, the wind didn’t cut him and the snow didn’t touch him. In the swaying torchlight he pulled away the rocks. He would toil alongside the Norsemen because he knew them well enough to realise that should he not do the work some might think he was not worth a share of the reward.
He knew that the hardest part would come if they found any treasure. Bodvar Bjarki owed him nothing; the crew owed him nothing and they were not men of his king. So he had to rely on two things - his sharp wits and his companions’ dim ones. Accordingly, he talked constantly of the robbing ways of southern merchants and how one fine warrior had been tricked into giving half a dragon’s hoard for a worthless belt that a merchant had claimed was that of the god Thor, capable of giving its owner a giant’s strength. In truth, he hadn’t really thought there would be any treasure and had run out of ideas as to how he would pay Hemming the ransom for the prince. However, anything was worth a go, and the crooked treasure mark and the great pile of stones looked very promising indeed. So he needed to make his companions see his worth.
‘To get the best price for plunder, you need an experienced merchant on your side,’ he said. ‘When I think of all the proud warriors who have sold great treasures never knowing what they had, it makes my heart weep. I tell you this, if I had that dragon’s loot to sell, I would have got twice what it was worth. But then again I know where to find the buyers.’
Some of the men were naive farm boys with little experience of anything and they lapped up what Veles was saying. Bjarki, however, was a different matter. The berserk had to realise that if Veles got back to Haithabyr with their plunder Bjarki would never see so much as a bushel of oats in reward. However, Veles thought he could convince him that bargaining skills might be useful in a neutral port where Bjarki didn’t have to fear the merchant’s connections. Also, Bodvar Bjarki owed compensation. If he took anything but coin back to Forkbeard, the king would place his own value on it, which might leave the berserk with still more to pay. The merchant thought he’d use all these arguments when the time was right.
The piled stones were finally clawed away and they stood looking at a great flat slab. It had on it the same rune as the first rock they had removed, a jagged line with another through it.
‘What does that mean?’ said Bjarki.
‘It is a curse,’ said Veles. ‘The treasure in here will need very careful handling if the men who take it are not to be struck down. In Byzantium this sign was used to slay the emperor himself.’
‘Where is Byzantium?’ said one of the farm boys.
‘He means Miklagard,’ said Bjarki.
‘Where is Miklagard?’ said the farm boy.
‘West of here and down a little,’ said Veles. ‘Big town, lots of sorcerers used to allaying curses. This did for them.’
Bjarki snorted. ‘I have my own way with curses,’ he said and tapped his sword. ‘I’ve never met a sorcerer who can put his head back on when you’ve cut it off.’
‘Then you have never met the wizard Ptolemy. He is a friend of mine and it is something of a party trick,’ said Veles.
The farm boys inclined their heads, impressed.
‘I would like to test that trick,’ said Bjarki. ‘Perhaps I’ll take you back in two pieces and see if he can stick you back together again.’
Veles went quiet. He knew enough about human nature to see that Bjarki was quite capable of carrying out his threats. He didn’t bother pointing out that, by the berserk’s own account, he had been trapped by a sorcerer. Perhaps the death of the men who had enchanted him had made him bolder, or had the ridiculous wolf mask given him courage?
‘Shall we get this done?’ said one of the men. ‘I don’t like this place. It grows crow food and I have no desire to let it make a meal of me.’
Bjarki nodded and went to the slab. He was a massive man but his arms were not long enough to span the stone. He tried to get his fingers behind it but it had jammed against the sloping end of the passage. Then he crouched and tugged at the rock at its front. He couldn’t get the purchase to move it.
‘Allow me,’ said Veles. He took up one of the wooden wedges lying on the floor and hammered it with a stone into the crack between the slab and the passage wall. Then he sent a crewman down to the beach for water. The man came back and Veles poured the water onto the wood.
‘Do you hope to wash it away?’ said one of the farm boys.
‘Yes,’ said Veles. After a few moments the wood began to swell and the gap between the wall and the slab widened. Bodvar Bjarki nodded, impressed, as Veles drove in more wedges.
‘I am a magician in my own right, as you can see,’ said the merchant with a smile.
Eventually, the gap was big enough and Bjarki stepped forward. He forced his hand in and pulled. Not
hing happened. He spat and he swore, working himself up into a rage, mumbling under his breath, ‘Odin, war merry, lord of death. Odin, destroyer, wrecker, mighty slayer. Odin means frenzy. Odin means war. Odin, Odin, the mad, the half blind. Odin! Odin! Ahhhhhhh!’
The slab lifted. Bjarki heaved it into the vertical, where it teetered for a heartbeat and seemed that it would fall back into place, but then it tipped towards him. Bjarki leaped back and the stone followed him with a crash. There was a rush of stinking air from the hole in the cave floor, and even Veles, a man of iron stomach, found himself retching. Two crewmen had to turn aside to vomit. Even Bjarki recoiled, though he stepped forward again pretty quickly.
‘It’s a tomb,’ he said, ‘and a fresh one - you can smell the rot. Come on, lads, it’s a good sign. No one’s been here before us. Here’s my freedom from my oath to Forkbeard.’