Chapter Forty-Eight: Elvar

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

ELVAR

Elvar looked up at the trees about her, an endless sea of elm and oak, the clouded sky beyond them a grey and sombre mantle, heavy with snow and flickering with the muted colours of the guðljós. The dark trees stood like sentinels, the woodland silent, no birdsong, no buzz or rasp of insects. Just a cold wind that hissed through branches, making them sway and creak.

Bodies hung from their boughs. Ancient, desiccated corpses with thick-knotted, half-frayed ropes around their necks. Each one had the ribs at their back hacked and torn outwards, looking like a bloody parody of wings.

“The blood-eagle,” Elvar whispered, staring. Hundreds of them hung all around, disappearing into the forest’s gloom, the creaking of their ropes sounding like a thousand skeletal corpses whispering and groaning.

“This is the Gallows Wood,” Uspa said.

“I had guessed that myself,” Sighvat muttered, looking up and turning in a slow circle, a hand going to the frost-spider’s claw hung about his neck, as if it were some good-luck talisman.

The Battle-Grim stood tight around their column, four carts with their harnessed ponies, forty warriors in mail. Instinctively they had drawn closer together as they’d passed through these new woods, spears held ready, eyes scouring the shadowed woodlands. That had been before they had even seen the first hanging corpse.

“The skálds call it the traitor-sea,” Kráka said. “Where Orna answered the betrayal of her sister, Lik-Rifa.”

Elvar knew the tale well. The skálds had sung of it in her father’s hall, and if the saga-tale was true then these corpses were dragon-born, children of Lik-Rifa, gathered and slain by Orna, their backs hacked and chopped open in answer to Lik-Rifa’s slaying of Orna and Ulfrir’s winged daughter, Valkyrie. Elvar’s mind flashed back to the oath stone where they had camped during the journey from Iskalt to Snakavik. She had seen an image of this carved into the stone and scoffed at it.

We are walking through the saga-tales, now, Elvar thought.

Agnar strode to the head of the column. He was dressed in his war gear, his iron and bronze-etched helm buckled upon his head. Again, no word had been said when they had risen and broken camp, but all had checked their weapons, donned their coats of mail if they had one, and buckled their helms on their heads.

“Onwards,” Agnar called out, his voice loud and harsh, but falling dead in the woods, hardly carrying. He hefted his spear and gestured to Uspa, who stood a little ahead of them.

They walked on, horses neighing and cartwheels creaking.

Elvar was in the vanguard today, Agnar shifting the marching position of all of his crew daily, and so she walked with Agnar and Sighvat, Grend at her left shoulder. Biórr was close as well, walking with Ilmur the Hundur-thrall.

They moved on in silence, following a path that ran north-east through the woods, Elvar’s eyes constantly flicking left and right, the movement of swaying corpses in the branches snagging and snaring the eye. It was unsettling. She picked up her pace until she was walking beside Agnar.

“Can you feel it?” she said to him.

Agnar glanced at her. His eyes were bright with excitement, but she could see a tiredness deeper within him, almost exhaustion, with dark pools around his eyes, his skin pale and red-veined, a hunch beneath his bearskin cloak to his shoulders and frame.

“I can feel something,” he said, “though I do not know what it is.”

“The presence of the gods?” Elvar wondered out loud.

“But they are all dead,” Agnar said. He looked around. “At least, I hope they are.”

“Aye, but we are close to where they died. Their blood spilled on this land, soaked into the ground we are treading. Perhaps something of them still lingers.”

“I hope so. Their bones and their power, that we can harness or sell.” He flashed a grin at her. “We will be rich beyond all imagining, our fair-fame known throughout all Vigrið and the world beyond.”

“Yes,” Elvar said, Agnar’s smile and excitement infectious, banishing the sense of dread and unease that had been building within her.

His eyes lingered on her. “You are… happy?” he asked her, hesitantly. “With him?” His eyes flickered to Biórr.

“I am,” Elvar said, her own grin spreading.

“You sound happy enough,” Agnar said. “Your humping behind the carts each night has been keeping me awake.”

Elvar flushed.

“I am glad that you are happy,” Agnar shrugged. “And I am glad you are here, part of the Battle-Grim. You are a fighter, no question of that, but you are an oath-keeper, too. Someone to be trusted. That is a rare thing in this world.” He looked at her, no smile, eyes serious. Elvar did not know what to say. Agnar just nodded to himself and they strode together in silence.

They were walking up a slow, gentle incline, the trees around them thinning. Elvar felt the gentle flicker of something on her cheek, looked up and saw it was starting to snow. Uspa walked ahead of them, leading their column. She reached the top of the incline they were climbing and stopped. Agnar broke into a run to reach her and stopped, staring at something over the ridge.

“Behold, Oskutreð,” Uspa said.

Elvar felt her heart quicken in her chest and broke into a run. She stumbled to a halt as she reached the crown of the slope, and stared.

A wide, treeless valley opened up before her, rolling in all directions as far as her eyes could see. The undulating ground was covered with snow, here and there tugged by the swirling wind. Great mounds lay scattered across the plain, covered in earth and moss and snow. Elvar saw the gleam of rusted steel, the glint of yellowed bone. Other shapes, the twisted and blackened branches of a tree, but longer and thicker than a drakkar, lay strewn across the plain.

Straight ahead and set deep into the plain like the iron boss of a huge shield stood the stump of an ancient tree, blackened as if lightning-struck, wider than the fjord of Snakavik.

Snow fell from the sky, gentle and cold as winter’s first kiss, the lights of the guðljós flickering behind the clouds, and behind or beneath it all there was a sound, a dull thud, more a feeling than a sound, vibrating through Elvar’s bones.

There were gasps as other Battle-Grim reached the ridge and stopped, staring. The creak of carts and whinnies of horses.

“It is a saga-tale made real,” Sighvat sighed.

Grend stood silent at Elvar’s shoulder.

Ilmur and Biórr ran on a few steps, both grinning like bairns on their name-day.

Uspa’s eyes swept the plain, a frown etched deep into her brow.

“Not much of a tree,” Sighvat huffed as he reached them.

“It was burned and broken in the last battle,” Uspa said.

That makes sense, Elvar thought, though in her mind she had expected to see the Ash Tree rearing impossibly tall and wide.

“On,” Agnar said, his eyes alight, back straightening, exhaustion falling from his frame like a discarded cloak.

They moved on, a fast march now, down a gentle slope and on to level ground. Elvar looked down and saw that it was not snow that coated the ground, but ash. Grey flakes stirred and swirled as they moved through them, sticking to Elvar’s boots and leaving footsteps where no one had trod for three hundred years. Elvar passed by a hundred ash-covered shapes, her urge to run and uncover what lay beneath each one overwhelming, but the broken stump of the tree seemed to call to all of them, drawing them across the plain like a rope-hauled drakkar.

And then Elvar saw a mound to her right, large as a mead hall, lying stretched upon the ground. Moss and ash lay thick upon it, but a gleam drew Elvar’s eye, like a hook in fish’s mouth. She veered away from the column, Grend calling her name and then following. Elvar stopped before the mound, staring up at it, and stabbed her spear into the ground. It towered over her, larger than her father’s hall at Snakavik, and as wide. A looming entrance curved and draped with vine stood before her. She took a step inside and peered into the darkness. A smell wafted out, of decay, and with it a sense of unbridled malice, of blood and savagery so strong that it snatched Elvar’s breath away. A wave of fear rippled through her, thick and palpable and she stumbled back, out into the daylight. She breathed deeply, and let the gently falling snow cleanse her.

“Can you feel it?” Elvar asked Grend, who was stood beside her, scowling into the dark maw before them.

“Aye. Violence deep as the marrow,” he muttered. “It is putting a trembling in my bones, making me want to kill something.”

Elvar drew her seax and scratched at a small section of the moss and lichen-covered entrance, a curved beam, like a giant whalebone and long as two spears. Slowly the accumulation of detritus fell away, the decades of ash and moss and growth scraped clear by her blade, revealing the glint of something old and yellow.

Elvar stepped back.

“It is a tooth,” Grend said. “A wolf’s, or a bear, I think.”

“It is Ulfrir,” Elvar breathed, stumbling away, looking again at the mound. And she could see it now, as she put some distance between her and the mound: the outline of a huge wolf’s skeleton, lying upon its side, limbs sprawled, jaws wide in one last defiant howl or snarl. Moss and grass and ash covered it like a new pelt. Close by something glinted in the ground and Elvar nudged it with her toe, saw that it was a lump of iron jutting from the earth. A curve in it showing forge-craft before a sharp break.

“A link from Ulfrir’s chain?” Grend said, frowning.

“Aye,” Elvar said, remembering again the oath stone they had camped beneath, and the image of the wolf snared and bound by a chain, jaws wide as it howled while warriors swarmed it, stabbing with sharp steel.

“Come away from it,” Grend said, and took Elvar’s arm, guiding her back to the column of the Battle-Grim. Elvar tripped and stumbled over something, saw the glint of rusted steel, an ancient sword held in a skeleton’s grip, but Grend steadied her and led her on, back to the column.

“We have found Ulfrir’s bones,” Elvar blurted, her voice a rush, words tripping in her excitement and awe.

“The Ravener,” Uspa nodded, glancing back at the wolf-shaped mound. She did not stop, though, leading them on across the plain, winding through the mounds and hillocks, until they were close to the blasted stump of Oskutreð, the great tree. Agnar held a fist up and the column drew to a halt. He strode on, Uspa and Sighvat at his side, Kráka, Ilmur and Biórr behind them. Elvar did not hesitate, but followed after, Grend padding beside her.

Elvar stared at the blasted stump of the ancient ash tree, wide as a lake, stretching jagged and sharp across the ground. The remains stood high as a mead hall’s wall, perhaps two men high. Something green against the blackened wood caught Elvar’s eye and she stared at it.

It was a sapling, the trunk as wide as a normal ash tree, boughs with green leaves sprouting upon it. New life, among the ash-grey wasteland. And into the tree’s trunk the likeness of a woman was carved, with flowing hair, a sharp jaw and wide, somehow-knowing eyes, a wooden staff in her hand.

Beside the new tree there was a flattened area of the ancient, fire-blasted trunk, that Elvar could have stepped on to. Filling much of the base and as wide as her father’s feasting hall was the outline of a great trapdoor, bolted a hundred times. As Elvar looked at it she could see a faint, rhythmic tremor running through the door like a pulse, as if the tree had a heart that was beating, deep within the ground.

They threaded closer, their path taking them towards the living tree, winding around what looked like huge, shattered branches until Uspa stopped before the last one that separated them from the stump. Elvar joined them as Agnar and his small band stared at it.

Elvar blinked, suddenly realising what it was.

A giant’s head, bigger by far than Hrung’s head in her father’s hall. And it looked to be carved from wood. Dry and dark as charcoal. Ashes lay thick in the carving’s eyes and mouth, which was open and stretched in a rictus scream. What Elvar had taken for branches nearby were in fact its body and limbs, broken and blasted, twisted, hands and fingers grasping.

“That is my mother, Aska, the Froa of Oskutreð,” a voice said, like the creaking of branches and rustle of leaves. Elvar and the others started, looking around and reaching for weapons.

Uspa saw her first.

The woman carved into the tree was moving. There was a cracking of bark, a splintering sound and she was stepping out from the trunk. She stood there a moment, stretching, a series of crackles through her limbs; she tilted her neck and there was another crack.

“I have been waiting for you a very long time,” she muttered. Then she was walking towards them. Her hair swirled about her shoulders like roots as she took careful steps through the ash. Elvar and the others just stared, wide-eyed. Sighvat hefted his bearded axe.

“And who are you?” Uspa asked.

“I am Vörn Askasdottir, Froa-spirit and newborn guardian of Oskutreð,” the woman said. Now that she was closer to them Elvar saw that she was tall, taller even than Sighvat. Her skin was grey as an ash tree, dark grain running through her like veins. Bark rippled across her arms and legs; her torso was yellowed with lichen.

“And who are you, that has come to disturb my sleep?” she asked, pausing a dozen paces away and looking intently at them, head to one side, her gaze piercing. Her eyes touched Elvar and she took a step back; it felt like leaves and branches were brushing across her skin.

“The blood of the gods has faded in so short a time,” she said, taking a long, deep-shuddering breath. Her bare feet twisted in the earth, toes digging deep, like roots. “Though they live on, still, faint as a whisper in some of your veins. Hundur the hound, Snaka and Orna, and Rotta, too.”

Rotta?thought Elvar.

Vörn took another step closer to them, her face proud and strong. “Why are you here?” she said. There was a threat in her voice.

Agnar stepped forwards. “To gaze on Oskutreð and the Battle-Plain,” he said. “In the new world the remnants of the gods are valued. Prized. We would take some of them.”

Vörn snorted, a twisted curl of her bark-covered lips.

“You are carrion-crows, then, come to pick the dead clean.” She nodded to herself, then waved her staff. “Disappointing. I had hoped for something… more. Never mind, just take what you will, but you cannot approach the dead tree. No hand may touch it, or foot tread upon it.”

Sighvat grunted and stepped forwards.

“We have crossed the Isbrún Bridge, fought a swarm of vaesen,” he said. “And now that we are here, I’ll not have some talking branch tell me what I can and cannot do.”

“Not another step,” Vörn said to him, raising a hand, one long, twig-like finger waving at him, like a mother scolding her bairn.

Sighvat raised his axe and swung at her. He was tall, broad-shouldered and fat-bellied, but he moved faster than any would think by looking at him. His axe was a blur, hissing towards Vörn’s head.

A whispered word, a blurred movement and Sighvat’s axe was crunching into her staff. It sank in a way, wedged, Vörn holding it two-handed, eyes flashing with green fire.

Sighvat yanked on the axe but it stuck fast.

A twist of her wrists and Vörn ripped the axe from Sighvat’s grip, struck him in the head with her staff and he fell like a poleaxed bull. He lay on the ground, groaning and bleeding. He shifted and tried to roll over.

“Rætur, sinum jarðarinnar, vaxa og binda þennan feita mann,” Vörn breathed and the ground around Sighvat moved, rippling and twisting, as if a hundred serpents writhed and burrowed beneath him. Vines burst from the ash-covered soil, wrapping around Sighvat’s body, drawing tight like fetters until he was held firm.

“I do not like axes,” Vörn said. She glared down at Sighvat. “Or the fat men who wield them.”

The vines constricted and Sighvat groaned.

Vörn looked at Agnar and the others.

“Who else wishes to touch Oskutreð’s sacred ground?” she whispered.

No one moved.

“Will you release him,” Agnar said, crouching beside Sighvat and resting a hand on his chest, “if I swear we shall not set foot on that tree?”

Sighvat groaned and looked wild-eyed at Agnar.

“I don’t like this, chief,” he grunted.

Agnar patted his vine-wrapped belly.

“When you are ready to leave, and you have kept your word,” Vörn said. “Then, I shall let this fat maggot go free.”

“Heya,” Agnar agreed, standing and stepping away. “We want nothing from the tree, anyway. What would we do with the remains of a dead tree?” He paused, looking back at Vörn. “Why do you still guard it? What is there left to guard except ash and cinder?”

Vörn did not answer him.

The distant tremor rumbled louder, the bolts on the carven door rattling, puffs of ash rising in small clouds.

“What is down there, in Oskutreð’s bowels?” Agnar asked.

Kráka stepped forwards.

“It is Lik-Rifa,” she breathed. “The saga-tales are true. The dragon is still caged deep within the roots of Oskutreð.”

“Of course it is true,” Vörn said. She scowled at them. “And I vow to you, the only way for you to touch Oskutreð is over my dead and splintered trunk. That will not be easy. And even if you managed to see me defeated and broken, you would have to face the three sisters. They would not take kindly to the door being opened.”

“The three sisters?” Elvar said, feeling her skin prickle, fear dancing down her spine at the thought of Lik-Rifa, the dragon-god, corpse-tearer, prowling in her prison chamber somewhere beneath their feet.

“Aye. Urd, Verdani and Skuld, Orna’s and Ulfrir’s daughters, gaolers of the dragon.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Sighvat mumbled from his prison of vines.

“You have my word,” Agnar said, “none of my company shall set foot near your dead tree. Come,” he called to those around him, turning away and raising his voice. “Let us do what we came for, and search this ground for the relics that will turn us into a saga-song of our own.”

The Battle-Grim let out a cheer and emptied out the carts, taking spades and axes, sheets of stitched linen and poles, and began to search through the mounds scattered all around them. Exclamations and cheers rang out as relics were unearthed, bones and weapons, armour and jewels, all of it being collected and piled together, wrapped in the linen sheets and carried to the carts.

Elvar and Grend set to work, digging at a mound close to the head of Aska, the dead Froa. They uncovered the skeletons of two people, twisted together in death. Elvar saw the teeth of one were unnaturally long and sharp. Seaxes of steel were in their fists, gold and silver glinting on the hilts. Elvar tapped Grend to show him, and saw that he had dropped his spade and was staring into the distance, back the way they had come. She stood and stared.

Through the snow she saw figures were emerging from wooded slopes: people on horseback, and wagons, many, many wagons.

“What is this?” Vörn said as she stood over Sighvat’s form. “I wait three hundred years and see no one, and then you humans all come at once.”

Elvar dropped her spade. The figures spilling down the slope towards them bore grey shields with the black wings of ravens upon them.

Ilska the Cruel had come.