Dead Souls Page 2

  ****

  licwiglunga

  T.A. Moore

  Gudrid ducked her head and trudged on: an old woman wearing a nun’s habit over men’s trews and boots. She was exhausted, old bones aching and the air like splinters in her lungs, freezing on the fur of her cloak, but she couldn’t stop. If she stopped she would die; winter could kill quicker than a knife, especially here.

  Nor could she return to the comfort of her convent, where her sisters would press warm mead on her and send for her thralls to attend her, not with the Lawspeaker’s geas still on her shoulders.

  He had come to her in church — Lawspeaker Orm — and knelt to her, although there was no humility to him. Somehow he had learnt that she had been tutored by a spae-wife as a girl.

  “The daughter of Volgang is dead,” he said. “Beyla, who would have been my bride. She sickened of the wasting fever and Hel took her only two days ago. She was the heart-beat in my chest, the breath in my lungs. Bring her back to me.”

  She had refused. It was an unchristian thing he was asking and she was a Christian woman who had made pilgrimage to Rome and seen the Holy Father there. Orm claimed allegiance to the Church, though he still wore Thor’s Hammer strung around his neck. What he asked should never have been asked.

  The second time he came he brought a chest with him that near foundered the thralls who carried it. Inside was the wealth of a year’s trade: wine, grapes, furs turned to gold, and gems. He pledged to give it to the church if only she would help him.

  “The daughter of Volgang is dead,” he said. “Beyla, who would have sat by my side in judgement. Hel took her four days ago. She was the blood in my veins, the light in my eyes. Bring her back to me.”

  Gudrid offered him her prayers and refused him for a second time: her heart heavy with fear of what would come next.

  Like Odin pursuing Rinda, Orm returned for a third time. This time he did not beg, nor did he ask. He came with armed men and threats against both the convent and Gudrid’s family.

  “The daughter of Volgang is dead,” he said. “Beyla, who would have mothered my son. Hel took her only six days ago. She was the speech on my tongue, the song in my ears. Bring her back to me, or I send all who give you joy to join her.”

  Unchristian or no, Gudrid had no choice but to accede to his demands.

  He gave until the first day of the Cuckoo month before blood would be shed.

  It was not a generous allocation of time. Only six days; the same length of time that Beyla had been in Hel’s realm.

  So Gudrid laboured across the brittle waste. Her footsteps filled with mist that then froze, hiding any trace of her passing.

  Things moved in the mist. Huge shapes that moved so silently they might have been ghosts. In this place, perhaps they were.

  The snow turned to icy pebbles under her feet: wide, flat stones that tilted and slid under her weight. She could hear the sea nearby, shushing over the shore. It sounded like distant voices whispering something she couldn’t make out. Something dark. Prayer rose to Gudrid’s lips, the words she would speak to dispel evil in the convent, but she did not let them escape the tip of her tongue. Those words had no power here. So she held her peace and saved her voice for later.

  Stone turned to bone underfoot. It cracked and splintered under her weight. Despite the cold, the smell was foul, and it would only get worse. The sucked clean bones grew fat with cold, waxen flesh and wound with thick, uncombed hair. They moaned in their hollow voices when she stood on them and begged her to have a care of where she stood. Some of the dead wore faces she knew.

  Gudrid turned her eyes away and kept walking. There was nothing she could do for them, nothing anyone could do for them, now.

  A dark shape appeared through the mist, so vast that it hurt the eye to look at it. It was the root of the World Tree; it plunged down through the mist, from somewhere unimaginably far above, and burrowed into the sere, salted earth. For a famn around the earth was covered with every sort of beast that crawled on its belly: vipers and asps and nightcrawlers. In the middle of them, triple-wound around the tree: the Niddhog.

  His great, grey bulk was wide around as a longship’s beam and his flesh had grown around the root, anchoring him in place. Beneath him Hvergelmir, the wellspring, spilled out of the ground, a seething torrent of water laced with needles of ice. The cold of it was so intense that it cracked and blackened Niddhog’s scales and withered the flesh beneath, leaving raw, weeping blisters along his flanks. If it pained Niddhog he did not show it, nor did it slow his ceaseless gnawing at Yggdrasil. Corruption spread from his bite, leaving a wet, rotting wound on the tree. It was from there the stench that fouled the air emanated, not from the corpses.

  Gudrid’s will failed and she stopped.

  One of the corpses opened its blind, milky eyes and stared up at her.

  “Turn back now,” it said. The words drifted from between still, grey lips. “No-one but the dead will know your courage failed.”

  Spite planted Gudrid’s foot firmly in the corpse’s face when she stepped forward. Its nose cracked and its lips split under her weight. No blood flowed.

  “I’m to listen to you about courage?” she asked. “If you had died a hero you would be drinking from Freya’s golden cup, not lying here.”

  The truth in her words bit deeper than the serpent’s fangs and the corpse’s keening wail followed Gudrid across the shore of corpses — towards Yggdrasil’s root.

  She had to pass Niddhog to get there, close enough that she could have touched his scarred, wounded side if she had any reason to do such a thing. Splinters festered in his lips and bloody gums, studded between the worn stumps of his fangs. Her heart thundered so loud in her chest she could hardly breathe and her ribs ached. Though there was no point to her terror. She was far too small a morsel for Niddhog to concern himself with. The great, frost-blind eye didn’t even roll to acknowledge her passing.

  Gudrid found shelter behind a twist of root and sat down. The chill of the hard earth made her hips ache. She ignored it and pulled a wax-cloth wrapped package from her cloak, snapping the frost-brittle string with her fingers. The cloth fell open, revealing a wedge of cheese, a wizened winter apple and one of Sister Hilde’s sugar-glazed sweet tarts. Gudrid’s departure had been hurried but she was too seasoned a traveller to leave without provisions.

  The bread and cheese she ate ravenously, tearing off chunks with her teeth and using a dampened finger to pick up crumbs from her lap. A draft of water, from a tributary and not the frosted well-spring itself, quenched her thirst well enough; although it was still cold enough to make her teeth hurt and her bowels clench. The apple and the sweet-tart she left sitting on the ground, covered by the waxed cloth.

  Cold and exhaustion lulled her to sleep, shivering there under the tree.

  It was the sound of ice breaking that roused her, and just in time. The cold had sunk into her bones, frosting the marrow, and slowed her blood. Her sleep had been within moments of becoming eternal.

  Gudrid coughed and spat, blood mixed with the sputum that hit the snow, and struggled to her feet. They didn’t hurt anymore: it wasn’t a good sign. Gudrid gathered up the remaining food and brushed the ice off it.

  A woman stood by the tree. She was white. Not just pale but white, like snow or swans: her hair, spilling unbound to her knees; her skin, flawless as mapping linen and the light tunic she wore in defiance of the elements. She went unshod in the snow. Water was frozen on her legs from where she’d forded the river. She carried a pot on one hip, her arm crooked protectively around it. It was full with thick white mud. The woman scooped it out, water dripping between her fingers and smeared it over the wounded, rotting parts of the tree.

  A squirrel, red-furred and twitching his tail, watched from high in the branches.

  Gudrid hugged herself, pinning cold fingers in her armpits, and waited.

  The woman scraped the last of the mud from the bottom of the pot. It was barely enough to cover her finge
rs. She wiped it over the tree, covering every spot of discolouration that she could reach.

  “Skuld,” Gudrid said. Her voice sounded like it had gone unused for centuries instead of hours. She stopped and cleared her throat, seeking some moisture. The tall, white woman turned to look at her with a stern, heavy face that had no kindness in it. “Skuld, will you break bread with me?”

  She held the food out, cradled in the half-frozen cloth. It looked a poor feast to offer to one who even the gods stepped warily around. Skuld contemplated the food and then raised her gaze to Gudrid. Under those pale, cool eyes, that offered neither condemnation nor compassion, Gudrid felt the years stripped from her face. Until she was, once again, that tall, strong girl who’d added her voice to the spae-wife’s song and called down the future.

  “Gudrid,” Skuld said, walking over to her. Gudrid was not small, but the Jotun’s daughter towered over her. “Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir. Is it the bread that is flesh of your White Christ that you offer me?”

  “No. It’s a tart baked by Sister Hilde.” The corner of Gudrid’s lips twitched into a wry smile. “Who would be equal parts delighted and horrified to know that it had passed your lips. She is Christian now, but the old ways still have influence. Especially in times of trouble, people turn back to you then.”

  “Yes.” Skuld took the tart and considered it curiously. “They do. But why should we listen? I know what is to come, Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir. I see your convent and the bloodline that passes from you to your son, Snorri, and to his children in turn. You lead the people away from my worship. “

  Gudrid gestured around her, the sweep of her fingers indicating the slowly rotting corpses, the long-suffering Yggdrasil and Niddhog and his children.

  “I lead my people away from this,” she said fiercely. The air caught in her throat and she had to stop to cough again. Cold sweat filmed her forehead when she finished. She wiped it away on her sleeve. “Not from you, Skuld of the Norns. You need no worship and ask for no sacrifice. You are Necessity, and if the coming of the White Christ is part of that necessity then you will not stand in His way.”

  “Perhaps,” Skuld said. It seemed impossible, arrogant to even think it, but she seemed weary. “It does not mean I have to like it.”

  Gudrid bent a creaky old knee and knelt amidst the snow and bodies.

  “I sang for you once,” she said. “In honour of that, aid me. For my mother, who loved you, aid me.”

  In the silence that followed her plea all Gudrid could hear was the sound of Skuld’s breathing. She had not known the gods breathed like men.

  “There will be a price,” Skuld said finally.

  “Anything.”

  “Do not speak so rashly,” Skuld warned. “This is a price you will not want to pay, Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir. It will be a sacrifice.”

  Gudrid closed her eyes and thought of her son and her grand-children and the lineage of light that Skuld herself had once promised.

  “Anything,” she repeated.

  A few pastry crumbs dropped to the ground in front of Gudrid. She looked up as Skuld finished the last of the treat and licked her fingers clean of mud and honey.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Skuld regarded her much as she had the tart — with distant curiosity. The ages were in her eyes.

  “That is the last time you will say that to me,” she said. “Say what it is it you want of me, Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir?”

  “Beyla Volnursdottir,” Gudrid said. “She died of plague six days ago.”

  “No,” Skuld said, turning away.

  The flat refusal rocked Gudrid. She hurried after Skuld, struggling to keep up with the Norn’s long, tireless stride.

  “No?” she said. “But you said you would help me.”

  “She did not die of the plague,” Skuld said. She stopped suddenly and Gudrid stumbled to stop next to her, struggling to keep her footing. Skuld pointed. “This is where her resting place is — with the unhonoured and the secret slain. You should busy yourself more with your people, anchorite. They act behind your back.”

  The shell of a half-built ship stood in front of them, hauled up onto the beach. The keel and stem were already finished and the mast was raised. An unfinished square sail lay pegged out on the beach and barrels and bales, tarred and tightly wrapped against the weather, were stacked back behind the high-tide mark.

  Gudrid’s breath caught in her throat. “It looks half-finished.”

  “It is,” Skuld said. “In just a few millennia the final plank will be sealed in place and the sail raised, ready to leave harbour.”

  Skuld said millennia like it was no time at all. To her it wasn’t.

  “And Beyla?”

  Skuld pointed again, this time to the mouth of a cave.

  “In there,” she said, “where they harvest the materials for the ship.”

  Materials: nails for the wood and hair for the sail. Gudrid turned her mind from that fact.

  “Can I get her back?” she asked.

  Skuld dropped her hand back to her side and raised one snow-white shoulder in a shrug.

  “You must ask the master of the ship,” she said. “But I warn you, Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, he will not surrender her lightly. The price will be all you can pay.”

  “And my children?” Gudrid asked. “My line?”

  “Will burn brightly and be honoured.”

  Skuld left her standing there, by the edge of the cold, grey sea. The great, scaled sides of a serpent breached the surface, water running down its sides, and then disappeared again. It took all the will that had brought Gudrid this far to get her to take that first step towards the black, ominous mouth of the cave.

  A tunnel, the floor worn smooth as glass, led into the earth. Gudrid followed it down, slipping and sliding as it grew steeper, tearing her gloves and skinning her hands. It grew warmer as she descended, until she was sweating under her clothes. She stripped off her cloak and bloody gloves, bundling them up inside each other.

  In the distance there was the sound of bellows wheezing and the crackling roar of a fire. It sounded like a blacksmith’s forge and a red glow beckoned Gudrid forwards, into a vaulted cave that would have put to shame the greatest hall in Midgard. The ceiling disappeared into the mists that sunk down through the earth; ropes of gold and gems grew from the walls and spilled to the ground in thick, tangled vines and statues of stern, incomparable beauty lined the walls with weapons in hand.

  In the midst of all that glory was a filthy, blood-stained stone altar with a thin, wiry man bound to it with chains twice as thick around as his legs. He was filthy, caked with blood and dirt, and his chest was an oozing mass of sores and blisters from the venom that dripped from the snake caged over his body. A haggard woman stood next to him, swaying with exhaustion, with a bowl held up to catch the drops of poison.

  A trickle of urine ran down Gudrid’s thigh as her guts weakened from terror. The weight of awe threatened to stop her heart.

  To tap into the old knowledge, to walk between the worlds, was unchristian and to bring back the dead was arrogance beyond words — but this was beyond that. This would damn her soul and even for her son, her grandchildren, she couldn’t bring herself to say the words that would send her to hell.

  In the end she didn’t have to.

  Loki turned his head to the side and caught her gaze with a bright, green eye. Despite the filth and the marks of suffering etched deeply on his face, he was more beautiful than the statues that lined his hall. When he smiled it felt like the sun had rose for the first time after a long winter.

  “Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir,” he said, his voice coaxing and cozening. “Welcome to my hall. Do you not bow to me?”

  Without any command from her will Gudrid felt her legs start to fold. She tried to stiffen them, but the weight of Loki’s regard was too much for her to bear. Her knees cracked hard against the ground. She crossed herself and closed her eyes to pray.

  “Oh no,” Loki said cheerfull
y. “None of that, now. Not here.”

  The words of the prayer went away. All of them. Even the names she used to pray too — the old names of the old gods. The only name left was his. All Gudrid had to cling to was the knowledge that there had been other names, once.

  “Better,” he said. The chains rattled as he made himself as comfortable as he could get here. His wife, his keeper, didn’t react. All her attention was focused on the slowly filling bowl she held cradled in her hands. “Now. What is it you would ask of me, Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir?”

  Gudrid swallowed and licked her dry lips. The words she needed hid in her brain, as if they were frightened of this chained, damned god too. It had been easier to speak to the Norn. Not because she was lesser, but because she had made no effort to overawe.

  “One of the dead, one who falls under your purview, I need you to release her to me.”

  Loki raised his eyebrows.

  “One of my dead?” he said. His voice danced with light mockery. “Oh, I fear I could never do that. What would I use to build my ship then?”

  Gudrid looked up at him and then dropped her gaze back to her hands. She pressed her fingers into her thighs until it hurt.

  “Only one of the dead,” she said. “Just one.”

  Loki laughed. The sound was unexpected enough to make his wife flinch and spill the tiniest spot of poison on his seared chest. It sizzled on his skin and shattered his smug composure. He screamed and jerked against his bonds, wrenching his body from side to side. The earth moved with him.

  Rocks and dirt fell from the unseen ceiling, bouncing from the statues and chipping their beautiful forms, and Gudrid cowered on the ground. She pressed her hands to her ears, trying to block out a god’s screams, and tired to pray again. The words were still gone, leaving her bereft.

  It seemed an eternity till Loki’s agonies eased and he returned to sanity. He cursed his wife in bitter tones, voicing insults that would have driven any mortal woman to slit his throat in his sleep once her blushes allowed her. The weary Sigyn didn’t seem to even hear the biting words. Her world was the bowl and the snake and the poison. Once Loki wore out his spleen on her, he turned his attention back to Gudrid.