The sharp air made me wish I had brought a cloak, made me wonder at this foolishness. There was rain in that air, yet no storm and the fear of that lack filled me. Dreams I knew — Odin’s arse, I had been hag-ridden by dreams all my life — but this was strange, a formless half-life, a draugr of a feeling that ruined sleep and nipped my waking heels.
Never before or since have I felt the power of the prow beast on a raiding ship as it locks jaws with the spirit of the land — but I felt them both that night, muscled and snarling shadows in the dark. Even then, I knew Randr Sterki was coming.
Yet the world remained the same, etched in black and silver, misted in shreds even in the black night. A dog fox barked far out on the pasture; the great dark of Ginnungagap still held the embers of Muspelheim, flung there by Odin’s brothers, Vili and Ve. Between scudding clouds, I found Aurvandill’s Toe and the Eyes of Thjazi after a search, but easily found the Wagon Star, which guides prow beasts everywhere. The one on Randr’s ship would be following it like a spooring wolf.
There was a closer light from the little building that housed Ref’s forge, a soft glow and I moved to it, drawn by the hope of heat. A few steps from it, the voices halted me — I have no idea why, since they were ones I knew; Ref was there and Botolf with him and the thrall boy, Toki.
Ref was nailing, which was a simple thing but a steading needed lots of them and he clearly took comfort in the easy repetitive task; he took slim lengths of worked bog-iron, flared one end and pointed the other, two taps for one, four for the other, then a plunge into the quench and a drop into a box. Even for that simple task, he kept the light in the forge dim, so that he could read the colour of the fire and the heated iron.
Toki, a doll-like silhouette with his back to me, worked the bellows and hugged his reedy arms between times, chilled despite the flames in his one-piece kjartan and bare feet, his near-bald head shining in the red light.
The place had the burned-hair smell of charred hooves, braided with the tang of sea-salt, charcoal and horse piss. In the dim light of the forge-fire and a small horn lantern above Botolf’s head, Ref looked like a dwarf and Botolf a giant, the one forging some magical thing, the other red-dyed with light and speaking in a low rumble, like boulders grinding.
‘That dog fox is out again,’ he was saying. ‘He’s after the chickens.’
‘That’s why we coop them,’ Ref replied, concentrating. Tap, tap. Pause. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Plunge and hiss. He picked up another length.
‘He won’t come near. He is afraid of the hounds,’ Botolf replied, shifting his weight. He nudged Toki, who pumped the bellows a few times.
‘Why is he afraid?’ the boy asked. ‘He can run.’
‘Because the hounds run slower but longer and will kill him,’ answered Ref. ‘So would you be afraid.’
The boy shivered. ‘I am afraid even in my dreams,’ he answered and Botolf looked at him.
‘Dreams, little Toki? What dreams? My Helga has dreams, too, which make her afraid. What do you dream?’
The boy shrugged. ‘Falling from a high place, like Aoife says my da did.’
Botolf nodded soberly, remembering that Toki had been fathered by a thrall called Geitleggr, whose hairy goat legs had given him the only name he had known — but none of the animal’s skill when it came to gathering eggs on narrow ledges. His mother, too, had died, of too much work, too little food and winter and now Aoife looked out for Toki, as much as anyone did.
‘I like high places,’ Botolf said, seeking to reassure the boy. ‘They are in nearly all my dreams.’
Ref absently pinched out a flaring ember on his already scorch-marked old tunic and I doubted if his horn-skinned fingers felt it. He never took his eyes from the iron, watching the colour of the flames for the right moment, even on just a nail.
Tap, tap, tap, tap — plunge, hiss.
‘What are they, then, these dreams of yours, Botolf?’ Ref wanted to know, sliding another length of bog-iron into the coals and jerking his chin at Toki to start pumping.
Botolf tapped his timber foot on the side of the oak stump which held the spiked anvil.
‘Since I got this, wings,’ he answered. ‘I dream I have wings. Big black ones, like a raven.’
‘What does it feel like?’ Toki asked, peering curiously. ‘Is it like a real leg?’
‘Mostly,’ answered Botolf, ‘except when it itches, for you cannot scratch it.’
‘Does it itch, then?’ Ref asked, pausing in wonder. ‘Like a real leg?’
Botolf nodded.
‘Did some magic woodworker make it so that it itched?’ Toki wanted to know and Botolf chuckled.
‘If he did, I wish he would come back and unmake it — or at least let me scratch. I dream of that when I am not dreaming of wings.’
‘Does no-one dream of proper things any more?’ Ref grumbled, turning the bog-iron length in the coals. ‘Wealth and fame and women?’
‘I have all three,’ Botolf answered. ‘I have no need of that dream.’
‘I dream of food most often,’ Toki admitted and the other two laughed; boys seldom had enough to eat and thralls never did.
‘Sing a song,’ Ref said, ‘soft now, so as not to wake everyone. Pick a good one and it will go into the iron and make the nails stronger.’
So Toki sang, a child song, a soft song of the sea and being lost on it. The wave of it left me stranded at the edge of darkness, icy and empty and wondering why he had chosen that of all songs and if the hand of Odin was in it.
I had heard that song before, in another place. We had come ashore in the night, blacker than the night itself with hate and fear, unseen, unheard until we raved down on Klerkon’s steading on Svartey at dawn — a steading like this, I remembered, sick and cold. Only one fighting man had been there and he had been easily killed by Kvasir and Finn.
Things had been done, as they always were in such events, made more savage because it was Klerkon we hunted and he had stolen Thorgunna’s sister, Thordis. He was not there, but all his folk’s women and bairns were and, prowling for him, I had heard the singing, sweet in the dawn’s dim, a song to keep out the fear.
I heard it stop, too. I had come upon the great tangle-haired growler who had cut it out of the girl’s throat with a single slash, his blade clotted with sticky darkness and strands of hair. He had turned to me, all beard and mad grin and I had known him at once — Red Njal, limping Red Njal, who now played with Botolf’s Helga and carved dolls for her.
Beyond, all twisted limbs and bewildered faces, were the singer’s three little siblings: blood smoked in the hearthfire coals and puddled the stones. The thrall-nurse was there, too, forearm hacked through where she had flung up her arms in a last desperate, useless attempt to ward off an axe edge. Red Njal was on his knees in the blood, rifling for plunder.
There were shouts then, and I followed them; outside lay a plough ox still dying, great head flapping and blood bubbling from its muzzle, the eyes wide and rolling. Across the heaving, weakly thrashing body of it, as if on some box-bed, three men stripped a woman to pale breasts and belly, down to the hair between her legs, while she gasped, strength almost gone but fighting still.
Her blonde braids flailed as her head thrashed back and forth and two of the men tried to hold her, while the third fought down his breeches and struggled to get between her legs. She spat crimson at him and he howled back at her and smacked her in the mouth, so that her head bounced off the twitching flank of the ox, which tried to bawl and only hissed out more blood.
They panted and struggled, like men trying to fit a new wheel on a heavy cart, calling advice, insults, curses when the ox shat itself, working steadily towards the inevitable…then the one between her legs, the one I knew well, lost his patience, unable to hold her and rid himself of the knee she kept wedging in his way.