Dry-mouthed, I moved forward, careful to stay beyond sword reach of her, out of politeness. Then I did the same as she had done and took a knee, Norse-style.
We faced each other, the width of a man apart, no more, and studied each other in silence, while the wind sighed, lifting little djinn of snow over the stippled ice of the lake.
She was nail-thin and wasted, but had all her finery on, from golden beads in her braids to necklets of silver animals and fine bangles. Her armour was polished bone leaves pared from the hooves of horses and she wore baggy breeks worked with gold threads. But what glittered most brightly on her were her polished jet eyes.
The silence stretched until I could stand it no longer, so I nodded politely at her and said: 'Skjaldmeyjar:
She cocked her head like a quizzical bird and, in good Greek, answered me with a smile. 'I hope that is friendly in your tongue.'
I told her what it meant — shieldmaiden — though she seemed more like someone who could be called valmeyjar, which most ignorant people who are not from the fjords translate as shield-maiden, or battle-maiden. Really, that word means corpse-maiden, chooser of the slain and is a name to hand out to a woman who looks like a wolfs grandmother two weeks dead. I did not tell her this.
'You know my name,' I added and left that hanging like a waiting hawk.
'Amacyn, they call me,' she answered. 'Which is the name given to me as leader of the tupate and the name given to all such leaders, who then forsake all other family ties. It means Mother of the People, but the foolish Greeks once thought it stood as name for us all and so called us amazonoi.'
'Who are the tupate?' I asked, my mind whirling already.
She spread her hands to encompass all the riders. 'We are. In Greek it would be tabiti. It is hard to translate correctly, but the nearest would be — oathsworn.'
I sat back on one heel at that. Oathsworn. Like us. I said so and she made a little head gesture, as if to say perhaps yes, perhaps no.
'You have a sword,' I said in Greek. 'Like mine. Hild had it last.'
She smiled, covering her face with her hand, which was custom, I learned. 'Hild. Is that the name you gave her, then? The one in the tomb of the Master of the World?'
'That is the name she gave herself,' I answered, breathing heavily, for I felt on the edge of a cliff with a mad desire to fly. 'How did you come by the sword?'
'Hild,' she repeated, then laughed, a surprising sound of lightness. 'Ildico. Yes, that would be part of her penance. Or a twisted joke.'
I did not understand any of this and she saw it, nodded seriously and adjusted her squat more comfortably, so that her knees came up round her chin, long, thin hands clasped in front of her.
'Long ago,' she said, 'when the Volsungs brought their treasure and a new wife called Ildico to Atil, Master of the World, we were the Chosen Ones, charged with making sure of our Lord's undisturbed afterlife.'
She waved a hand, slim, pale and languid as a dragonfly in summer heat and talked as if she had been there herself, as if it had been yesterday, or the day before.
'This place,' she added. 'We made sure those who laboured on it could not reveal the secret of it, every one, from those who dug, to those who planned, to those who brought the treasure to place in it.'
She paused and looked at me with those black eyes, so that my heart clenched. I could almost believe she had been there herself, dealing out the slaughter.
'The steppe ran with blood for days,' she said, 'so that, in the end, only the Chosen Ones and the flies knew where the tomb lay and if the flies passed it on, mother to daughter, generation to generation, I never knew of it. But that is what the Chosen Ones did.'
There was a long, wind-sighing pause while she fiddled with the thongs of her soft boots and gathered her thoughts. Mine were of all the shrieking fetches who drifted in this place and if this woman was one, for she spoke so knowingly of five centuries before. No wonder the rest of the steppe kept clear.
'We did not expect the Master of the World to occupy it for some time, of course,' she went on, 'but the Volsungs came, with their gift of silver and swords and Ildico, the new bride. They did not stay for the wedding — did not dare, of course, since Ildico planned red murder — and when they left, one of us went with them.'
'One of. . you?' I asked, uncertainly. 'A Chosen One?'
She nodded and shifted. 'Her name, as far as any Volsung knew, was my name — Amacyn. She was then leader of the tupate but forgot her oath for love of the smith, the one called Regin. She went back with him to the north and by the time it was discovered, it was too late. The Master of the World wanted her death, to keep the secret of his tomb, but we were told to wait until after his wedding.'
By which time it was too late, for Ildico killed him on the wedding night. I licked dry lips, thinking on all the years between then and now and what that love had cost.
'The oathbreaker was not hunted down, then,' I said, the mosaic of it filling in for me even as I spoke.
The woman shrugged. 'The tupate had lost face and the one who favoured us was dead,' she said. 'The sons of the Master of the World did not care for us as much — but we had sworn to guard his tomb and so we did, as best as we were able. The last task of that tupate was to carry the Lord of the World to this place — then slay everyone who was not one of us.
'After that, the Chosen Ones went home — but daughters were trained in war, given the secret and served, as best as could be done, down the long years. Faithful to the last task — to keep the secret of the tomb. The oath would not let us do less.'
I knew that oath and how it bound. Who it bound. Hild. The woman nodded.
'The oathbreaking Amacyn could not live with what she had done in the end, so it became known,' she went on softly. 'She birthed a daughter and did what we all do — passed on the secret of the tomb. My mother did so to me, which is how I know that the oathbreaking Amacyn then went into Regin's forge and would not come out, sealed it so that it could never be used again. Regin the smith died and some say his heart snapped because of both his loves were gone, woman and forge. All this was found out, piece by piece, over the years.'
I saw the weft of it then, a harsh-woven cloak of misery visited on the innocent daughters of that forge village. All the ones who came after would not break that chain, waited until a girl was born — or chosen, even — and reached the full of their womanhood, then passed on the secret of Atil's tomb, an echo of what Regin's woman had once been. Then they went into the forge mountain, for the shame of what had been done. Probably those who thought twice about it were forced in; it became a god-ritual for the people who lived by the forge and they would be afraid to break it.
The woman sat quietly and said nothing while I stammered all this out, hammering it straight as I said it.
'Except for Hild,' I said, seeing it clearly, the sad, untangled knot of it. She had been stolen from that little Karelian village because Martin the priest thought he had found a secret and hired a man called Skartsmadr Mikill, Quite The Dandy, to get it. When he could not find it he and his crew of Danes tried to force the knowledge from the villagers by taking what they clearly valued — the young, bewildered Hild, still raw with the whispered secret, still weeping from the loss of her mother, gone into the forge.
In the end, Quite The Dandy found out how much she was valued; the villagers attacked them with such ferocity that those hard Danes had run for it, dragging Hild with them as their only prize. By the time she was delivered to Martin of Hammaburg they had taken out their anger and frustration on her so badly that her mind was cracking.