of despair.
Then, as suddenly as it had come on, the terror was gone and he felt peaceful, as if any cares he had, any frustrations and fears, were just silly things, almost incomprehensible under the calm that came down on him like a parent’s kiss on a sleepy child.
Light. And noise, hard blows and a sensation of movement. The grass felt cold. Someone was slapping him across the back of the head. He tried to defend himself but his hands were tied. A face came into focus. It was Jodis.
‘Nothing?’ she said.
Vali coughed, spluttering out water and mucus from his nose and mouth.
‘Nothing.’
‘Do you need a rest?’
Vali thought of Adisla, of what she would be enduring on the Danes’ drakkar. ‘No rest,’ he said. He could hardly get the words out. His throat was dry and sore from where it had constricted in the water and his muscles writhed on his bones in a deep shiver.
‘Put him back,’ said Jodis.
Time became flexible to Vali, a malleable thing, like a piece of hide to be stretched or shrunk, a smith’s ingot heated and cooled, bent and straightened. When he was in the water every heartbeat seemed a year. When he was out the sun seemed to dip and rise like a skimmed stone. Even though his will was strong, Vali couldn’t help but take rests. At first they untied him when he did so. Eventually they did not. He could say, ‘Put me back in the water,’ but he couldn’t make his body allow it, and the more times he went in, the harder he struggled. At first he could control himself until he reached the centre of the mire. After a day he began to fight as they led him to the edge. It was a place of horror to him now, though no visions came, no insight or revelation, just the awful black water closing in on him, the pressures from within as the air struggled to burst from his lungs, and without as the water rushed to get in. A weighty black mass seemed to pull at his brain, heavier on the left than the right, the asymmetry giving him a headache like he had never known. His throat was raw and he could hardly speak.
There was no crowd there to see the magic. The Danes had gone and the Rygir were at home, sitting in groups remembering the dead, tending the wounded or just keeping their children close and the door shut. Adisla was the only one taken but ten others had died and still more were wounded. People drank, though not in celebration, hoping to damp down the misery and accentuate the glory of the violent day. Only Jodis’s children and Bragi came to watch Vali suffer.
Jodis sent her girl away to bring soup, but Vali couldn’t drink it. His throat had clamped shut, so he shivered out the interludes between his ordeals starving and cold. On the first day he managed twelve trips to the water. On the second he did four. The third day, lack of sleep blunting the reality of what he was doing, he managed eight. And, towards the evening, he did begin to see.
Drowning beneath the dark waters, he was somewhere else other than the mire, somewhere equally cold but not wet or dark. At that turning point, the moment between the panic and the calm of drowning, he was in a confined space, a tunnel that seemed to glow, the rocks emitting a soft and alien light. Someone was there, he was sure, though he couldn’t say who. He could feel their presence as a tone, a mood or a pattern of thought. He had never known anything like it. It was a mind that seemed like a river — always moving, always the same — and, like a river, it had currents that might drag you down.
And when he was lifted from the water, he didn’t see Orri and Hogni but that strange red-haired man in the cloak of hawk feathers, taking him up and out into the clean cold air. He heard a voice that seemed familiar.
‘Give yourself completely.’ Then the man was gone and Vali could stand it no more. He knew what was required. You cannot go to the gates of death if you are still looking back at life. He needed to step forward boldly. The idea didn’t come to him in words but as a feeling of want, like a prisoner wants freedom. He was fettered by something and the fetters needed to break.
The men pulled him up and he lay back in their arms, limp as pondweed.
‘Lord,’ said Orri, ‘you have tried. There is nothing there for you.’
‘No,’ said Vali, though the word was more of a cough than anything understandable. The men started towards the bank.
‘No.’
They stopped.
‘What, lord?’
Vali made himself speak, forcing his aching lungs to expel the air through the constriction of his throat to frame the words. He was weak and tired and he needed to end this suffering whatever the cost. From behind the hillside, towards the sea, there came the sound of horns and a clamour. Forkbeard was returning. It meant nothing to Vali.
‘Do not pull me out,’ he said.
‘You mean to die?’
‘The water,’ said Vali, pointing into the mire. He was beyond explanation. The sky was a cave, black with rain, the light unnatural, a subterranean glow, like that tunnel. His senses seemed muted and dull, as if the darkness of the mire still clung to him.
‘You are raving, lord,’ said Hogni. ‘Ma Jodis, the prince says we are to put him in again.’
Jodis tapped the ground with her foot in thought. She looked back over her shoulder in the direction of the sea, thinking of the girl on the Danish ship. Of course, the prince would be taken out of the mire but perhaps it was time to give it longer. Much longer.
‘Do as he says,’ she said.
Now it was Hogni and Orri who hesitated, but Vali took the decision from their hands. With the last of his strength he kicked his feet away from under him and cast himself back into the water.
22
The witch queen was working on the Moonsword when she realised that the sorcerer had found Vali. She had taken Authun’s weapon on an impulse, not a whim like an ordinary human might have but in response to a magical feeling. She knew it was important and, in the years since the king had come to the cave, she had realised how. The wolf would kill Odin but then it would need to die. Ancient prophecy was clear on how this would happen. Odin would fall, and then another, kinder, more humane god would kill the wolf. If the pre-echo of that conflict really was to be played out in her lifetime then that god would need a weapon. The wolf could not be killed by any normal blade, otherwise it would not be able to defeat the king of gods in battle. So the sword would need to be enchanted.
In the lower caves there was a narrow wedge of rock where the jagged ceiling met an uneven floor. She had always thought it looked like the jaws of a wolf. Now she wedged the sword into it, as the sword was wedged into the jaws of the Fenris Wolf, and for months she concentrated on seeing it as something that could harm the savage god.
The witch was so strong in magic that she was half a god herself, and her perceptions were not like those of humans, things that flicker into being for an instant and then cease to exist when attention shifts. They were more like living things, spider thoughts that crawled from the egg of her mind over the object of her meditation — the sword — and waited to ensnare whatever encountered the weapon in future. She convinced herself that the weapon would kill the wolf, and the sisters sat with her, sharing that belief. At the end of their period of meditation that idea had entered the Moonsword and would warp the perceptions of all who encountered it in future, including the wolf himself.
Gullveig knew that anything that could defeat Odin would not be killed by a lesser magic, and all magics were less than that possessed by the king of gods, but she saw one hope. The prince, she knew, had been raised on tales of his father’s battles and had grown up hearing stories of the magical lost sword. When he was eaten by the wolf, his consciousness would mingle with his brother’s. That, she believed, provided the key to the wolf’s death. The
