‘Looks like somebody beat us to it,’ said Bjarki, ‘though they’ve left enough furs. Doubtless their ship was too laden with gold.’
He was more used to this sort of sight than Veles and he picked his way through the corpses while the merchant caught his breath and composed himself. Veles looked about him. He wanted to be certain that whoever or whatever had caused this mess had gone from the island. The bodies had not been there for very long and the ravens still had some rich pickings. One pecked at a corpse next to him, watching Veles as the corpse itself seemed to watch him through the eyes of a stag mask. He didn’t like this at all and shooed the bird away. His confidence in the non-existence of supernatural powers was always stronger by a fire, drinking with his fellows, than it was in such wild places.
The crew spread over the island, looking to loot the unlootable. There was the odd fur, the odd knife, but these people had been very poor. Their drums might be worth a bit, Veles thought. He could always sell them back to them, or offer them as curiosities to the courts of the south.
‘Here’s your treasure!’ It was Bjarki’s voice, shouting from somewhere down the slope towards the open sea.
Veles couldn’t see where he was calling from. He walked down. This slaughter must have been some sort of mass human sacrifice, he thought.
‘Some Blot, eh?’ said Bjarki as if reading his mind. ‘Old King Hrutr did nine slaves at midsummer one year, but this beats that head or rump however you look at it.’ He pointed into a cave. ‘Down there,’ he said. ‘Look.’
Veles squinted into the darkness. He could see nothing. Anxiety gripped him. He wondered if Bjarki was luring him into the dark of the cave to kill him. No. The berserk would have had no qualms at all about splitting his skull in broad daylight, in front of a market-day crowd if the mood took him. If Bjarki had wanted him dead, he would be so already.
‘Do you have any way of seeing better?’
Bodvar Bjarki picked up a dead brand from the fingers of a corpse with as little disquiet as if the man had still been alive and simply passed it to him. Veles struck a flint, kindled the sparks on some wood shavings he had in his pouch and applied them. The torch flamed and the men went down.
Shadows danced around them as they descended. The light of the torch seemed merely an absence of dark, not a thing of itself. In it they saw runes painted on the walls.
‘Can you read them?’ said Bodvar Bjarki.
‘Treasure,’ said Veles, ‘and good fortune.’ He had never bothered too much with runes, preferring the Latin alphabet. He could read them but with difficulty. He wished they did say that, but it seemed to be the normal bilge about spirits and gods.
‘How did you see in here?’ said Veles. It seemed very dark to him.
‘It’s obvious it’s a tomb,’ said Bjarki.
‘So you haven’t actually been in here?’
‘I have no intention of letting you out of my sight, merchant. I don’t trust you. You’d strike a bargain with the men, maroon me here, sell the boat and cheat them out of the profit if I gave you as much as half a chance.’
‘The idea never occurred to me,’ said Veles. It hadn’t actually, but it was good to know Bjarki feared a mutiny, and kind of him to suggest a way it might be done.
The passageway stopped at a large mound of stones. There was no sign of collapse on the tunnel roof, so Veles took them to have been placed there. On one large block a rune had been carved, a jagged sideways swipe with a line through it.
‘What does that mean?’
‘I’ve never seen it before,’ said Veles.
Some other men were behind him now, peering through the wavering light.
‘It’s a holy sign of their people,’ said one.
‘Very likely,’ said Veles, ‘and whoever did this slaughter has taken care to secrete something here.’
‘What?’
Veles shrugged and smiled. ‘We won’t find out until we open it, will we? I suggest you get to work.’
Bjarki grunted. Then he began on the pile of stones.
46
Saitada sat in a shaft of light that cut through from a finger-width opening in the side of the upper cave. She watched her image looking back from the blade of the sword.
She was much older. How much? She didn’t know. The unburned side of her face was not pretty any more: her skin was tight on her bones, pale from lack of light, dirty and cut.
Saitada had been a long time in the dark. The witch caves were endless and deep. She had not known at first that her boys had been taken and had remained underground, trawling the blackness with her fingertips, reaching for a hand, the brush of some hair, listening for the cries of her children in the dark, living off the water of streams and food she could beg from the witches’ servants.
For years, Saitada hadn’t known why her children had been taken. But crawling through blind chimneys, emerging from dripping sumps of rock where her mouth had stolen the inch of air between the water and the tunnel ceiling, taking candles from the boy servants and watching the light struggle against the deep dark, she listened and she learned. The witches, who from their lowest caves could hear a hare’s breath on the mountainside, to whom the rock and the ice of the Troll Wall were just a veil through which they saw from sea to sea, did not notice her, and she did not know to think that odd.
The older witches of course did not speak, and the boys knew only that they needed to fear and to serve them. Neither yielded any information about what had happened to Saitada’s children. The girls, however, initiates new to the dark, shivered and trembled and clung to what they had been. Saitada came to them, sat with them, hugged them and calmed them, though she never thought to say anything. The girls needed to talk, to confess their fears as they would have to their mothers. They told her, among other things, of the threat that was coming, of the deaths and the terror of death. They told her too about two boys who would become one wolf to kill the murderous god. One boy’s body would host the spirit of the wolf, the other would be his food, giving his brother the strength he needed. The witch queen had taken the boys and only one would live. Saitada never found it strange that she could understand the girls’ language. She only knew that her babies had gone.
They were always in her mind, their memory like a tumour that ate everything else she had seen, everything she had been. After years alone she was not a person, just a love and a hate encased in flesh — cherishing the thought of her children, loathing the witch queen who had taken them — watching death begin to creep through the caves.
The girls had all died when Saitada’s grief was at its height. She had gone to the deep dark, where she had thought she would die, when five of them were dead, and emerged to find none alive. The boys were all dead too. From one she had taken tinder and lit a candle. She had no idea why she had come back — her own motivations were now a mystery to her — but in a week her purpose became clear. She had come back to watch the witch queen kill her sisters.
Some went in their sleep; some were strangled and some burned. The majority would have died from neglect, with no boys to tend them, but Saitada brought them food from the sacrifices. It wasn’t kindness. She saw the distress the murders caused the witch queen and didn’t want starvation or thirst to spare her a single one. Saitada saw how the deaths drove the queen on to madness and she sought to guide her hand, leaving rope or tinder, stakes or, once, a long pin that she found in some cloth left as a sacrifice. The queen quickly put Saitada’s gifts to use.
Saitada watched for the arrival of the god the girls had talked about but saw nothing. Rock, pool and stream remained the same in the yellow light of a candle stub; the torpid air and dripping damp didn’t change when the flame was spent.
When the witches were all dead, she tried to kill the witch queen herself. She could not go through with it.
