saw what was being taught to her and, finally, a too-brief time when the pair of them worked in tandem. Then, suddenly, she was alone with the burden of waiting, for the axe and her own successor, the first to be returned to the stone kist until someone brave came to claim it, the second to sit at her fire and begin the task of shouldering the burden of all the long years of old knowing. So it had always been, so it would always be.
Well, the first had come, passed hand to hand through blood and danger, for the axe had claimed its cursed victims — she remembered being told that the axe had failed to return only once, when a true
Svein he had called himself, a man bitter with defeat and death, she had seen, twisted from his faith by the betrayal of that axe. His king and master had commanded him to take it here, he said. He did not want his sons to get it, she learned, even the worst of them, for none were worthy and all would be betrayed, like him. She had watched this Svein stumble off and thought it likely he would die in the Finnmark cold, for he was so uncaring of life.
The second had not come and she was beginning to wonder if it would ever happen. There was always the raid on a village — but she remembered the fear and the hate of it and balked at doing it.
Now, she thought, it might be too late. There were many folk plootering over her fire mountain to claim the Bloodaxe and her hunters had suffered for it. It had come to her, just recently, that perhaps she was the last of her kind and the thought troubled her.
She found a nice spot by the clawed hand of tree, while the wind hissed down the bowl of the valley and drew the reeking white smoke out of the entrance to it. She knew the swirl of it sucked the smoke from the strange hot, bubbling pits in the Cleft, then roared it out through the mountain beyond, as if the place breathed.
She had made fires here before and liked the place, for it reminded the air about true cold. It took a hard winter to make this sheltered, eldritch-heated valley clog with snow and she was used to the warmth, so that stepping out beyond it ached her bones these days; she preferred to wait until folk came to her.
She found her ring of old stones, coned a few sticks together and sparked up a fire. Her hunting men settled down to watch. They were hurting and sick and too many of them had died and she was sorry she had asked them to. They thought they had been fighting to keep the northers away from this place, the home of their wise-woman goddess and that they were failing; they did not know that they were meant to fail if one wyrd was to prove a success.
The soft flames spilled red-gold into another long night of white and bruise-blue. A good fat moon, crisp air and a warm hue dancing in a hearth. Grandma was another name she didn’t mind, though only children, the ache of her lost heart, called her that. She had not seen one for some time, but remembered how they had liked her stories, in the days when she had gone abroad more.
She liked to tell stories to herself — at least, that is what she said when she caught herself mumbling into the straggles of her hair. Sometimes she let the fur-masks listen, but even those hunters preferred to creep away, ducking away from an old-young, shapeless, mumbling woman hung about with odd weavings and difference.
She knew one or two stopped to listen and would have been surprised at the few, the very few, who wondered if what she muttered needed some other name than ‘story’ — but they only wondered that sort of thing when they could not hear it being told.
While they were listening they felt lifted up into a cloud of dusted age, where there was nevertheless something firm and strong, like finding a good pass through the mountains. There were some who said she spoke of their own home, but long ago, where their people must have lived forever. No-one who listened went away unmoved and some were woken to wondering who the stories were for.
Now, though, the Sami beast-warriors saw that she just seemed to be humming to herself, and kicking snow off the old hearth, talking life back into it, like a bitch mouths and licks the litter’s failing runt. The hunters sat silent and waiting.
The man came quiet out of the cleft, but the hunters knew and their beast-masked heads came up; others followed the man. The hunters glanced at their goddess, but she showed no alarm and they took the hint, lowered their weapons and waited.
She watched the group coming towards her — a litter on poles, with a man at each corner, another man hirpling painfully, and one with a bow, some more behind. The hirpling man had a robe which might have been any colour but now was mainly stain, dagged and torn round the hem where it straggled in strips. He carried a staff in one hand, had a face like a long stretch of bad road and one foot was bare. Twisted and crippled, that foot, but not so dead that it never felt the bite of stone or cold, but the eyes in him were even more dead than that and the dangling cross made her catch her breath.
A Christ priest. Here. Did he come to claim the axe? The thought stunned her, almost crushed her with the wyrd of it — then the litter was set down and she sensed the
Old, she thought. An old power, this, and one to be feared. Still, she did as she was supposed to do. She nodded at the curved roots opposite and watched as her visitor sat down. The wind sighed and the fire hissed and the Old Power looked at the hunters and they looked back at her, hackles ruffed as dogs, for they sensed what she was. She looked round at the place, at the lack of snow, and the warmth compared with what was on the other side of the rock walls and nodded.
Then, finally, she turned and looked into the sere, ageless face of the woman opposite.
‘Goddess, is it?’ she said, in a voice made harsh by design. The woman nodded briefly, trying to look through the spiderweb-silk veil and seeing only the glitter of old ice eyes.
‘Aye, so they call you now. They have power, the Sami, but no common sense.’
She stopped, sucked in breath and muttered.
‘Still, no reason to be discourteous,’ Gunnhild added. ‘I have come for the Bloodaxe,’ Gunnhild said. ‘I had it before, when your … predecessor … was here, though I did not ask politely then. I had it then for my husband. Now I take it for my son.’
All her trepidation about old power vanished and the Sami goddess laughed with the sheer delight of this funny little veiled woman who thought the Sami had no common sense, yet came for the axe that had killed her husband and all her sons but one.
Crowbone’s Crew
The masked Sami would not stop. They were harried from rock to treeline, into clumped stands of pine and out on to the bare tumble of snow-draped rocks and still they would not go away. Crowbone wondered what hand guided them, for he knew there was a leader driving them. There seemed, to most, to be no sense in the losses they took, but Crowbone knew the game of kings well and the King Player’s best defence was to hurl his warriors at the enemy. The Orkneymen had died in winnowed droves and now Crowbone’s men did, too.
They found Mar spreadeagled on a rock, his insides laid out in some ritual. Gjallandi thought that a Sami wizard had done it, but the why remained a mystery. Crowbone sat back on his heels and looked at the iron-tangle of the man’s beard, the frosted eyes. Because he had broken that Oath he had taken so lightly? He looked to where Onund and Kaetilmund stood, accusing-grim, but they said nothing and, eventually, he broke their gaze.
‘We should give this axe foolishness up,’ growled Klaenger, a tall, rangy man with a nose red-raw with cold. ‘It is clear the folk here do not want us to have Odin’s Daughter.’
Crowbone knew that the man and Mar had been friends and saw a few agreeing nods from others. He looked up, to where the grey-green rocks piled ever higher, right up to the mountain fang where the white smoke plumed.
‘Look behind you,’ he said to Klaenger, who jumped and did so. When he saw nothing threatening, he turned back, scowling and wary.
‘Do you see the sea?’ Crowbone demanded. ‘Our ships?’
Klaenger’s lip drooped sullenly.
‘Look ahead,’ Crowbone offered and it was no longer for Klaenger, but for all the men. ‘There is the mountain where our quest ends. Which is easier to get to now?’
