they were ready for trouble.
“Now, that got me mad right off. But I'm not as mad as they think I am. I reckon they'd have liked me to be, that day. But I got out of the boat, and got right up close to Brand where I could get my hands on him if anything started—he knew what I was doing.
“ ‘Now listen,’ he said, talking very carefully. ‘I mean you no harm, but I want to give you a warning. Go round in your boat. That's all right. Go anywhere you like—round the island, out to the seal-skerries, anywhere to the south. Not north.’
“ ‘I've just been north,’ I said. ‘No harm in that that I could see.’
“ ‘You can't have gone very far,’ he said. ‘You just went up to Naestifjorth, that's what they call the next big fjord north of here. That's all right. Most of the time. The next one is Midfjorth. You don't want to go in there.’
“ ‘And the one after that?’ I asked him, pushing him a bit.
“Well, he shut his jaw like a wolf-trap. In the end he just said, ‘You don't want to know about that at all. Stay away from it.’ ”
“That's strange,” said Shef. “After all they go north often enough, all of them, to meet the Finns and collect the Finn-tax. They say no-one really lives north of here, not Norsemen anyway, just the Finns. But they seem to know their way north all right.”
“But when the ships go north,” Cuthred answered, “they go outside the line of the skerries. I've been asking round, as much as I can, and Martha, she asks the women-folk for me. North of here, on the real coast, inside the skerries—that's no-go country. I wonder why. They're hiding something. When I walked off, after they'd warned me, I heard one of Brand's cousins say something to him, trying to calm him down. ‘Let him go,’ he said, ‘he's no loss.’ So he really was trying to warn me, of something they think really is dangerous. But they don't want it talked about just the same.”
Cuthred's low voice slowly drifted off to a list of other insults and spites that had been put upon him, while he toiled at the mill. Men and women who had mocked him, the bitter cold of the mountain winter, the way he had tried to block the shutter with dirt, the way the shutter kept opening again, faces that had appeared at the window, the way they had rattled the door trying to reach him in the night…
Relaxing in the heat, Shef's mind slowly lost its incessant turning over of the problems of Bruno and Alfred and Sigurth and Olaf, of the dead Harald and Ragnhild, yes, and Godive too. His head sank back into the corner, against the pine-scented wooden walls, he dropped into an uneasy sleep.
He was still in the dark, but a different dark—not the warm, comfortably-scented, mildly companionable one he had left, but a place cold and still and smelling of earth and mold. Yet it was not an enclosed place. It was a road, and there was a mount beneath him, carrying him along at an unearthly pace, with a strong swarming movement, as if it had more legs than a horse should.
The horse was Sleipnir, Shef realized, the eight-legged steed of the father of the gods. But he, the rider whom Shef was accompanying in his dream, was not All-father. He could feel what sort of a person it was, and it was not a god, but a man. A madman, like Cuthred, but without Cuthred's reasons. The main emotion he felt—he felt it all the time—was a furious glee at meeting and overcoming obstacles. His memories were a blur of slashing and slicing and trampling, broken only by the oblivion of drink. Of Othin's mead. The rider of Sleipnir, something told Shef, was Hermoth. It was a name he had met before. The name the champions had shouted in celebration and praise at the end of the long day's fighting at Valhalla. The champion for the day, before the host of Othin, the Einheriar, returned to the hall, their death-wounds magically healed, for an evening of carouse before the next day's contests. Hermoth had won more often than any other hero, more often than Sigurth Fafnisbani, more often than Bothvar Bjarki. So they had chosen him for this exploit, the most vital Othin had ever dispatched a hero on.
To bring back Balder from the dead. The Shef-mind that observed all this knew a little of the dead god, Balder, had heard a story from Thorvin. Now it came to him not as a story but as a series of flashes of sight. Balder, Othin's son, most beautiful of all the gods. Though he was a male god, he was too beautiful to be called handsome. Shef could see no picture of him, just a blur through Hermoth's mind of brilliant light, that seemed to blaze from the flesh of the god.
So beautiful was Balder that the gods, fearing ever to lose him, had made all created things take an oath not to harm him. Iron had sworn, and fire, and disease, and terrible old age, and the giant-brood even, unable to resist his beauty, and every fish and snake and animal in the world, and every tree in the wood. One thing had not sworn: the little, weak, sappy mistletoe plant that climbs up the oak-tree. It could do no harm if it wanted to—or so the gods reasoned.
And once the oath had been taken, Balder was invulnerable, and so the gods, amusing themselves in much the same way as their earthly followers, made sport out of setting up Balder the beautiful as a target and throwing at him every kind of edged and pointed weapon that came to hand. One god could not join in —Hoth, Balder's brother, who was blind. But one day a voice came to him in his blindness and said, would he not like to join in. Yes, he replied, but I am blind. And the voice said, I will set you in the right place and direct your arm. Throw this. And the voice put in his hand a spear made of the mistletoe plant, but hardened with magic arts.
The voice was Loki's, the trickster of the gods, enemy of gods and men, father of the monster- brood. Hoth took the spear and threw.
Hermoth's ears were still ringing with the great cry of lamentation that went up when the gods, and then all other created things, realized that Balder was dead, realized because of the way the light went instantly out of the universe, so that all things became mundane and dreary and dull, as they have stayed forever since. In his mind's eye he could still see the great pyre on which Othin had laid his son, in the funeral ship that would take him down to the Hel-world. Saw how even the giants had been bidden to the funeral and had come. Saw the giant-woman Hyrrokkin push the boat out, weeping—Hermoth had been one of the four champions chosen to hold her wolf-steed with viper-reins. Saw, just as the boat was pushed out along the slipway, Othin bend and whisper something in the ear of his dead son.
What had that word been? He did not know. It was his task, now, to ride to Hel and fetch Balder back.
The horse was out from its constricting walls now, clattering out on to a great bridge that sprang through the air—what air this could be in the world below, Hermoth did not know. He was passing ghosts now, shades that looked anxiously at him, aware of the clatter of the hooves, unlike their own silent passage. They were insignificant ghosts, pale men and women, children, not ghosts chosen for Valhalla or the groves of Frey. And at the bottom of the bridge there, there were gates.
As Sleipnir tore towards them they swung slowly shut. Hermoth stooped, whispered encouragement in the ear of his steed.
A clenching of muscles, a leap so high it seemed they would strike the lower surface of Hel itself. The gates were behind them, the baffled guardians gaping in their track.
This time it was a wall, a wall that ran up, or so it seemed, to the sky that was not there. Yet there was a crack, a tiny crack, at the top. Too small for Sleipnir, too small for Hermoth. Hermoth did not need to be told that this was magic. He drew rein, cantered up, stopped, dismounted. Beat with his massive knuckles on the stone wall, beat till his knuckles were bloody, ignoring the pain, as he always did.
A voice from the other side. “Who is that, that does not beat like a pale ghost from Hel?”
“Hermoth I am, Othin's boy, Othin's errand-rider. I come to speak to Balder.”
Another voice, and this one Balder's, slow and dragging and weary, as if the mouth were filled with mold. “Go home, Hermoth, and tell them: I may not leave unless the whole world weeps for me. And I know. Just as there was one thing that would harm me, so there is one thing that will not weep. Tell them.” And the voice trailed away as if being dragged down some long and dusty corridor.
Hermoth did not hesitate or falter, for such was not his nature. He knew certainty when he heard it. And he had no fear of returning with such a discouraging message. He mounted and turned again to ride back. Thought for a moment. Reached inside his tunic, where he had stowed a black cock from Asgarth, one of Othin's own breed.
He whipped the knife from his belt, slashed the head from the cockerel, threw first the head, and
