Prince of Fools

TWENTY-ONE

A man can drown in the grass seas of Thurtan. In the swaying green, wind-rippled, with twenty miles and more of cold bog and saw grass on every side, it can seem that you’ve been set adrift in an ocean without end.

The fire at our back at least provided a reference point, an idea of distance and measure. These are things easily lost in the grass. As we walked, Snorri had told me the men of the pines had haunted forests like Gowfaugh for generations. The stories differed on the source of the original evil but now they perpetuated themselves, letting out the blood of their victims and replacing it with the sap of the oldest trees. The creatures kept some measure of intelligence, but if they served any master other than their own hunger it wasn’t spoken of. It seemed hard to credit, though, that the Dead King hadn’t steered them into our path.

“No more forests,” I said.

Snorri wiped the soot from his eyes and nodded.

We trekked a mile, another mile, and collapsed on the side of a gentle rise, looking back to watch the smoke and flame swirl above the burning forest. It seemed inconceivable that such an inferno, lofting embers into the heavens and scorching the clouds themselves, could have started with the tiny spark struck from my flint and nursed by my breath. Still, perhaps that’s all lives are, all the world is, a collision of vast conflagrations, each sparked from nothing. It might be said that the whole course of my own adventure sprang from a die that should have rolled a five or a two, landing instead with a single snake eye pointing at me, a pitiless eye watching me plunge further into Maeres Allus’s debt.

“That,” I said, “was close.”

“Yes.” Snorri sat knees to chest, watching the fire. He pulled a stick loose, tangled in his hair.

“We can’t go on like this. The next time we won’t be so lucky.” He had to see sense. Two men couldn’t carry on against such opposition. I’d gambled on long odds before-not my life, but my fortune-but never on so hopeless a bet as Snorri offered. Without prize or purpose.

“I would have given Karl such a pyre.” Snorri waved a hand at the burning horizon. “I built his beside the Wodinswood from deadfall. The trees were too heavy with the winter’s snow for the fire to spread, but I would have burned them all.

“He should have had a ship, my Karl. A longship. I would have laid him before the mast with my father’s axe and such armour as would serve him in Valhalla. But there was no time and I couldn’t leave him for the dead to find and use. Better wolves have him than that.”

“He told you about a key?” I said. Snorri had spoken of it back in the ruins of Compere but fallen silent. Perhaps now, with mile upon mile of blazing forest burning as Compere had burned, he would speak again. His eldest boy broke bones to escape his shackles and his last words to Snorri had been of a key.

And in the darkness of the grassland, with Gowfaugh burning red behind us, Snorri told me a story.

• • •

“My father told me the tale of Olaaf Rikeson and his march to the Bitter Ice. I heard it by the hearth many times. Father would spin it out on the deepest nights of winter when the ice on the Uulisk made sharp complaint against the cold.

“It takes more than a warrior or a general to lead ten thousand men into the Bitter Ice. Ten thousand who were not Viking would die before they reached the true ice. Ten thousand who knew enough to survive would know enough not to go. There is nothing there for men. Even the Inowen keep to the shore and the sea ice. Whale, seal, and fish is all that will sustain men in such places.

“It might be that no jarl ever had more longboats at his command than Olaaf Rikeson, or had brought more treasure across the North Sea, won with axe and fire from weaker men. Even so, it took more than his word to gather ten thousand from the bleak shores of the fjords where a hundred men were counted an army, and to march them into the Bitter Ice.

“Olaaf Rikeson had a vision. He had the gods at his side. The wise echoed what he said. The rune stones spoke for him. And more than this. He had a key. Even now the völvas argue over how he came to own it, but in the tale Snorri’s father told, Loki had given it to Olaaf after he burned the cathedral of the White Christ at York and slaughtered twice a hundred monks there. What Olaaf had to promise in return was never told.

“The fact that the god’s gift had been a key had always disappointed Snorri, but then Loki was the god of disappointment, amongst other things, things such as lies and trickery. Snorri would have preferred a battle ram. A warrior destroys the door-he doesn’t unlock it. But his father told him that Olaaf’s key was a talisman. It opened any lock, any door, and more than that-it opened men’s hearts.

“The oldest legends have it that Olaaf marched to open the gates of Niflheim and beard the frost giants in their lair, to shame the gods and their false Ragnarok of many suns, and to bring about the true end of all things in a last battle. Snorri’s father never denied the tale but spoke of how one thing might hide another, like a feint in combat. Men, he said, were more often moved by more basic wants-hunger, greed, and lust. Stories grew from seed and spread like weeds. Perhaps the gods touched Rikeson, or perhaps a bloody-handed reaver took a few hundred men north to raid the Inowen and from his failure sprang a song that bards wove into a saga and placed amongst the treasured memories of the North. Whatever truth there was, years have stolen it from us.”

• • •

Snorri left his son’s pyre, the last logs still blazing, the snow on all sides retreating to expose the black earth of the Wodinswood. Behind him embers swirled skyward amidst dark smoke. He trekked the hills of the hinterland, leaving the Uulisk far behind, tracking Sven Broke-Oar and the men of the Drowned Isles across the boulder fields of Törn, where vicious winds shape the rocks themselves. Above Törn the Jarlson Uplands, and beyond those, the Bitter Ice.

What he would do when he reached his enemy, Snorri had no idea, other than to die well. Grief and guilt and rage consumed him. Perhaps any of these on its own would have destroyed him, but in conflict, each with the next, they achieved a balance within him and he carried on.

The pace the raiders set was fierce and Snorri couldn’t think it one that Freja or Egil, with just ten years to his name, could match. In grim visions he saw them dead, marching with the tireless corpses that had come ashore at Eight Quays. But Karl had been alive; they had shackled prisoners-it made no sense to be taking them inland, but the necromancers had wanted live prisoners, that much was clear.

Only night stopped him. The light fled early, still new to the world after the winter darkness that had held the ice for months. Without sight a man can’t follow a trail. All he’ll find in the dark is a broken leg, for the hinterlands are treacherous, the rocky ground ice-clad and fissured.

The night had lasted forever, a misery of cold, haunted by visions of the slaughter at Eight Quays. Of Karl, broken and dying by the Wodinswood, of Emy. . Her screaming had followed Snorri into the wilderness and the wind spoke it all through the long wait for dawn.

And when the light came, snow came also, falling heavy from leaden skies, though Snorri had thought it too cold for snow. He’d roared at it. Lofted his axe at the clouds and threatened every god he could name. But still the snow fell, careless, dropping into his open mouth as he shouted, filling his eyes.

Snorri carried on without a trail to follow, lost in the trackless white. What else was there for him? He took the direction his quarry had taken and struck out into the empty wastes.

He found the dead man hours later. One of the Islanders who had been dead on the deck of his ship as it sailed the North Sea bound for the mouth of the Uulisk. No less dead now and no less hungry. The man struggled uselessly, bound chest-deep in a drift whose soft snow had accepted his dead flesh, then locked about it as his efforts to escape compressed the walls of his prison into something hard as rock. He reached for Snorri, his fingers black with the freezing blood locked inside. A sword blow had opened his face from eye to chin, exposing a jawbone wrapped in freeze-dried muscle, shattered teeth, frost-darkened and bloodless flesh. The remaining eye fixed Snorri with inhuman intensity.

“You should be solid.” He had found men dead in the snow before, their limbs frozen hard as ice. He stared a moment longer. “You’re no part of what is right,” Snorri told it. “This is Hel.” He lifted his axe, knuckles white on the haft. “But you didn’t come from there, and this won’t send you to the river of swords.”

The dead man only watched him, straining at the snow, tearing at it, without the wit to dig.

“Even the frost giants would want no part of you.” Snorri struck the man’s head from his shoulders and watched it roll away, spattering the clean snow with rotten blood, sluggish and half frozen. The air held a strange chemical scent, like lamp oil, but different.

Snorri wiped Hel’s blades in the snow until all trace of the creature had gone, then walked on, leaving the body still twitching in the drift.

• • •

By the time a man reaches the Bitter Ice he will have seen nothing but a world in shades of white for day upon day. He will have walked upon ice sheets and seen no tree or blade of grass, no rock or stone, heard no sound but that of his own loneliness and the mockery of the wind. He will believe there is in all the world no place more cruel, no place less suited to the business of living. And then he will see the Bitter Ice.

In places the Bitter Ice may be gained by snow-clad slopes as one might scale a mountain. In other places the ice shelf towers in a series of vast cliff faces, some frost-white, some glacial blue and offering clear depths. When the midnight sun shines on such faces, it reaches in and hints of shapes are revealed as if the ice has swallowed and held great ocean whales, and leviathans that dwarf even these, all trapped for eternity beneath a mile and more of glacier. For the Bitter Ice is just that, one huge glacier, spread across a continent, always advancing or retreating at a pace that makes men’s lives seem brief as mayflies.

Snorri couldn’t believe the Broke-Oar would allow himself to be led up onto the high ice, whatever madness might infect the Islanders with their dead men. Greed drove Sven Broke-Oar; he would accept risk, but never suicidal risk. Armed with this assessment of the man, Snorri trekked along the margins of the ice cliffs, low on food, as numb with the cold as he had been with the ghouls’ poisons.

When Snorri first saw the black spot he thought it part of dying, his vision failing as the wilderness claimed him. But the spot persisted, kept its place, grew as he staggered on. And in time it became the Black Fort.

• • •

“Black Fort?” I asked.

“An ancient stronghold built at the farthest reach of the Bitter Ice. Miles from it now. Built in days when that land was green.”

“And what- Who holds it? Was your wife there?”

“Not tonight, Jal. I can’t speak of it. Not tonight.”

Snorri turned his face to the blaze in the west. He sat, lit with the fire glow, and I saw the memories take him, back to the Wodinswood once again, where he had burned his son.