Snow-Walker

Nine

Death is the portion of doomed men.

Two days later, early in the afternoon, they came to the edge of the wood.

For hours they had been riding through its outlying fringes, the scattered trees and sparse growths of hazel and birch, but now, coming down a steep hillside, they saw the sudden thickening of the trees, a massing of greenery. Below them lay a mighty forest, its millions of treetops stirring in the soft breeze. It stretched far to the north, beyond sight into mist and low gray rain cloud, as if somewhere it merged with the sky and dissolved there, at the edge of existence.

The road had dwindled to little more than a track, thin and muddy. It ran down among the trees and was swallowed.

Brochael ducked his head under a branch. “Someone must still use it.”

Silent, they gathered beside him, letting the horses graze.

Jessa slid down and stretched stiffly. “So this is Ironwood. Easy to get lost in.”

Hakon took a long drink and wiped his mouth. “I thought Ironwood was just a place in tales.”

“So it is,” Skapti said promptly, “but all tales are true. They’re just the way we struggle with the world.” He folded his thin arms, looking out over the forest. “The Ironwood of the stories is a very strange place. It lies far in the northeast. A giantess lives in its heart, and many troll wives. The giantess breeds sons able to shape-shift into wolf form. All the wolves of the world are descended from her. One day, they say, there will come an enormous wolf, called Hati, or Moongarm, who will strengthen himself by drinking the blood of all who die. Then he’ll swallow the moon itself at the world’s end, in the last conflict.” He raised a thin eyebrow. “As the old man said, no place for mortals.”

“But this isn’t that wood, is it?” Hakon asked.

“Who knows. Perhaps every wood is that wood.”

“If it’s not, the old man gave it a bitter name,” Brochael remarked. “And stop teasing the boy, Skapti, or he’ll be no good to any of us.”

The skald grinned. Hakon went red.

“But there are wolves.” Jessa got back on her horse. “We’ve heard them.”

“And other beasts, I hope. Some fresh meat wouldn’t come amiss.”

They picked their way down carefully. The remaining stones of the road were cracked and treacherous, poking up here and there through mud and leaf litter. As the riders passed silently into the wood they felt its rich scents wrap around them; tree sap and fungi, crumbling bark, centuries of decay and growth. High above, the spindly branches of silver birch rustled, the sky blue and remote through the windblown boughs. Birds whistled here, flitting among the leaves, but gradually the wood became thicker and darker. The birches gave way to oaks, then a mass of evergreens, pine and spruce and fir, clogging the light. Soon the riders moved in a green gloom, silent except for the soft footfalls of the horses.

Brochael rode ahead, with Kari and Jessa close behind. Skapti and Hakon came last, urging on the nervous packhorse. The wood closed in. Branches hung over the path, swishing back into their faces; far off, the dimness was split by shafts of sunlight, slanting here and there between the crowded trees.

After only a few minutes Brochael stopped suddenly. Jessa’s horse, always nervy, snorted and skittered sideways with fright, and she tugged its head around, trying not to back into Skapti.

Then she saw what had frightened it.

Skulls.

They were threaded, one above the other, hanging on long strings from the still branches, small skulls of birds and tiny animals—pine marten, stoat, rats, crows. Hundreds of them. In the faint breeze the bizarre hangings clicked and tapped against one another, the empty slits of their eyes turning. Half-rotten, green with mold and lichen, beaks and teeth and bones swung in the dimness. Feathers were knotted into bundles among them, and the stink of decay hung under the trees.

“What is it?” Hakon whispered, appalled.

None of them answered him. The sudden smell of decay brought terror, numbing and cold. Centuries of superstition rose in their hearts, fear of sorcery, sacrifice, unknown rites. Small flies buzzed and whined about Jessa’s face; she beat them off in disgust.

Then Kari nudged his horse forward. He rode in under the long dangling lines of bone and caught one with his thin hands. Pulling it toward him he examined it carefully, the horse fidgeting beneath him.

His movement broke the stillness that held them. Jessa moved up beside him; the others came too, reluctantly.

“Look at this.” Kari’s fingers slid the skulls apart; he touched carved circles of bone, each marked with runes, the same angular letters they had seen on the standing stone.

“What do they mean?” Brochael growled. He had his ax in his hand; he glanced around at the clinking curtain of death as if it made his skin crawl.

“Looks like a place of ritual,” Jessa muttered.

“Sacrifices?”

“Yes, but who left them,” Skapti murmured, “and how long ago?”

Each of them kept their voices low; each of them noticed the human skulls, just a few, threaded here and there between the others.

Kari let the string of bones drop; it clicked and rattled and swung ominously to and fro. He was the only one of them who seemed unaffected by the grimness of the place. “Some are old,” he said thoughtfully. “They’ve been here years. But that—that’s new enough.”

It was the jawbone of a reindeer or some other grazing beast, snapped clean in half, impaled on the thorns of a bush. Strips of skin still hung from it. Around it, as if placed like offerings, were four small metal arrowheads, some black feathers, a broken bear’s claw.

“This is sorcery,” Brochael muttered, backing suddenly. He gripped the thorshammer at his neck and looked at Kari as if there was a question he didn’t know how to ask.

Kari answered it. “I don’t know for sure, but I think Jessa’s right, in a way. The wood ahead of us is haunted by something. This is the barrier. Someone has made these offerings, built this curtain of power, hoping that whatever is in the wood can’t pass it. I left something similar around the Jarlshold.”

Jessa looked at him in surprise but Brochael nodded. He looked worried. “So what do we do?”

“We go on,” Skapti said quietly.

“If the wood is haunted—”

“We have to go through, Brochael. Anything else would take too long.”

Each of them nodded, silent.

“Then we keep together, and all armed.”

“Let me go first,” Kari said.

“No!”

“Brochael.” Kari came up to him, his pale hair silvery in the dimness. “I’m the best armed of all of you when it comes to things like this.”

For a moment Brochael said nothing. Then, with a grimace, he muttered, “I know that.”

“So?”

“So watch my back.”

He turned his horse and led them out of the grove, between the bones that turned and glittered in the draft. Jessa pulled a wry face at Kari, and he smiled and shook his head. She for one was glad to get away from the horror of the skulls, but fear had fingered them now and they could not shake it off. The wood was full of shadows, sly movements, unease. Branches rustled, as if invisible watchers touched them, and as the darkness grew to the dim blue of night, a mist began to gather, waist high, hanging between the dank boughs.

It became harder to keep to the path. Once, Brochael lost it, and they had to backtrack through an open stand of larches, bare of leaf below but black above. Skapti found a narrow track, but no one could tell if it was the remains of the road or not. Suddenly, in the great silence, they knew they were lost.

Lost. Skapti felt the word crisp like a dead leaf in his mind.

Brochael swung himself down. “Well, we had to stop somewhere; it may as well be here. We need daylight to see our way out of this.”

But Jessa thought that this was not a place they would have chosen. The wood had chosen it for them. It was open, with no real shelter among the trees; they built the fire near a mass of holly that might be some protection, but the kindling was damp and the mist put the flames out twice before Kari intervened and made them roar up and crackle.

It was a miserable night. They were short of water, and the damp glistened on their clothes and hair however close to the fire they crowded. They tried to keep up a conversation, and Skapti told stories, but in the silences between the words, they were all listening.

The wood stirred and rustled around them. As night thickened, their uneasiness grew. Once, a low thud of hooves in the distance made Hakon and Brochael leap up, weapons in hand, but the sound had gone; only the trees creaked in the rising wind. There were other noises: cries, far off; long, strange howlings; the distant, unmistakable beat of a drum. And always the wind, gusting.

Late in the night they heard something else: a scream, suddenly cut off.

“That was a man,” Hakon whispered.

Brochael nodded grimly.

“Shouldn’t we go and see?”

“We’re going nowhere, lad. Not until it’s light.”

They tried to sleep, but the damp and the eerie night sounds made it difficult. When Hakon finally woke Jessa to take her turn at the watch, she felt as if she had drifted from one nightmare to another. She sat up, stiff and dirty.

“For Odin’s sake, keep your eyes open,” Hakon muttered. “This place terrifies me. I see what the old man meant.”

Irritably she nodded, tugging out the long sharp knives from her belt. “I know. Go to sleep, worrier.”

The fire was low, the mist smothering it. She fed it carefully, squatting with her back to the others. The horses tugged restlessly at their ropes, their ears flickering as a murmur of sound came from the wood. Jessa crouched, listening. She wondered where Kari’s birds were. There was no sign of them, but they might be roosting above, invisible in the black branches.

It took about half an hour for the kindling to run out.

Finally she stood up, brushing dead leaves from her knees. Gripping the knives tight, she ventured out cautiously into the trees and looked around.

The wood was a dim gloom, mist drifting round the dark trunks. She crouched quickly, snatching up anything that would burn—pinecones, snapped twigs, branches. Suddenly her fingers touched something hard, and she lifted it, curious.

It was an old war helmet, rusting away. One of the cheek plates was gone; the empty eyeholes were clotted with soil. As she raised it the soil shifted and fell, as if the eyes had opened.

And something touched her.

She looked down, heart thudding.

A hand had been laid on her sleeve softly. The fingers were scarred, pale as bone. And they had claws.