Snow-Walker (37 page)

As they rose into the valley the light lessened; the shoulders of the hills rose about them. Down here the air was warm and hushed, the last of the evening birdsong fading over the fields. By the time they neared the hold, the purple half-light had begun, and the weak sun was lost behind the hills.

There was a long low building which looked like the farmhouse, roofed in green turf to keep in the warmth. Smoke rose from a hearth hole near its center; Jessa smelled its sharpness. Other buildings clustered around it, barns and byres, all very quiet and dark under the rising moon.

The horses' hooves crunched down the narrow track.

“Perhaps they're all asleep,” Jessa said.

“Not Ulf,” Brochael muttered.

A dog barked ahead, then another. After a moment a slot opened in the dark house; light and smoke and cooking smells streamed out. The great bulk of a man clogged the doorway; then he strode out, others behind him.

“Who have I to welcome at this time of night?”

He glanced out at the riders through the eerie night mist, taking them in quickly, their numbers and strength; a tall, heavy man, his hair shaved close, a long sword held easily in his hand.

Wulfgar dismounted. “Me, Ulf Thorirsson.”

“Jarl!” The holder turned, surprised. “What's happened?” he asked quickly, seeing Wulfgar's face. “What's wrong?”

“Plenty,” Wulfgar said grimly. “But it'll keep until we're inside.”

Ulf nodded, passing his sword back to a thrall. “My house is honored. In now, all of you. My men will see to the animals.” He swept around and collided with Brochael, who had been standing close behind him. Halfway off her horse, Jessa giggled at the look on his face, half amazement, half delight.

“Brochael?” he breathed.

“Come for a rematch, Ulf.” Brochael folded his arms and looked his old friend up and down. “You've been overeating. Running to fat.”

Ulf grinned. “There's been no one here to challenge me.”

“Until now.”

They gripped hands, and Ulf slapped Brochael with a palm that would have made most men crumple. “It's good to see you,” he said warmly.

The hall was small, and heavy with smoke. Food was cooked here over the central hearth. The women of the farm were thrown into cold terror by the sight of the Jarl and all his war band descending on them out of the night, until Ulf 's wife, a tall, gaunt woman called Helga, gave quiet, efficient orders.

The high table was cleared; Wulfgar sat in the center, his friends on each side of him, Kari next to Jessa. She knew he was uneasy. Once the excitement of their arrival had died down the people of the hold were only interested in him. They stared frankly, like animals, until he looked up, and then their eyes slid away.

“Center of attention,” Jessa whispered.

He nodded, silent.

She trimmed the meat with her knife. “You must be getting used to it.”

“You never do.” He picked listlessly at his food. “It's not the way they look, but what they feel. Fear. Gudrun's shadow.”

There was no denying that, she thought. In the silence that followed, she began to listen to Wulfgar. He was explaining what had happened at the Jarlshold, and Ulf was listening gravely. Brochael had been right; this man was enormous, a head higher than anyone else, even Skapti, his neck thick as a sapling. The coarse wool of his shirt strained over his broad back. Jessa saw that the chair he sat in was huge and old, its legs carved like wolves, their backs arched to bear his weight.

“Will it spread?” Ulf said urgently. “If the whole of the Jarlshold falls into the witch spell, what's to stop it spreading out here?”

Wulfgar looked at Kari.

Kari spoke quietly. “It won't leave the Jarlshold. I've made a binding ring of bone. The dream spell is trapped inside. It won't spread, as long as the people stay within.”

“What sort of ring?” Ulf asked curiously. He stared down at Kari's thin face shrewdly, without fear. “Sorcery, is this?”

“You could call it that.”

“And you trust it, Jarl?”

Wulfgar smiled slowly. “I trust it.”

“Then that's good enough for me. But what about the people in the hold?”

Wulfgar's expression hardened. “We'll stay. That's the choice we've had to make.” Then, as if to forget, he reached out a lazy hand for more wine and leaned back. “This is a fine hall, Ulf.”

“My father built it. Now there was a big man, bigger even than me.” He scratched his stubbly beard.

“Indeed he was.” Brochael passed the wine. “They say he once carried a stray reindeer home, two days' journey. Is that true?”

Ulf nodded proudly. “Thorir Giantblood, they called him.”

“Tell us about the road,” Wulfgar said.

The huge man sat still, the firelight warming his face. Behind him his massive shadow darkened the hung shields.

“There's not much known about it. All the stories of the giants are almost forgotten; even who they were. Your friend here would know more about that than me.”

Skapti nodded wryly.

“But the road,” Ulf went on, “is real enough. It goes north. They say it runs even to the edge of the world, to a country where the snow falls all night and all day, and where in winter the sun never rises. No one has ever traveled a week's journey along it, to my knowledge, except Laiki.”

“Laiki?” Wulfgar murmured.

“An old man now.” Ulf stood up and roared, “Thror! Fetch Laiki!” and sat down again. “He went in his younger days. He tells strange tales about it, and they get stranger year by year. I don't promise, Jarl, that any of them are true.”

The old man came up slowly. He was shriveled, his hair white as wool, long and straggly. A thick fleece coat covered his body, and as he grasped the chair and lowered himself into it they saw his hand had two fingers missing; two stumps were left, long healed.

“Well, Father, we hear you know something of the giant road.” Wulfgar leaned forward and poured him a drink. “My friends will be traveling that way. Can you tell us about it?”

The old man's weak blue eyes looked at them all. He seemed delighted, Jessa thought, to have such an audience.

“Once, I went that way.”

“Long ago?”

He wheezed out a laugh. “Forty years or more, masters. Forty years. Two other men and I, we set out to find the road's end. We had learned there was amber up there in the north, and jet. We wanted wealth. Like all young men, we were fools.”

He smiled at Jessa and put a cool hand on hers. “Are you going on this journey?”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“Not just young men, then.” He shook his head. “The road is paved at first, masters, whole and easy. After a while it becomes fragmented. It leads into a great forest, dark and deep. Ironwood, my friends called it, for a joke, but we were more than a week in that haunted, ghost-ridden place, and all the time we heard the stir and passing of invisible spirits, as if a great army of men whispered about us in the dark. None of us slept. We walked day and night to leave that nightmare behind. The air became colder. One night we came to a great ruined hall, deep in the wood. We were exhausted, and slept, and when we woke, one of my friends had gone. We never found him.”

He gazed around at them soberly.

“After the wood, the ice. We struggled on, but our food was gone and our hearts were failing. Then wolves came. Alric was killed, and the horses that we hadn't yet eaten ran off. I wandered alone in the empty land, a place of glaciers, wide snow plains where the icy winds roared all night. I was lost there, starved and delirious. I do not remember, masters, how I got back through the wood. Sometimes it seems to me that I saw terrible sights, things I can't piece together, a great city in a lake, a bridge that rose up to the stars, but I cannot tell if these things were real or a delirium.” He paused, sighing. “All I do know is that I came to myself in a shieling north of here, nursed back to health by a shepherd. For two weeks I had lain there, he said, babbling the nightmares of the wood.”

He held up his hand. “And these fingers were gone. Bitten off, the good man thought. And to this day I do not know what happened to me.”

He looked around at them all. “If your journey is not urgent, masters, take my advice. Turn back. That is no country for mortals.”

They were silent a moment.

Then Brochael shook his head. “Lives depend on it, old man. We've no choice.”

The road was floored with great slabs, powdered with gray and green overlapping lichens. Here and there saplings had sprouted up through the gaps between stones, and bushes of thorn and rowan, but the way was still surprisingly easy to follow, leading downhill among the light-barred glades of trees.

Jessa sat herself down on the edge of it and looked closely at the giants' handiwork. The slabs had been squared and laid close, each one flat and slotted in neatly to its neighbor. It would take many men and horses to lift even a few. No wonder people thought of giants.

“Are there such things?” she asked aloud.

“Indeed there are. Or there were.” Skapti drew his long knees up. “Once, at Hollfara, I saw a merchant selling bones. Huge bones they were, immense, Jessa, bigger than any man or animal, except the great serpent that winds around the earth. What else could they be but giants' bones?”

She touched the amulet at her neck lightly. “Then I hope we don't meet any! Ulf's big enough.”

She watched him saying good-bye to Brochael.

“Time to go.”

Reluctantly the skald got up after her.

Wulfgar lifted her onto her horse and stood there while Hakon and Brochael mounted. Kari was already waiting, the ravens silent on a branch above him. Wulfgar looked at them all. “It hurts me bitterly to let you all go.” He glanced at Skapti. “Especially you.”

Skapti gave a lopsided smile. “You can get yourself a better poet. You've always wanted to.”

“There is no better poet.” He put a hand on Skapti's shoulder. “If you don't come back, and I haven't been caught in the witch spell, then I'll come looking for you. One day.”

Skapti nodded. He climbed up onto the long-maned horse and the five of them looked at one another, silent among the crowd of men.

“Good luck,” Wulfgar said simply. He glanced at Kari. “There are no others but you who could do this. Let the gods watch you.”

“And you,” Brochael rumbled.

“Good-bye, Wulfgar,” Jessa said sadly. She turned her horse and rode out quickly over the gray stones, the others following, Hakon tugging the long rein of the packhorse.

They clattered down the slope, between the sprouting trees. When Jessa looked back she saw Wulfgar standing at the top, arms folded, watching them. He raised a hand. Then the bushes hid him, and all the men with him.

They were alone.

It was a silent journey, that descent of the ancient road.

None of them wanted to talk, and there was no sense of danger on them, so they rode in a long, straggling line, picking their way over the broken paving.

The road led down and up, winding over low hills, its gray line visible sometimes far ahead. Late in the day they rode over a high moor, with the gray scatter of broken paving stretching in front of them, mosses and peat spreading out over it, as if the land was drawing it back.

Hakon slowed his horse. “What's that?”

On the horizon a gaunt pillar stood stark against the cloudy sky.

“Dead tree,” Brochael suggested.

“Too straight.” Skapti narrowed his eyes. “A rock, maybe.”

Cautiously they rode toward it. As they came close they saw that he was right, but that this rock too had been shaped, heaved upright. Sliced deep into its surface was a carving of three wolves, tangled together, their jaws agape. Behind them, his great hand reining them in, stood a huge man, his head roughly shaped, his eyes looking fiercely out. Unfamiliar words were carved at his feet.

“Can you read it?” Jessa asked Skapti.

The skald dismounted and went over to the stone, reaching up and fingering the carving thoughtfully. “No. These are no runes I know. And it's old, Jessa. Centuries.”

“It could be a gravestone,” Hakon said uneasily.

“It could. But I think it's a marker of territory. Or was.”

“Giants?” Brochael wondered.

Skapti shrugged and climbed back onto his horse. “Maybe. But long ago.”

Jessa looked at Kari. He was gazing up at the stone, his eyes strangely distant. For a moment she thought he was listening to some sound, straining to catch it, but when he saw her looking, he said nothing.

They went on, but after that silent warning a sense of foreboding seemed to fall on them; they rode together now, and more warily.

Slowly the long day died, but still they traveled, not knowing where to stop. Finally, in a small copse of birch by the roadside, they saw the rise of a thatched roof.

Brochael drew rein. “I'll go and see,” he said. “Skapti, come too. The rest of you, wait here.”

But the ravens had come karking down about Kari in a flutter of noise; they perched on the gray stones, walking and pecking over them.

“They say it's empty,” Kari said.

Brochael glared at him. “Are you sure?”

“So they say.”

Everyone stared at the birds, but they knew better than to doubt him. Brochael urged his horse off the road. “This is going to be a very strange expedition,” he muttered.

It was an old shepherd's hut, long deserted. Trees had sprouted in the doorway, and the walls had gaping holes, but the roof was more or less intact, and the floor seemed dry.

They hacked their way in and soon had a fire lit; Hakon and Jessa rubbed the horses down and let them graze tied to a long rope.

“What about wolves?” Hakon said nervously.