Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

“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.

Maladon is Norse-land. Crossing from East Thurtan you see it almost immediately. In the use of the land, the monuments, rough-hewn works of stone, carrying a power and a beauty not seen in the roadside chapels of the Thurtans. Many of the houses are roofed with turf, and the roof beams sport curving prows to remember the longboats that bore their ancestors to these shores. Perhaps some are even those same timbers, taken from ships beached on once-hostile shores.