C. Brittain - Voima

“All right. It doesn’t matter now anyway.”

“I hope you realize, Karin,” the queen continued, “that it is very hard to keep the reputation of a virgin queen if one is seen to suckle a babe! People may have suspicions, but without evidence suspicions are nothing. My household has always been very protective of me and very loyal, but there are limits to what even the most close-mouthed servants can keep hid. And of course I did not want Roric to grow up the target for a dagger-thrust from any man who hoped to win me and father his own sons on me.”

“Did you think never to see him again when you sent him away?” Karin asked dully.

“If he had lived, I would have told him, sooner or later, that he was my son. A little boy would be in too much danger from his relatives for me openly to declare him my heir, especially when he was a child born to a secret union, when I had never married the man before witnesses or with the consent of my kin. Someone like that the Fifty Kings would be very slow to accept! But a full-grown man, someone with the warrior skills of King Hadros, would have been different. Even as No-man’s son, such a man could still be chosen by my kingdom’s Gemot as the next king-and accepted by the other kings-if I had no obvious other heir and swore that he was mine.

“But your child,” continued Arane with the ghost of a smile, “will be the grandchild of a king and of a sovereign queen, a fine baby boy or girl to rule Kardan’s kingdom after him and after you. All you need now is a husband-the Fifty Kings will still be reluctant to recognize that the child of a woman who has never been wed may inherit royal rule. Of course, as long as you are married before the babe is actually born, you should be all right… I do not, from my own experiences, recommend out-fostering your child on someone else! Now, you said you thought that Valmar may still be alive-”

Karin could not stand it, the plotting, the maneuvering, all ready to begin again and this time around her. “No!” she cried, sitting up abruptly. “Roric is scarcely dead! I cannot start looking at once for a husband, planning whom to fool into thinking Roric’s child is his. I would rather-”

She never had a chance to say what she would rather do. There was a great roar outside the tent, not an animal sound but much deeper, a roar of sea and earth.

Karin and Arane scrambled out into the cold night air to see beneath a moonlit sky the Hot-River Mountains quivering as though shaken by an unimaginably enormous hand. The ground beneath their feet began to tremble and sway. As they clutched at each other the moonlight glinted on a giant wave racing up the salt river. It swept across the pebbled beach where the warriors of the two kings were sleeping and spun around the longship that had been hauled up beside them. Splashing and yelling, the men bobbed to the surface as the wave passed by. The few horses they had with them began to scream, and the dogs barked wildly.

“The end has begun,” said Karin in a very small voice.

They were not far from the burial mound where Gizor and the others were laid, built well above the waterline. Karin heard Hadros’s and Kardan’s voices shouting over the din, trying to find out how many men they still had and bellowing orders to secure the ship again.

But she paid no attention, for her eyes were riveted on the burial mound. It moved, but not with the motion of earthquake. One of the horses-Roric’s stallion, she thought-had broken loose and was striking at the mound with his hooves. It shook as though something-or someone-was coming up beneath it.

The wave, having bounced off the cliffs at the eastern end of the salt river, came pouring back, lower now but sending the men and supplies anew into swirling confusion. The stallion screamed again. The men, snatching their equipment out of the water, scrambled for higher ground. A number pulled at the ship’s mooring lines. Both kings climbed to the top of the burial mound to shout orders. They had not seen the shaking she had seen.

It came again. A great clod of dirt flew from the side of the mound, then another. The dogs went abruptly silent. And someone, black with earth, stepped from within the mound.

That was when the moon went out.

Roric glared upward at the renegade king. The sky above was still pale, though everything around them was losing its color as dark came on.

“You’re definitely more trouble than you’re worth,” said Eirik with a sneer of his scarred lip. “If it hadn’t been for you, me and my men would still be living peacefully in what’s left of our kingdom, raiding and capturing those who didn’t know better than to come within a hundred miles.” He paused for a second, muttered, “Though that life’s been getting pretty thin lately,” then glared at Roric again. “First you show up with the princess, then it turns out that ship had come looking for you, you free the king’s son I was going to offer to the lords of death, and now between you and him I’ve lost half my men.”

“Where’s your fair lady Wigla?” said Roric mockingly. “Am I responsible for her disappearance as well?”

Eirik shook his head. “You fight like a berserker, like someone who doesn’t care if he lives or dies-only I, Eirik, am supposed to fight like that. And now you act like you want me to kill you in cold blood. Well, I wouldn’t let my men kill you, to let the princess make a great song to keep your spirit happy in Hel. And I’m not going to kill you quickly and cleanly now. You’re going to be the sacrifice.”

They dragged him up the cliff by the waterfall and back to where the bodies of those Valmar had slain were laid out. They added the men Roric had killed before they overpowered him.

Two of the king’s warriors had gone back into the cave by the pool but emerged in a moment with puzzled frowns. So Karin and Valmar were safely back home, Roric thought and grinned wolfishly.

The sounds of the fight between the Wanderers and the dragon had died away. Roric peered through the dimness but saw no sign of the lords of voima. “No use waiting for midnight,” said Eirik. “The day moves so slowly around here that it might be a week’s worth of waiting. We’ll make the sacrifices and get back to our own land with the booty.”

“How about Wigla?” asked one of his warriors, picking up Roric’s question.

Eirik growled and glared over his shoulder at Roric again. “She can do what she likes.” He turned back to his men. “Now, we don’t have any women so you two will have to do. And this spring will do instead of the boiling pool. Stand there with the bread and ale. I don’t have my lyre, but I should still be able to make a song.”

He considered a moment, arms crossed and forehead furrowed, then began to sing.

“Outlaws they called us, the men of the south,

“Renegade warriors to the Fifty Kings,

“But brothers in blood to the band of King Eirik,

“They fought, never shirking, till fate struck them down.

“Come death, take our brothers, to dark realms below!

“Take them now to the one realm that endures!

“In lands of immortals, as in human realms,

“Our swords serve the master whom no one evades.”

King Eirik snorted and shook his head. “Not one of my better songs. I really need the lyre. You, there! You have to do the calling.”

Roric noticed that neither Valmar nor he himself got any credit in the song for having killed Eirik’s men.

Two of the warriors stepped forward then while the rest went absolutely silent. They sprinkled the bodies with bits of bread and splashed them with ale. “We call on the lords of death,” piped up one in a shaking voice. “We call on those whose power is greater than all the lords of voima! Come, nameless ones of the night!”