Robert Low - The Whale Road

I saw him force Einar to drink and, an hour later, I could already smell the garlic from his severed gut from where I stood, but Einar gave a little shake of his head when Illugi came to him and put his tunic back on.

Hild crouched nearby, watching like a buzzard waiting for prey to die.

Eight were dead, almost all the others wounded and two of those had soup wounds, which Ketil Crow dealt with. Sixteen enemy corpses were left where they lay, though they were stripped naked. The horsemen had disappeared.

An hour after the battle, half of those still fit started to shore up the tunnel and recommenced digging, those too hurt to dig tended the wounded and prepared food. At noon, I handed Einar a bowl of meat and bread and our eyes met.

He was so pale the veins on his hands were blue ropes, but his eyes locked with mine and were still black and steady and I was first to look away, still unsure whether he had been trying to kill me or save me.

When I collected the bowl again, it was still full, the food congealed. Einar looked asleep, head on his chest, face hidden by the matted wings of his hair, but his hands looked so white I thought, for a second, that I could see through them.

All that day I wondered about him, while the heat grew brassy and the corpses swelled and began to blacken and stink.

`We shall have to get out of here soon,' muttered Kvasir. 'If not, we will get sick and die.'

They called him Spittle as a joke, after the wise man made from the saliva of the gods, because there were stones with more sense than Kvasir. But it is possible that he had made his first-ever joke, since most of us were sick or dying already. Kvasir himself had an infection in one eye that leaked pus: if a cure wasn't found, he would go blind in it.

I wasn't even sure of my own state. The bindings round my lost fingers were filthy and stained, my ankle ached and, once I had peeled the tattered mail and padding off, my ribs were looking anything but healthy under the tunic.

`Looks like Bifrost,' said Finn Horsehead. It was a measure of how bad things were, for he never said much at the best of times. Ìt will have more colours than the rainbow bridge by morning, I am thinking.

Does that hurt?'

It did and I slapped his hand away and told him to leave off prodding it. I could feel it grate when I moved and worried that I had broken a rib or more.

`We are so cursed that we will soon come to envy the dead,' answered Short Eldgrim morosely.

We still called him Short Eldgrim, even though the reason for it—another Eldgrim, nicknamed Long—

was under the mound of earth nearby. Short Eldgrim, slashed badly about the face and hands, didn't look like he would be long in lying next to him.

`You old woman,' answered a man called Arnod, though he made a sign against the evil eye with the one arm that was still good. The other was strapped to his side with two wooden spars on either side, badly smashed by one of the cavalrymen's maces.

Ì would like to see my old woman,' Finn muttered and everyone glanced at him, stunned by this display of affection. He saw it and scowled. 'She owes me money.'

I sat by the fire, whose flames twisted and flattened in the rising wind and listened to them talk, as if they had no injuries worth speaking of, about what they might find inside that gods-cursed howe.

They had everything in there, from Odin's magic ring, Draupnir, to the Mead of Poetry, brewed from blood and honey.

Then Short Eldgrim, hunched and grumbling and in pain from the carvings on his face and hands, moodily pointed out that, if we were descending into the realm of saga tales, there was every chance we'd find Hati, the wolf who chases and tries to devour the moon, or even Nidhogg, the corpse-devouring dragon.

In the distance came a rumbling on the rising wind. As the twilight grew and the wind moaned down the balka, Valknut came up to where we all huddled round the fire, watching the blue-white flashes light up the sky in the distance, listening to the rumbling wheels of Thor's goat-pulled chariot.

He held up a guttering torch, whose flames were nearly flat in the wind. 'We have broken into the howe of Attila,' he said, 'and Hild has gone inside.'

There was a mad scramble from the fire then, a scrabble of eager men heading for the tunnel until they were brought up short by the grim figure of Ketil Crow, standing light on the balls of his feet, his sword, saw-edged with nicks, swinging in one hand.

`Best if only a few go in,' Einar said, moving slowly, half-hunched to one side. His face seemed to have shrunk and had a greenish tinge, the eyes sunk so deep that his face already looked like a corpse. There was a huge seep of blood from his bandaged side. 'The tunnel isn't all that wide, or safe. Ketil Crow, me, Illugi, Sig—Orm, you are fit, I am thinking, so you will go. The rest remain.'

`Prepare the carts, lads,' Ketil Crow added with a grin. 'We will be hauling out a fortune soon.'

That mollified them but it didn't take much—while the lure of plundering a huge hoard of silver was strong, the fear of Nidhogg or worse was stronger. Best, I could see them all reason, to let someone else find out the dangers. There was plenty of opportunity for plunder later.

The dawn horizon flashed and roared behind me as I ducked into the tunnel. I was the last man, almost on all fours, wincing at my various pains and carrying only my sword. Ahead, Einar's arse was barely visible and I could hear him grunt and pant. Up front, Ketil Crow, Valknut and Illugi Godi struggled to keep torch flames from their faces and still avoid elbowing all the shaky timber uprights.

Earth trickled down my neck—a run of it, like thick water, spilled over the back of my hand as I brushed the roof. Something dug into my knee: metal. I dug it out, made out a dull gleam, held it close, saw the wink of silver.

Now that I looked, I could see other lumps of dull, age-black metal. We had dug straight through a wall of silver objects and earth.

I crawled on, feeling my other hand slap into something sticky and, when I brought it close to my face, smelled the iron tang of fresh blood. Einar, leaking like a sprung bucket, slithered along the tunnel and, suddenly, stood upright.

I followed, scrambling out into the howe of Attila.

I had had no idea what we would find, even from the start. A cave, I had imagined, with neat piles of gleaming treasure, like all the sagas seemed to have. Hopefully with no coiled dragon.

But this was no cave. Even in the light of the torches, held high by Ketil Crow, Sigtrygg and Illugi, you could see that his people had done Attila proud.

The howe was the size of a small town, though I only had that impression from the great vault of the roof.

The floor was flagged with stone; the roof, which should have been dirt, was a vague, arched shape in the darkness, its great wooden beams socketed into solid stone pillars and, though crusted with age, still firm.

At one end of this flagstoned square was a huge throne, a magnificent edifice of wood and gleaming silver raised high above the flagged level, with a pile of bright, brocaded robes in red and green and blue lying at the foot of it.

And all around, everywhere, piled to the roof, gleaming here and there, were blackened shapes, ominous and flickering in the torch shadows, a great tumble of forms, like buildings, strange and slanted, holding the gods knew what.

Each arm of that throne was as large as a table and, fastened to one, I saw with a sudden leap to my throat, was a skeleton, held at the neck and wrists by short, thick black chains embedded in the base.

I knew it was a woman, though there was nothing there to let me know that. Naked, she had been chained to the throne of the dead Attila. I knew who she was: Ildico, his bride of one night. The dream rushed back to me, of Hild and the collar of silver.