turned his gaze on the Red Queen and gave her the type of look that’s apt to lose men eyeballs. He had blue eyes, pale. That at least was in keeping with his heritage. That and the remnants of his furs and sealskins, and the Norse runes picked out in black ink and blue around his upper arms. Writing too, some sort of heathen script by the look of it but with the hammer and the axe in there as well.
Grandmother opened her mouth to speak again but the Norseman pre-empted her, stealing the tension for his own words.
‘I left the North from Hardanger but it is not my home. Hardanger is quiet waters, green slopes, goats and cherry orchards. The people there are not the true folk of the North.’
He spoke with a deep voice and a shallow accent, sharpening the blunt edges of each word just enough so you knew he was raised in another tongue. He addressed the whole room, though he kept his eyes on the queen. He told his story with an orator’s skill. I’ve heard tell that the winter in the North is a night that lasts three months. Such nights breed storytellers.
‘My home was in Uuliskind, at the far reach of the Bitter Ice. I tell you my story because that place and time are over and live only in memory. I would put these things into your minds, not to give them meaning or life, but to make them real to you, to let you walk among the Undoreth, the Children of the Hammer, and to have you hear of their last struggle.’
I don’t know how he did it but when he wrapped his voice around the words Snorri wove a kind of magic. It set the hairs pricking on the backs of my arms, and damned if I didn’t want to be a Viking too, swinging my axe on a longboat sailing up the Uulisk Fjord, with the spring ice crunching beneath its hull.
Every time he paused for breath the foolishness left me and I counted myself very lucky to be warm and safe in Red March, but while he spoke a Viking heart beat in every listener’s chest, even mine.
‘North of Uuliskind, past the Jarlson Uplands, the ice begins in earnest. The highest summer will drive it back a mile or three but before long you find yourself raised above the land on a blanket of ice that never melts, folded, fissured, and ancient. The Undoreth venture there only to trade with Inowen, the men who live in snow and hunt for seal on the sea-ice. The Inowen are not as other men, sewn into their sealskins and eating the fat of whales. They are … a different kind.
‘Inowen offer walrus tusks, oils sweated from blubber, the teeth of great sharks, pelts of the white bear and skins. Also ivories carved into combs and picks and into the shapes of the true spirits of the ice.’
When my grandmother interjected into the story’s flow she sounded like a screeching crow trying to overwrite a melody. Still, credit to her for finding the will to speak – I’d forgotten even that I stood in the throne room, sore-footed and yawning for my bed. Instead I was with Snorri trading shaped iron and salt for seals carved from the bones of whales.
‘Speak of the dead, Snagason. Put some fear into these idle princes,’ Grandmother told him.
I saw it then. The quickest flicker of his glance toward the blind-eye woman. I’d come to understand it was common knowledge that the Red Queen consulted with the Silent Sister. But like most such ‘common knowledge’ the recipients would be hard pressed to tell you how they came by their information, though willing to insist upon its veracity with considerable vigour. It was common knowledge, for example, that the Duke of Grast took young boys to his bed. I put that one about after he slapped me for making an improper suggestion to his sister – a buxom wench with plenty of improper suggestions of her own. The vicious slander stuck and I’ve taken great delight in defending his honour ever since against heated opposition who ‘had it from a trusted source’! It was common knowledge that the Duke of Grast sodomized small boys in the privacy of his castle, common knowledge that the Red Queen practised forbidden sorceries in her highest tower, common knowledge that the Silent Sister, a parlous witch whose hand lay behind much of the empire’s ills, was either in the Red Queen’s palm or vice versa. But until this brutish Norseman glanced her way I’d never encountered any other person who truly saw the blind-eye woman at my grandmother’s side.
Whether convinced by the Silent Sister’s pearl-eyed stare or the Red Queen’s command Snorri ver Snagason bowed his head and spoke of the dead.
‘In the Jarlson Uplands the frozen dead wander. Corpse tribes, black with frost, stagger in columns, lost in the swirl of the frostral. They say mammoth walk with them, dead beasts freed from the ice cliffs that held them far to the north from times before Odin first gave men the curse of speech. Their numbers are unknown but they are many.
‘When the gates of Niflheim open to release the winter, and the frost giants’ breath rolls out across the North, the dead come with it, taking whoever they can find to join their ranks. Sometimes lone traders, or fishermen washed up on strange shores. Sometimes they cross a fjord by ice bridges and take whole villages.’
Grandmother rose from her throne and a score of gauntleted hands moved to cover sword hilts. She cast a sour glance toward her offspring. ‘And how do you come to stand before me in chains, Snorri ver Snagason?’
‘We thought the threat came from the north: from the Uplands and the Bitter Ice.’ He shook his head. ‘When ships came up the Uulisk in depths of night, black-sailed and silent, we slept, our sentries watching north for the frozen dead. Raiders had crossed the Quiet Sea and come against the Undoreth. Men of the Drowned Isles broke amongst us. Some living, others corpses preserved from rot, and other creatures still – half-men from the Brettan swamps, corpse-eaters, ghouls with venomed darts that steal a man’s strength and leave him helpless as a newborn.
‘Sven Broke-Oar guided their ships. Sven and others of the Hardassa. Without their treachery the Islanders would never have been able to navigate the Uulisk by night. Even by day they would have lost ships.’ Snorri’s hands closed into huge fists and muscle heaped across his shoulders, twitching for violence. ‘The Broke-Oar took twenty warriors in chains as part of his payment. He sold us in Hardanger Fjord. The trader, a merchant of the Port Kingdoms, meant to have us sold again in Afrique after we’d rowed his cargo south. Your agent bought me in Kordoba, in the port of Albus.’
Grandmother must have been hunting far and wide for these tales – Red March had no tradition of slavery and I knew she didn’t approve of the trade.
‘And the rest?’ Grandmother asked, stepping past him, beyond arms’ reach, seemingly angled toward me. ‘Those not taken by your countryman?’
Snorri stared into the empty throne, then directly at the blind-eye woman. He spoke past gritted teeth. ‘Many were killed. I lay poisoned and saw ghouls swarm my wife. I saw Drowned men chase my children and couldn’t turn my head to watch their flight. The Islanders returned to their ships with red swords. Prisoners were taken.’ He paused, frowned, shook his head. ‘Sven Broke-Oar told me … tales. The truth would twist the Broke-Oar’s tongue … but he said the Islanders planned to take prisoners to excavate the Bitter Ice. Olaaf Rikeson’s army is out there. The Broke-Oar told it that the Islanders had been sent to free them.’
‘An army?’ Grandmother stood almost close enough to touch now. A monster of a woman, taller than me – and I overtop six foot – and probably strong enough to break me across her knee. ‘Who is this Rikeson?’
The Norseman raised an eyebrow at that, as if every monarch should know the tawdry history of his frozen wastes. ‘Olaaf Rikeson marched north in the first summer of the reign of Emperor Orrin III. The sagas have it that he planned to drive the giants from Jotenheim and bore with him the key to their gates. More sober histories say perhaps his goal was just to bring the Inowen into the empire. Whatever the truth, the records agree he took a thousand and more with him, perhaps ten thousand.’ Snorri
