all, Vigfus’s crew had been routed by them and they were, presumably, hard-enough fighters. It meant that he wanted to see if he could persuade the villagers to help. If not, he would stamp them, swift and hard, in the dark.
It’s what I would have done.
The problem was, as I told him, that I didn’t think Hild would want to do it, that she was following her own saga here and needed to be in that forge. I believed, too, that if we had any hope of reaching the end of this whale road, we needed her to be there.
And the good people of Koksalmi wouldn’t stand for that.
‘You think they would kill her?’ Einar asked. I nodded. Skapti hoomed and then spat in the dying embers of the fire.
‘How do you know so much? I know you cared for the woman, but she is out of her head half the time. And you are a boy – Frigg’s tits, you have not even been with us a season, are barely big enough to fit in that mail you strut in.’
I bridled, half rising, and big Skapti waved a placating hand. ‘Easy, easy – I meant no insult by it. Do not mistake me for a bear, young Orm.’
There were chuckles and I lost my anger in embarrassment and scrubbed my face again. ‘She will lead us to the forge if you give her leave and trust her to do it,’ I said, with only a slight twinge of fear that I was wrong. ‘Perhaps we can stay quiet and sneak in and out, no harm done.’
‘I thought the forge was in the village?’ growled Ketil Crow.
‘No. From what I understand, it is in a small hill nearby. The villagers count the place as a god place, but they fear it, too, and never go there, from what Hild says.’
This was stretching the cloth a great deal. It was what I had garnered from Hild’s ravings, which was not quite the same thing as a straight fact.
Einar considered it, then nodded. ‘In, out and then we move west and south, to where the Elk lies,’ he said.
‘And on to somewhere,’ Skapti rumbled, ‘where there is something on the cookfire that isn’t fish.’
The next morning was misted, tendrils of it snaking round our ankles, lying in the hollows and under the trees like smoke.
We had been moving for no more than a few minutes when we broached the cap of a hill. Below, the mist roiled down the slope as the morning sun burned it off and the bare hillside led down into the beginnings of a fair-sized forest, where the river sparkled.
Hild stood and pointed, right across the river and the trees, to a great craggy outcrop, almost bare save for stunted stands of fir. ‘The forge lies under that,’ she said, then turned to the north. ‘And the village is an hour that way. I came here sometimes, but she …’ She broke off, wrapped her arms round herself, moaned slightly.
Ketil Crow, looking dubious, glanced at Einar. Hild swayed and Illugi steadied her. I moved to her side and heard her say, as if fighting for breath: ‘The old entrance is closed. Barred. Only from the top. Barred, Orm. You understand? Barred …’ Her eyes rolled and she fell against me.
‘Fuck,’ said Skapti. ‘Now we’ll have to carry her.’
‘What was all that growling about?’ demanded Einar. I told him as we moved on, four men sharing the burden of Hild, on another spear-bed.
We moved through the whispering trees, splashed across the fast-running, knee-high stream and on, up to where the ground started to rise and the trees thin. Then there were only withered efforts, like a crone’s clawed hands, and Einar called a halt as Geir Bagnose and Steinthor came sliding in.
‘We found a track,’ said Bagnose.
‘And a door.’
It was the faintest of trails, and it led to a hacked-out entrance. Sunk a little way into it was a stout wooden door.
‘It was a mine once,’ someone noted and when we looked, we could see the faint remains of the old wooden slats which had carried ore carts long ago.
‘This door is a good one,’ remarked another, whose name I knew to be Bodvar. He had been a woodworker and knew one when he saw it. ‘But it has been repaired a few times, here just recently.’
He pointed and we saw the difference in weathering, the thick new cross-planks.
‘Vigfus,’ muttered Einar and we all saw the remains of axe scores, where his crew had tried to cut through. It was clear someone had come and repaired the damage caused after they’d been chased off. Which meant, of course, that they were not entirely afraid of their mountain forge.
Skapti gripped the edge of a cross-plank and heaved. When nothing happened, he pushed, then stopped, shoved his helmet up and scratched. ‘There’s a thing,’ he said. ‘It’s barred from the inside. I can feel it.’
‘So there is someone in there,’ said Ketil Crow and chuckled nastily. ‘Perhaps we should knock.’
‘That’s what Vigfus did,’ Valknut said, pulling off his helmet and wiping the sweat from his brow. ‘Look where it got him.’
‘The thing of it is,’ said Bodvar, ‘that this door has not been opened in a long while. Look, there’s an old bird’s nest in the angle of that hinge.’
He was right. And the more we looked, the older the door was and the longer it had been shut. There was silence and Einar stroked his chin. Finally, he said, ‘Bagnose, Steinthor, see if you can find another way in round this rock. The rest of us will go to where Hild said to go – the top.’
‘This is a mountain,’ protested Steinthor. ‘It will take hours to go round the whole circle of it.’
‘Then get started,’ growled Einar and they left, splitting to right and left. The rest of us hefted our gear and got ready to climb. No one spoke. If challenged, they’d have said they were saving their breath for the task, but their minds were on dwarves and trolls and other things that lived under mountains, guarding the secret of treasure.
I thought most were chewing over the prospect of turning up some of Atil’s hoard – and a few droop-lips were just stupid enough to think that it was actually buried here.
But I was wrong. Everyone was too busy wondering who had barred the door inside the mountain.
Long, painful, sweaty. There – to say it takes three words and I wish it had been as easy to get to the top of that gods-cursed forge mountain. But I remember the climb as being tough, mainly because I was wearing mail: the weight of a small boy on my shoulders. That and all the other stuff – two shields, because I felt guilty and offered to share the burden of one of those who had to carry Hild up it on the spear-bed.
At the top, I was too busy ripping off my salt-stained boots and woollen socks to care about a cairn of stones. The cold air on my aching, throbbing feet almost made me moan with pleasure and, after I had inspected the rawest bits, I then took time to look around.
Everyone else was in a similar state. Men wriggled out of mail, stripped off layers of linen and wool, sat with their heads lowered, dripping under the unexpectedly warm spring sun. Skapti’s face looked like it would burst.
But Einar, if he was suffering, showed no sign of it. He stood, pensively staring at the cairn and the poles that surrounded them. Every one but four of them bore a skull, leering and weatherbeaten. The four that didn’t had recognisable heads, with eyes gone, lips peeled back, strips of skin pecked from cheeks.
‘Vigfus’s men,’ said Valknut, who was nearest me, massaging his calf muscles.
I shed my mail like a wriggling snake, then wandered over to have a closer look. The heads were ruins; you couldn’t tell if they’d even been men, save for one who had a fringe of beard left.
The cairn was waist height, with fallen