joined me, as did a few others. And, of course, Bodvar picked up a stone and dropped it in. There was a short pause, then a faint splash.
‘A well?’ queried Bodvar.
‘On a mountain top?’ responded Ketil Crow with a curl of his lip.
‘I wish you had not done that,’ Illugi Godi said, frowning at Bodvar, who merely shrugged.
‘If not a well, what?’ demanded Skapti, lumbering up.
‘A smoke hole,’ said Einar absently, then kicked one of the stones at his feet. We all saw that the blackening was an age of soot.
‘For the forge,’ someone said, enlightened.
‘His charcoal is a little damp,’ commented Valknut and there were chuckles.
We milled and peered and argued this and that for a while. Einar stood and thought and, apart from the whirr and song of birds, there was only the muttered rant of Hild, that constant background noise we had all become used to.
‘Rope,’ said Einar. There was some – Valknut had a length; two others had coils of it round their waists. Einar had a fire lit, made a torch, held it over the hole and let it drop. We all watched it fall, turning lazily, trailing sparks. We saw the shaft, where it suddenly widened out, the gleam of water – then the torch hissed and was gone.
‘Take a sounding on that,’ ordered Einar and the ropes were knotted firmly, then a bearded boarding axe tied to one end and lowered. When the rope end was reached, it still hadn’t gone slack and that meant some two hundred feet. We hauled it up and found it dry.
‘That’s a deep hole,’ muttered Skapti uneasily and everyone agreed. Deep holes were to be avoided: the lair of dragons or black dwarves.
‘Let’s find out how deep,’ said Einar and had us take off the leather neck straps from our shields and fasten them to the rope. Then we lowered it again. At 250 feet, the rope went slack and, when it was hauled up, the last twenty or so was wet.
‘So, now we know,’ said Einar. ‘Who will be lowered, then?’
There was a shifting from leg to leg and a studious attempt to be looking somewhere else.
‘I would go,’ offered Skapti and everyone groaned and laughed.
‘Just so,’ said Einar. ‘Someone small and light, then.’
‘Send the Christ priest,’ shouted someone. ‘He’s scrawny enough.’
There was laughter and Martin’s face went white. But Einar shook his head, tugging on the leash a little. ‘The black dwarves will eat him,’ he said. More laughter.
‘I will do it,’ offered Pinleg and there were nods and some appreciative noises at his bravery.
‘Can you swim?’ added Einar and Pinleg acknowledged his lack with a wry wave.
It took me a while to realise they were silent and all looking at me.
‘Can you swim?’ asked Einar.
I swallowed, for I swam like a fish, the legacy of sometimes falling off those black gull cliffs. I could lie, but Gunnar Raudi knew, so I nodded.
There was a single exhale of relief and a few hands clapped my back, more because the owners weren’t going than at my courage.
Skapti knotted the rope into a kind of sling, which made it a seat rather than round my waist, which cut the wind from you. They made a new torch and I climbed on to the crumbling edge of the cairn, while Skapti wrapped two coils round his ample frame and braced himself. Two others, shoulders humped with muscle from rowing, stood to help him.
‘Jerk the rope twice to have us stop,’ he growled.
‘What if I need to come up in a hurry?’
‘If the dragon is burning your skinny arse,’ he replied, ‘we’ll hear you scream.’
As the others laughed, Einar lit the torch. Then I kicked out and started down.
At first they went so fast that I clattered off the sides, but I yelled up to them, my voice bouncing crazily in my ears and they slowed the descent. Turning slowly I was lowered, down and down and down into the dark shaft, the torch guttering.
I saw a small, round opening midway down, set into one side of the shaft like a dark lidless eye. I almost called out, but then I was sinking below it and, suddenly, out of the shaft entirely.
There was the impression of airiness, a great expanse of vaulted rock, which the torch only dimly revealed. Water dripped and the air felt damp and cold and smelled musty. When I saw the water gleaming red in the torchlight, I jerked the rope and stopped.
Swinging gently, I lowered the torch a little, peering around. There was nothing but water. I swallowed the dry spear in my throat and realised I had no way of telling them to haul me up save one.
So I yelled. The sound boomed off the wall. I was jerked up like fish bait, shot back up the shaft so quickly I hit the sides and yelped in pain, which only made them haul harder. I almost shot out into the sunlight, the torch falling back into the darkness.
I was cursing them as they dragged me over the side of the cairn stones and, when they saw I was unharmed, everyone laughed at my fury. I didn’t think it was funny; both my elbows and one knee were bloodied.
‘You’ve had worse humping on a dirt floor,’ observed Skapti, hauling me up and grinning. Then they all wanted to know what I had seen.
‘A shaft, widens out into a chamber full of water,’ I revealed.
‘That much we found out without lowering you,’ Einar grunted.
‘There isn’t much more,’ I bridled. ‘Short of going in the water and swimming about in the dark, I couldn’t find out more.’
‘It might come to that,’ Einar growled and I saw he was serious. The thought of being in that black water in the pitch dark shut me up and focused my mind. I remembered the opening, and thought more about it.
‘I am thinking that there is something of the heathen sacrifice about this place,’ Martin the monk said slowly. ‘I can smell it.’
‘You … have the … right … of it.’
The voice was weak, but so unexpected that we all whirled and stared. Hild was upright, swaying, her face bloodless.
‘The only way in is here,’ she said, speaking in a rush, as if trying to get it all out as fast as she could. ‘Was once to be my fate … All who know go into the dark. There is a way to the door if you can find it. If you do, you can choose – to unbar it, or stay. No one has unbarred the door since the woman of the first smith. She went in for her sin, gave sin and secret to her children.’ She paused, sagged. ‘My mother is in there. When I had provided a daughter, that was to be my fate.’
We all chewed that over. Martin crossed himself. So that was the ‘dark’ Hild spoke of, the ‘she’ who haunted her. Her mother. In the black pit of that forge, probably mouldering at the bottom of that lake. And if she still spoke to her daughter, she was a fetch of rare fierceness.
‘They threw them in, all the smith’s daughters?’ demanded Valknut.
‘The heirs of Regin,’ muttered Illugi. ‘I have heard that name before …’
The others, even though they did not know the whole of it, were equally uneasy faced with this. Like them, I was thinking that a village capable of heaving their own down a hole were not ones to walk up to as a stranger.
I was so petrified I couldn’t stand – and I wasn’t going swimming down there, even if Einar cut my bollocks off with his truth-seeking knife.
‘There is an opening, midway down,’ I babbled to Einar. ‘The edges are smoke-blackened, upwards, but not beneath. I think that is the true smoke hole.’
Einar