“Ah,” I said, trying to give myself pause for all the lies to sink in. Yngvildr appeared to be a highly creative girl under pressure. “I think maybe that was an accident? One of the idiots must have taken a lamp into the barn—probably they were planning to collect a few girls there before setting off for home. Must’ve got knocked over in the excitement . . .”
Snorri repeated what I’d said in Norse for the gathered crowd. A silence trailed his last word and two score and more of Harrowheim’s eyes stared hard at me through the flame-lit gloom. I figured if I shoved Yngvildr at the feet of the nearest ones and ran for it I might lose them in the night. I’d tensed for the shove when without warning a cheer went up, beards split into broad smiles full of bad teeth, and before I knew what was happening we’d been swept along the muddy streets and back into the mead-hall. This time they managed to squeeze twice as many bodies into the place, half of them female. As the ale started to flow once more and I found myself squashed between Yngvildr and an older but no less comely woman that Snorri assured me was her sister rather than her mother, I started to think a night in Harrowheim might have its charms after all.
? ? ?
We left on the morning tide with sore heads and foggy recollections of the night’s events. The rain had let up, the relentless wind had relented, and the true story of how their largest barn got burned flat had yet to emerge. It seemed the best time to depart. Even so I would have dallied a day or three, but Snorri had an urgency about him, his humour gone. When he thought no one watching I saw him hold his side above the poisoned wound and I knew then that he felt that pull, drawing him south.
Sad to say neither Yngvildr nor her still less pronounceable sister came to see me off at the quay, but they had both managed a smile when Snorri hauled me from the furs that morning and I let that warm me against the cold wind as we set sail.
As the distance took Harrowheim I didn’t feel quite so well rid of this Norse town as I had of Trond, Olaafheim, and Haargfjord. Even so, the glories of Vermillion beckoned. Wine, women, song . . . preferably not opera . . . and I’d certainly search out Lisa DeVeer, perhaps even marry her one day.
? ? ?
“We’re going the wrong way!” It had taken me the best part of half an hour to realize it. The fjord had narrowed a touch and there was no sign of the sea.
“We’re sailing up the Harrowfjord.” Snorri at the tiller.
“Up?” I looked for the sun. It was true. “Why? And where do I know that name from?”
“I told it to you four nights ago. Ekatri told me—”
“Eridruin’s Cave. Monsters!” It all came back to me, rather like unexpectedly vomiting into your mouth. The v?lva’s mad tale about a door in a cave.
“It was meant to be. Fated. My namesake sailed here three centuries ago.”
“Snorri Hengest died here.” Tuttugu from the prow. “We should see Skilfar. She’ll know of a better way. Nobody comes here, Snorri. It’s a bad place.”
“We’re looking for a bad thing.”
And that was that. We kept going.
? ? ?
“So, who was Eridruin?” Sailing on a fjord is infinitely preferable to sailing on the sea. The water stays where it’s put and the shore is so close that even I might make it there if it came to swimming. This said, I would rather be sailing over rough seas away from any place famed for monsters than sailing toward it on the flattest of millponds. “I said, who was—”
“I don’t know. Tuttugu?” Snorri kept his eyes on the left shore.
Tuttugu shrugged. “It must ache Eridruin’s spirit to be famed enough for his name to survive but not quite enough for anyone to remember why they remember it.”
A stiff breeze had carried us inland. The day kept grey, the sun showing only brief and weak. By late afternoon we’d covered perhaps thirty miles and seen no sign of habitation. I had thought Harrowheim’s raiders came from further up the fjord, but nobody lived here. Tuttugu had the right of it. A bad place. Somehow you could tell. It wasn’t anything as simple as dead and crooked trees, or rocks with sinister shapes . . . it was a feeling, a wrongness, the certain knowledge that the world grew thin here, and what waited beneath the surface loved us not. I watched the sun sinking toward the high ridges and listened. The Harrowfjord wasn’t silent or lifeless, the water lapped our hull, the sails flapped, birds sang . . . but each sound held a discordant tone, as if the skylarks were just a note away from screaming. You could almost catch it . . . some dreadful melody played out just beneath hearing.
“There.” Snorri pointed to a place high upon the stepped shore to our left. Like a dark eye amid the stony slopes, Eridruin’s Cave watched us. It couldn’t be any other.
The Norsemen lowered the sails and brought us into the shallows. Fjords have deep shallows, diving down as steeply as the valleys that contain them. I jumped out a yard from the shore and managed to wet myself to the hips.
“You’re just going up there . . . right now?” I looked about for the promised monsters. “Shouldn’t we wait and . . . plan?”
Snorri shouldered his axe. “You want to wait until it gets dark, Jal?”