Snorri walks on, out into the wilds where Hel’s domain borders other places, the lands of ice and the lands of fire where the j?tun dwell and build their strength for Ragnarok. Other places too, stranger places, all bound together by the roots of Yggdrasil. The land heaves and breaks as if frozen in its death agonies, mounded into compression ridges, scarred by deep rifts, stepping up toward daunting heights.
Few wander here, just the occasional soul bent around its purpose, and twice a troll-kin, hunched and moving swiftly through the scatter of rocks. In places monoliths stand, towers of black basalt, each carved with an eye as if to suggest the goddess watches even in the margins of her lands.
With Jal’s departure the Hel that Snorri crosses has grown closer and closer to the tales the skáld would sing in the long night around the dying fire of the mead hall. Snorri knows that Hel herself sits enthroned at the heart of these lands, split like night and day, as if Baraqel and Aslaug had been sliced head to groin and half of each bound into one being. Snorri, despite the depth of his conviction, can’t help but be glad his path has led him to the margins rather than to Hel’s court. He means to break Hel’s law, but he would rather not attempt it with her standing behind him.
In the distance hills rise from the blood-dust, dark with menace. The plain before them lies scattered with dead and twisted trees, ancient wind-stunted things, not one with a leaf on it, nor any hint of green across the whole swathe of the forest. Snorri sets off walking.
“Ccraaaawk!”
Snorri spins toward the sudden cry, axe ready. He sees nothing. Blood-dust rises around his feet, reaching his knees.
“Crawwk!” A raven, black and glossy, perched on a tree some yards back, long toes curled around a dry twig. “Here’s an odd thing. A living man in Hel.” The raven tilts its head first one way, then the other, sizing Snorri up.
“Odder than a raven that can speak?”
“Perhaps all ravens can, but most don’t choose to.”
“What do you want with me, spirit?”
“No spirit, just a raven, wanting what we all want: to watch, to learn, to fly back and whisper our secrets to the All-father. And perhaps a juicy worm.”
“Truly?” Snorri lowers his axe, amazed. “You are Muninn? . . . or Huginn?” He recalls the names of Odin’s two ravens from the priests’ tales. Appropriately he recalled Muninn—memory—first, and Huginn— thought—took a little more thought.
The raven crawks, shakes its feathers, and settles. “Mother and father to us all. We all fly in their wake.”
“Oh.” Snorri’s disappointment colours the word. “You don’t speak to Odin then?”
“Everything that speaks speaks to Odin, Snorri son of Snaga, son of Olaaf.” The bird wipes its beak on the branch beside it. “Why are you here? Why heading out into the wilds?”
Snorri knows his destination—he hasn’t thought to question his path. “I’m here for my wife and children. It was wrong how they were taken from me.”
“Wrong?”
“I failed them.”
“We all fail, Snorri. In the end we all fail. Often sooner.”
Snorri finds his hand pressed to his face, a weight of memory pushing him down, emotion choking him. “What was I supposed to do? Leave them? I could not let this stand. Win or lose, my fight is here. What else could I do?”
The raven shakes again, a stray feather floating down between dead branches. “Don’t ask me for counsel. I’m just a bird. Just memory.”
Snorri sniffs, ashamed of the tears he thought himself too dry for, feeling stupid and hurt. “I thought they would have gone before the goddess. I thought they would have gone before Hel and that she would have seen their goodness with her white eye and seen no evil with her black eye. They should be at Helgafell . . .” The holy mountain waited for the little ones and for those not slain in battle . . . though gods knew Freja must have fought to save her children. But Hel wouldn’t separate her from Emy and Egil . . . surely that couldn’t be the reward for her valour? Snorri’s head spins and it seems that Hel rotates about him so that he and the raven become the centre of all things, all pivoting on this one question. “Why are they out here?”
Snorri wipes his forearm across his eyes and draws breath to repeat the question, but the tree is empty, the branch bare. For a long moment he wonders if the bird was ever there. Then he kneels and retrieves a lone feather from the rust-coloured dust. Standing, he slips the feather into his coin pouch, and continues through the dead forest toward the distant hills.
The sky seems closer here, and although it remains monotone somehow it bears the threat of a storm. The whole region does, as if it holds its breath, waiting. The Northman sets his gaze upon a high ridge and, with teeth gritted, he begins the long ascent.
Snorri climbs, scrambling up rough slopes, clambering over rocks that hurt for no reason other than that he touches them—as if they are made of pain itself. Visions of Eight Quays fill his mind as he reaches, grips, hauls himself up, and repeats the process. His village rising above the Uulisk, above the quays that give its name, the scatter of huts that he knows well enough to navigate around in the blind night, sometimes blind drunk. He sees his own home, Freja at the door, golden hair all around her shoulders, blue eyes smiling, small crinkles at the corners, one hand on Emy’s shoulder, the other ruffling Egil’s hair, red about her fingers. Coming up behind her, looming head and shoulders above his stepmother, Karl, white-blonde like his true mother and promising to be as tall as his father. Even at fifteen he overtops most men.
How would Egil have grown from the scrawny energetic child, eager to investigate everything the world had to offer or to hide? Always into mischief of one sort or another. The boy had worshipped Snorri . . .
“I let him die.” Another hold. A snarl of effort. Another few feet of elevation gained. “I let them all die.”
Snorri looks up, blinking his vision clear. No pain he has suffered in Hel comes close to the ache that lodged in his chest the day he found Emy in the snow, mutilated by the ghouls that Sven Broke-Oar had brought to Eight Quays. That ache has grown around his heart—grown larger and tighter with each of their deaths, undiminished by passing time, an armour against what the world might offer, a prison too. It will end though. Here in Hel, it will end.
How long the climb takes him Snorri can’t say. Without night or day, without food or water, with no living thing close enough that its distance might be measured in so slight a thing as miles, time runs its own strange paths. Snorri couldn’t say how long the climb took but he feels, as he crests the ridge, that he has grown old somewhere along the way.
The ridge offers a view across a folded topography where a labyrinth of dry valleys, box canyons and deep rifts stretches away toward a dark horizon. The sky lies tainted with shadow, as if faint streamers of cloud have been strewn across it, clinging to the underside of the world above Hel. Each line of shadow forms some part of a pattern, a great gyre, its rotation too slow for the eye and centred on some vertex miles out, above the labyrinth.
“I see it.” Snorri sets his axe down for a moment, drawing a deep breath. “I’m coming for you, Freja.” He wipes the blood from his hands. “I’m coming for all of you.” He has a goal. Freja will be there with his children. All of Hel cannot stop him now.
Murder missed his footing on a loose rock and for a moment it jolted me from Snorri’s story. We’d come deep into the Wheel-lands, perhaps almost as far as on our first incursion. Standing stones, each taller than a man, ran in five close and parallel lines, radiating like a spoke, passing close by us and rushing on ahead toward a convergence at infinity. Heather grew over-tall in sickly and twisted clumps. I heard my name called among the stones . . . a pale long-fingered hand reached around the side of one close by, ancient with lichen. I closed my eyes and the story caught around me once more, swirling me along a different path.