The Tempering of Men (30 page)

He knew as well as anyone that the jarl of a great keep might hesitate to listen to a clutch of raggle-taggle travelers from far away, even be they ever-so-romantic a band as wolfcarls. But Randulfr and Fargrimr's father had made them a gift of some vellum and ink—rare and expensive items—and Skjaldwulf and Otter had spent their nights on the trail drawing up maps of all she knew about the Rhean strength and movements.

More and more, Skjaldwulf was finding himself grateful that they had come together out of captivity. He'd said as much to Freyvithr, and Freyvithr had smiled slyly and said, “Then thank those who placed her in your path.”

Godsmen,
Skjaldwulf cursed to himself, but it was a mild and amused frustration.

“The jarl,” Brunnhilde said. She glanced at her husband. “Is this something the godheofodman needs to know of?”

Freyvithr nodded, frowning. “The Brythoni have made alliance with the Rhean empire, from the far south. And the Rheans have come to take Brython's justice upon us for all the years of viking.”

Brunnhilde was fair enough to show it clearly when she flushed. “And this lass?”

Otter was not so clear-skinned. But she ducked her chin nonetheless, and Skjaldwulf wondered if it was from the notice, or simply that she was unaccustomed to being called “lass.”

“A Brython enslaved by the Rheans,” he said. “She has been of great help.”

“Hmm,” Brunnhilde said. But whether she was thinking of inquiring why it was that Skjaldwulf did not fear Otter as a Brythoni spy or whether she was about to pry Otter loose from the men and take her somewhere to cosset her, he never found out. Because Freyvithr was gesturing them up the pier to the road it fronted on, past an assemblage of shacks strung with fishing nets drying in the sun.

Skjaldwulf's feet hurt, and his calves ached with walking. The maps were safe in his pack, and they would speak with the jarl as soon as the godheofodman secured an audience for them.

They were safe. For a time.

FIFTEEN

The wolves and men—and Otter—were still settling into their austere quarters, Skjaldwulf with his hand on the door to the cell he'd been allotted, when a young girl came up to him at a run. Her bare feet scattered the rushes softening the monastery's ancient stone floors. Skjaldwulf assumed she was an acolyte, because she wore plain homespun but was not collared or crop-haired like a thrall.

Sunshine,
Mar said, of her scent. He leaned his shoulder against Skjaldwulf's hip and thigh, and Skjaldwulf leaned a little back.

The girl neither curtseyed nor effaced herself in any manner, but met his eyes as boldly as befitted a priestess. The sunlight through the monastery's narrow windows haloed her. Her bearing contradicted the freshness of her face. He wondered whom she served, and amused himself briefly thinking that it must be Ithunn, of the golden apples of immortality.

After all that, what she said turned out to be reassuringly mundane. She spoke in a light self-confident voice, telling Skjaldwulf that he, Fargrimr, and Otter were summoned to the Hall of Othinn in as much time as it should take the sun to move two fingers' width across the sky, and that she would be pleased to guide him once he had made ready.

“My wolf comes with me,” Skjaldwulf said.

That, at last, provoked a smile. And a pair of pretty dimples as she glanced down at Mar. Maybe she was Ithunn herself and no mere servant.

Stranger things happened in epics, and that was where Skjaldwulf, all unwitting, seemed to have landed himself.

She said, “In the hall of the god of wolves, how can a wolf be unwelcome?”

Skjaldwulf let himself and his wolf into the cell and shut the door between them, begging her pardon. He tidied himself as best he could in such haste, which meant that the tangled braids he'd half-undone had to be loosed completely and combed in rough haste, as there was no time to find a threatbrother to rebraid them. At least they'd been spending so little time in beds that he was comfortably louse-free.

Then he stomped into his boots and opened the door to the hall again, to find the Ithunn-girl waiting as if she had scarcely breathed in his absence. “Follow!” she said, and again she ran.

Skjaldwulf ran behind her, his steps in his worn boots significantly heavier than hers. He kept up easily enough, though he had a sense she was intentionally pressing him. But Mar responded to the challenge—a healthy wolf would no more refuse an invitation to run than he would refuse raw meat—and even Skjaldwulf drew up with her before the doors of the Hall of Othinn only slightly out of breath, despite the summer heat.

Fargrimr arrived a moment later, also running behind a young man dressed as alike to the Ithunn-girl as if the cloth had been cut from the same bolt. The sworn-son ran as well as he did everything else save grow a beard. Skjaldwulf wondered for a moment what it was like to take to being a man as a profession, rather than an accident of birth. You'd study it, he imagined. You'd learn it as well as Isolfr had learned swordplay when he had been Njall Gunnarrson and the future jarl of Nithogsfjoll.

Skjaldwulf nodded a greeting. “One more?” he asked.

The Ithunn-girl shook her head. “The Brython is already within.”

Separate and conquer,
Skjaldwulf thought. But in the godheofodman's sandals he would have done the same: gotten an uninfluenced interview with the primary source—and potential spy—before bringing in the leaders of the party.

The Ithunn-girl and Fargrimr's lad stepped to either side of the doors and moved latches. The doors themselves were carved of some wood aged almost black, showing the hack marks of more than one set of ancient axes over carving that had once been an intricate and subtle study of innumerable wolves and ravens.

“God of winter, god of war,” Skjaldwulf muttered as they passed over the foot-dished stone and the cool of the chapel's interior enfolded them. It was dim within, and the space was smaller than he had anticipated. He'd imagined something like the great hall of a wolfheall, but this was a more intimate setting—a large empty room with a reliquary on one end, the interior pierced by close-set columns in military rows, no two left alike by the stonecutter's whims.

A low dais supported the reliquary, and on the edge of that dais, Otter perched beside a great shaggy bulk of a man. She turned when the doors opened, gathering about her the skirts of yet another dress Randulfr's family had given her, and stood. The man beside her rose to his feet like one of the stone columns that surrounded them, and came forward, trailing a visibly anxious Otter.

Erik, godheofodman of Hergilsberg, could not have been more exactly what Skjaldwulf would have imagined, had Skjaldwulf been required for the purpose of some tale-telling to imagine him. He was a man in the last vigorous years of his life, as tall as, broader than, and perhaps fifteen years older than Skjaldwulf.

Unlike the boy-faced tribune, he looked his age. A scar creased his cheek and brow, disappearing under an eyepatch on the right side, leaving Skjaldwulf to wonder if that had been an intentional sacrifice to his god or the manner in which the god had claimed him off some battlefield. His hair, unbraided and caught at his nape in a clasp, had once been black, but years had weathered it to the color of granite. His beard was still black at the center, but the sides and the moustache glittered like hammered steel. He, too, wore homespun, a rough robe with no sleeves, open at the side-seams to accommodate arms as broad as some men's thighs. He had the belly of a man who liked his ale, and the shoulders of a man who carried the kegs up from the cellars two at a time.

And over his priest's robe he wore a cloak of bearskin, thrown back off his shoulders now, the silver-tipped seal-brown hairs ruffling gently in the wind of his movement.

His voice, though, was soft and rough as he extended his right arm to clasp and said, “In Othinn's name, wolfjarl, I thank you your journey. And you, Siglufjordhur's heir, be welcome in Othinn's house.”

“Thank you for your graciousness,” Skjaldwulf answered, returning the clasp before standing aside so that Fargrimr could have his turn. The godheofodman had a forearm like bandy steel, enough to make Skjaldwulf wonder if he spent his evenings at the smithy. “Unfortunately, as you have no doubt heard, we do not come merely to meet Freyvithr's thirst for histories.”

“Alas,” Erik said. “I know. And your charming companion has been most enlightening.”

Was that actually a flush warming Otter's cheeks? It was hard to tell, with her complexion and the dimness. But the duck of her head suggested so.

“It seems you are well in advance of all our intelligence,” Skjaldwulf said. “And, I would guess, also all our requests. There must be an AllThing; we must prepare for war.”

“You wish me to speak to the jarl of Hergilsberg, and plead this case before him.”

Skjaldwulf looked at Fargrimr.

Fargrimr nodded.

Erik sighed. “I tell you this because I know the jarl and I know what he will say. He will say,
it seems that the wolfheallan come crying for assistance a great deal of late
. He will say,
did we not send men from Holm and Siglufjordhur to fight their last war for them—
”

“The men from Siglufjordhur,” Fargrimr said stiffly, “went of their own accord.”

The godheofodman showed broken teeth when he smiled.

Skjaldwulf shook his head. “A jarl would say this?”

“He is old. He had played politics too long, and forgotten what it is to be a warrior. To be a wolf. He will say,
what, the northerners cannot handle a few raiding parties of Brythoni allies? Are they wolves or are they women?
”

“I see,” Skjaldwulf said. Over Erik's shoulder, Otter threw him a bitter grimace.

Fargrimr drew himself up. “And when the Rheans sail up to Hergilsberg and say,
we have taken all the farms and all the forest, will you open the gates or will you starve?
”

“He'll open the gates,” Erik said. He waited, looking from man to man, and Skjaldwulf nodded.

“You see another option.”

Erik spread wide hands, each like the paw of a bear. “Where is it sung that the Wolfmaegth cannot call an AllThing?”

Skjaldwulf felt himself take a step back. “A wolfcarl could not be konungur over wolfless men—”

“Calling an AllThing is not the same as proclaiming one's self konungur,” Erik said. “It is proclaiming the need for a konungur. I am sure a suitable selection of candidates for argument could be arranged.”

Skjaldwulf folded his arms, too aware that this aged berserk—and who had ever heard of such a thing, a bear-cloak living to retire?—was outmaneuvering him on the field of politics to such a degree that Skjaldwulf was not even certain what Erik's final goal might be.

“Would the wolfless men come to the Wolfmaegth's summoning?”

There was a pause. A hesitation. Then Fargrimr said, “Siglufjordhur would.”

And Erik hitched his bear-cloak back with a thumb and said, “The jarl of Hergilsberg might not. But the godheofodman would. And if I came, so would a number of the thanes.”

“And if it did not work,” Fargrimr said, “if not enough jarls and thanes decided to come?”

“Either they would accept the konungur the rest chose, or they would go to war against him,” said the godheofodman. “And the Rheans would inherit a shattered Iskryne for no more effort than the lifting of a hand.”

“The harvest is upon us. By the time messengers go out and travelers gather—” Skjaldwulf stroked his beard, wishing the gesture imparted wisdom in life as it did in tales. “There is only just time before winter locks down to do this.”

Wolfcarls could travel in winter. Most townsmen could not. It was a bold decision. It was a dangerous decision. It was the sort of decision, Skjaldwulf thought, that would be either honored or mocked in a hundred years of songs.

Songs.
He breathed in deep. “If we must, so we must,” he said. “Listen, I have an idea.”

Erik Godsman stared him up and down. “Speak it. Or are wolfcarls known for their coyness?”

“You must have some priests that can sing, aye?”

The godsman's smile took awhile to reach his eyes. “Some,” he allowed. “Aye.”

*   *   *

As much as Skjaldwulf fretted to be away from Hergilsberg at once, common sense and experience reminded him that he had come all this way—
through untold perils
—for a task and it would be best if that task was completed. Moreover, there was the song to compose and priest-skalds to send out to sing it.

A song that, having said he would compose, Skjaldwulf hadn't the faintest idea how to begin.

It was easier to extemporize, to unlock a word-hoard and make something up on the spot, knowing that people would quote the best bits and forget the rest. But this had to be memorable, and chantable, and it had to be the sort of thing people would pick up in a hearing or three and repeat to their friends.

And here he was just beyond the walls of a city such as he had never imagined, a city vast as a trellwarren, teeming with people, with markets, with foreigners—

Skjaldwulf suppressed his restlessness for two days. With Frithulf, who had been Isolfr's shieldbrother through many of his adventures, he went to the archives each morning after porridge and stayed there, spinning tales and investigating the history of human relations with the svartalfar until the bell for supper rang. The priests ate well, if plainly, and Skjaldwulf soon felt the flesh that travel had stripped from his always-bony frame returning.

Scribes needed good light, and so the archives had broad windows. These were shaded by the tree Skjaldwulf had heard of, the one supposedly planted by Freya's own hand, and the space was very pleasant, if dusty. The priests were skilled questioners and in giving them his history, he found himself learning things he had never suspected. He knew how to piece together a tale as a skald would, how to ferret out the truth behind a warrior's recital of renown—and retell it so the truth seemed more exciting than the lies. But this thing the godsmen historians did—they built a mosaic of tiny details, things that seemed insignificant to Skaldwulf, like the rations needed for a band of men and wolves on the move to war, into a sort of comprehensive whole that he'd never imagined.