The Storyteller and Other Tales Read online

  In the days of the first kings in the north, said the storyteller, there was a woman named Ulfhild the King’s Sword. She was the sister of Hravnmod the Wise, his captain, because her mother had raised her to be so, just as her grandmother had set her feet on the path of wizardry, in her girlhood at Hravnsfjall, Ravensfell in the lost western islands. If her heart yearned for another road and she ran at the heels of her father’s skald all her childhood, she knew her duty nonetheless. When the world broke and burned around them and the sea rushed in, it was not her harp she saved, but the sword she had inherited from her uncle, to carry to the founding of the kingdoms in the north.

  Ulfhild was one of the seven wizards of the tales. She became the devil Vartu Kingsbane, who was perhaps not the most powerful of the seven devils, but who would be the most hated, for Hravnmod the Wise was a beloved king, and all the tales agree it was she who betrayed and slew him.

  Now, in this tale, long years after those days, long years after the stories you know, the devil Vartu, who had once been Ulfhild, the silver wolf of Ulvsness, slept in what might pass for death — swordless, fleshless, but she slept lightly. Death could not take the devils and the Old Great Gods would not. Earth bound her, earth prisoned her, buried deep beneath a grave-hill of tunnels and caves and chambers where the little first folk had once laid the bones of their dead, generation upon generation, turning a natural ridge into a great mound, a village of the dead. A demon of the earth stood sentinel, lest the devil find a way to weaken the bonds the Old Great Gods themselves had set on her.

  You all know what is said of the demons: ‘Though they may wander all the secret places of the world, their hearts are bound each to their own place.’ The grave-hill of the first folk was the place of the great bear-demon Moraig and had been since before bones were ever laid there. Save for her, it was a place of stillness, almost forgotten in the heart of the earth. And there Vartu lay, through season upon season, and none spoke to her but the bear’s son.

  “The what?” demanded the queen’s wizard, and the tale shattered. Even Ragnvor gave him a stern look for his rudeness, but Yorthas only laughed, like a boy. The queen smiled forgiveness. Ulfleif made a face, then realized the storyteller had seen it.

  “Ah,” said Moth gravely. She drew up her knees and locked her hands around them. “Didn’t I say the demon had a son?”

  “How?” Yorthas asked, all innocence. He glanced sidelong at Ragnvor and curled his lip at his own mocking cleverness.

  “In the usual way,” the storyteller said mildly. “She loved a man. A human man, a Northron raider whose heart had turned to peace and the growing of cabbages, who cleared a steading in that distant inland forest and fell in love with a demon’s song. She bore a son, and when the sun set on the first day of his life, blind mewling cub turned to naked squalling babe. Which worried her, as you might imagine.”

  Moth made a place for them to laugh, then, and they were glad to do it, but Yorthas would not let it alone.

  “How perverse.”

  “Do you think?” Moth remained unruffled. “It’s a tale. Not one for tonight. Moraig’s lover died when old feud caught up with him. The demon avenged him, and mourned, and raised her man-cub in the caverns of the devil’s grave. The cub grew and went wandering, driven by his father’s restless blood. He lived among human-folk in lands like ours where demons are not feared. But he always returned to the land of his mother’s heart, and when he did, he brought tales of the wide world and told them to the devil, sitting by a cavern where maybe a bone or two showed in the dry earth that sifted between the stone slabs of the roof.

  “Why?” Ulfleif whispered it before Yorthas could, and bit her lip, ashamed of discourtesy.

  “Perhaps he had grown used to the noisy ways of men,” Moth suggested. “Perhaps he found his mother’s calm stillness and her sweet sad singing over-lonely. Perhaps he’d thought too long on the stories of the first kings in the north, and laid his own colours over Ulfhild’s tale.”

  The bear’s son came often to the devil’s grave, as demons judge time. He told of how the first kings in the north, and the seven wizards, and the seven devils, had grown to legend, bright and gleaming and dark as midnight. He told her of travelling among the tribes of the Great Grass and the distant mountains of the east. He told her smaller things, of friends and ships and sea-journeys. He told her of iris and kingcup along the brook, of a thorn-tree in bloom like a drift of snow, of fawns beneath the oaks and beeches, autumn coming early and the geese crying away south.

  One time he told her, “They’re saying down on the river that a shaman of the Great Grass spoke in a trance with Honey-tongued Ogada, sealed in stone. The goddess of the forest river is troubled; she hears things, feels things, passed between the gods of the high places and the goddesses of the waters. Something is wrong. We feel it, too. Do you? Would you still wake and trouble the heart of Moraig my mother, if you could? Or would you rather sleep till even the stones of the earth have forgotten you?”

  The bear’s son told her, “I think whatever you gained, you lost more, and I wonder, when I listen to the shadows of shadows of tales ... was what the seven found in the end the thing that you were seeking, or did you lose it on the way?”

  Vartu had indeed felt a stirring among the buried devils. Silver threads of power bound her, and amber, and the crimson of blood. Threads knotted and sparked, ran and danced. All seven of them were bound, scattered across the world, and somewhere, one of her fellows had also woken, but not to watch. He picked at the bindings, fretting at the silver threads, until they began to fray. Years had passed, as one, and then another, and another thread thinned. With the weakening of the bonds, Vartu who had been Ulfhild stretched and found faint embers still live in her soul. She shaped, slowly — years, perhaps, passed in the shaping — a rune, and another, and set them on the threads that bound her.

  Earth shifted, and shivered, and trickled down the walls of that deepest chamber. A stone fell.

  Moraig did nothing, did not sense the runes, or never thought to test herself the work of the Old Great Gods.

  The devil drew blood from the marrow, and her bones found flesh again. Earth crumbled, and she dragged a single breath. Then she stopped, and let the bindings lie. There was nothing waiting for her beyond the mound, and Vartu, who would once have turned that emptiness to anger and made the world know that she was free, was only curious, and weary, to find that somehow, sometime, ambition, will, had sunk into ashes.

  Maybe it had been when Hravnmod died.

  So having nothing else to do, she waited, hidden in earth. She felt, one thread at a time, the slow unpicking of another’s chains, weakening the interwoven bonds that held them all, and she wondered what would happen when that one was free.

  It was only a tale, Ulfleif reminded herself, a lying-saga spun by an over-bold storyteller for an evening’s pleasure, no true history. The devils had been bound by the Old Great Gods themselves.

  The threads at which he fretted frayed, spun out to nothing. He was free, Honey-tongued Ogada who had been Heuslar the Cunning. The god of a mountain died, his stones shattering, broken by runes long-laid against him while he thought his prisoner slept.

  The web that bound all the seven shivered, weakened, other threads snapping.

  If Vartu felt anything, and she was not sure that she did, it was wariness.

  Ogada came for her. The first she knew of it was the splintering of trees, the fracturing of earth and stone in a red-skied dawn. Light blinded her, a faint ray spearing eyes that had stared only into darkness since flesh returned to them. The demons, mother and son, attacked, thinking it was some fool come to wake the devil, as wizards talked sometimes of doing, dreaming of a devil bound and obedient to their will. The demons did not realize what they faced until it was too late. Ogada knew the way to kill a demon, even one as great as Moraig. No doubt he had cast runes and searc
hed in dreams; he knew where the demon’s heart lay hidden, and it was too late for Vartu to warn Moraig then. Ogada split the oldest of the old oaks with a claw of fire, striking from the sky, and he clove the demon’s heart in two with a new-forged sword, Moraig’s name cut on its blade in runes of death. Dying, the bear cursed him in the name of the Old Great Gods. But Moraig died nonetheless, and Ogada hurled the bear’s son over the brow of the ridge, to fall unheeded amid the broken trees.

  Vartu, in the strength of white rage, pulled herself fully into life again and flung stone and earth aside.

  “Cousin!” Ogada cried, and tried to embrace her, with no heed for the fine eastern silk he wore or his cloak of slate-blue feathers, though she was filthy, earth-caked, trailing rotten rags.

  Vartu pushed him away and turned her back on him to crouch by the great demon’s body, clenching her hand in the thick fur, feeling the cooling skin beneath. Kingdoms had cursed and feared and followed her as she looked for something lost, or never possessed, and she had learned to envy a forest demon whose life was the slow breath of spring and leaf-fall, envy a cub who clambered into every muddy hole and hollow he could find, came home burr-tattered and wasp-stung and limping, and went out rambling again.

  “Ulfhild ... Vartu, you’re confused. It’s difficult, crawling back to life. It’s me, Ogada. You remember me.”

  She did, indeed.

  She spun and kicked the sword from his hand while he gaped, snatched it from the air and swung it, anger kindling a burning wake in the air, but he melted to shadow, a trick he had, and danced away.

  “I thought you’d want out of this. Have you turned coward in the end? The Great Gods won’t leave us to peace in the grave forever. They’ll be back to finish what they began, when they find the courage to face the road from the heavens again.”

  Earth erupted beneath him, flung him forward, and she hurled the sword like a spear, heard him roar both anger and pain as it struck, but he was gone, fled into the air, a falcon speeding away. The sword fell, its blade shattered.

  She had no feather cloak and could not follow.

  Demons were not humans, to linger ghostly if left unburied, but she scattered a double handful of earth over the great brown bulk of the bear anyway.

  “Go with your heart into the earth that bore you,’ she wished Moraig hoarsely, the only parting blessing one could give a demon.

  You’re still here, the other demon whispered in her mind. Vartu stayed where she was, listening to him, dragging a leg, stumbling, pulling himself uphill, until his breath was hot on her neck and the reek of his blood all around her. He was small only compared to his mother. Vartu would not — she knew that then, and it astonished her — would not, could not, fight this demon.

  Even dying, he could break her neck with a lifted paw.

  “I did not call Ogada here,” she whispered. She had not helped the demon, either. Perhaps she might have broken the last bonds in time, if she had realized that she did care.

  “I know.” The words were breath as much as voice, felt on the skin.

  Vartu looked around, slowly, not to spark a predator’s reactions. But the tawny-gold bear only blinked and lowered his muzzle to touch his mother’s fur.

  “She would say I should stay here, to guard you.”

  “You can’t keep me here now.”

  “No,” he agreed. “I have the heart of my father’s people. I’ll see Ogada dead. So go, Vartu. Flee. I’ll find you again when I’m able.” The bear’s son licked his mother’s face and turned away. Vartu called to him.

  He looked back. One side of his head was clotted with blood, and he could barely walk.

  “Wait till you’ve healed, fool.”

  He ignored that, limped on.

  Vartu followed. He endured her following, till he stumbled down the bank at the shallow river’s ford and lay panting, unable to rise.

  “Fool cub.” She slid down after him, took his heavy head unresisting onto her lap, tore her hand with his claw and traced a rune on his forehead in her own blood, then two more, with all her will in them. Sun, for life and heart, boar for protection, aurochs for strength. In silence, he let her, and the sun warmed the both of them. She had forgotten sun, till he told her of it as she lay in her grave. There would be rain before evening; she smelt it on the wind. And so the world went on.

  When the bear’s son could travel again, they travelled together. Vartu cast the runes and they followed where such foretelling led, hunting Ogada.

  But there came a night, a cold night, when frost cracked the very stones and the stars burned sharp and high.

  One came, from the Old Great Gods.

  The bear’s son never woke, but Vartu was called from his arms to stand before a God.

  Ulfleif gripped her sword’s hilt. Ragnvor drew a breath like she prepared to deal a blow. Yorthas leaned forward, hands on his knees. In all the hall, no-one stirred or coughed or called for the ale-servers. When a log burst and spat a fountain of sparks, they all jumped as though a messenger from the Old Great Gods had thundered divine wrath.

  In the final battle, as the devils knew they were defeated, as they went down before the power of men and Gods, they drew on the power of their devils’ souls, the stuff of the distant heavens, and they drew on the power of their human souls, children of the Old Great Gods. They drew on the earth of which human-folk were made. Souls of the remote heavens and souls of the earth, they worked one great spell. They set a curse on the road they could not storm, the road to the land of the Old Great Gods. They cursed it, not against the human souls that travel it in death and sometimes return again to new life — their war was never on humankind, though it seemed they had forgotten that, drowning in human thoughts and lost in conquest. The devils cursed the road against the Old Great Gods, to hold them in torment as they travelled it and while they remained on the earth where they had no right to walk.

  So though the Great Gods lingered and endured to see the devils bound, they did so wounded and in pain, and their return to the remote heavens was a retreat along that cursed road.

  But now, now they counted the journey worth the pain it dealt them. Not when Ogada gnawed over long years at the bindings they had set on the devils. Not when he slew a god of the earth and burst his bonds and came to kill the demon Moraig, the heart of the deep woods. But now.

  The Great God was a stark streak of shifting light, a colour in the air. It came not in battle but to make a bargain.

  The bargain was one Vartu could not refuse.

  “What was the bargain?” the wizard asked. Ulfleif could have kicked him, though she wanted to know herself. But Moth was patient.

  “Her service, as their sword.”

  “Vartu would have spat in the God’s face!”

  “She did not. She agreed.”

  “She never would. Why? They had their quarrels, but she would never betray her fellows. Never. What did the Gods offer?”

  “That’s no part of this story.”

  But it is! Ulfleif thought. It must be.

  Vartu agreed, and the God withdrew. It would be long ages recovering from its journey in the land beyond the stars. For that, Vartu was glad.

  A sword stood in the earth where the Old Great God had hovered, its hilt silver and black niello, its tapering blade obsidian. Already frost settled, white on its edge. Lakkariss. It was made not for battle, but to drink the souls of the seven devils.

  Someone in the hall hissed, a breath sharply indrawn. Ulfleif saw the storyteller’s man again, leaning in the doorway, a shape too large to be any other.

  Moth looked down at her hands, and her voice no longer told the story to each and every one alone. She wanted it over; almost she sounded as though she grew bored with it. “So Vartu cast the runes again, and again they followed, through a year and another, under fores
t, over water, to the sea-gnawed cliffs of the north and west of the world. They came to the seat of Hravnmod the Wise overlooking the landing-beach that Ulfhild’s wizardry had found for him, when they ran before the wind from the drowned islands. They found Heuslar there, her kinsman Heuslar, who was the devil Honey-tongued Ogada.”

  “And what then?” asked the wizard, sitting back in his chair.

  Moth looked up, and it could not be firelight in her eyes; she was between Ulfleif and the fire. “You were a man of honour once, I thought, kinslayer. Maybe it’s not entirely the fault of man or devil, what you’ve become. We all lost our way. I meant to kill you where you sat, but I don’t find I can. It seems I haven’t quite become a murderer after all.”

  The giant in the doorway stirred and the storyteller held up a hand, though she could not have seen him. Yarthos seemed to blur a moment, like a fish glimpsed through tumbling water. He rose half to his feet and dropped back into his chair again with a grunt. Ragnvor turned to whisper, “What’s wrong?”

  Did she not see, had she not been listening? The tale had opened its jaws and swallowed them into its heart. Ulfleif could hardly breathe. And Yarthos, Yarthos flung himself to his feet again, the queen’s sword naked in his hand.

  Moth still did not rise. “You always did run when the odds were against you, Heuslar, but if you leave here now, you walk out by the door. I fenced the hall with runes against your vanishing. But I give you this, for the man you were — Mikki would kill you for his mother, but mine is an older claim and comes first — I call you to a holmganging, cousin, for my brother. I say before the folk of the hall that once was his and before Mertyn the god of this place, that it was you who murdered Hravnmod and I will prove it on your body in fair fight.”

  Holmganging was an old thing out of the tales, two warriors on an islet, before fate and the Old Great Gods — though Moth had rather pointedly not named the Great Gods to witness.