Flinging icy specks and flurries of snow into their faces by ever madder gusts of wind, Skaði, the winter goddess, mocked these puny men who stumbled across a landscape with no shelter. Not a tree, not a shepherd’s hut interrupted the playing field of the whirlwind, a bleak stretch of grassland with water beyond. Skarfr hoped the water was beyond and not a misstep away as the world whitened, blinding him so he could barely see his own hands, freezing even in the wool mittens he’d donned. Like a land version of the Swelchie, the blizzard turned around the company in a vortex of stinging snow.
‘He’s blowing a guster,’ the man beside Skarfr yelled in his ear, as if describing the weather gave them some control over its impact.
‘Ay, and a moor.’ Skarfr responded in kind, using the local word for blinding snow.
Stumbling, frozen, each barely able to see the man next to him, they moved onwards without knowing what Rognvald was leading them into. His voice sometimes carried above the keening wind, hoarse but encouraging. Hidden by the whirling snow, Skarfr reached for Hlif’s hand, mitten around mitten, and squeezed. They would come through this.
Such snow was rare and if it came at all, was usually in the months after Yuletide, so the men were ill-equipped for such an onslaught. All the familiar features of their landscape were lost in blinding white. No sun, no ancient stones, no lochs. Heading home would only be an option if they knew which direction to go. Even if they were lucky, they’d walked well over an hour before the snowstorm struck. At their current pace, how long would it take them to retrace their steps? And if they went round in circles? Was that better than mistaking loch for land and drowning in the icy waters?
While such gloomy thoughts vied in his head with verse expressing them, Skaði’s white tears, winter’s eagle-food, Skarfr realised he was walking up a slope. Hlif dropped his hand, pushed past the man in front of her to reach Rognvald, shouted something, but her words were whipped away and Skarfr only knew that she moved in front of Rognvald, walking up some kind of hillock. The Jarl and the men followed, snow now up to their calves and forming drifts that caused more than one to lurch and grab his neighbour.
Then Hlif and Rognvald disappeared. Not just by walking down the other side of the hill and fading from sight: they completely vanished at the crest of the hill. They were yards in front of Skarfr, then they’d gone. When he reached the same place, he saw the hole in the snow, rubble below, a rough descent to … somewhere. There was no choice but to follow, yelling to those behind him to do likewise.
Scrambling down the steep, tumbled rock, trying not to twist ankles already tired from negotiating hazards hidden by snow, Skarfr could see Hlif and the Jarl taking in their surroundings in silence. As well they might.
This was no cavern but a stone building of ancient and skilled construction, dimly visible in the light entering from the hole in the roof, through which men scrambled, cursing, accompanied by snowflakes which found their way through the opening, dusting the rockfall in white.
‘Move slowly till you touch a wall and stand still!’ ordered Rognvald, his voice echoing in what must be a confined space.
Skarfr told himself they could climb out the way they’d come, they weren’t trapped, they had plenty of air from the hole above. The air was musty, dank, suffocating. And there was something in the quality of darkness, of being underground, as in a barrow, a tomb, but made of stone rather than earth.
No sooner had the thought come to him than he heard whispers, in no language he knew. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck and he knew from the poor attempts at jokes by the other men that they felt uneasy too. But they weren’t trapped.
‘We’re all here.’ Hlif’s voice was calm but then she was used to the dead walking. Skarfr shuddered as invisible beings brushed against him.
‘If we light a fire on the rocks here,’ she moved to the bottom of the rockfall, a slight figure flickering in the stormlight, ‘we’ll have warmth and light. There’s enough kindling to start it. Someone has been here before us. Vemundr, do you have your touchwood with you?’
‘Ay.’ The Ness man joined Hlif, brought the precious firelighter out of his metal tin and blew on it. After some perseverance, the smouldering matter flickered into life and breathed fire into the sticks and lump of peat bequeathed to those seeking shelter by whoever had come this way before them.
Nostrils clogged with earthy smoke and ancient fustiness, Skarfr catalogued his surroundings in the flickering firelight. Like penned sheep, even smelling of damp wool, the men were huddled in a large square chamber. The ceiling was a high dome, with the hole in the top where they’d entered. In each of the four walls was a shadow, a recess.
Surely there was an entry? Unless the stone barrow had been walled up after … whatever … had been placed here. And where there were barrows, ‘haugs’, as they were known, there were haug-boys protecting them, ghostly occupants fighting against the desecration of their last resting-place and against the theft of the goods they would need in the next world.
Skarfr ignored the susurration, the light touch on his face. Spider-webs, he told himself. He saw Hlif’s face glow unearthly, as if she walked in two worlds. He dared not reach out to her, this time not only because of Rognvald’s ban.
The Jarl ordered four men to each explore a recess, see what was in it and report.
‘Nothing,’ came three answers. ‘An empty alcove one and a half paces deep.’
Big enough for a body. Someone important.
Rognvald must have had the same thought. ‘Must have been treasures here once.’
‘Well, there’s nothing now.’
The fourth man reported back. ‘It’s not a recess – it’s a tunnel. You have to double up to walk along, and it’s only one man’s width, but it’s solid, well-constructed. It’s blocked at the other end but I think that might have been the way in. I tested it with my axe and it’s earth, not stone.’
Rognvald glanced up at the hole in the roof, where snow was still spiralling down from a steely sky.
‘We’ll shelter here till it stops,’ he decided. ‘Ottar and Arnfior, take turns using your axes at the end of the tunnel, see if we can free up an entry. If the earth starts blocking the access, leave it. We can always try to find the entry from the outside, now we know the layout.
‘Ormr, pace out the chamber’s width and length. Note the point where you’re under the hole in the roof. The tunnel’s in the middle of that wall so when the blizzard’s stopped we can work out the orientation and where to connect with the entry.’
‘Why?’ asked Ormr. ‘It’s only some old building with nothing in it.’
‘What are we supposed to do while we’re waiting?’ complained one voice.
Rognvald snapped. ‘Are you men or children with your whining and boredom? Don’t you sense something in this place?’ He glanced at Hlif and once more, Skarfr wondered what she had told the Jarl when she brought him to the hole in the top of the hillock.
‘It is gods-touched,’ said the Jarl, doing what he did best, taking a hard situation and mastering it. ‘See these lines?’ He ran his finger along nicks carved in the wall. ‘They are smoothed with time, ancient. Maybe they were once sacred pictures.
‘And we are pilgrims. So let us mark this place as ours, in God’s name, for all those who come to know we were here, when we have gone to heaven. See, I’ll begin.’
He took up a shard of stone and wrote the futhark, the runic alphabet, in sixteen careful runes on the ancient wall. Rune-making: one of Rognvald’s nine skills. Skarfr thought of the stonemason at the cathedral, marking his building blocks. The men’s humour swung from surly to enthusiastic. With an axe or knife-tip, with found stones or with fire-flints, they took turns carving a message to the future, jostling each other for space. This would be their cathedral, one where crude men could leave their mark. A saga etched in stone. They had lived and they had been here.
Checking their runes against the futhark Rognvald had cut into the stone or against each other’s work, men put their names on the walls. Vermundr, Ottar, Ogmundr, Hermundr Hard, Anfior son of Stein and Arnfirthr Food carved these runes.
The shortest man of the company drew gales of laughter when he perched on another’s shoulders to chip into the stone, Eyolfr Kolbeinssonr carved these runes high.
The Jarl displayed his skill in another message more fitting for eternity.
The man who is most skilled in runes west of the ocean carved these runes with the axe which Gaukr Trandlissonr owned in the south of the Old Country.
With supreme confidence in his own future fame, he didn’t even sign it.
‘Is that Gaukr Trandlissonr’s axe?’ asked an innocent, in awe, eying Rognvald’s weapon, supposedly that of a dead saga hero. His question was met with guffaws and a heavy slap on the back.
‘It’s a joke! It’s like saying he wields Thórr’s hammer! It’s what poets do,’ explained Hermundr, taking pity on the poor soul.
One of the more pious Ness men started a new topic with, Jórsalaheim men broke this mound and first Benedikt, then two more men etched crosses, whether from religious fervour or because they didn’t trust their runes.
Then Hlif made the men step aside for her to carve her runes on two blocks to the right-hand side of what must be the back wall. She asked Skarfr for his hand-axe and made a tentative mark with the sharp tip but she shook her head at its unwieldy heft. Returning the axe, she pulled the steel-tipped wand from her belt instead and with a steady hand, she scored the stone. When she realised that she might not have enough space, she made the runes narrower so she could squeeze them all in.
Jórsalaheim-farers broke Orkhaugr. Carved by Hlif, the Jarl's housekeeper.
Orkhaugr. In naming the stone barrow, Hlif made them all aware once more of the hostile atmosphere and attempts at jokes fell flat in nervous laughter. The chamber was full of invisible haugars and haug-boys, revenants and barrow-spirits who hated intruders.
‘What do you think happened to the treasure that must have been here?’ asked Rognvald, distracting the men from dark thoughts.
‘Rats ate it,’ suggested one man.
‘Big rats with two legs stole it, more like. Whoever broke in before us and left the kindling.’
The Jarl was thoughtful. ‘And whoever comes after us will think we took it.’
Hlif said, ‘No they won’t. Let’s make them look elsewhere!’ She carved,
In the north-west great treasure is hidden
It was long ago that great treasure was hidden here
Happy is he who can find the great wealth as
Hakon alone carried treasure from this mound.
Men sucked their beards, slapped their sides and laughed. ‘That should send them all off to Byrgisey chasing some Hakon.’
‘I wouldn’t want to live in Byrgisey and be called Hakon.’ Just the thought of some poor man being harassed for his treasure made them laugh all the more.
Then someone had another idea.
‘Let’s make them think we only just missed getting the treasure so they think the trail’s still hot and get their boats to the water faster than a dog to a bone.’ He carved,
What I say is true, that the treasure was carried away three nights before they broke this mound.
Hlif pursed her lips. ‘Shouldn’t it be “we” not “they”?’
‘I meant “they, the Jórsalaheim-farers”, same as you wrote,’ came the aggrieved reply.
‘But—’ began Hlif, about to argue.
Skarfr was relieved when she thought better of it and held her tongue. Debate on the finer points of runes and grammar would not have been appreciated.
Luckily, somebody else had an idea to keep the joke running.
‘Let’s confuse them, make them wonder whether the treasure is hidden here after all!’ Oddr set to, marking on the wall,
Truly it is told to me that the treasure is hidden here well enough. Few know this, says Oddr Orkansor in the runes he carved.
Imagining the confusion of those reading such contradictory messages briefly lightened the atmosphere again but the shadows still flickered. Skarfr’s head felt the pressure of untold years weighing on him, whispering wrongness.
‘I want to write something about this place,’ said Rognvald, ‘something respectful.’
The men watched as their Jarl carved his precise runes.
This mound was built before Lodbrok’s. Her sons were bold; they were real men.
Everyone knew of Ragnar Lodbrok, ‘Shaggy-Breeks’, a hero every bit as famous as the Rognvald from whom the Jarl took his name. But ‘her’ made no sense unless... Skarfr laughed at the wit.
‘Why “her”?’ asked Hlif, boldly asking what others would not.
‘It’s making fun of Lodbrok’s hairy breeks, suggesting they’re unmanly, but of course he was the most manly of heroes so it’s ironic.’
‘Oh.’ Hlif’s tone suggested she wasn’t convinced. Women never did understand the subtleties of skaldic wit.
‘Your words are good,’ Skarfr told Hlif, trying to take her mind off Rognvald’s jokes. She looked at her runes on the wall and he could feel her slipping into the otherworldly trance of her visions.
Jórsalaheim-farers broke Orkhaugr. Carved by Hlif, the Jarl's housekeeper.
Stepping back from her work, Hlif turned towards Skarfr, her eyes glowing ever brighter, drawing power from the chamber that was not empty but full of ghosts, all hammering in his head as if he were their anvil and they would beat him to fine steel. Urging him to make his mark.
When Hlif spoke to him, her voice was heavy with his doom and he could only obey. ‘Make your mark, Skarfr.’
Hardly aware he was holding a shard he’d picked up, Skarfr turned to the wall, found his space on the narrow edge of an upright slab, near the two blocks Hlif had inscribed. Then the dragon breathed fire and Skarfr’s world flamed red and gold.