ibba Vakrison pulls his stick back from the campfire and examines the smoking strip of mutton. At his side, the orange-haired Buhund perks up, licks her lips, and barks in protest.
“No, girl. Down!”
The Buhund whines sadly and rests her head between her paws. Sibba pours himself a horn of mead and the boy across the fire watches him slurp it from the brim.
“Sibba, can I have some of that?”
“No.”
“Come on, Sibba. Please? Mjadveig lets me.”
“I am not Mjadveig and I respect Father's rules. And the rule is, no mead for Dunk until he can grow a beard.”
Dunk sighs and inspects his own mutton stick. “Where do you think those ships were headed?”
“I don’t know.”
“I bet they were raiders.”
“They were more likely to be merchants.”
Dunk rolls his eyes.
“What? You think a few long-ships full of blood-thirsty thugs is more exciting than a bunch of merchants?
“Yes,” Dunk says quietly.
Sibba shakes his head. “Trading is always better than raiding. When you trade with another port, you stimulate both economies. You benefit from each other’s needs and strengths, and profit together, establishing a relationship based on mutual prosperity which can develop into a residual income.
“If you raid that port, kill everyone and burn it to the ground—sure you’ll carry off some slaves and loot—but you can’t raid them again. You’ve destroyed them. Not to mention that you’ll lose some of your own men in the fight—if you aren’t killed yourself. Who will look after their wives and children? The women will have to find new husbands. Those that can’t will become a burden on society. Raiding actually weakens your economy.”
“Maybe,” says Dunk, “but in a raid, you can prove yourself and show the gods how brave you are. You can win honour and wealth. No one ever became famous just by working on a farm. But if you’re fierce and strong you can win farms and women and get renown for your name just by fighting a single duel.”
“And who told you about that?” asks Sibba.
Dunk shrugs.
Sibba eyes his brother suspiciously. “Dunk—You know better than to talk to them.”
“I wasn’t talking to them,” says Dunk, “I was just sitting there—”
“With Mjadveig. She isn’t supposed to be talking to them either.”
Dunk shivers. “She says she likes to speak with them, if she meets them in the daytime. She says they’re often friendly.”
“It doesn’t matter if they’re friendly,” hisses Sibba, “They’re—”
Just then the Buhund pricks up her ears and barks a warning, and the two brothers stiffen as bells clatter in the dark; spooked sheep shuffle around them to one side of the fire. Dunk and Sibba stare at each other. Slow, squishing footsteps slog towards them through the long grass.
The Buhund growls, and Sibba bolts to his feet. Dunk turns white, his eyes sprung wide with fear. His knife glimmers in the firelight as he draws it from his belt.
“Put your sax away,” whispers Sibba. “You’ll only anger it! Get behind me! Cover your eyes!”
Dunk claps his hands over his face. “Mjadveig says I have to look,” he whimpers.
“Look in the daytime. You can look in the night when you grow a beard!”
His brother cowering behind him in silent terror, Sibba grits his teeth as he braces for the sight, gripping his staff with white knuckles as the heavy footsteps trudge nearer.
The Buhund barks madly. A vague form emerges from the darkness, a black shadow against the night sky. Hoarse gasps cause Sibba’s hair to stand on end. His own breath quivers nervously.
“Go away!” he shouts, “You have no business with us!”
An inhuman groan comes from the dark shape and Sibba whispers an oath as its soggy footfalls quicken into a staggering run.
“I say be gone! Leave us! Leave us now in Odin’s name!”
But his words have no effect.
A wretched creature stumbles into the firelight—a woman, sopping wet from the sea, too pale to be alive. Her skin is murky white, like the belly of a dead fish; her lips, a bluish grey. Her yellow hair is tangled with seaweed, cut just above the shoulders: she’s a drowned slave-girl that must have washed up on the shore—a risen corpse, reanimated by the weird and inexplicable forces that linger over the island. But unlike the dead Sibba has encountered, whose eyeballs have long since been nibbled from their skulls by worms and beetles, leaving their faces pocked with hideous, gaping caverns, this thrall still has her eyes.
She looks uncertainly at the snarling Buhund, then stares at Sibba intensely, a storm of blue fire raging in her fearsome gaze. He can sense the violence about her, the panic and awful desperation as she clung to life. She’s shivering horribly; her teeth are chattering—the memory of the freezing waves so recent in her unliving mind. She starts toward him, and Sibba backs up into his brother.
The newly dead are the most dangerous of all.
“O-out of my w-way,” she mumbles as she staggers for the fire. The Buhund barks indignantly, and the woman glares at Sibba. “If th-that d-d-d-dog bites me … I’ll k-kill all th-three of you.”
Sibba quiets the Buhund, then says to her, “I’m afraid you’ll find the fire offers you no warmth. You are—”
His voice trails off as the girl peels off her wet clothing and reaches her arms out over the fire, her lithe body glistening in the ruddy light.
“Loki,” Dunk whispers, peeking through his fingers.
For a moment, the older shepherd stares speechless at her athletic figure until she looks at him again out of the corner of her eye.
“What k-kind of m-man are you not t-t-to offer me your c-c-c-cloak?”
“I—Yes, you’re—Gods in Asgard! Yes! Here! Sorry!” Sibba whirls off his cloak and drapes it over the girl’s naked shoulders. “We thought you were—I mean, after all, this is—”
“I kn-know,” she says, “Sams-s-sø Island.”
She draws the cloak tighter around herself and squats down near the flame, and after some time the colour returns to the girl’s face. She is quite beautiful, far more than any of the island women. She looks to be a year or two younger than Sibba. Her previous owner obviously didn’t care to keep her; why shouldn’t he take her for himself? A warm feeling rises in his chest at the thought of making her his bed-slave.
But though the length of her hair identifies her as a thrall, and though he and his brother have just looked on the full view of her nakedness, there is still an unsettling air about her. The sense of violence around her has not ceased with the knowledge that she is alive. Rather than some lowly slave-woman, he finds himself regarding her as his superior. It’s almost as if a queen has crawled out of the sea.
He offers her their food and drink, and she tears hungrily into a strip of mutton. Even the way she eats presents a sense of entitlement not found among any thrall. She must come from a noble family. But then why does she wear the mark of thralldom?
Sibba’s lingering unease swells like a shadow behind him, creeping up his spine. Just who have they run into?
“You’re from those ships, aren’t you?” asks Dunk as the girl rips off another chunk of meat with her white teeth. She looks up at him coolly, drops of water sparkling in the firelight as they drip from her golden hair.
“Yes, I’m from those ships.”
“Who were they?”
“The flagship was a Frankish vessel, homeward bound from Sweden. The others were Swedes helping bear back their cargo.”
“I suppose they were merchants,” Dunk says sadly.
A shadow falls across her face. “Merchants? No. That was Prince Sigurd of Xanten.”
“You were his slave then?” asks Sibba, skewering another mutton strip and lowering it to the flame. She turns her eyes on him, sharp and cruel as a pair of skinning knives. “Do you see a slave collar on my neck?”
“No, but—”
“I’m no slave. And if I wasn’t in such a pleasant mood it’d be you roasting over that fire on a stick.”
Sibba cringes. If this is her in a pleasant mood, he wouldn’t want to meet her on a bad day.
“Sorry,” he says. “I wasn’t trying to insult you. I’m just trying to understand what you were doing in the sea.”
Steel flashes in her eyes and she begins to recount the events which led to her washing up on Samsø’s shore, beginning with the raid in the night, her capture, and the slaughter of her crewmates, then how in return for her freedom she helped Sigurd kill the Serpent of Lake Storsjön.”
“Hold on,” says Sibba, “The Serpent of Lake Storsjön—you mean Fafnir?”
“Yes.”
“You’re saying you killed Fafnir.”
“I am, yes.” She narrows her eyes as she looks between them. “His head was on those ships. It was so big it had to be hewn apart.”
Sibba resists a snicker. Hewn apart? Everyone knows Fafnir’s hide is impenetrable, stronger than a sheer rock face—”
“Sigurd has a magic sword that can cut through anything.”
“And then there’s a matter of his acid breath …”
“Indeed. I lost my arm in the battle,” she says. “It got caught in his poison smog. The flesh was eaten right down to the bone. Sigurd was in the blast too, but he was drenched in the creature’s blood and unharmed. It made him invincible. And afterwards, when I tried avenging my crewmates, I was unable to wound him—though any other man would have been lying in a puddle of himself. That’s why he threw me overboard, for trying to kill him. And now he thinks I’ve drowned, and that Hel keeps me in a watery tomb.”
Her story finished, she drinks noisily from the horn in three big gulps. Her tale has grown more preposterous with each new syllable. Dunk stifles an awkward laugh as he eyes the woman’s slender, fully-fleshed arm; but Sibba doesn’t find it funny, not with that aura of violence about her, and the look of murder in her eyes. She might be a liar—she might be a cracked egg; but the girl’s a killer, of that he’s certain. The sooner they can be rid of her the better.
Sibba eyes her warily as she stands up from the fire. “Speaking of tombs,” she says, “what do you shepherds know about the graves on the island?”
“Plenty,” says Sibba, “Our people dug most of them.”
A strange light flickers in her eyes. “Good. Then you can help me find the one I’m looking for.”
“I doubt it,” Sibba says. “There are more than a thousand graves here, many of them from long before our time.
This seems to displease the woman.
“Whose grave are you looking for?” asks Dunk.
The woman proudly tilts her chin. “The barrow of Angantyr Arngrimsson. I am Hervor, his daughter.”
Now it all makes sense. The aura of violence, the eerie feeling niggling at the back of his mind—the girl is a berserker; it’s clear to him, now that he knows who her father was. And she’s come looking for his tomb—then she means to unearth the curse, the dark power of which his own father sometimes whispered, though very rarely, and with much haste.
If only this woman had drowned in the Kattegat.
“I’m sorry,” says Sibba, “I don’t think we can be much help. Like I said, there are more than a thousand graves—”
The woman’s hair bristles from her shoulders and she draws a long breath in through her nostrils. “Don’t pretend,” she says, her voiced laced with silky poison. “You know where his barrow is. And you know what’s in there. I can see it in your eyes.”
Sibba glances at Dunk. He’s grown very quiet, staring down at his knees. Beside him, the Buhund whines submissively.
“Yes,” she says, “I’ve come for Tyrfing, the precious heirloom of my forefathers. I know you mean to keep me from it. No doubt you’ve heard of the dark powers which possess it. No doubt you’ve heard of the curse that has haunted my family for generation upon generation. But I tell you, I will find my father’s grave, and I will claim Tyrfing as my own.
“Now, if you help me find it, I will be gracious. I’ll always remember how you treated me with kindness, and I swear I’ll leave the island in peace. If you don’t help me, well … I’ll probably get frustrated looking for the tomb. I’ll be thinking about the two you, getting angrier and angrier.
“I’ve heard a lot about Tyrfing’s power,” she says. “I’ll be pretty eager to test it out, if you understand me.”
Sibba swallows as she looks from him to his brother, then back to him.
“So, where is my father buried?”
“On the south of the island,” says Sibba, “in the forest, near the coast.”
“You’ll lead me to it then?”
“Yes, but we must wait until morning.”
“I don’t want to wait.”
“But—Please—This is Samsø Island. There are places not even the bravest man would dare venture to at night. That forest being chief among them …”
She sucks her teeth. “Do I look like a man to you?”
“No—But—”
“I want to go now.”
“Alright,” he says, his voice shaking a little, “I’ll take you to the edge of the forest. But no further—I don’t care what you say.”
Dunk gasps. “Sibba, you can’t!”
“Dunk, you stay here with the sheep.”
Sibba looks up at the woman, his stomach squirming. “Swear to me you’ll leave in peace.”
The woman grins and raises her hand over one eye.