Karli grabbed his arm. “Enough! Don’t say it. They might hear themselves called and come.”
“There are no such things,” said Shef, confident again of his bearings and moving off on the slightly firmer ground between two sloughs. “People just make up the stories to explain why people don’t come back. In marshes like this you don’t need a thurs to make you vanish. Look, there’s the camp through these alders.”
Karli looked up at him as they reached the edge of the camp clearing, men already wrapped motionless in their blankets. “I don’t understand you,” he said. “You’re always sure you know best. But you act like a sleepwalker. Are you sent by the gods?”
Shef noticed Nikko, awake and seated silently observing from the shadows. “If I am,” he said, “I hope they have some help for me tomorrow.”
In his dream that night he felt as if the nape of his neck were gripped in steely fingers, forcing him to look this way and then that.
The first sight he saw was somewhere on a desolate plain. A young warrior stood, holding himself upright with difficulty. Black blood covered his armor, and more ran down his legs from under the mail shirt. He clutched a broken sword in his hand and another warrior lay at his feet. From somewhere far off Shef heard a voice chanting:
Sixteen wounds I have, slit is my armor,
Closed my eyes, I cannot see to walk.
Angantyr’s sword sliced me to the heart
The sharp blood-pourer, poison-hardened.
You can’t harden swords in poison, thought Shef. Hardening is a matter of great heat and sudden cooling. Why is water not sudden enough? Maybe it is the steam that comes from it. What is steam anyway?
The fingers at his neck tweaked him suddenly, as if to make him pay attention. Across the plain Shef saw birds of prey flying, and the chanting voice said again:
The hungry raven roves from the South,
The white-tailed carrion-fowl follows his brother.
It is the last time I lay for them a table.
It is my blood now the battle-beasts feast on.
Behind the birds Shef thought for a moment he could see women, female shapes riding on the wind, and behind even them the dim sight of great doors opening: doors he had seen before, the doors of Valhalla.
So the heroes die, said another voice, not the chanting one. Even in the paralysis of his dream Shef felt a chill as he recognized the grim ironic tones of his protector, the god Rig, whose ladder-sign he wore round his neck. That is the death of Hjalmar the Magnanimous, the voice went on. Picked a fight with a Swedish berserk, provided two recruits for my father Othin.
The scene vanished, Shef felt his eyes twisted supernaturally elsewhere. A moment, and then another vision came into focus. Shef was looking down at a narrow pallet laid on an earth floor. It was somewhere aside from main rooms, maybe a blind passageway somewhere out of the way of passing feet, but cold and comfortless. On it an old woman was stretching herself out, carefully and painfully. Shef knew that she had just been told that she was bound to die, by a leech or a cunning man or a beast-doctor. Not from the lung-sickness that usually carried off the old folk in the winter, but from some growth or evil inside her. It hurt her terribly, but she dared not speak of it. She had no relatives left, if she had had a man or sons of her own, they were dead or gone, she lived now on the doubtful tolerance of those not her blood. If she gave trouble of any kind even her pallet and her bread would be withdrawn. She was a person of no importance.
She was the girl he had left in the marsh, come to the end of her life. Or she could be. There were others she could be: Shef thought of Godive’s mother, the Irish slave whom Wulfgar his foster father had taken as a lemman and then sold away from her child when his wife grew jealous. But there were others, many many others. The world was full of desperate old women, and old men too, trying with the last of their strength to die quietly and not attract attention. Then they could creep into their graves and vanish from mind. They had been young once.