What have these to tell me, Shef wondered. That I killed them? I know that.
The ghosts were backing away from the grille, reluctantly and angrily, as if compelled. Someone else was coming, another woman. Shef recognized a worn face from which he had brushed snow two mornings before, Godsibb, who had died unnoticed. Her face was tired still, but less lined than he remembered, more peaceful. She wanted to speak. Her voice was like a bat’s squeak, and he bent forward to listen.
“Go on,” it said. “Go on. I am here, in Hel, from following you. I would have been anyway. If I had not followed you I would have been a slave here—a slave to those.” She nodded at the retreating ghosts of the two queens. “I am spared that.”
The voice faded, and the wall, and the bridge, and the darkness. Shef found himself once more sitting in the tent, tears rolling down his cheeks. Though the vision had seemed to take no time to him, he was the last to wake again. The others looked at him, Hund with concern and Karli with fellow-feeling. The two Finns seemed pleased, satisfied, as if his emotion proved him human, of the same flesh as themselves.
Slowly Shef rose, muttered a few words, picked up his lance from by the tent-flap. Frost glinted on its tip, yet the weight of it seemed to steady his nerves. The three walked out into the freezing night and the dark birch-woods.
As they crunched through the snow towards the fire and the sentry’s challenge, Shef said to the others, “We must bury Godsibb and the others properly, not burn them or hang them in a tree. We will dig beneath the fires where the ground has been warmed. Take stones from the stream-bed and make a cairn.”
“Does that do the dead any good?” asked Hund.
“I think so.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Two nights and a day later, the party stood ready to move on, on a bright windless day, in light snow. Shef would willingly have assembled them all and set off the day before, but Hund had vetoed it.
“Some of us are too weak,” he said sharply. “Hurry them on and you will find more of them not waking up in the morning, like Godsibb.”
Shef, haunted by the memory of her peering through the lattice of Hel-gate, gave way unwillingly. Yet even as he hauled stones out of the freezing stream-bed for her cairn, watched by interested but disbelieving Finns, he thought to himself, she said “Go on.”
“I have to get out of this wasteland,” he had told Hund, trying to get some urgency into him. “I told you, I saw the warriors round Hedeby. It may have fallen by now, and the Ragnarssons will be richer and stronger. At the rate we’re going, Sigurth will be King of all Denmark by the time we are there.”
“And is it your duty to stop him?” Hund looked at his friend and reconsidered. “Well, maybe it is. But you cannot stop him from here. We will just have to move on as fast as we can.”
“Do you think these visions of mine are true?” Shef asked him. “Or is it just the drink that does it, as beer and mead make men think they are mightier than they are? Maybe all my visions—maybe Vigleik’s visions and all the things the Way sees, maybe they are just some kind of delusion, some kind of drunkenness.”
Hund hesitated for a while before replying. “That could be,” he admitted. “I will tell you one thing, Shef. That fly killer mushroom, the red one with the white spots on it, that men crush and put on the walls to keep insects off, you would not eat that by accident. But there are other things like it that sometimes grow in the corn, get reaped with it. Maybe find their way into the bread. Or the porridge. Especially if the corn has been left damp in store.”
“It’s always damp in store in England,” said Shef. “So why doesn’t everybody have these visions all the time?”
“Maybe they do, but dare not speak. But more likely you are especially sensitive to such things. You drank no more than Karli or the Finns last night, but it seemed to affect you for much longer. And then, maybe because you are affected by such things, the gods send themselves to you. Or maybe the gods have given you this weakness for their own purpose.”