Brandewyne, Rebecca (6 page)

Like
stalactites, icicles hung from tree and bush alike, and snow weighed down the
boughs and lay thick upon the ground; in places, the wind had blown drifts
several feet deep against thickets, brambles, and tree trunks. Scattered upon
the snow's whiteness were green needles and brown cones from the evergreen
trees, and brittle, dead leaves from the deciduous trees. The naked branches of
these last, entangled and heavily encrusted with ice, resembled an enormous
cobweb spun by some unearthly, gargantuan spider, Wulfgar thought, and they
swayed and creaked in the wind, singing a ghostly song that sent a grue up his
spine. Sometimes, the burden of the snow and ice was so heavy that without
warning, a dead limb would snap from its trunk to crash to the ground below. He
had seen a man struck and killed that way once, long ago, and so he kept a wary
eye out for rotten boughs.

But
there was beauty as well as danger to be found in the forest. The tall,
feathery pine and spruce trees were haunts from which the winter birds chirped
their plaintive songs above an earthen floor thickly carpeted with aromatic
heather, lichens, and moss underneath
the snow. From the summits of the
hills, clear-running rills with sweet melodies all their own twisted and
tumbled down through deep, narrow, rocky crevasses and shallower, wider gullies
they had carved out over the years; they spilled in waterfalls over stony
outcrops into small, secluded pools, half frozen now in the dead of winter and
whose gentle rippling was a harmonious whisper on the wind. The crisp air was
clean, untainted by the smells of smoke from cooking fires and burning fat from
rushlights and whale-oil lamps, and fragrant with the scents of pine and spruce
and the wintry decay of the rich, dark earth. Inhaling deeply of the forest
perfume, Wulfgar trailed along in the wake of his father and half brothers, his
shuttered gaze enviously regarding Ivar, who rode upon the showy, snow-white
steed. It was not fair, Wulfgar thought bitterly, that one so wicked should be
so blessed by the gods. But then, Yelkei had told him often enough that life
was seldom fair, and from the time he was old enough to grasp such things
himself, Wulfgar had seen that this was indeed so. Some men were born to the
great mead halls of the
jarlar,
others, to the slaves' iron pens, and
most, like him, to that place in between, where a man must struggle to survive,
having neither riches of his own nor a master bound by law to ensure his
welfare.

Beneath
the dark canopy formed by the overhanging branches of the trees, along rough
paths dimly dappled with grey sunlight, the hunting party wound its way
steadily upward through the wooded hills until at last, along a stream that
elk, reindeer, roe deer, and other animals were known to frequent, the hounds
caught the fresh scent where tree bark had been scraped away by the antlers of
stags, and great patches of snow had earlier that day been trampled and pawed
by herds feeding on the moss and lichen beneath. The rocks that strewed the
stream banks and protruded from the icy water were slimed with moss; the earth
all about was slick and muddy. The stream itself, half frozen, flowed
sluggishly, and so was easy enough to ford when the dogs, barking and
impatiently straining at their leashes, were freed by the hunters to plunge
into the water and to wade across, their tails waving like gay banners behind
them. After shaking themselves off vigorously on the far bank, the hounds again
put their noses to the ground, then eagerly set to running and baying as they
once more picked up the scent, their voices echoing through the woods, above
the high-pitched wail of the chief hunter's horn.

At
the sound, Ragnar and the other
jarlar
and
thegns
spurred their
horses forward, splashing through the frigid water, with the hunters and freedmen
racing swiftly behind. Once on the other side of the stream, Wulfgar fairly
flew over the snowy earth, using the spears of his father and half brothers
both to keep his balance and to pull himself along in the wake of the horses.
After a time, despite his wet leather breeches and sealskin boots, he no longer
felt the cold, but was as warm as though he sat before a too-hot fire. Beneath
his fur cloak and leather garments, he could feel sweat trickling down his
body, and his breath came fast and harsh, forming clouds in the air. Still, he,
like the hunters and the other freedmen, was accustomed to running with the
horses and so did not lag behind as the hunt wore on, but pressed on
determinedly, keeping to the tracks that snaked through the forest until
reaching higher ground, where the trees thinned and there was more room to
maneuver as he drove the spears hard into the snow, sliding and swishing
forward on his snowshoes, exhilarated by the chase.

The
hounds, who had scrabbled over fallen logs and through snarls of brush, where
the horses and men could not follow, had long been lost to sight. But an
occasional blast on the chief hunter's horn brought distant,
answering barks
in response, drawing the hunting party on in the right direction; and sometime past
noon, the men swung eastward, up a slope to a crest where the pine and spruce
trees were sparse, and there, across the way, in the distance, they spied a
herd of fleet roe deer, twenty to thirty head strong, Wulfgar estimated,
bounding through the woods. At the sighting of their quarry, the chief hunter
once more blew his horn, and the dogs, who had been silent for the better part
of an hour, hard on the trail as they sniffed out the scent, now renewed their
baying with vigor. Breaking from the trees to the north, they spotted their
fleeing prey and scrambled down the acclivity to strike out across the wide,
misty valley below and then up the opposite hillside, streaking after the roe
deer.

"Björn
Ironside! Hasting! Take half the men and circle around behind the herd!"
Ragnar directed as he drew his snorting steed up short, lifting one hand to
bring the hunting party to a halt behind him. "The rest of us will ride
south and head them off before they reach the pass."

With
exuberant shouts, the men were off and away, setting spurs to mounts to thunder
in a cloud of churning snow from the crest, down the incline to the floor of
the valley,
where the trees were few and on the forest fringe, although boulders and
smaller rocks swept down from the hills through the years by avalanches hove up
from the ground, and the scrub was more prolific, the earth choked with the
sodden tangle of brush and dead weeds that spread across the marshy ground. At
the heart of the valley, where the mist hung low, a shallow mere stretched, and
this slowed Wulfgar and the other men afoot, so that by the time they had
slogged across the icy water, the men ahorse to the south had succeeded in
turning back the herd of roe deer and driving them toward the hounds and the
rest of the mounted men led by Björn Ironside and Hasting to the north. For a
moment, it seemed the panicked herd would fly deep into the forest to the east,
heedless that the going would be difficult at such a pace, with low-hanging
boughs to hinder the lead stag's antlered head. But in the end, the dogs
prevented this, snarling and snapping and streaming out in a wide half circle
to cut off the herd's course of escape; and the magnificent lead stag swung
hard about to the west, toward the only perceived route to freedom, which lay
across the mere and the valley, on the hillside whence the hunting party had
come.

Realizing
this, Wulfgar and the other men
afoot stealthily advanced, making little sound upon
the snowy earth, using the stones and thickets and brambles for cover, their
furs and hide garments providing additional camouflage from their prey. Silent
and alert, they watched from their places of concealment, waiting to show
themselves as the herd came, leaping agilely over rocks and scrub alike,
afraid, upwind, into the snare laid by the men. From where he crouched behind a
stout bush to avoid being trampled, Wulfgar could now see through its skein of
bare branches the blur of laboring greyish sides and white underbellies as the
roe deer pelted toward him, the whites of their terrified eyes and the frantic
flaring of their black-velvet nostrils as the hounds came hard on the herd's
heels and the
jarlar
and
thegns
closed in from the north and the
south, yanking mounts up short and readying bows and arrows. At Ragnar's signal,
the chief hunter sounded his horn long and loud; and at that, the hunters and
freedmen rose up from their hiding places, clambering onto boulders and
outcrops for safety, yelling fiercely and waving their arms wildly at the
oncoming roe deer, throwing them into further panic and disarray. The violence
that erupted was fatal to man as well as beast as, in the confusion, Wulfgar
saw a hunter knocked down and crushed beneath stampeding hooves, and a freedman
gored by lowered antlers in passing. But most of the startled herd
instinctively shied away from the shouting men, crashing into other roe deer as
bows were drawn tight and notched arrows loosed amid the chaos.

One
of the roe deer stumbled and went down then, an arrow protruding from its
heaving side, and then another roe deer and yet another fell as, too late, the
lead stag realized the trap and raced on out of sheer instinct to survive,
sailing over a hummock and then bounding into the mere, striving to gain the
trees at the foot of the western hills, the majority of the herd coming hard
and fast behind, nearly trampling one another in their haste to escape as some
of their number ran crazily in the opposite direction, impeding the flow, and
stragglers struggled to catch up. But the slender, fletched shafts of the
jarlar
and
thegns
drove true; like
stinging bees, sharp iron barbs bit deep, bloodying greyish winter coats that
would never again turn red-brown with the summer, and a second barrage of
arrows followed the first as at least half a dozen more wounded roe deer,
bleating with pain and fear, staggered and rolled in a tangle of thrashing
limbs to be viciously fallen upon by the frenzied dogs.

Then
the hunters were there, shouting,
cursing, and jerking the hounds back by
the collar and leashing them, while, with wild whoops of triumph and bloodlust,
the men ahorse dismounted to surge forward, as well. Now, like the rest of the
freedmen, Wulfgar rushed to catch the reins carelessly tossed to him by his
father and half brothers, and to give them their spears, with which they
brought low the few injured roe deer still endeavoring to lurch on. Then,
scramasaxes in hand, the
jarlar
and
thegns
waded into the melee
to deliver the death blows to those roe deer downed but still alive.

It
was then that in the cacophony, a streak of grey fur burst with a ferocious
snarl from a misty hollow beneath a rocky outcrop amid the scrub, where,
wounded in a fierce fray with a much younger foe and driven from its pack, it
had sought refuge. Across the wet, low-lying ground, the creature leaped, its
brain clouded from its injuries, its belly sharp with pain and hunger. For a
moment, caught up in the slaughter of the roe deer, the men were only dimly
aware of the flash of grey fur that bolted into their midst. Then Ivar cried
out hoarsely, a terrible sound, so the eyes of all who heard it were drawn to
him; and coming to their senses, the men realized that the beast that had
sprung from the hollow was a lone wolf, maddened with rage and
and the smell
of blood. It had knocked Ivar down where he had knelt over one of the fallen
deer, and was now at his throat.

In
that instant, it seemed that time stopped and that all in the hunting party
were paralyzed, frozen with horror and disbelief. Never had Wulfgar seen a wolf
so huge; and it came to him in that seemingly eternal moment that it was no
ordinary wolf at all, but a were-wolf, Fenrir, progeny of the wicked Loki and
brother to Jormungand, the monstrous Midgard serpent that girded the earth, and
also to Hela, who was Death. The gods had created the strongest of fetters to
chain Fenrir, but he had broken the bonds as though they were made of cobwebs.
Angry and alarmed at seeing this, the gods had then dispatched a messenger to
the mountain spirits, and they had forged for the gods a chain known as
Gleipnir, fashioned of these six things: the sound made by a cat's footfall,
the beards of women, the roots of stones, the breath of fish, the nerves of
bears, and the spittle of birds. When complete, the fetter was as slender and
soft and delicate as a silken riband. But the were-wolf, suspecting that it was
enchanted, had refused to be bound by it unless he could hold in his mouth the
hand of one of the gods as hostage for their good faith. Knowing how they
planned to
trick Fenrir, only Týr, the god of battles, had proved brave enough to place
his hand inside the were-wolf s massive jaws with their sharp, carnivorous
teeth; and when Fenrir had discovered he could not escape from the chain called
Gleipnir, he had bitten Týr's hand off at the wrist as punishment for deceiving
and imprisoning him.

But
now, Wulfgar thought, the were-wolf had at last somehow broken free of his
magical bonds and descended to Midgard, the earth. Wulfgar shuddered with fear
at the notion, for if that were indeed so, it could mean only one thing: that
Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods, was at hand. Now, too, would Garm, the
hound of Hel, howl; Jormungand, the terrible Midgard serpent, rise from the
seas to spew venom upon the earth; the giant Hrym sail forth Naglfar, the Ship
of the Dead; and the watchman, Heimdall, blow his horn, a call to battle.
Wicked Loki would join the enemies of the gods— the followers of Hela, who was
Death, and the Frost giants; and the sons of Muspell, with their leader, Surt,
at their vanguard, would ride over the rainbow bridge, Bifröst, breaking it
beneath their weight, on their way to the last battlefield, Vigrid. There, all
the gods and their foes would be slain; then the universe would burn up and be
no more— or so the
skálds
sang
in the great
mead halls of the
jarlar,
and so all his life, Wulfgar had believed. Nor
was he the only one of the hunting party to think that their doom was come upon
them. Stricken, the rest of the freedman had fallen to their knees as though
awaiting retribution, and even the
jarlar
and
thegns
were stunned
and uneasy, uncertain what to do.