Prince of Fools

“It takes more than a warrior or a general to lead ten thousand men into the Bitter Ice. Ten thousand who were not Viking would die before they reached the true ice. Ten thousand who knew enough to survive would know enough not to go. There is nothing there for men. Even the Inowen keep to the shore and the sea ice. Whale, seal, and fish is all that will sustain men in such places.

“It might be that no jarl ever had more longboats at his command than Olaaf Rikeson, or had brought more treasure across the North Sea, won with axe and fire from weaker men. Even so, it took more than his word to gather ten thousand from the bleak shores of the fjords where a hundred men were counted an army, and to march them into the Bitter Ice.

“Olaaf Rikeson had a vision. He had the gods at his side. The wise echoed what he said. The rune stones spoke for him. And more than this. He had a key. Even now the völvas argue over how he came to own it, but in the tale Snorri’s father told, Loki had given it to Olaaf after he burned the cathedral of the White Christ at York and slaughtered twice a hundred monks there. What Olaaf had to promise in return was never told.

“The fact that the god’s gift had been a key had always disappointed Snorri, but then Loki was the god of disappointment, amongst other things, things such as lies and trickery. Snorri would have preferred a battle ram. A warrior destroys the door—he doesn’t unlock it. But his father told him that Olaaf’s key was a talisman. It opened any lock, any door, and more than that—it opened men’s hearts.

“The oldest legends have it that Olaaf marched to open the gates of Niflheim and beard the frost giants in their lair, to shame the gods and their false Ragnarok of many suns, and to bring about the true end of all things in a last battle. Snorri’s father never denied the tale but spoke of how one thing might hide another, like a feint in combat. Men, he said, were more often moved by more basic wants—hunger, greed, and lust. Stories grew from seed and spread like weeds. Perhaps the gods touched Rikeson, or perhaps a bloody-handed reaver took a few hundred men north to raid the Inowen and from his failure sprang a song that bards wove into a saga and placed amongst the treasured memories of the North. Whatever truth there was, years have stolen it from us.”

• • •

Snorri left his son’s pyre, the last logs still blazing, the snow on all sides retreating to expose the black earth of the Wodinswood. Behind him embers swirled skyward amidst dark smoke. He trekked the hills of the hinterland, leaving the Uulisk far behind, tracking Sven Broke-Oar and the men of the Drowned Isles across the boulder fields of Törn, where vicious winds shape the rocks themselves. Above Törn the Jarlson Uplands, and beyond those, the Bitter Ice.

What he would do when he reached his enemy, Snorri had no idea, other than to die well. Grief and guilt and rage consumed him. Perhaps any of these on its own would have destroyed him, but in conflict, each with the next, they achieved a balance within him and he carried on.

The pace the raiders set was fierce and Snorri couldn’t think it one that Freja or Egil, with just ten years to his name, could match. In grim visions he saw them dead, marching with the tireless corpses that had come ashore at Eight Quays. But Karl had been alive; they had shackled prisoners—it made no sense to be taking them inland, but the necromancers had wanted live prisoners, that much was clear.

Only night stopped him. The light fled early, still new to the world after the winter darkness that had held the ice for months. Without sight a man can’t follow a trail. All he’ll find in the dark is a broken leg, for the hinterlands are treacherous, the rocky ground ice-clad and fissured.

The night had lasted forever, a misery of cold, haunted by visions of the slaughter at Eight Quays. Of Karl, broken and dying by the Wodinswood, of Emy . . . Her screaming had followed Snorri into the wilderness and the wind spoke it all through the long wait for dawn.

And when the light came, snow came also, falling heavy from leaden skies, though Snorri had thought it too cold for snow. He’d roared at it. Lofted his axe at the clouds and threatened every god he could name. But still the snow fell, careless, dropping into his open mouth as he shouted, filling his eyes.

Snorri carried on without a trail to follow, lost in the trackless white. What else was there for him? He took the direction his quarry had taken and struck out into the empty wastes.

He found the dead man hours later. One of the Islanders who had been dead on the deck of his ship as it sailed the North Sea bound for the mouth of the Uulisk. No less dead now and no less hungry. The man struggled uselessly, bound chest-deep in a drift whose soft snow had accepted his dead flesh, then locked about it as his efforts to escape compressed the walls of his prison into something hard as rock. He reached for Snorri, his fingers black with the freezing blood locked inside. A sword blow had opened his face from eye to chin, exposing a jawbone wrapped in freeze-dried muscle, shattered teeth, frost-darkened and bloodless flesh. The remaining eye fixed Snorri with inhuman intensity.