The Skrayling Tree (21 page)

“I thought Gunnar had taken
The Swan
there?”

“They both went in
The Swan.
She returned in
The Either/Or
after some dispute between them.” He stopped suddenly and looked up. I knew Gunnar had come into the courtyard. The friar
began to laugh, as if at his own joke. “And then the other dog said, ‘No I only came in to get my claws trimmed.’ ”

Gunnar’s hand fell on my shoulder. “We still have business to discuss,” he said. “You, Sir Priest, have no business with me,
I understand.”

Pulling his worn cassock about him Friar Tristelunne got up. “I will never be desperate enough, sir, to seek the devil’s employment.”

“Then I was right,” said Gunnar. “Is there no service in here?” He went inside. The friar seemed completely amused. He shrugged,
winked at me, told me that our paths were bound to cross again and slipped out of the gate as Gunnar came back holding a boy
by his ear. “All the girls are elsewhere, is it?”

“It is, sir,” said the boy, dropped back to the paving of the yard. “I’m all that is left.”

Gunnar cursed the urgency of his own men’s drives and bellowed at the boy to bring ale. I told the lad to bring one more shant,
tossed him a coin and got up. Gunnar’s glittering mask looked at me in evident astonishment.

“You have the advantage of me, sir, and I cannot judge you for that,” I said, “but it’s clear you’ve no experience of partnership.
I do not wish to hire your ship. I think you have some misunderstanding about me. You already told me that you know my blood
and position. While I expect little from these kulaks and other rabble, I expect far more from one who claims to know my rank.”

A sardonic bow. “Well, I apologize if that suits you. A breath of air and all is settled between us.”

“Actions impress me more than words.” I made to leave. I was, of course, playing a game, but I was playing it by following
my own natural inclinations.

Gunnar, too, knew what was going on. He began to laugh. “Very well, Sir Silverskin. Let’s talk as equals. It’s true I’m used
to bullying my way through this
world, but you see the kind of company I’m forced to keep these days. I, too, was a Prince of the Balance. Now you find me
a wretched corsair, clutching at legends for booty when once I crushed famous cities.”

I sat down again. “While I am certain you have no intention of telling me your whole story, I suggest you let me know when
you intend to sail for Vinland. Only the god-touched would venture into those seas in winter.”

“Or the damned. Sir Silverskin, the course I propose to sail is directly through the realms of Hel. The entrance is on the
other side of Greenland. Through the Underworld, through the moving rocks and the sucking whirlpools, through the monstrous
darkness, to a land of eternal summer where riches are for the taking. The land is lush, growing wild what we cultivate with
the sweat of our brows. And for wealth, there is legendary gold. A great ziggurat made entirely of gold and mysteriously abandoned
by her people. So since we venture into the supernatural world, I suspect it makes little difference whether the season be
summer or winter. We sail to Nifelheim itself.”

“You sail to the north and the west,” I told him. “I have useful experience and something you value.”

He sucked thoughtfully through one of his straws. “And what would you gain from this voyage?”

“I seek a certain famous immortal smith. A Norseman maybe.”

The noise from within the helm might have been laughter. “Is his name Volund? For Volund and his brothers guard that city
called Illa Paglia della Oro by the Venetians. It stands in the center of a lake at the
place where the edge of the world meets Polaris. That is where I am bound.”

Gunnar was not telling me the whole truth. He wanted me to think a city of gold his goal. I guessed he sought something else
at the World’s Rim. Something he could destroy.

For the moment, however, I was content.
The Swan
was going where I wished to go. Whether the realm of Hel was supernatural or natural scarcely mattered if we sailed the North
Sea in December or January. “You trust your boat completely,” I observed.

“I have to,” he said. “Our fates are intertwined now. The ship will survive as long as I survive. I have magic, as I promised,
and not the mere alchemical nonsense you hear in Nürnberg. I follow a vision.”

“I suspect I do, also,” I said.

Norn-curs’d Norsemen, nature-driven to explore Earth’s End,

Followed their weird to Fimbulwinter’s icey land.

Longswords lay unblooded in lifeless hands

When warriors went the way of Gaynor, call’d the Damn’d.

L
ONGFELLOW
,

“Lord of the Lost”

W
hen we left port a few days later, the seas were still calm. Gunnar hoped to make headway through a good autumn. We might
even reach Greenland before the ice settled in.

I asked him if, beyond Nifelheim, he did not expect to find empires and soldiers as powerful as any in this sphere. He looked
at me as if I were mad. “I’ve heard the story from a dozen sources. It’s virgin land, free for the taking. The only defenders
are wretched savages whose ancestors built the city before they offended the gods. It’s all written down.”

I was amused. “So that makes it true?”

We were in his tiny deckhouse. Stooping, he opened a small chest and took out a parchment. “If not, we’ll make it true!” The
parchment was written in Latin, but there was runic scattered through the text. I glanced over it. The account of some Irish
monk who had been the secretary of a Danish king, it told the story, in bare details, of a certain Eric the White. He had
gone with five ships to Vinland and there established a colony, building a fortified town against those whom they called variously
skredlinj, skraelings
or
skrayling.
This was the Viking name for the local people. As far as I could tell it meant ‘whiner’ or ‘moaner’, and the Vikings considered
them wretches and outlaws.

On this evidence Gunnar was prepared to sail through Nifelheim. I had heard similar stories from every Norseman I had known.
Moorish philosophers proposed that the world was the shape of an elongated egg with the barbarian, godless races somehow clinging
to the underside in perpetual darkness. In all such matters, as one is taught to do in the Dream of a Thousand Years, I remained
silent. This was a dream I could not afford to have truncated. This was the last possible dream I could occupy before Jagreen
Lern destroyed our fleet and then destroyed Moonglum and myself.

“So we will have only a land full of savages to conquer,” I said sardonically. “And, say, thirty of us?”

“Exactly,” said Gunnar. “With your sword and mine, it will take us a couple of months at most.”

“Your sword?”

“You have Ravenbrand”—the faceless man tapped the swaddled blade at his side—“and I have Angurvadel.”

He pulled away some of the covering to reveal a red-gold hilt hammered with the most intricate designs. “You’ll take my word
that the blade has runes embedded in it which flame red in war and that if it be drawn it must be blooded…”

I was, of course, curious. Did Gunnar carry a fauxglaive? Or did his sword have genuine magic? Was Angurvadel just another
cursed sword of which the Norse folktales abounded? I had heard the name, of course, but it was an archetype I sought. Even
if it were not false, Angurvadel was only one of the black sword’s many brothers.

As Gunnar had hoped, the sailing was fair into the Atlantic. We stopped to take in provisions at a British settlement far
from the protection of Norman law. There were only a few villagers left alive after Gunnar’s men had finished their slaughter.
These were forced to help kill their own animals and haul their own grain to our ship before they were in turn disposed of.
Gunnar had an old-fashioned efficiency and attention to detail in his work. Like mine, his own sword was not drawn during
this time.

We sailed on, knowing it would be some while before anyone considered pursuing us. Gunnar had a lodestone compass and various
other Moorish instruments, which was probably what his men considered his magic. This made it far easier to risk quicker routes.
As it happens, the sea was extraordinarily calm and the pale blue skies almost cloudless. Gunnar’s men ascribed the
weather to a damned man’s luck. Gunnar himself had the air of a man thoroughly satisfied with his own good judgment.

During the few hours we had, I talked to some of the crew. They were friendly enough in a generally uncouth manner. Few of
these reavers had much in the way of imagination, which was perhaps why they were prepared to follow Gunnar’s standard.

One of the Ashanti, whom we called Asolingas, was by now wrapped in thick wool. He spoke good Moorish and told me how he and
ten others had been captured after a battle and taken down the coast to be sold. Bought to row a Syrian trader, they had overwhelmed
the rest of the ship within an hour of being at sea and, with the few other slaves who had joined them, managed to get themselves
to Las Cascadas where, he said, they had been cheated out of the boat. The others had all been killed in later raiding expeditions.

Asolingas said he was homesick for Africa. Since his soul had already died and returned there, he supposed it would not be
long before he followed it. He knew he would be killed sometime after we made our final landfall.

“Then why do you go?” I asked.

“Because I believe that my soul awaits me on the other side,” he said.

A sigh came from starboard as the wind rose. I heard a gull. It would not be long before we made landfall.

In Greenland the colonists were so poor that the best we could get for ourselves was their water, a little sour beer and a
weary goat that seemed glad to be slaughtered.
Greenland settlements were notoriously impoverished, the settlers inbred and insular, forever at odds with the native tribes
over their small resources. I said to Gunnar how I hoped that the entrance into Nifelheim was close. We had provisions for
two weeks at most. He reassured me. “Where we’re going, there won’t be time for eating and drinking.”

When we put out from Greenland, heading west, the weather was already growling. A sea which had been slightly more than choppy
began sending massive waves against the bleak beaches. We had considerable trouble getting into open water. We left behind
perhaps the last European colony, struggling no more in that harsh world. Gunnar often joked that he was God’s kindest angel.
“Do you know what they call this blade in Lombardy? Saint Michael’s Justice.” He began telling me a story which rambled off
into nothing. He seemed to absorb himself psychically in the mountainous waves. There was a massive, slow repetition to the
sea, even as it howled and thrashed and tossed us a hundred feet into the air, even as the wind and rain whistled in the rigging,
and we dived another hundred feet into a white-tipped, swirling valley of water.

I grew used to the larger rhythm to which the ship moved. I sensed the security and strength which lay beneath all that unruly
ocean. Now I knew what Gunnar and his men knew, why the ship was thought to be a magic one. She slipped through all that weather
like a barracuda, virtually oblivious and scarcely touched by it. She was so beautifully constructed that she never held water
between waves and almost always rose up
as another wave came down. The exhilaration of sailing on such an astonishingly well-made vessel, trusting her more than one
trusted oneself, was something I had never experienced before. The nearest experience I knew was flying on a Phoorn dragon.
I began to understand Gunnar’s reckless confidence. As I stood wrapped in my blue sea-cloak and stared into the face of the
gale, I looked at the ship’s figurehead in a new light. Was this some memory of flight?

Gunnar began swinging his way along the running ropes, a great bellow of glee issuing from within his faceless helm. Clearly
he was almost drunk on the experience. His head flung back, his laughter did not stop. At length he turned to me and gripped
my arm. “By God, Prince Elric, we are going to be heroes, you and I.”

Any pleasure I had felt up to that moment immediately dissipated. I could think of nothing worse than being remembered for
my association with Gunnar the Doomed.

The Viking moved his head, like a scenting beast. “She is there,” he said. “I know she is there. And you and I will find her.
But only one of us will keep her. Whoever it is shall be the final martyr.”

His hand fell on my back. Then he returned to the stern and his tiller.

I was, for a moment, reminded of my mother’s death, of my father’s hatred. I recalled my cousin’s bloody end, weeping as the
soul was sucked from her. Who was “she”? Who did he mean?

The waves crashed down again, and up we rose on
the next, constantly moving ahead of the turbulence so that sometimes it really did seem we flew over the water. The ship’s
half-reefed sail would catch the wind and act like a wing, allowing Gunnar to touch the tiller this way and that rapidly,
and swing her with the water. I have never seen a captain before or since who could handle his ship with his fingertips, who
could issue a command and have it instantly followed in any weather. Gunnar boasted that however many he lost on land, he
almost never lost a man at sea.

Foam drenched the decks, settled on the shoulders and thighs of the oarsmen. Foam flecked the troubled air. Black, red, brown
and yellow backs bent and straightened like so many identical cogs, water and sweat pouring over them. Above, the sky was
torn with wet, ragged clouds, boiling and black. I shivered in my cloak. I longed to be able to call Mishashaaa or any of
the other elementals, to calm this storm by magic means. But I was already using my magic to inhabit this dream! The power
of Ravenbrand was potent only in battle. To attempt anything else might result in uncontrollable consequences.