The Skrayling Tree (22 page)

All day and all night we plunged on through the wild Atlantic waters. We used oars, tiller and sails to answer every change
of the wind and, with the help of Gunnar’s Moorish lodestone, now ran like an arrow due north until Gunnar called me into
his deckhouse and showed me the instrument. “There’s sorcery here,” he insisted. “Some bastard’s bewitched the thing!”

The stone was spinning in its glass, completely erratic.

“There’s no other explanation,” Gunnar said. “The place has a protector. Some Lord of the Higher Worlds…”

A howl came from the deck, and we both burst out of the deerskin deckhouse to see Leif the Larger, his face a frozen mask,
staring at a vast head erupting from the wild water, glaring with apparent malevolence at our vulnerable little ship. It was
human, and it filled the horizon. Gunnar grasped the Norseman by the shoulder and slapped him viciously. “Fool! It’s a score
of miles away. It’s stone! It’s on the shore!” But at the same time Gunnar was lifting his head to look upward… and then upward
again. There was no question that what we saw was a gigantic face, the eyes staring sightlessly down from under the cloud
which covered its forehead. We were too small for it to see. We were specks of dust in comparison. What Gunnar had noted was
true. The thing did not seem to be alive. Presumably, therefore, we had nothing to fear from it. It was not a sentient human
or god, rather an extraordinarily detailed sculpture in textured and delicately colored granite.

Leif the Larger drew in a breath and mumbled something into his golden beard. Then he went to the side and threw up. The ship
was still tossing about in the ocean, was still on top of the waves. She continued the course we had set before our lodestar
was enchanted. A course which took us directly towards that gigantic head.

When I pointed this out to Gunnar he shrugged. “Perhaps it’s your giant who lives at the North Pole? We must trust the fates,”
he said. “You must have faith, Elric, to tread your path, to follow your myth.”

And then, in an instant, the head opened its vast, black mouth and the sea poured down into it, taking us relentlessly towards
a horizon which was dark, glistening and thoroughly organic.

Gunnar roared his frustration and his despair. He made every effort to turn the ship. His men back-rowed heroically. But we
were being drawn down into that fleshy pit.

Gunnar shook his fist against the fates. He seemed more affronted than terrified. “Damn you!” Then he began laughing. “Can’t
you see what’s happening to us, Elric? We’re being
swallowed!”

It was true. We might have been the contents of a cup of water with which some monstrous ogre refreshed himself. I found that
I, too, was laughing. The situation seemed irredeemably comical to me. And yet there was every chance I was about to perish.
If I did so, I would perish in both realities.

All at once we were totally engulfed. The boat banged and buffeted, as if against the banks of a river. From somewhere amidships
rose the sound of a deep, chanting song, its melody older than the world. Asolingas, the Ashanti, clearly believed his own
particular moment had come.

Then he, too, fell silent.

I gasped and coughed at the foulness of the air. It was as if a street cur had breathed in my face. A whole series of fables
I had heard about men being swallowed by gigantic fish came to mind. I could not recall a story about a ship being swallowed
by a giant. Or was it a giant? Had we simply let ourselves see a configuration
of rocks and made it into a face? Or was this some ancient sea-monster, large enough to swallow ships and drink seas?

The stink grew worse, but since it was the only air to breathe, we breathed it. With every breath, I filled my lungs with
the dust of death.

And then we were in Nifelheim.

Leif the Shorter, from somewhere in the middle of the ship, cried out in frustration. “I should not be here. I have done nothing
wrong. I killed my share. Is it my fault that I should be punished simply because I did not die in battle?”

I wrapped my sea-cloak more closely about me. It had become profoundly cold. The icy air was hard against my skin, threatening
to strip it off. Breathing became painful. I felt I inhaled a thousand shards of glass.

There was no wind—just cold, pitch darkness, utter silence. I heard the sound of our oars dipping and rising, dipping and
rising with almost unnatural regularity. A brand flared suddenly. I saw Gunnar’s glittering mask, illuminated by the rush
torch. I caught a faint impression of the rowers as he came back up the central board. “Where are we, Prince Elric? Do you
know? Is this Nifelheim?”

“It might as well be,” I said. The deck then slanted again, and we ran downwards for a short while before righting ourselves.

As soon as we were back into still water, the oars began to dip and rise, dip and rise. All around us was the sound of running
water, like glaciers melting—a thousand rivers running from both sides of the narrow watercourse on which we now rowed.

Gunnar was jubilant. “Hel’s rivers!”

The rest of us did not respond to his joy. We became aware of deep, despairing groans which were not quite human, of bubbling
noises which might have been the last moments of drowning children. There was clashing and sibilant shushing, which could
have been the sound of whispering voices. We concentrated on the dip and rise, dip and rise of our oars. This familiar slap
was our only hold on logic as our senses screamed to escape.

Leif the Shorter’s rasp came again. He was raving. “Elivagar, the Leipter and the Slid,” he shouted. “Can you all hear them?
They are the rivers of Nifelheim. The river of glaciers, the river of oaths, the river of naked swords. Can’t you hear them?
We are abandoned in the Underworld. That is the sound of Hvergelmir, the great cauldron, boiling eternally, dragging ships
whole into her maw.” He began to mumble something about wishing he had been braver and more reckless in his youth and how
he hoped this death counted as a violent one. How he had never been a religious man but had done his best to follow the rules.
Again he wailed that it was scarcely his fault he had not been killed in battle. Leif the Larger economically silenced his
cousin. Yet even Leif the Shorter’s wailings had not interrupted the steady rise and fall of our oars. Every man aboard clung
to this effortful repetition, hoping it would somehow redeem him in the eyes of Fate and allow him entry into Paradise.

Now imploring voices called out to us. We heard the sound of hands on the sides of the ship, attempts to grasp our oars. Yet
still the men rowed on at the same
pace, Gunnar’s voice rising over all the other sounds as he called out the rhythm. His voice was aggressive and bold and commanded
absolute obedience.

Down dipped the oars and up again they rose. Gunnar cursed the darkness and defied the Queen of the Dead. “Know this, Lady
Hel, that I am already dead. I live neither in Nifelheim nor in Valhalla. I die again and again, for I am Gunnar the Doomed.
I have already been to the brink of oblivion and know my fate. You cannot frighten me, Hel, for I have more to fear than thee!
When I die, life and death die with me!” His defiant laughter echoed through those bleak halls. And if, somewhere, there was
a pale goddess whose knife was called Greed and whose dish was named Hunger, she heard that laughter and would think Ragnarok
had come, that the Horn of Fate had blown and summoned the end of the world. It would not occur to her that a mere man voiced
that laughter. Courage of Gunnar’s order was rewarded in Valhalla, not Nifelheim.

Gunnar’s defiance further heartened his men. We heard no more of Leif the Shorter’s discovery of religion.

The sound of clashing metal grew louder, as if in response to Gunnar. The human voices became more coherent. They formed words,
but in a language none of us knew. From out of that chilled darkness there emerged other, less easily identified sounds, including
a gasping, bubbling, sucking noise like an old woman’s death rattle. Yet still
The Swan
rowed on, straight and steady, to Gunnar’s beating fist and rhythmic song.

Then he stopped singing.

A great silence fell again, save for the steady thrust
of the oars. We felt a tug at the ship as if a great hand had seized it from below and was lifting it upward. A howling voice.
A whirlwind. Yet we were being dragged into rather than out of the water.

I gasped as salt filled my mouth. I clung to whatever rigging I could find in the darkness while behind me Gunnar’s laughter
roared. He began to sing again as it seemed that he steered us directly into the drowning current. The ship creaked and complained
as I had never heard before. She tilted violently, and at last the rhythm of her oars no longer matched the rhythm of Gunnar’s
song.

There was a tearing sound. I was convinced we were breaking up. Then came a great thrumming chord, as if the strings of an
instrument had been struck. The chord consumed me, set every nerve singing to its tune and lifted me, as it lifted the entire
ship, until we were driving upwards as rapidly as we had gone down. A white, blinding light dominated the horizon. My lungs
filled entirely with water. I knew that I had failed in my quest, that in a few moments my only grasp on life was what was
left to me as I hung in Jagreen Lern’s rigging.

The ship began to yaw and spin in the water until I lost what little sense of direction I had. Suddenly the light faded to
a pale grey. The noise became a steady shout, and again I heard Gunnar’s laughter as he bawled to his men to return to their
oars. “Row, lads. Hel’s not far behind!”

And row they did, with the same extraordinary precision, their muscles bulging to bursting from the effort of it, while Gunnar
lifted his gleaming helm towards
heaven and pointed. Here was proof that we had left the supernatural world.

The bright light faded. Above us was a grey, darkening sky. Behind us some kind of maelstrom danced and sucked, but we had
escaped it and were even now rowing steadily away from it.

Ahead of us lay a high, wooded coastline with a number of small islands standing off it. The cloud cover was heavy, but from
the nature of the light sunset was not far off.

The sounds of the maelstrom fell away. I wondered at the extraordinary sorcery it had taken to achieve such a strange transition.
Gunnar presented the coast to me with a proprietorial hand.

“Behold,” he said with sardonic triumph, “the lost continent of Vinland!” He leaned forward, drinking it in. “The Greeks called
it Atlantis and the Romans called it Thule. All races have their own name for it. Many have died seeking it. Few ever made
the pacts I made to get here…”

A mist was rising. The coast vanished into it, as if the gods had grown tired of Gunnar’s posturings. As we slowed oars and
came in on a long, cold surf, we began to make out the darkening outlines of a fir-crowded coast edged by dark rock and small,
unwelcoming beaches. Gunnar steered us between rocky, fir-clad islands as if he knew where he wanted to go. By the nature
of the waves we had entered a bay and must be nearing a mooring of some sort, but there were still many small islands to negotiate.

I began to smell the land. It was rich with pine and
ferny undergrowth, verdant with life. Gunnar’s sense of that had been right, at least.

Asolingas saw the house first. He pointed and yelled to get Gunnar’s attention.

Gunnar cursed loudly. “I’ll swear to you, Elric—and I paid heavily in gold and souls for this information—I was told Vinland
held nothing but savages.”

“Who says they are not?” After all these years I was still confused by the fine distinctions.

“That manor could have been built in Norway last week! These aren’t like the wretches we dealt with in Greenland.” Gunnar
was furious. “Leif’s damned colonies were supposed to have perished! And now we’re sailing into a port that probably has a
dozen Viking ships in it and knows exactly what we’re here for!”

He gave the order to back water and up oars. We drifted close in to the island and the house. The lower windows were already
lit against the twilight and cast a mottled pattern on the surrounding shrubs. These windows were typically of lightly woven
branches which admitted light and afforded privacy during the day but could be covered against the night. I wondered if the
place was some sort of inn. There was thin smoke rising from its chimneys. It looked a good solid place, of big oak beams
and white daub, such as any rich peasant might build from Normandy to Norway. If it was a little taller, perhaps a little
more circular in shape than average, that was probably explained by local materials and conditions.

The manor’s existence, of course, suggested exactly what Gunnar feared—that the Ericsson colonies had not
only survived but prospered and produced an independent culture as typically Scandinavian as Iceland’s. A house of these proportions
and materials meant something else to Gunnar. It meant there were stone fortifications and sophisticated defenses. It meant
fierce men who were conditioned to fighting the native skraylings and had a code of honor which demanded they die in battle.
It meant that one ship, even ours, could not take the harbor, let alone the continent.

I was not, of course, disappointed. I had no quarrel with this folk and no eye on their possessions. Gunnar, however, had
been promised a kingdom only to discover that apparently it already had a king.

As we passed the house we looked in vain for the city which we now expected to see. The shoreline was virgin woodland or harsh,
pebble beach, with occasional slabs of rock rising up directly from the water. When night at last fell it was very clear there
was no thriving harbor nearby. Gunnar was careful. He did not relax his guard. There were a dozen headlands which could be
hiding a fair-sized fortified town. His position as a leader was threatened. He had promised an abandoned city of gold, not
a city of stone crammed with warriors. The politics of our ship were beginning to shift radically.

The only light gleaming through all that watery, pine-drenched darkness was from the house on the island. At least we were
not immediately threatened. If challenged, Gunnar would greet the Vikings as a brother, I knew. He would bide his time, search
for their weaknesses, while he praised and flattered and told exotic stories.