8. EIGHT
EIGHT
HERVOR
It’s impossible to say for sure how much time has passed since I’ve been down here.
I’m immersed in total darkness. I don’t know if it’s day or night.
It’s throwing off my sleep. I can’t tell if my eyes are closed or open.
Sometimes I forget if I’m standing up against the wall or lying on the floor.
Occasionally I hear thuds and shuffling on the other side of the door—probably the thralls fetching some stores up to the hall. It makes me hope that someone might open the door. Sometimes I call out to them. They never answer, not even to tell me to shut my mouth.
I think they’re feeding me twice a day. That’s the only thing I have to look forward to—those fleeting seconds where someone opens the door and floods my cell with flickering light, and I get a brief glimpse at another living human and can finally see my own hands in front of my face.
But then it’s over. They abandon me again, and I’m left to fill my belly with cold porridge in the lonely dark.
Loki! It’s enough to drive a person crazy!
Locking them up down here—nothing to look at but the colour black, nothing to smell but my own shit and piss and the musty cellar.
Nothing to think about but how they’re going to kill me when they finally get around to it.
I wish they’d do it already. It’d be worth it just to see the sun again, and grass. And the sea!
Gods! Let me out of here!
The exact dimensions of this cell are fourteen paces by eighteen paces, heel to toe; seventeen paces by twenty-one if I pace it out with my hands.
There are two hundred and sixty-seven stones in the wall and on the floor—I’ve counted them four hundred and eighty-two times.
There are twenty-four links in the chain on my ankle, and I can’t quite reach the door.
I get up on the bench, and standing on my tip-toes I reach up to the ceiling. To my excitement, I realize I haven’t counted the joists yet.
I’m moving sideways to the left along the bench with my arms above my head, reaching from one joist to the next.
Suddenly I lose my footing, and I throw out my hands to grab onto the beam at the top of the wall.
I yelp as I catch my fingernail on something sharp.
I suck on my finger and feel for whatever it is to make sure I don’t make the same mistake again.
It’s a nail sticking out about half an inch from where the joist is fastened across the top of the beam.
I twist my thumb and forefinger around the head, thinking that I ought to count the nails once I’m done with the joists.
My wits are dulled from sitting around for so long in the dark, but after a moment I realize my luck.
I spend what feels like an hour wiggling it, tugging it, straining my fingers and rubbing them raw trying to work it free.
It isn’t coming loose. I’m closer to prying off my own fingernails than I am to pulling out that nail.
Then the wood creaks and I’ve got a little more room to grip it.
Pain shoots through my fingers and I can tell I’m bleeding because they’re wet and sticky.
My hands are shaking from the effort and the throbbing licks of pain.
Then the wood creaks again. I yank so hard on the nail it comes right out of the joist and I lose my balance and go sailing backward off the bench.
I throw my fists up to my ears to protect my head as I smack against the stone floor with the rattling chain.
I lie perfectly still, listening to the quiet clinking in the heavy black.
I get up on my hands and knees, sweeping my palms across the floor.
I press my shoulder against the bench and reach underneath it, and I nearly laugh out loud as I feel a thin metal object, coarse with rust, underneath my hand.
I twist the nail between my fingers, grinning for the first time in I don’t know how long. It’s bent, but I figure if it was straight it’d be the length of my middle finger to the centre of my palm. It should be thin enough to do the trick.
I fit the nail into the small lock on the shackle around my ankle. In the dark, it’s easy to visualize the inside of the lock as I jiggle the nail around in the keyhole. There’s the pin. I press the tip of the nail against it and push up.
Click.
The shackle slips off my ankle and clatters to the floor, and for a moment I sit there in astonishment. Panic flutters in my heart, and I clap the shackle back around my ankle, careful not lock it again.
When they bring my supper, that’s when it’ll happen. They’ll open the door—I’ll rush them, take them by surprise. Maybe they’ll have a knife in their belt or a sword that I can take.
That’s going to be tough.
If it’s Asger or one of the huskarls … They won’t be expecting it, but even so. If they so much as scream or yell it will alert everyone in Ofotfjord.
Say I manage to take them down right away without a sound—maybe they’ve got a weapon that I can use, and a shirt of mail or some clothes I can change into and disguise myself—I lock them in here, then what?
Sneak back out into the forest? Hide until dark then steal a boat?
Where would I go? Somewhere. Someplace far outside H?logaland.
That’s what I should have done in the first place.
Gods, why am I so stupid? Stupid bastard swineherd girl.
There’s no way I’m going to pull this off!
I have to try I guess. Better than sitting around in the pitch-black waiting for my execution.
The faint footsteps on the cellar stairs are nearly enough to make me vomit. I take deep breaths to calm my nervous shivering. As soon as he come through that door, I’ll slam into him and poke this nail through his throat.
“Odin, guide my hands in battle,” I whisper, but even as the prayer escapes my lips it seems unlikely I’d be getting help from any god. A lump swells in the back of my throat as a dark thought occurs to me. There are some who might be willing. A cold finger traces up my spine.
“Gullveig, help me to escape tonight. Accept the blood I’m about to spill as an oblation—”
The hair rises on the back of my neck as I hear my grandfather’s muffled voice on the other side of the door, and I quickly tuck the nail away underneath the bench. The heavy bolt clacks open and I throw my arm across my face as red light spills into my cell.
“Wait here,” says my grandfather, a shadow behind a flickering torch.
He comes inside, followed by another man.
It’s Asger with my supper—smoked herring, boiled cabbage and carrots.
He sets the steaming plate down on the bench with a pitcher of mead, and steps back, glancing between me and my grandfather.
“I’ll be right outside,” he says, then leaves and shuts the door.
My grandfather gestures to the plate and I tear into it like a starving dog.
I’m so glad to be driving down a hot meal that I don’t care that I’m burning my mouth and tongue to cinders.
I spit a bone out on the floor and tip up the pitcher and flood my mouth with strong mead.
Gods, does it ever feel good to be gulping mead.
That’s just what I needed to soothe my nerves. I take another swig and set it down.
My grandfather is staring at me. He’s thinner than usual, hunched over, and his bushy brows are sagging over his eyes. When did his hair become so white? My grandfather never seemed like such an old man before. The sight of him pierces me with a sliver of regret. It’s my doing.
He sighs deeply and there’s an awkward moment of silence which he spends wringing his withered hands.
Though he’s warm and sturdy, my grandfather is an anxious man, tortured day and night by the many worries that burden every ruler.
At last he speaks, but there’s a frailty in his voice I find unsettling.
“Hervor, your parents told me what happened in the sheep pasture.”
Fire licks my insides as I recall that sour incident where that thrall, Folki, wrecked my life with that filthy secret about my mother.
My body spasms with a black surge of hate, and I remind myself that I stuck my blade into his belly and let him fumble with his guts for a good minute before shearing his head right off his shoulders.
“I avenged my honour,” I say, “I just wish mother hadn’t been so quick to admit to what he said. She could have lied. She could have thought of something to keep me from knowing instead of seizing the opportunity to get it off her chest.”
“Don’t be too hard on your mother,” my grandfather says, “She’s not to blame. She’s been the bravest of anyone throughout this whole ordeal.”
“Why? Because she spread her legs for some swineherd?”
A great reluctance comes over his face as he weighs the consequences of what he’s about to say. “Hervor,” he says, “there is no swineherd.”
“What do you mean? Is Frodmar really—”
He shakes his head. He sits down on the bench beside me, holding the torch in both hands as he leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he stares into the crackling flame. “Angantyr Arngrimsson was your father.”
A long silence hangs between us before he speaks again.
Finally my grandfather shifts his jaw. “He was a berserker,” he says, “from Bolm Island.
He and his brothers used to sail around extorting riches from wealthy men all over Scandinavia.
He was a blood-drunk savage—they all were. Everybody hated them.
“Your Uncle Hjorvard challenged Hjalmar the Great-Hearted to a hjolmgang over the Princess of Sweden: Twelve on twelve—your father and all his brothers against Hjalmar and eleven of his friends.
They all killed each other on Sams? Island.
Your father, your uncles, Hjalmar... Only one man lived to sail away from Sams?'s shore.
A friend of Hjalmar's, a wanderer called Arrow-Odd.”
A deep rage flares up in my gut. “You should have told me. I would have dedicated my life to avenging my father with his blood.”