Turning, Grislae sprinted back to the stern, drawing her sword as she ran. She cut the anchor line just as the arrows began to fall. The sound erupted like giant rune stones being cast upon a mead-hall table. Rolling underneath the covered cooking area, she watched as a deadly flight of arrows impaled the deck, the oar benches, the gunwales, the upright oars, each one quivering. Crouching, she grabbed a shield from the Reinen’s bulwark, and holding it angled toward the shore, Grislae sprinted to the Reinen’s prow before another flight of arrows could fall. Her sword fell upon the second anchor line, severing it clean, and she threw herself against the gunwale facing the shore.
A long moment passed. The longship Reinen did not stir in the river. Grislae felt a scream building behind her breast, a yelp of frustration and rage. She held it back with clenched teeth. There were cries of men from the shore, and another vicious rain of arrows.
“Fuck you, you fucking sheep!” she yelled, allowing some of the titanic anger in her to spill out. Just a little. She had so much more to give. The shield clattered on the deck as she snatched an oar from its mooring hole, half-crawling toward where the pier met the Reinen. On her knees, one foot braced upon an oarsman’s bench, she peeked up, planted the long oar on the soft wood of the pier, and pushed. Her body thrummed and creaked with stress and inaction. “Odin,” she said, but could not be sure it came out as words. Torchlight came from the burnt fishing hut. There was a cry and another flight of arrows fell. Thunk thunk thunk thunk.
Almost imperceptibly, the Reinen moved.
More arrows flew. But these were different. They rose burning, trailing oily black smoke. The soldiers of Risle had wrapped their arrows with pitch-soaked rags. And now the Reinen was itself feathered with fire. More cries came from the shore, and the clomp of many boots sounded on wood. Torchlight neared.
The distance between the Reinen and the shore grew, bit by bit. And grew further as the Reinen was caught in the faster currents of the river.
More burning arrows fell, but hissed as they were extinguished by the river. Soon the husk of the fishing hut, the soldiers of Risle, and the accursed shore all diminished, disappearing in the fog. The muffled cries grew faint. Then there was only silence, the sizzle of burning pitch arrows, and the gurgle of the river as the Reinen floated downstream to the sea.
“Grissssslay,” Snurri called from beneath her. “Grissssslay. Come.”
Grislae turned slowly on the empty deck, listening with her sole remaining ear.
“What has become of you, Snurri?” she asked.
There was a long silence. She moved to the prow and reclaimed her dropped sword.
“Snurri, I would have an answer,” she said. Some of the bulwark was beginning to burn where the arrow had ignited it. Her first inclination was to draw up a bucket and extinguish the spreading flames, but Snurri’s voice made her pause.
More silence, but for a rustling and the crackle of flames.
Grislae returned to the covered stern. Touching Heingistr’s neck, she found no thrum of life there, no stirring of his blood. Grabbing a handful of acrid-smelling touchwood, she stuffed it into her tunic and picked up the jar of oil the women had used for cooking. Her sword held in her off hand, she slowly descended the narrow wooden stairs into the belly of the longship.
It was dark in the Reinen’s hold. Crates of spoils, casks of provender, and barrels of fresh water lined the hull walls. The slaves they had taken were all missing, along with the goats. Firelight from the deck fell in patches through the grating, illuminating a shifting, undulating floor that was all too familiar to Grislae. Snakes. Countless snakes, writhing and churning in a mass, falling into the bilgewater below and slithering up again.
“Snurri,” she said. “What has become of you, Snurri?”
“At firssst, I thought it a cursssse. But now, I realize, a blessssing. I am become…” Snurri’s voice came soft and low. Something moved in the darkness. The longship Reinen pitched slightly, as if a great stone had been rolled from one side of the hold to the other. The stench of fish and the familiar scent of death from the shadowy interior of the ship, along with a wet, scraping sound.
Then it came into the light.
Five times the size of a man, it was naked save for scales, and devoid of all hair and human features, like a once jagged stone left in fast-running water and smoothed by the current. Snurri, or what remained of him, truncated in a great serpent’s body, disappearing behind him, into the dark. Of his torso, the musculature and bones had been wrenched about in some gruesome transformation, so that his arms flared out like a cloak’s hood caught in wind.
The worst was his head. It had grown large, tremendous, and distended in a slick, hairless wedge, creased by a great, gaping maw that smelled of freshly split flesh and old death.
“Grisssslay,” it said. “I am become… wondrousssss.”
The thing slithered forward and raised its head. Its mouth opened wide. Grislae saw the vicious maw was lined with countless teeth and wondered how the thing could vocalize at all. It was a mouth to get lost in, a mouth to fall inside and find yourself shat out into Hel.
“You are about as wondrous as a piece of shite,” she said.
Its great head reared back at her words. “I am the offssspring of Yig! The child of wondrous Yig!”
“You sorry fuck, I do not spare children,” Grislae said, and hurled the jar of oil at the thing. It shattered, sending viscous fluid everywhere.
Snurri lashed forward, his serpentine maw open, his body a single scaled spring. Grislae was ready. Leaping to the side, she drove the point of her sword into the thing’s eye as far as she could. The serpent whipped about, thrashing violently. The wedge of its head smacked into Grislae’s torso, and she was knocked back, hard, onto her arse. She crab-walked backward, scrambling up the stairs to the deck.
The arrows’ flames had grown during her time below. Smoked teared her eyes. She pulled the touchwood from her tunic, set it alight and tossed it down the stairs into the hold. Flames and heat whooshed out of the opening as the spilled oil caught.
The Reinen shifted and pitched as thunderous blows shook the hull of the longship.
“We are the Children of Yig!” the serpent Snurri cried. “We are the sumptuous brood! We are —”
“Good and fucked,” Grislae said, and turning, she dived off the Reinen.
The current was swift, and she found herself borne away from the longship. Despite her weariness, she swam clear to shore, pulling herself out of the water and slumping on her back in exhaustion. She was at the point where the river became bay, and would eventually become sea.
The Reinen was a torch upon the waters. The sail, bundled against the mast, caught fire, and for a moment, in the conflagration, Grislae thought she could see a great serpent’s head worming its way into the world above… Then something exploded, perhaps more touchwood or oil in the hold, and the serpent was gone, replaced only by tongues of flame, licking at the night sky.