“Why did you do that?” the fat priest asked in surprise.
“Why? Because I’m Ulf, because I wanted the sheep. A woman acting a man’s part, it’s unnatural anyway.”
“The next day I went back to Hallstein’s stead, and the flocks had already been driven in. I went into the garth around the buildings and called for the master to come out and fetch me a sheep.” The berserkers teeth ground audibly as he remembered. Johann saw his knuckles whiten on the axe helve and stiffened in terror.
“Ho!” Ulf shouted, bringing his left hand down on the shield slung at his horse’s flank. The copper boss rang like thunder in the clouds. “She came out,” Ulf grated, “and her hair was red. ‘All our sheep are penned,’ says she, ‘but you’re in good time for the butchering.’ And from out the hall came her three brothers and the men of the stead, ten in all. They were in full armor and their swords were in their hands. And they would have slain me, Ulf Otgeir’s son, me, at a woman’s word. Forced me to run from a woman!”
The berserker was snarling his words to the forest. Johann knew he watched a scene that had been played a score of times with only the trees to witness. The rage of disgrace burned in Ulf like pitch in a pine faggot, and his mind was lost to everything except the past.
“But I came back,” he continued, “in the darkness, when all feasted within the hall and drank their ale to victory. Behind the hall burned a log fire to roast a sheep. I killed the two there, and I thrust one of the logs half-burnt up under the eaves. Then at the door I waited until those within noticed the heat and Thora looked outside.
“ ‘Greetings, Thora,’ I said. ‘You would not give me mutton, so I must roast men tonight.’ She asked me for speech. I knew she was fey, so I listened to her. And she told me of the Parma lord and the treasure he brought back from Ireland, gold and gems. And she said it was cursed that a troll should guard it, and that I must have a mass priest, for the troll could not cross a Christian’s fire and I should slay him then.”
“Didn’t you spare her for that?” Johann quavered, more fearful of silence than he was of misspeaking.
“Spare her? No, nor any of her house,” Ulf thundered back. “She might better have asked the flames for mercy, as she knew. The fire was at her hair. I struck her, and never was a woman better made for an axe to bite—she cleft like a waxen doll, and I threw the pieces back. Her brothers came then, but one and one and one through the doorway, and I killed each in his turn. No more came. When the roof fell, I left them with the ash for a headstone and went my way to find a mass priest—to find you, priestling.” Ulf, restored to good humor by the climax of his own tale, tweaked the lead cord again.
Johann choked onto his horse’s neck, nauseated as much by the story as by the noose. At last he said, thick-voiced, “Why do you trust her tale if she knew you would kill her with it or not?”
“She was fey,” Ulf chuckled, as if that explained everything. “Who knows what a man will do when his death is upon him? Or a woman,” he added more thoughtfully.
They rode on in growing darkness. With no breath of wind to stir them, the trees stood as dead as the rocks underfoot.
“Will you know the place?” the German asked suddenly. “Shouldn’t we camp now and go on in the morning?”
“I’ll know it,” Ulf grunted. “We’re not far now—we’re going downhill, can’t you feel?” He tossed his bare haystack of hair, silvered into a false sheen of age by the moon. He continued, “The Parma lord sacked a dozen churches, so they say, and then one more with more of gold than the twelve besides, but also the curse. And he brought it back with him to Parma, and there it rests in his barrow, the troll guarding it. That I have on Thora’s word.”
“But she hated you!”
“She was fey.”
They were into the trees, and looking to either side Johann could see hill slopes rising away from them. They were in a valley, Parma or another. Scraps of wattle and daub, the remains of a house or garth fence, thrust up to the right. The firs that had grown through it were generations old. Johann’s stubbled tonsure crawled in the night air.
“She said there was a clearing,” the berserker muttered, more to himself than his companion. Johann’s horse stumbled. The priest clutched the cord reflexively as it tightened. When he looked up at his captor, he saw the huge Northerner fumbling at his shield’s fastenings. For the first time that evening, a breeze stirred. It stank of death.
“Others have been here before us,” said Ulf needlessly.
A row of skulls, at least a score of them, stared blank-eyed from atop stakes rammed through their spinal openings. To one, dried sinew still held the lower jaw in a ghastly rictus; the others had fallen away into the general scatter of bones whitening the ground. All of them were human or could have been. They were mixed with occasional glimmers of buttons and rust smears. The freshest of the grisly trophies was very old, perhaps decades old. Too old to explain the reek of decay.
Ulf wrapped his left fist around the twin handles of his shield. It was a heavy circle of linden wood, faced with leather. Its rim and central boss were of copper, and rivets of bronze and copper decorated the face in a serpent pattern.
“Good that the moon is full,” Ulf said, glancing at the bright orb still tangled in the fir branches. “I fight best in the moonlight. We’ll let her rise the rest of the way, I think.”
Johann was trembling. He joined his hands about his saddle horn to keep from falling off the horse. He knew Ulf might let him jerk and strangle there, even after dragging him across half the northlands. The humor of the idea might strike him. Johann’s rosary, his crucifix—everything he had brought from Germany or purchased in Schleswig save his robe—had been left behind in Hedeby when the berserker awakened him in his bed. Ulf had jerked a noose to near-lethal tautness and whispered that he needed a priest, that this one would do, but that there were others should this one prefer to feed crows. The disinterested bloodlust in Ulf’s tone had been more terrifying than the threat itself. Johann had followed in silence to the waiting horses. In despair, he wondered again if a quick death would not have been better than this lingering one that had ridden for weeks a mood away from him.
“It looks like a palisade for a house,” the priest said aloud in what he pretended was a normal voice.
“That’s right,” Ulf replied, giving his axe in exploratory heft that sent shivers of moonlight across the blade. “There was a hall here, a big one. Did it bum, do you think?” His knees sent his roan gelding forward in a shambling walk past the line of skulls. Johann followed of necessity.
“No, rotted away,” the berserker said, bending over to study the post holes.
“You said it had been deserted a long time,” the priest commented. His eyes were fixed straight forward. One of the skulls was level with his waist and close enough to bite him, could it turn on its stake.
“There was time for the house to fall in, the ground is damp,” Ulf agreed. “But the stakes, then, have been replaced. Our troll keeps his front fence new, priestling.”
Johann swallowed, said nothing.
Ulf gestured briefly. “Come on, you have to get your fire ready. I want it really holy.”
“But we don’t sacrifice with fires. I don’t know how—”
“Then learn!” the berserker snarled with a vicious yank that drew blood and a gasp from the German. “I’ve seen how you Christ-shouters love to bless things. You’ll bless me a fire, that’s all. And if anything goes wrong and the troll spares you—I won’t, priestling. I’ll rive you apart if I have to come off a stake to do it.”