1NÁSTROND
The figure struggled against the water’s embrace; he thrashed as the cold undertow sucked him deeper into darkness. He tasted bitter salts and ash, as though from burned driftwood. His tattered mail, his heavy boots, his leather weapons belt … these things did nothing to help him against the grasping fingers of the sjóvættir who pulled at his legs. He could see them, these spirits of freshet and fjord, like smudges of corpse-pale flesh in the depths below; their eyes were black sockets, and hair floated like lake grass around skeletal faces. He could hear their whispered songs:
“Child of Angrboða’s folly,
Filth-born skrælingr,
Why do you fight
Dark Gjöll’s embrace?
“Or is Christ-haunted Miðgarðr
So dear to your black heart?
“Keep from the surface,
Sweet son of Bálegyr,
And let our thralls ride you
Like Svaðilfari!”
Their mockery, their laughter—like the burbles of air escaping the lips of drowning men—kindled something hot and raw in the figure’s breast. He bared jagged yellow teeth, jaws clenched against the water; his single red eye flared in the gloom. Legs knotted with muscle kicked against the undertow. They thought they knew hate, these sjóvættir? They thought they knew fury? Nár! He would show these filthy spirits what such words meant! He clawed for the surface.
Skrælingr, they called him. Son of Bálegyr. Yes, he was these things. He remembered, now. He was these things and much more, besides. In his veins ran the hot blood of Angrboða and the cold ichor of Father Loki, but Ymir—the Lord of Frosts—was his people’s sire. He was kaunr. He was Grimnir.
Grimnir.
Like the meeting of flint and steel over a cold bed of embers, the names clashed and sparked, igniting the edges of the darkness muffling his mind.
Grimnir.
Son of Bálegyr.
Skrælingr.
Kaunr.
And through that smoldering cerecloth came the ghosts of memory …
An ancient ruin in the heart of a marsh, blackened and rotting. Domes of old marble cover shrines to heretic gods and forgotten nymphs. He sidles up the crumbling road—a road verged by sedge grass and gnarled cypress; he keeps to the shadows, the gloom thickening as the sun sinks into the west. Hobnailed boots crunch old Roman stone.
Ahead, he spots those who defend his quarry: a dozen thin and wasted figures—mailed mercenaries leaning on heavy spears; arbalesters with their crossbows shouldered. The Company of the Sickle, they are called. Weak-minded fools! They are the wyrm’s thralls, and they stand between him and his foe, the dragon Níðhöggr, the cursed Malice-Striker. For that they must die.
They guard a strange conveyance: a pageant wagon with a broken axle, a gaudy ship on wheels meant for the court of the Nailed God’s earthly chieftain, the so-called Pope. The beast’s hiding place.
“Spread your men out,” a voice says. A eunuch’s voice, thin and reedy—the priest from Messina, black-cassocked and filthy. “That devil is still out there.”
The man who answers is a giant, his frame shrouded in a mail haubergeon and a coat-of-plates; he has a patrician nose and eyes that have seen death. “Devil?” he replies, scoffing. “I’ll bugger your devil, priest! He is nothing! Do you hear me? Nothing! A milk-livered whore’s son!”
Grimnir hisses at the challenge, his single eye alight with rage. He draws his long-seax with a mirthless smile …
Grimnir kicked and struggled; without warning, his foot touched solid ground, rocky and thick with silt. He thrust himself forward until his head broke the surface. He coughed; spluttering, he took in great lungfuls of acrid air.
He strikes with the onset of twilight, as the sun slips over the rim of the world. He strikes even as a fire is kindled in the weed-choked plaza, whose stones were laid in the time of the Caesars. Old wood crackles; embers drift up into the cold November air.
His first victim turns away from watching the dancing motes of cinder. He is young, barely beyond the cusp of manhood, with jaundiced, pox-scarred features and watery blue eyes. His last vision this side of the grave is of a burning eye wrapped in shadow; he opens his mouth to shout … and dies with Grimnir’s long-seax wedged in his gullet. He crumples, choking on bloody froth.
Copyright © 2023 by Scott Oden
