The Broken Sword

XVIII

Skafloc and Freda took shelter in a cave. It was a deep hole in a cliff that slanted back from the seashore, well north of the elf-hills. Behind it was a forest of ice-sheathed trees which grew thicker towards the south and faded into moor and highland toward the north. Dark and drear was that land, unpeopled by men or Faerie folk, and thus about as safe as any place from which to carry on the war.

They could use little magic, for fear of being sensed by the trolls, but Skafloc did a good deal of hunting in guise of the wolf or otter or eagle whose skins Freda had brought, and he conjured ale from seawater. It was hard work merely to keep alive in that wintery world—the hardest winter that England remembered since almost the time of the Great Ice—and he spent most of his days ranging for game.

Dank and chill was the cave. Winds whittered in its mouth and surf pounded on the rocks at its foot. But when Skafloc came back from his first long hunt, he thought for a moment he had found the wrong place.

A fire blazed cheerily on a hearthstone, with smoke guided out a rude pipe of wicker and green hides. Other skins made a warm covering on floor and walls, and one hung in the cave mouth against the wind. The horses were tethered in the rear, chewing hay that Skafloc had magicked from kelp, and the spare weapons were polished and stacked in a row as if this were a feasting hall. And behind each weapon was a little spray of red winter berries.

Crouched over the fire and turning meat on a spit was Freda. Skafloc stopped in midstride. His heart stumbled at sight of her. She wore only a brief tunic, and her slim long-legged body, with its gentle curves of thigh and waist and breast, seemed poised in the gloom like a bird ready for flight.

She saw him come in, and from under tousled ruddy hair, in the flushed and smoke-smudged face, her great grey eyes kindled with gladness. Wordlessly she sped to him, with her dear coltish gait, and they held each other close for a while.

He asked wonderingly: “How did you ever do this, my sweet?”

She laughed softly. “I am no bear, or man, to make a heap of leaves and call that home for the winter. Some of these skins and so on we had, the rest I got for myself. Oh, I am a good housewife.” Pressing against him, shivering: “You were so long away, and time was so empty. I had to pass the days, and make myself weary enough to sleep at night.”

His own hands shook as he fondled her. “This is no stead for you. Hard and dangerous is the outlaw life. I should take you to a human garth, to await our victory or forget our defeat.”

“No-no, never shall you do that!” She grasped his ears and pulled till his mouth lay on hers. Presently, half laughing and half sobbing: “I have said I will not leave you. No, Skafloc, ’twill be harder than that to get rid of me.”

“Truth to tell,” he admitted after a while, “I do not know what I would do without you. Naught would seem worth the trouble any more.”

“Then do not leave me, ever again.”

“I must hunt, dearest one.”

“I will hunt with you.” She waved at the hides and the roasting meat. “I am not unskilled at that.”

“Nor at other things,” he laughed. Turned grim again: “It is not game alone I will be stalking, Freda, but also trolls.”

“There too will I be.” The girl’s countenance grew hard as his own. “Think you I have no vengeance to take?” His head lifted in pride, until he bent to kiss her anew like an osprey stooping on its catch. “Then so be it! And Orm the warrior could be glad of such a daughter.” Her fingers traced the lines of his cheekbone and jaw.

“Know you not who your father was?” she asked.

“No.” He grew uneasy, remembering Tyr’s words. “I never did.”

“No matter,” she smiled, “save that he too could be proud. I think Orm the Strong would have given all his wealth for a son like you—not that Ketil and Asmund were weaklings. And failing that, he must be glad indeed to see you joined with his daughter.”

As the winter deepened, life grew yet harder. Hunger was often a guest in the cave, and chill crept in past the hide door and the fire until only huddled together in bearskins could Skafloc and Freda find warmth. For days on end they would be afield, riding the swift elf horses which sank not into the snow, seeking game in a vast white emptiness.

Now and again they would come on the blackened ruins of an elf garth. At such times Skafloc grew white about the nostrils and said nothing for many hours. Once in a while a living elf would appear, gaunt and ragged, but the man did not try to build up a band. It would only draw the enemy’s heed without being able to stand before him. Could help be gotten from outside, then there might be sense in leagues like that.

Always he was on the lookout for trolls. If he found their tracks, he and the girl would be off at a wild gallop. At a large group they would shoot arrows from afar, then wheel and race away; or Skafloc might wait for daylight, then creep into whatever the shelter was wherein the trolls slept and cut throats. Were there no more than two or three, he would be on them with a sword whose whine, together with Freda’s arrow-buzz, was the last sound they heard.

Relentless was that hunt, on both sides. Often they crouched in cave or beneath windfall while troll pursuit went before their eyes, and naught but a thin screen of wizardry wrought by the rune staves, hardly hiding them from a straight-on glance, covered their spoor. Arrows and spears and slung stones hissed after them when they fled from shooting down two or three of a company. From their home cave they saw troll longships row past, near enough for them to count the rivets in the warriors’ shields.

And it was cold, cold.

Yet in that life they truly found each other. They learned that their bodies were the least of what there was to love. Skafloc wondered how he could have had the heart to wage his fight without Freda. Her arrows had brought down trolls, and her daring schemes of ambush still more—but the kisses she gave him in their dear moments of peace were what drove him to his own deeds, and the help and comfort she gave every hour were what upheld his strength. And to her, he was the greatest and bravest and kindest of men, her sword and shield at once, lover and oath-brother.

She even owned to herself, feeling a little guilty that she did not feel very guilty, that she did not much miss her Faith. Skafloc had explained that its words and signs would upset the magic he needed. For her part, she decided it would be blasphemous to use them for mere advantage in a war between two soulless tribes; better, even safer maybe, to leave prayers unspoken. As for that war, since it was Skafloc’s it was hers. Someday after it was won she would get him to listen to a priest, and surely God would not withhold belief from a man like this.

Harsh was the outlaw life, but she felt her body respond, in keenness of sense and tautness of sinew and endurance of spirit. The wind flogged the blood in her veins till it tingled; the stars lent their brightness to her eyes. When life balanced on a sword-edge, she learned to taste each moment of it with a fullness she had not dreamed before.

Strange, she thought, how even when hungry and cold and afraid they had no hard words between them. They thought and acted like one, as if they had come from the same mould. Their differences were merely those in which each filled the need of the other.

“I bragged once to Imric that I had never known fear, or defeat, or love-sickness,” said Skafloc. He lay in the cave with his head on her lap, letting her comb his wind-tangled hair. “He said those were the three ends and beginnings of human life. At that time I understood him not. Now I see he was wise.”

“How should he know?” she asked.

“I cannot say, for elves know defeat only sometimes, fear seldom, and love never. But since meeting you, dear, I have found all three in myself. I was becoming more elf than man. You are making me human again, and elfhood fades within me.”

“And somewhat of elf has entered my blood. I fear that less and less do I think of what is right and holy, more and more of what is useful and pleasant. My sins grow heavy—”

Skafloc hauled her face down to his. “In that you do well. This muttering of duty and law and sin brings no good.”

“You speak profanely—” she began. He stopped her words with a kiss. She sought to pull free, and it ended in a laughing, tumbling wrestling match. By the time they were done, she had forgotten her forebodings.

But after the trolls finished wasting the elf lands, they withdrew into their strongholds, rarely venturing out except in troops too big to attack. Skafloc, who by killing a number of deer had laid in ample frozen meat, grew moody in idleness. His banter dropped off and he spent days at a time hunched surly in the cave.

Freda sought to cheer him. “Now are we in less danger,” she said.

“What good is that, when we cannot fight?” he answered. “We only wait for the end. Alfheim is dying. Soon every realm in Faerie will belong to the trolls. And I-I sit here!”

Another day he went out and saw a raven beating upwind under the lowering sky. The sea dashed on rocks at his feet, rattled and roared back for a new leap, and spindrift froze where it struck.

“What news?” called Skafloc in the raven tongue. It was not in such words that he spoke or was spoken to, for beasts and birds have different sorts of language from men, but the meaning is near enough.

“I come from south beyond the channel to fetch my kindred,” replied the raven. “Valland and Wendland have fallen to the trolls, Scania totters, and the Elfking’s armies go back and back towards his middle domains. Good is the feasting, but ravens had best hurry thither, for the war cannot last much longer.”

At this such anger blazed up in Skafloc that he put an arrow to his bow and shot the bird. But when it lay dead at his feet the wrath drained from him, leaving an emptiness which sorrow rose slowly to fill.

“It was wicked to slay you, brother,” he said low, “who have done no harm, who rather do good by clearing the stinking clutter of the past from this world. Friendly you were to me, and defenseless, yet I slew you and let my foes sit in peace.”

He turned back into the cave, and of a sudden he was weeping. The sobs nigh shook his ribs apart. Freda held him, murmuring to him as to a child, and he wept himself out on her breast.

That night he could not sleep. “Alfheim is falling,” he mumbled. “Before the snows melt, Alfheim will be a memory. Naught is left but for me to ride against the trolls and take as many as may be down hell-road with me.”

“Say not that,” she answered. “It would be a stupid betrayal of your trust—and of me too. Better and braver to live, fighting.”

“Fighting with what?” he asked bitterly. “The elf ships are sunken or scattered, the warriors dead or in chains or hunted like us. Wind, snow, and wolves dwell in the proud castles, and the foe sits in the high seat of our olden lords. Alone are the elves, naked, starving, weaponless—”

She kissed him. As it were a lightning bolt, he seemed to see before his eyes the gleam of a sword lifted high across darkness.

For a long moment she felt him stiff as an iron bar but trembling as if that bar were hammerstruck; and then he breathed into the gloom: “The sword—the naming-gift of the Aisir-aye, the sword—”

A formless fear sprang high in her. “What do you mean? What sword is this?”

So as they lay in the dark, close together against the frost, he whispered it to her, soft in her ears as if afraid the night would listen. He told how Skirnir brought the broken glaive, how Imric hid it in the wall of Elfheugh’s dungeons, and how Tyr had warned that the time was nigh when he would have need of it.

In the end he felt her shiver in his clutch, she who had hunted armed trolls. Her voice came small and unsteady: “I like it not, Skafloc. It is no good thing.”

“Not good?” he cried. “Why, it is the one last great hope we have left. Odin, who reads the morrow, must have foreseen this day of Alfheim’s undoing-must have given us the sword against it. Weaponless? Ha, we will show them otherwise !”

“It is wrong to deal with heathen things, most of all when the heathen gods offer them,” she pleaded. “Evil must come of it. Oh, my beloved, forget the sword!”

“True, the gods doubtless have their own ends,” he said “but those need not be at odds with ours, I think Faerie is a chessboard on which Aisir and Jötuns move elves and trolls, in some game beyond our understanding. Yet the wise chessplayer takes care of his pieces.”

“But the sword is buried in Elfheugh.”

“I will get in somehow. I have an idea already.”

“The sword is broken. How shall you—we-find that giant who it is said can mend it? How make him forge it anew to be used against his kin the trolls?”

“There will be a way.” Skafloc’s tone rang like metal. “Even now I know one means to find out how, though it is dangerous. We may well fail, aye, but the gods’ gift is our last chance.”

“The gods’ gift.” She began to weep in her turn. “I tell you, naught but harm can come of this. I feel it in me, cold and heavy. If you embark on this search, Skafloc, our days together are numbered.”

“Would you leave me on that account?” he asked, aghast.

“No-no, my darling—” She clung to him, blind with darkness and tears. “It is but a whisper in my soul-yet I know—”

He drew her closer still. Wildly he kissed her, until her head swam, and he laughed and was joyous; finally she could do no else than drive the fears from her awareness, for they were unworthy of Skafloc’s bride, and be glad with him.

But there was a yearning in her love which had not been there before. In her inmost deeps, she felt that they would not have many more times like this.