The mellow afternoon rain patters on the wolf fur draped over Brynjar’s shoulders. The raindrops clang a maddening beat on his helmet, so he takes it off and holds it in his left hand. In his right hand is his axe. He raises its handle’s stump and pounds on the door in front of him.
The farm stands in an open green field by the shore, below steep hills that slope up to the inland volcanic mountains. The rain’s noise hammers over the cawing seagulls and the rush of the storming waves behind him. Each step of his leather boots sloshes in wet grass.
The timber door creaks and swings inward. A slender, blonde woman looks up at Brynjar. She opens her mouth in a shocked, wordless gape. Her stupid, blank eyes make his blood seethe in his throat. He raises his helmet and smashes it on her nose.
She screams and falls back into the house. Her hand covers the blood that seeps around her mouth. Her underdress trails on the floor, as she crawls towards the table inside. Two children sit around it, a boy and a little girl with sun-bright hair and stew around her mouth.
The boy is older. His shoulders are starting to broaden, but his beard hasn’t grown yet. He is not the man Brynjar is looking for, but his face is much the same. The boy kicks his chair back, fumbles his knife out of the stew, and waves it towards the intruder.
“You!” says the boy. “You go away!”
“Do you know who I am?” Brynjar walks deeper into the farmhouse.
The boy steps past his mom and waves the knife, still slick with brown stew, at the man’s chest. “I don’t care,” he says. “Get away, bandit!”
“I am not the bandit,” says Brynjar. The boy’s arm shakes in front of him. The kitchen knife couldn’t cut the man’s skin, much less the chain mail he wears under his wool jacket. “Where is Olafr, the coward?”
“Don’t say that about father!”
“Ingvald,” says the little girl, who still forks through her stew. “Who is the man?”
“Hush, girl,” says their mother and uses the table to raise herself to a stand. “It is farm business. You can eat still.”
“You are bleeding,” says the girl.
“Farm business can be serious.” The woman turns, lays her hand on the boy’s arm, and says, “The man wears armor. Your butter knife will not do.”
The boy, Ingvald, turns to her. Brynjar could slap the knife out of his hand but doesn’t need to. Ingvald mutters, “Mother…”
“Look at him,” she says. “We have to talk to him.”
“You must be Ingjerd,” says Brynjar. “The coward told me about your cunt, but your tits are smaller than he says. Where is he?”
She wears a blank face. Blood drips from her chin and stains the chest of her grey underdress. “Olafr died months ago.”
“Of course he did,” says Brynjar with a harsh grin. “My blade I took from an English witch.”
“A witchblade,” she says and lowers her eyes. Her face stiffens in a mask that hides her feeling.
“Any who steals it will die,” says Brynjar.
“The stupid man.” She keeps her face in a mask and shakes her head.
“Where is the sword?”
She looks back up. “We buried it with him. It was his wish.”
“Of course he did.” Brynjar shakes his head. “And in a big stone mound, didn’t you?”
“The biggest this side of the fjord.” Ingvald puffs his chest out and forgets to scowl.
“And now you’ll tear it back down.”
His face finds again his scowl.
“It isn’t needed,” says the women. “You can enter.”
“He made you to build an entrance for him.” Brynjar nods. The grime on his rain-wet face shines in the firelight. “So you can visit him and give him offerings of sheep meat and iron.”
The woman grunts and nods.
“Are you seeing father?” The bright voice of the little girl in the back rings above Brynjar’s heavy air.
The woman opens her mouth, but Brynjar cuts her off. “I am seeing a pile of bones, and I am taking my sword back.”
“Can you bring him this?” She picks a small bone out of her stew with her hands, bounces off her chair, and runs over to him. With straggly, blond hair and bright eyes, she reaches it up to him and says, “He likes the thigh bones.”
Brynjar takes the bone and packs it in his belt. The girl’s eyes do not part with his. He does not want to look away and does not want to speak, but she does not look away either.
“Do you want to see him?” The woman’s voice snaps him out of it.
He looks around the room, finds Ingvald, and points his axe at him. “I will bring the boy.”
“I was coming anyway.” Ingvald spits on the floor.
Brynjar walks out of the door with the boy next to him. They walk up the hill behind the farm. Obsidian earth below bright green grass. Every heavy step drowns a plant patch in rain-soaked dirt. With each new hundred steps, another black island peeks over the ocean horizon, until the grey rainclouds hide all beyond.
The woman walks behind, almost out of view. She clasps her hands in front of her dress. Her sleeve is blood-dark, but she couldn’t wipe all of it off her face. Still some blood from her nose stains down her cheek and around her mouth. Brynjar ignores her and marches her son up the hill.
In the mountainside, below the volcano’s peak stands a rounded hut of obsidian stones. It is smaller than any farm, but a man can lie down and straighten his legs inside. The grass is sparse up here. All trees are dead.
“That is where your thief father lies.” Brynjar points his axe at the stone heap.
“He is waiting for you,” says Ingvald.
“I won’t go in that creepy pile,” says Brynjar. “You’re gonna fetch that for me.”
“You’re gonna kiss my ass.”
Brynjar lunges towards Ingvald. The boy purses his lips in an oval shout and flails his arms in front of his face, but the man grabs his wrists and flings him into the path that leads down into the stones. The boy stumbles in the trodden, yellow grass and pushes himself back up. With hollow eyes, he stares back at Brynjar.
“Walk back to your father!” says the man.
“I’m not getting it for you.”
Brynjar twirls his axe above his head. With the blunt back end, he swings into the boy’s chest. Ingvald falls on his back in front of the mound’s black entry. He clutches his belly and coughs in the dead grass.
The man plants his feet wide in front of the walk down to the grave. The mound looks bigger up close. The path digs into the earth to the low floor, so the grave could house a tall, standing man. The wide, stony hollow could hold all the treasures of all the raids of Brynjar’s life.
He stomps the ground in front of the boy. “Crawl in to your old man!”
The boy says nothing. He pushes off the ground and scampers backwards in below the stones, while he sneers at the man.
Brynjar keeps a wide stance, his chest puffed, and an angry grimace, while he waits for his artifact at the top of the path. The wind slowly starts to chill his skin and freeze his fingertips. A deeper darkness rises behind the rainclouds.
“You should not have sent him to his father.”
Brynjar catches himself in a sleepy posture and looks up to the woman. She sits on the obsidian stones next to the path into the mound. He shakes his head and sits next to her.
“Your boy plays games,” he says. “I should cut a line over your cheek as punishment.” He rests his hands on his thighs and watches her face. The rain has washed away her blood made waves in her long, blonde hair. He punched her so quickly before, he didn’t notice what she looked like. Now he can’t look away.
“You sent my boy to his father,” says the woman. “You should go and see why he does not return. You should punish him if it is his fault.”
“Ja,” says the man and stands. The dark inside the grave mound looks no different from the darkness outside. Night is within and without. The man sheaths his axe. Hunger growls in his belly. The boy will be starved and curled in a ball in a small corner of the mound now, crying and hopeless.
Brynjar walks into the grave. His sight is black, while his eyes adjust to the light. The dry stone ground grinds under his boot.
“You came after me.” A deep voice grates in the darkness. “You seek my bane. It lies before you.”
Brynjar stumbles forward. A hard edge cracks on his shin. The blackness reveals a pale skeleton shape that lies on a circular stone altar in front of him. Each clean bone is arranged in a fine, branching pattern around the center. The coward’s skull sits on the far end. Below it, inside the bone ring, lies the witchblade.
Brynjar steps around the plateau. His foot stumbles on a low pile that falls and rolls over the stone. The reek of rotten meat and old, musty grain strikes him. Prayer offerings cover the ground around his feet. He does not see any scared boy in the darkness.
“It has a new home after you.” The deep voice rings from anywhere inside the grave. “But it does not have to be this way.”
The witchblade drains any light inside the grave. Brynjar sees only its steel and a shimmer in the bones. Their arrangement branches like rune staves out from the weapon. He rests his hands on the stone and leans over the handle.
He stares at the old, dark steel of the English witch’s sword. The pain of the coward’s theft burns in his chest. His panting breath fogs on the shining blade.
“Take it back.” The voice rumbles deeper in the darkness. “Grip the hilt. You want to know me again.”
Brynjar reaches into the bone ring and curls his fingers around the cold hilt. He lifts it while his eyes adjust to the witch sight that reveals the inside of the mound. Rotting relics and prayer offerings strew on the obsidian floor.
By the wall on his left, he sees a creature curled into a ball on the floor. Its muscles have withered under its pale skin and left its arms and legs little more than skeleton limbs. The white hair on its head is balding in patches. It stares unblinking with wide, black eyes up at Brynjar.
A sullen moan rises like an echo from the other side of a thin veil. It comes from the bones in the stone circle. Brynjar tears his eyes off the unblinking creature and sees a moving head in the place of the dead skull.
With pale skin and tongue cut out of the mouth, Olafr’s head lies on the altar’s end. It watches his own bones spread below it in the shape of a shimmering runic seal. His moans fill his grave with a sinking chill.
“You come to thieve again.” The deep voice comes not from Olafr or the silent creature on the floor. “You have found theft.”
Brynjar screams and runs through the grave. He kicks sacrifice piles in front of him and storms out of the mound, into the damp night air. The moon shines through the clouds and glitters in the sea below.
The woman stands in Brynjar’s way in the path up from the mound. Her wild hair floats in the air around her head and shines silver in the moonlight. Deep blackness settles in her eyes. Warts fester on her crooked nose and around her mouth. Her dry, bent, cracked form cackles at the man’s fear.
Brynjar grips the witchblade with both hands and points it to her. “What did you do to him?”
“I am still doing it to him.” The witch’s deep, rumbling voice comes from the air all around them.
“It is unnatural!”
“You will learn about what is unnatural.”
He raises the sword above his head and lunges with a scream at the witch. Faster than a blink, she jumps and catches his forehead with the palm of her right hand. He stops feeling his body. The witchblade clanks on the stone. His legs collapse beneath him. He watches his torso, severed from his head at the neck, crash on the ground. The chain mail jangles and rolls to a stop.
The witch carries his head in front of her. He can’t look away from her black eyes, as she walks him back into the grave. Her pleasing human features have returned, and her blonde hair and blue eyes. But her smile is inhuman and cruel. Her voice rings with the same depth that fills his world.
“I do not need your bones when I have his.” She carries him back into the darkness. “Ingvald, find a place for his head.”
The boy comes to her and carries Brynjar to the altar’s end near the entry and opposite Olafr. He stares at the coward’s skull. The beautiful witch returns with her blade. She lays it between the heads, in the center of the bone ring.
Brynjar tries to speak but finds his tongue rotted in his mouth. He struggles to move but cannot feel anything except the cold stone altar below his neck. His meek moans fill the grave. Tears roll down his cheeks. Their salt stings in his throat’s open wound.
The witch and the boy leave Brynjar in the darkness with the skull of his old comrade. Once every moon, he forgets the witchblade and who he is, until the boy brings an offering of lamb meat and grains.
The mellow afternoon rain patters on the wolf fur draped over Brynjar’s shoulders. The raindrops clang a maddening beat on his helmet, so he takes it off and holds it in his left hand. In his right hand is his axe. He raises its handle’s stump and pounds on the door in front of him.
The farm stands in an open green field by the shore, below steep hills that slope up to the inland volcanic mountains. The rain’s noise hammers over the cawing seagulls and the rush of the storming waves behind him. Each step of his leather boots sloshes in wet grass.
The timber door creaks and swings inward. A slender, blonde woman looks up at Brynjar. She opens her mouth in a shocked, wordless gape. Her stupid, blank eyes make his blood seethe in his throat. He raises his helmet and smashes it on her nose.
She screams and falls back into the house. Her hand covers the blood that seeps around her mouth. Her underdress trails on the floor, as she crawls towards the table inside. Two children sit around it, a boy and a little girl with sun-bright hair and stew around her mouth.
The boy is older. His shoulders are starting to broaden, but his beard hasn’t grown yet. He is not the man Brynjar is looking for, but his face is much the same. The boy kicks his chair back, fumbles his knife out of the stew, and waves it towards the intruder.
“You!” says the boy. “You go away!”
“Do you know who I am?” Brynjar walks deeper into the farmhouse.
The boy steps past his mom and waves the knife, still slick with brown stew, at the man’s chest. “I don’t care,” he says. “Get away, bandit!”
“I am not the bandit,” says Brynjar. The boy’s arm shakes in front of him. The kitchen knife couldn’t cut the man’s skin, much less the chain mail he wears under his wool jacket. “Where is Olafr, the coward?”
“Don’t say that about father!”
“Ingvald,” says the little girl, who still forks through her stew. “Who is the man?”
“Hush, girl,” says their mother and uses the table to raise herself to a stand. “It is farm business. You can eat still.”
“You are bleeding,” says the girl.
“Farm business can be serious.” The woman turns, lays her hand on the boy’s arm, and says, “The man wears armor. Your butter knife will not do.”
The boy, Ingvald, turns to her. Brynjar could slap the knife out of his hand but doesn’t need to. Ingvald mutters, “Mother…”
“Look at him,” she says. “We have to talk to him.”
“You must be Ingjerd,” says Brynjar. “The coward told me about your cunt, but your tits are smaller than he says. Where is he?”
She wears a blank face. Blood drips from her chin and stains the chest of her grey underdress. “Olafr died months ago.”
“Of course he did,” says Brynjar with a harsh grin. “My blade I took from an English witch.”
“A witchblade,” she says and lowers her eyes. Her face stiffens in a mask that hides her feeling.
“Any who steals it will die,” says Brynjar.
“The stupid man.” She keeps her face in a mask and shakes her head.
“Where is the sword?”
She looks back up. “We buried it with him. It was his wish.”
“Of course he did.” Brynjar shakes his head. “And in a big stone mound, didn’t you?”
“The biggest this side of the fjord.” Ingvald puffs his chest out and forgets to scowl.
“And now you’ll tear it back down.”
His face finds again his scowl.
“It isn’t needed,” says the women. “You can enter.”
“He made you to build an entrance for him.” Brynjar nods. The grime on his rain-wet face shines in the firelight. “So you can visit him and give him offerings of sheep meat and iron.”
The woman grunts and nods.
“Are you seeing father?” The bright voice of the little girl in the back rings above Brynjar’s heavy air.
The woman opens her mouth, but Brynjar cuts her off. “I am seeing a pile of bones, and I am taking my sword back.”
“Can you bring him this?” She picks a small bone out of her stew with her hands, bounces off her chair, and runs over to him. With straggly, blond hair and bright eyes, she reaches it up to him and says, “He likes the thigh bones.”
Brynjar takes the bone and packs it in his belt. The girl’s eyes do not part with his. He does not want to look away and does not want to speak, but she does not look away either.
“Do you want to see him?” The woman’s voice snaps him out of it.
He looks around the room, finds Ingvald, and points his axe at him. “I will bring the boy.”
“I was coming anyway.” Ingvald spits on the floor.
Brynjar walks out of the door with the boy next to him. They walk up the hill behind the farm. Obsidian earth below bright green grass. Every heavy step drowns a plant patch in rain-soaked dirt. With each new hundred steps, another black island peeks over the ocean horizon, until the grey rainclouds hide all beyond.
The woman walks behind, almost out of view. She clasps her hands in front of her dress. Her sleeve is blood-dark, but she couldn’t wipe all of it off her face. Still some blood from her nose stains down her cheek and around her mouth. Brynjar ignores her and marches her son up the hill.
In the mountainside, below the volcano’s peak stands a rounded hut of obsidian stones. It is smaller than any farm, but a man can lie down and straighten his legs inside. The grass is sparse up here. All trees are dead.
“That is where your thief father lies.” Brynjar points his axe at the stone heap.
“He is waiting for you,” says Ingvald.
“I won’t go in that creepy pile,” says Brynjar. “You’re gonna fetch that for me.”
“You’re gonna kiss my ass.”
Brynjar lunges towards Ingvald. The boy purses his lips in an oval shout and flails his arms in front of his face, but the man grabs his wrists and flings him into the path that leads down into the stones. The boy stumbles in the trodden, yellow grass and pushes himself back up. With hollow eyes, he stares back at Brynjar.
“Walk back to your father!” says the man.
“I’m not getting it for you.”
Brynjar twirls his axe above his head. With the blunt back end, he swings into the boy’s chest. Ingvald falls on his back in front of the mound’s black entry. He clutches his belly and coughs in the dead grass.
The man plants his feet wide in front of the walk down to the grave. The mound looks bigger up close. The path digs into the earth to the low floor, so the grave could house a tall, standing man. The wide, stony hollow could hold all the treasures of all the raids of Brynjar’s life.
He stomps the ground in front of the boy. “Crawl in to your old man!”
The boy says nothing. He pushes off the ground and scampers backwards in below the stones, while he sneers at the man.
Brynjar keeps a wide stance, his chest puffed, and an angry grimace, while he waits for his artifact at the top of the path. The wind slowly starts to chill his skin and freeze his fingertips. A deeper darkness rises behind the rainclouds.
“You should not have sent him to his father.”
Brynjar catches himself in a sleepy posture and looks up to the woman. She sits on the obsidian stones next to the path into the mound. He shakes his head and sits next to her.
“Your boy plays games,” he says. “I should cut a line over your cheek as punishment.” He rests his hands on his thighs and watches her face. The rain has washed away her blood made waves in her long, blonde hair. He punched her so quickly before, he didn’t notice what she looked like. Now he can’t look away.
“You sent my boy to his father,” says the woman. “You should go and see why he does not return. You should punish him if it is his fault.”
“Ja,” says the man and stands. The dark inside the grave mound looks no different from the darkness outside. Night is within and without. The man sheaths his axe. Hunger growls in his belly. The boy will be starved and curled in a ball in a small corner of the mound now, crying and hopeless.
Brynjar walks into the grave. His sight is black, while his eyes adjust to the light. The dry stone ground grinds under his boot.
“You came after me.” A deep voice grates in the darkness. “You seek my bane. It lies before you.”
Brynjar stumbles forward. A hard edge cracks on his shin. The blackness reveals a pale skeleton shape that lies on a circular stone altar in front of him. Each clean bone is arranged in a fine, branching pattern around the center. The coward’s skull sits on the far end. Below it, inside the bone ring, lies the witchblade.
Brynjar steps around the plateau. His foot stumbles on a low pile that falls and rolls over the stone. The reek of rotten meat and old, musty grain strikes him. Prayer offerings cover the ground around his feet. He does not see any scared boy in the darkness.
“It has a new home after you.” The deep voice rings from anywhere inside the grave. “But it does not have to be this way.”
The witchblade drains any light inside the grave. Brynjar sees only its steel and a shimmer in the bones. Their arrangement branches like rune staves out from the weapon. He rests his hands on the stone and leans over the handle.
He stares at the old, dark steel of the English witch’s sword. The pain of the coward’s theft burns in his chest. His panting breath fogs on the shining blade.
“Take it back.” The voice rumbles deeper in the darkness. “Grip the hilt. You want to know me again.”
Brynjar reaches into the bone ring and curls his fingers around the cold hilt. He lifts it while his eyes adjust to the witch sight that reveals the inside of the mound. Rotting relics and prayer offerings strew on the obsidian floor.
By the wall on his left, he sees a creature curled into a ball on the floor. Its muscles have withered under its pale skin and left its arms and legs little more than skeleton limbs. The white hair on its head is balding in patches. It stares unblinking with wide, black eyes up at Brynjar.
A sullen moan rises like an echo from the other side of a thin veil. It comes from the bones in the stone circle. Brynjar tears his eyes off the unblinking creature and sees a moving head in the place of the dead skull.
With pale skin and tongue cut out of the mouth, Olafr’s head lies on the altar’s end. It watches his own bones spread below it in the shape of a shimmering runic seal. His moans fill his grave with a sinking chill.
“You come to thieve again.” The deep voice comes not from Olafr or the silent creature on the floor. “You have found theft.”
Brynjar screams and runs through the grave. He kicks sacrifice piles in front of him and storms out of the mound, into the damp night air. The moon shines through the clouds and glitters in the sea below.
The woman stands in Brynjar’s way in the path up from the mound. Her wild hair floats in the air around her head and shines silver in the moonlight. Deep blackness settles in her eyes. Warts fester on her crooked nose and around her mouth. Her dry, bent, cracked form cackles at the man’s fear.
Brynjar grips the witchblade with both hands and points it to her. “What did you do to him?”
“I am still doing it to him.” The witch’s deep, rumbling voice comes from the air all around them.
“It is unnatural!”
“You will learn about what is unnatural.”
He raises the sword above his head and lunges with a scream at the witch. Faster than a blink, she jumps and catches his forehead with the palm of her right hand. He stops feeling his body. The witchblade clanks on the stone. His legs collapse beneath him. He watches his torso, severed from his head at the neck, crash on the ground. The chain mail jangles and rolls to a stop.
The witch carries his head in front of her. He can’t look away from her black eyes, as she walks him back into the grave. Her pleasing human features have returned, and her blonde hair and blue eyes. But her smile is inhuman and cruel. Her voice rings with the same depth that fills his world.
“I do not need your bones when I have his.” She carries him back into the darkness. “Ingvald, find a place for his head.”
The boy comes to her and carries Brynjar to the altar’s end near the entry and opposite Olafr. He stares at the coward’s skull. The beautiful witch returns with her blade. She lays it between the heads, in the center of the bone ring.
Brynjar tries to speak but finds his tongue rotted in his mouth. He struggles to move but cannot feel anything except the cold stone altar below his neck. His meek moans fill the grave. Tears roll down his cheeks. Their salt stings in his throat’s open wound.
The witch and the boy leave Brynjar in the darkness with the skull of his old comrade. Once every moon, he forgets the witchblade and who he is, until the boy brings an offering of lamb meat and grains.