Midwinterblood

  He knew she did not understand, would never understand, this third young wife.

  The first two dead for decades, only with Melle had he ever felt peace, ever felt such joy, ever felt such love, and though she was young, younger than him, now she was maybe too old for children anyway.

  It mattered little. He had once believed he would sire a son, but now, he knew there would be a fight to succeed him, a fight between the three strongest of his warriors, and he already knew who would win.

  Gunnar.

  The wolf.

  He had never made any pretence that he wanted anything other than to lead the people, when Eirikr’s time was over.

  And now that time had come, a little sooner than planned, and Gunnar could not hide his delight. He, despite the suffering that filled them all, every day, strode through the village as though he was already their lord, his black beard jutting in front of him, his hand on his sword as if he was always going into war, something, thought Eirikr with a spit in his mind, that Gunnar had never done.

  Yes, Gunnar had been raiding, but raiding near defenseless peasants across the seas was nothing to walking naked into battle.

  No matter. It was Gunnar who would be king next, he could see, for he had already intimidated everyone in the village, warrior and woman alike.

  * * *

  Eirikr stood.

  All the talking, all the whispering, all the shouting and the crying were done now.

  Eirikr had never been short of words for his people, not before. Not when the crops bloomed under the sun and summer rain, not when the raiding was good, when the children came quickly and grew happily.

  He had not been short of words in times of need either, or when a warrior had fallen, or when a battle had been won, at great cost.

  And yet now, he thought, as he looked across the silent faces of his people, what words are there?

  My time has run.

  What can I say to these people now?

  I can say nothing to my queen, what then can I say to them?

  Their story will go on without me, with Gunnar to take them into whatever future awaits them. And may the gods help them all.

  Eirikr looks at his queen for the last time, and from all the thousands of memories of their time together, just one drifts into his mind; an image of them bathing together in the summer, at the south of the island. They used to spend as long as they could underwater, sleek like seals, before rising to the surface, gasping, and laughing.

  The image is gone as soon as it arrives.

  He lifts his head to his people once more.

  They wait for him to speak, and he does. “Well,” he says, so quietly only those near the front hear, “so it is.”

  The Sacrifice

  The first thing to die is that brief silence, before the supreme violence.

  It is destroyed by Melle herself, whose body cannot contain the rage and the grief any longer.

  She does not care that she is a queen anymore.

  She only knows that she loves her husband, and cannot bear to see him die.

  She tries to stand, and scrambles forward in the snow, but stumbles again immediately. Her legs will not obey her anymore; she has lost the strength, and now she tries to pull herself forward through the freezing snow, her green robes sweeping it around her in miniature drifts.

  * * *

  Thorolf nods to two of the women, who step forward and grasp Melle by the arms as she tries to stand again.

  She turns her head blindly to each of them, but they will not look at her. Their faces are set firm, and they are strong women, their hands dig into her soft arms like the winter ice grips the harbor, and she succumbs to them, her chest heaving.

  * * *

  Eirikr turns his head toward her. He sees little. He has been smoking stem as well as drinking petals, and his mind is fogged.

  My queen, he thinks.

  That’s all.

  His queen.

  He does not feel the cold, though it bites his naked skin all over his body at once.

  He lifts his head to the moon, the blood moon, and he prays that his death will rescue his people. He is no longer certain that it will, not after the other blessings, whose skulls now hang in the evergreen, but he has said this to no one, for he knows that his people have nothing else now, and that it is only a small shred of belief.

  Without it, he knows they will be dead before the next full moon.

  * * *

  He steps from the sled, letting the fox fur fall into the muddy snow at his feet.

  In front of him, the stone table waits, a simple flat rectangle, with a stubby stone pillar at each corner, to which to tie less willing sacrifices.

  From the top of the table projects a short spout, carved into the stone, thick, and wide, with a deep groove running out from the center of the bed. It is stained, a deep, rusty color, and Eirikr understands that in a few moments, it will gleam wet and bright again.

  So it is, he thinks.

  He looks at Thorolf, whose face is as unreadable as the stone bed itself.

  Thorolf nods imperceptibly, and Eirikr steps onto the bed, and stretches his arms wide.

  He feels the cold a little now, for the first time, but makes a full turn, taking in the whole scene around him, the last his eyes will ever see.

  Slowly, he kneels, then lies on his back, on the table.

  Melle’s moans become wails, and she begins to tug frantically at the hands that hold her.

  Thorolf nods at a warrior, one with a hammer in his hand, who begins to edge through the crowd toward Melle.

  Eirikr lies on the table, staring into the night sky, staring at the uncountable stars that are shining brightly down on him.

  What lives, he thinks, are lived by the men up there?

  What do they do?

  What do they believe?

  What do they see?

  Do they see me?

  He wonders about them all, all the many lives that have been, and that will be, and wonders why they are not all the same, why they are what they are. It cannot be, he thinks, that when our life is run, we are done. There must be more to man than that, surely?

  That we are not just one, but a multitude.

  * * *

  “Now,” says Thorolf, and he points at the executioner.

  The figure in red has been standing statue-still all this time, head bowed under his red hood, knife concealed, tucked up behind his forearm.

  Now, he steps forward, and in two paces he’s above Eirikr on the stone table, and though he should not, the executioner pulls the red hood from his head, showing himself to the world.

  It is Gunnar.

  The dog, thinks Eirikr, with sudden fury, he made some trick with the pebbles, with the black pebble, so he could be the one to do it. The dog.

  “Well,” Eirikr murmurs, “his horns appear.”

  * * *

  Melle screams. The warrior with the hammer is by her side, and lifts it to still her noise.

  The hammer falls, but Melle, making as if to faint, slumps to one side, pulling the woman on the other side with her. The hammer strikes the woman’s shoulder instead of Melle’s head, and she collapses.

  There is confusion, and Melle slips free, her legs strong again, and scrabbles toward the table.

  “Eirikr!” she cries, and now Eirikr turns to her.

  His rage at seeing Gunnar, and the cold, and the hot blood inside him all work some power, and his head begins to clear.

  “Melle!” he roars, and begins to sit up, “Melle!”

  Thorolf sees that he means to move. He still wields his own, ceremonial hammer of gold, and he brings it down, sharply.

  Eirikr sees, and tries to move, but his body is slow, his muscles stiff from the cold, his mind foggy from the dragon, and the hammer catches the side of his head.

  He collapses onto the bed once more, on his side, but he is still conscious, though Thorolf has hit a nerve, some part of his brain, and as he tries to stand aga
in now, he finds his arms do not work.

  His legs shudder, his arms twitch, but his eyes and ears are open as Melle tumbles in the snow at the side of the table.

  “Eirikr!” she cries. “No!”

  But Eirikr knows it is too late.

  Gunnar steps forward, and other hands are already grasping Melle’s arms again.

  Eirikr speaks.

  He looks at Thorolf, and at Gunnar, and with the magic of the dragon inside him, he speaks his last words.

  “You cannot kill me,” he shouts hoarsely, and yet as loudly as he can. “You cannot kill me. Do you not know my name? I am Eirikr. The One King! Forever Strong, and though you kill my body today, I will live again! I will live!”

  He turns to his queen, to Melle, and his voice drops. “I will live seven lives, Melle, this is only my first.”

  The stars shine down on Eirikr, on his twitching body on the cold stone table.

  “I will live seven times, and I will look for you in each one. We will always be together.”

  Gunnar raises the knife, and the moonlight gleams from its edge.

  “I will look for you and love you in each one. Will you follow?”

  Suddenly Gunnar sweeps the knife across Eirikr’s throat, in a single long arc of silver.

  He makes no sound now. There is no air to make the sound. There are only the lips moving on Eirikr’s face, but Melle sees what the words are.

  “Will you follow?”

  * * *

  Blood gushes from Eirikr’s neck, spurting across the ground, making a mockery of the stone spout, spraying Gunnar and Melle alike.

  The snow steams, red.

  Evocation of the Ancestors

  The years passed.

  Melle disappeared from the sight of the people, no one knew where she had gone, where she took herself that very night that they killed her king.

  She did not see the funeral they made for King Eirikr, how they piled the wood high and burned his body and bones on the shore of the western isle.

  She did not hear the words that Thorolf spoke, nor Gunnar after him, as they praised the sacrifice of the king.

  No one knew where she had gone, nor how she kept herself alive, how she fed herself, nor kept herself warm, and to start with at least, they did not care, for there was still the long winter to get through, with almost nothing to eat. Two less mouths to feed was a blessing.

  And yet, as spring returned, and as the grasses and flowers began to grow, and the crops flourished, and fruit hung heavy on the trees, they all came to see that Eirikr’s sacrifice had worked its magic, and that he had saved them. And with that thought, they began to wonder about Melle, and wondered at her passing, till they thought her dead, and she had become a figure of story, as in the old tales.

  Then, one day, maybe seven years after the blessing of Eirikr, around midsummer, Melle walked back into the village.

  People screamed at first, believing her to be a ghost or a vampire, until they saw that it was a full sunny day.

  They spoke to her.

  She didn’t answer.

  They looked at her in wonder. Her green robe, in tatters. She seemed no older than the day she had left, though she was thin, and her hair matted and dirty. Around her neck she wore a necklace. Something she had made, from the bones of hares, and so they understood that she had hunted the winter hare in order to survive.

  They asked her questions, a thousand questions.

  She spoke to nobody. Not a word.

  They gave her a house, at the edge of the village, a small hut, where she lived by herself.

  Everyone tried to speak to her.

  Thorolf tried.

  Even Gunnar tried, but she treated them all the same, looking through them as if they weren’t there, as if her eyes saw something else, as if they saw someone else, all the time.

  She took the food they offered, the new clothes they made her, but she said not a word.

  Every day, in the summer, she would walk to the western isle, and return with a bunch of the dragon, and when she did, people shunned her, for they had come to fear the flower, since they had noticed that those who drank most deeply of the dragon were also those unable to bring forth children. Even Thorolf no longer wore the triple device at his neck, and as the village drank less of the strongest variety of the brew, babies had returned. The sounds of small children once more filled the huts of the island.

  * * *

  So, the years passed, one after the other, and, slowly, they all grew older.

  Gunnar died before Thorolf, killed on a raid when he fell between two ships, and was crushed. People mourned his passing, for though he had been troublesome as a warrior before he became king, he had proved himself a fair ruler.

  Something had changed for him, that night, as Eirikr’s hot blood washed his face. He had had the old temple pulled down, and declared that there was a new god to believe in, a god he had learned about on a raid to the east, a god who did not hold with sacrifice, or magic.

  * * *

  Thorolf died a few years later, of old age, and yet, still Melle lived. People grew old and died around her, until almost everyone who knew the story of her king had died, or forgotten what it was all about.

  And every morning, until she was an ancient, crippled and tiny figure, she walked to the western isle and back, until one day, at summer’s dusk, she walked to the center of the island, to where the stone table still sat, where the timber of the temple had long since vanished, and been used to make ships and houses.

  * * *

  Knowing her time was at an end, she lay down on the table.

  People gathered around, but she still saw no one but the face in front of her, the face of Eirikr, her king.

  She shut her eyes, and as the life sighed gently away from her, she finally answered his question.

  “Yes,” she whispered, “I will follow you.”

  * * *

  And so, their journeys begin.

  EPILOGUE

  My Spirit Is Crying for Leaving

  JUNE 2073—THE FLOWER MOON

  Yes, thinks Eric Seven. Our journeys began, lifetimes ago.

  I have lived this before, but I will not live it again.

  He knows that this is his last life. Somehow, as he lies on the stone table, the moment before the violence of the knife-fall, he knows it all.

  The sun shines and the lizards crawl and the clover scents the sea air and the knife gleams and Merle’s face hangs over him, blotting out the ever-present sun like an eclipse.

  Maybe he knows nothing. Maybe it’s that he feels it all, but whatever is happening to him, he understands that he lived before. He lived other lives, in different times. And why not? It’s something he has often wondered about, sitting on the train in the morning, looking from the corner of his eye at the other commuters, wondering why.

  Why am I not living that person’s life? That man, there, with the sharp suit and the slightly stupid tie? Or that scruffy guy with his headphones? Or that woman, a little pregnant?

  Often, as he sat fiddling with OneDegree, he has wondered why this life is the one he’s had, and not one of the thousands of contacts passing through the device, or one of the countless others that could have been his.

  Now he knows. He has been others.

  * * *

  A blood sacrifice.

  A blessing, so that his blood might bring children back to the island.

  Tor nods, and Henrik’s hand rises.

  Then.

  “Wait,” says Merle, quietly.

  Henrik hesitates, and Tor turns to Merle. “What is it, child?”

  Merle turns slowly to Tor, smiling. “Let me do it. I am the child of the island. Let me bring the children back.”

  Tor smiles, and nods.

  “Yes. Yes, that is the right thing,” he says.

  Henrik hands the long ritual knife to Merle.

  Eric wriggles in their hands, and yet he does not fight so very hard.

  He cannot
believe it will end like this.

  Merle swings the knife, but not down at Eric, she swings it sideways, and with a stroke, she has slashed the hands holding him down.

  With another stroke, she slices at the faces of Tor and Henrik.

  The hands tumble away and Merle looks at Eric.

  Dropping the knife, she shouts, “Run!”

  People rush to help the wounded islanders. For a moment everyone is too stunned to grasp what has happened.

  Tor tries to shout. He tries to speak. He tries to tell the others to stop Merle and Eric, but he cannot, for she has sliced his throat, not deeply, but enough to stop him from doing anything but writhing on the table, and now it is his blood that washes from the spout.

  “There!” shouts Merle, as they scramble down toward the shore, to the rocks. “I have a boat!”

  Eric is shocked, too, too shocked to speak, or to question.

  Merle cries out, “I knew it was you!” she shouts, triumphantly. “I knew it was you.”

  “But you…?” Eric cries. “The tea?”

  “Stopped drinking it months ago. Just let them think I still was.”

  They round the rocks as the pursuit finally closes in on them, and there is the boat, hidden in a small cove.

  But there, too, are more islanders.

  Eric and Merle stop dead.

  Between them and the boat are a dozen strong men at least.

  They falter, and as they falter, they are seized, with fierce hands and strong words.

  They fight, wordlessly, but it is hopeless. Grimly and silently, they are dragged back to the table, where Henrik stands, clutching his face.

  Tor lies on the hot summer earth, bleeding into it.

  More hands push them roughly to the table.

  “No!” screams Merle now, as she sees Henrik lift the knife from the ground, and approach them, but Eric calls to her, “Merle! Merle!”

  She turns, looking into his eyes.

  “Merle. My spirit is crying for leaving.”

  She shakes her head, tears flowing freely.

  “Merle. Understand. Remember the sea…”

  She does understand, she senses it, too. Her tears and her trembling cease, and calm enters her blood.

  She knows that they both believe the same thing, that if a life can be ruined in a single moment, a moment of betrayal, or violence, or ill luck, then why can a life not also be saved, be worth living, be made, by just a few pure moments of perfection?