Robert Low - The Whale Road

At the top, I was too busy ripping off my salt-stained boots and woollen socks to care about a cairn of stones. The cold air on my aching, throbbing feet almost made me moan with pleasure and, after I had inspected the rawest bits, I then took time to look around.

Everyone else was in a similar state. Men wriggled out of mail, stripped off layers of linen and wool, sat with their heads lowered, dripping under the unexpectedly warm spring sun. Skapti's face looked like it would burst.

But Einar, if he was suffering, showed no sign of it. He stood, pensively staring at the cairn and the poles that surrounded them. Every one but four of them bore a skull, leering and weatherbeaten. The four that didn't had recognisable heads, with eyes gone, lips peeled back, strips of skin pecked from cheeks.

`Vigfus's men,' said Valknut, who was nearest me, massaging his calf muscles.

I shed my mail like a wriggling snake, then wandered over to have a closer look. The heads were ruins; you couldn't tell if they'd even been men, save for one who had a fringe of beard left.

The cairn was waist height, with fallen stones around it. When I looked more closely, I realised it wasn't a cairn, but a ring of stones round a blackened opening. Peering down revealed only more blackness.

Ketil Crow joined me, as did a few others. And, of course, Bodvar picked up a stone and dropped it in.

There was a short pause, then a faint splash.

À well?' queried Bodvar.

Òn a mountain top?' responded Ketil Crow with a curl of his lip.

Ì wish you had not done that,' Illugi Godi said, frowning at Bodvar, who merely shrugged.

Ìf not a well, what?' demanded Skapti, lumbering up.

À smoke hole,' said Einar absently, then kicked one of the stones at his feet. We all saw that the blackening was an age of soot.

'For the forge,' someone said, enlightened.

`His charcoal is a little damp,' commented Valknut and there were chuckles.

We milled and peered and argued this and that for a while. Einar stood and thought and, apart from the whirr and song of birds, there was only the muttered rant of Hild, that constant background noise we had all become used to.

`Rope,' said Einar. There was some—Valknut had a length; two others had coils of it round their waists.

Einar had a fire lit, made a torch, held it over the hole and let it drop. We all watched it fall, turning lazily, trailing sparks. We saw the shaft, where it suddenly widened out, the gleam of water—then the torch hissed and was gone.

`Take a sounding on that,' ordered Einar and the ropes were knotted firmly, then a bearded boarding axe tied to one end and lowered. When the rope end was reached, it still hadn't gone slack and that meant some two hundred feet. We hauled it up and found it dry.

`That's a deep hole,' muttered Skapti uneasily and everyone agreed. Deep holes were to be avoided: the lair of dragons or black dwarves.

`Let's find out how deep,' said Einar and had us take off the leather neck straps from our shields and fasten them to the rope. Then we lowered it again. At 250 feet, the rope went slack and, when it was hauled up, the last twenty or so was wet.

`So, now we know,' said Einar. 'Who will be lowered, then?'

There was a shifting from leg to leg and a studious attempt to be looking somewhere else.

Ì would go,' offered Skapti and everyone groaned and laughed.

`Just so,' said Einar. 'Someone small and light, then.'

`Send the Christ priest,' shouted someone. `He's scrawny enough.'

There was laughter and Martin's face went white. But Einar shook his head, tugging on the leash a little.

'The black dwarves will eat him,' he said. More laughter.

Ì will do it,' offered Pinleg and there were nods and some appreciative noises at his bravery.

`Can you swim?' added Einar and Pinleg acknowledged his lack with a wry wave.

It took me a while to realise they were silent and all looking at me.

`Can you swim?' asked Einar.

I swallowed, for I swam like a fish, the legacy of sometimes falling off those black gull cliffs. I could lie, but Gunnar Raudi knew, so I nodded.

There was a single exhale of relief and a few hands clapped my back, more because the owners weren't going than at my courage.

Skapti knotted the rope into a kind of sling, which made it a seat rather than round my waist, which cut the wind from you. They made a new torch and I climbed on to the crumbling edge of the cairn, while Skapti wrapped two coils round his ample frame and braced himself. Two others, shoulders humped with muscle from rowing, stood to help him.

`Jerk the rope twice to have us stop,' he growled.

`What if I need to come up in a hurry?'

Ìf the dragon is burning your skinny arse,' he replied, 'we'll hear you scream.'

As the others laughed, Einar lit the torch.

Then I kicked out and started down.

At first they went so fast that I clattered off the sides, but I yelled up to them, my voice bouncing crazily in my ears and they slowed the descent. Turning slowly I was lowered, down and down and down into the dark shaft, the torch guttering.

I saw a small, round opening midway down, set into one side of the shaft like a dark lidless eye. I almost called out, but then I was sinking below it and, suddenly, out of the shaft entirely.

There was the impression of airiness, a great expanse of vaulted rock, which the torch only dimly revealed. Water dripped and the air felt damp and cold and smelled musty. When I saw the water gleaming red in the torchlight, I jerked the rope and stopped.

Swinging gently, I lowered the torch a little, peering around. There was nothing but water. I swallowed the dry spear in my throat and realised I had no way of telling them to haul me up save one.

So I yelled. The sound boomed off the wall. I was jerked up like fish bait, shot back up the shaft so quickly I hit the sides and yelped in pain, which only made them haul harder. I almost shot out into the sunlight, the torch falling back into the darkness.

I was cursing them as they dragged me over the side of the cairn stones and, when they saw I was unharmed, everyone laughed at my fury. I didn't think it was funny; both my elbows and one knee were bloodied.

`You've had worse humping on a dirt floor,' observed Skapti, hauling me up and grinning. Then they all wanted to know what I had seen.

À shaft, widens out into a chamber full of water,' I revealed.

`That much we found out without lowering you,' Einar grunted.

`There isn't much more,' I bridled. 'Short of going in the water and swimming about in the dark, I couldn't find out more.'

Ìt might come to that,' Einar growled and I saw he was serious. The thought of being in that black water in the pitch dark shut me up and focused my mind. I remembered the opening, and thought more about it.

Ì am thinking that there is something of the heathen sacrifice about this place,' Martin the monk said slowly. 'I can smell it.'

`You . . . have the . . . right . . . of it.'

The voice was weak, but so unexpected that we all whirled and stared. Hild was upright, swaying, her face bloodless.

`The only way in is here,' she said, speaking in a rush, as if trying to get it all out as fast as she could.

'Was once to be my fate . . . All who know go into the dark. There is a way to the door if you can find it. If you do, you can choose—to unbar it, or stay. No one has unbarred the door since the woman of the first smith. She went in for her sin, gave sin and secret to her children.' She paused, sagged. 'My mother is in there. When I had provided a daughter, that was to be my fate.'

We all chewed that over. Martin crossed himself. So that was the 'dark' Hild spoke of, the 'she' who haunted her. Her mother. In the black pit of that forge, probably mouldering at the bottom of that lake. And if she still spoke to her daughter, she was a fetch of rare fierceness.

`They threw them in, all the smith's daughters?' demanded Valknut.

`The heirs of Regin,' muttered Illugi. 'I have heard that name before . . .'

The others, even though they did not know the whole of it, were equally uneasy faced with this. Like them, I was thinking that a village capable of heaving their own down a hole were not ones to walk up to as a stranger.

I was so petrified I couldn't stand—and I wasn't going swimming down there, even if Einar cut my bollocks off with his truth-seeking knife.

`There is an opening, midway down,' I babbled to Einar. 'The edges are smoke-blackened, upwards, but not beneath. I think that is the true smoke hole.'

Einar glared at me. 'Can you get in it?'

I paused, trying to think, then nodded. As I peeled off my tunic, I felt Hild's black eyes on me. She was wrapped like a corpse bundle in my cloak and shivering in the warm sun.

`Bodvar, you and Valknut pick three more and go back to the barred door. When Orm here reaches it, he may need help. Send back for the rest of us to come, too.'

Both men groaned at that. The idea of tramping all the way back down that gods-cursed hill was not appealing. On the other hand, I saw, it was still better to them than going down the shaft. And Einar had spoken of 'when' I reached the door. Not 'if'.

I felt Hild at my side, her hand on my naked arm. I looked into the dark eyes and saw fear. But not for me, I thought as I turned away, stuffing a firestarter and my eating knife in my boot.

At the edge of the loose-stone cairn, Einar caught my arm, his black eyes like nails on my face. He said nothing and, after a moment, let me go.

Then I was down the shaft again, torch in hand. When I got to the round opening, I had them stop and swung for a bit, studying it. Then I hooked myself near it, slid my feet in to the knees.

It would be a tight squeeze and what to do with the torch bothered me, for I couldn't take it lit, but maybe couldn't fit with it unlit and stuffed in my belt. And I didn't want to be in the dark wherever that smoke hole ended.

In the end, I worked it out. I undid my breeks and hauled the ties out of them. As they slid and flapped round my boots, I stubbed the torch into sparks and embers, fastened my breeks cord to one end and made a loop at the other.

In the dark, I looped it round my neck, then slithered further into the smoke hole, let go the rope and was alone. In the dark. In a hole no bigger than a burial chamber.

It went down at a sharp angle, as it had to, but I was offering up extravagant sacrifices to all the gods, Aesir and Vanir and any others I could think of, that it didn't get narrower. My hands were out above my head, palms flat on the rough stone—a natural crag, this, I thought with the part of my mind not screaming in terror at the fact that my nose was so close to it.

Like a tomb. Dark . . . I hit an obstacle and stopped. An obstacle. Solid. I was stuck.

There is no feeling like that. The hardest thing I ever did was not scream and thrash. I felt the weight of it above me, had the sweat of fear and labour stinging my eyes, beard the rasp of my own breath in that hot, cloistered dark.

I lay, hands up behind my head, palms flat, pushing. Nothing. My feet were on something solid. I brought my knees a little way up, hard up against the roof of the shaft until I felt them puncture and bleed to try and shove against the obstruction—and found nothing beneath my feet.

I blinked away sweat and gasped and tried to think. It bent. Of course it did. It turned from an angled shaft to a straight one.

I wriggled, legs lowered, felt them slide down and was just sighing with relief when I realised that if it angled down it was a sheer drop. At which I shot forward, ripping the skin from the palms of my hands, straight down, crashing into something that seemed soft, though the hard edges of it cracked my head and an already battered elbow.