The Islands of the Blessed

Thorgil had collapsed against the wall, trembling violently. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m sure we’re alive,” Jack said, kneeling beside her. He guessed that she was terrified of meeting the dead, and he wasn’t all that thrilled about it either. He’d run into a lot of unquiet spirits recently, from the draugr to the men trapped in the wall to the hogboon.

“I’m so afraid,” she moaned. “It’s like the night of the Wild Hunt. Olaf wouldn’t take me along because Odin wouldn’t let him. Oh, Jack, what if we go out there and he—he—rejects me?” She burst into tears.

Of course, thought Jack. Thorgil wasn’t afraid of a host of dead berserkers who, by the sound of it, had spent a happy day slicing one another to bits. She was afraid they wouldn’t let her join in. He could see the opening at the top of the tunnel. Night had fallen, but a bonfire nearby cast flickering light. A large figure suddenly eclipsed it.

“Don’t hang back now,” a man called. “We have food aplenty and the party’s just beginning.” He lumbered down the tunnel and picked up Thorgil. “You’re too dainty for a Valkyrie,” he rumbled. “Get on the outside of a haunch of boar and we’ll see you right.”

“Don’t touch her!” Jack cried, pointing his staff, but nothing happened. No fire sprouted out of the end, and the man was completely unaffected. He laughed good-naturedly, and Jack could see a line of red where his head had been reattached. So this was Bjorn.

“You come too, little skald,” said Bjorn. “I haven’t seen your kind since Dragon Tongue scorched the fur off Ivar the Boneless for marrying Frith. Plenty of boar to go around.”

“It’s all right,” said Thorgil, tucked under the warrior’s arm. Jack followed them up, feeling somewhat foolish. The cloak and staff of St. Columba ought to have earned him some respect. Little skald indeed!

They came out to a completely wild scene. The whole mountaintop was covered with warriors wandering among the trees to find parts of themselves that had been hacked off. They fitted hands back on to wrists, feet onto ankles, heads on to necks. When reapplied, only a line showed where they had been joined, and the scars faded quickly. Bjorn’s neck was already completely healed. Other men stuffed intestines into gaping holes in their stomachs, and the skin grew back.

Horses huddled in clearings, their eyes glinting whitely.

Above the trees the clouds rushed by in a mighty, soundless storm.

A giant boar was roasting over a fire pit, and dozens of warriors were hacking off bits to devour. Tables were laden with all manner of food, including pots of nauseating graffisk, codfish that had been buried underground until it smelled of the graveyard. Beefy Valkyries in leather armor served horns of drink to the feasting men.

In the middle of a clearing a Valkyrie sat behind an enormous, surly-looking goat. She monotonously pulled on teats the size of grain bags and liquid thundered into a wash tub.

“The goat’s name is Heidrun,” said Bjorn, putting Thorgil down. “She feeds on the leaves of Yggdrassil and produces an endless supply of mead. Good Heidrun,” he said, patting the beast on the head. The creature snapped at him.

“Don’t Valkyries have names?” Thorgil said faintly. The women were moving around the forest, finding men who were too injured to move. They reattached missing parts and dragged the warriors to the tables, where they fed them morsels of food. “Dotti and Lotti used to baby Olaf like that when he came home drunk.”

Jack had once made fun of Valkyries, claiming that they were no better than servants in Valhalla. He had driven Thorgil into a fury, but he felt no wish to do so now. She looked stricken. This was the ideal she had always held in her mind, to fall in battle and join her comrades in Odin’s realm. Only now it seemed she would be consigned to waiting on tables and milking goats.

“I want to see Olaf,” she said in a tearful voice.

“You mean Olaf One-Brow? He’s my best friend,” said Bjorn proudly.

In spite of cutting your head off three times today, thought Jack. “You wouldn’t happen to be Bjorn Skull-Splitter?” he asked. The warrior was almost as big as Olaf, with legs like tree trunks and a chest as broad as a door.

Bjorn grinned. “I see my fame has not died in Middle Earth. Tell me, little skald, am I sung about wherever brave men gather?”

“Your tale has certainly spread,” Jack said evasively. Einar Adder-Tooth had been wrong in one regard: Bjorn wasn’t roaming the icy halls of Hel. “Would you like to know what happened to your—” Jack had been about to say enemy when he saw a familiar figure emerge from the forest and snatch a horn of mead from a Valkyrie. “That can’t be Einar Adder-Tooth!”

“He arrived recently,” said Bjorn. “Said he’d been caught in a landslide. I killed him twice last week, and he only got me once.” The warrior showed not the slightest resentment toward the man who’d arranged for him to be devoured by a hogboon.