The Second Blind Son by Amy Harmon

29

DEEP

He heard the moment Ghisla reached the wood. At least thirty women—hearts thrumming—were with her. A wash of relief followed by a rush of anger flooded him. No keepers walked among them. Even now, they huddled in the temple, clustered in the sanctum, but Master Ivo was not among them. Hod searched for his signature sound, for the hitch and hollow drumming of his ancient heart, but it was not there.

No one had questioned Hod when he returned to the mount. The bridge had been lowered for much of the tournament. It was lowered now. The portcullis was at half-staff, and he easily rolled beneath it. Someone greeted him—a young sentry who sometimes stood at the temple door—and Hod waved him over.

“Where are the archers who should be on the wall?” he asked.

“I don’t know, sir. I’m stationed at the gate today. But half the hill is sozzled. The melee was a bit of a bust, and weddings aren’t as entertaining as wine.”

He’d insisted that the sentry—Edward from Ebba—send archers to the wall immediately.

“As many as you can find. On the king’s orders.”

“Y-y-yessir,” Edward stammered. “I’ll do my best. Elijah is here. He’s my brother. He won the archery contest. He wants to meet you. I’ll get him!”

“Have him bring his bow,” Hod grunted.

Hod climbed the stairs to the top of the ramparts and found a spot where he could hear the traffic from the entrance road and the goings-on in the courtyard equally well.

There was no panic on the temple grounds. No urgency at all. The mood was celebratory but with a sleepy edge, like the clanspeople were ready to be done with it all. Then the temple doors opened, and Northmen and warriors streamed out.

The bells began their clangor again.

Alba was escorted into the courtyard, Gudrun beside her. She cried out in distress as he lifted her into the saddle with a careless toss. Her horse whinnied in sympathy, and she patted and shushed him almost hypnotically.

She was in shock. Why had she not left the mount with the other women?

“It will be better this way,” she whispered, almost as if she answered him. She was praying. “Freya watch over the daughters,” she murmured. “And keep Bayr far from this hill.”

Gudrun was nervous. His pulse whined with adrenaline, and he kept sucking at his teeth. His behavior alone made the hair stand up on Hod’s neck.

As the North King and his men mounted their horses, Banruud and his men exited the temple and climbed the palace steps to oversee the departure. The grating sound of the swinging doors followed on their heels, and the clap of bars being lowered behind the entrance to the temple made Hod shudder. Ghisla had warned the keepers. They’d simply chosen not to go, but they were barring the door.

An old woman was crying, moaning like she was at a wake instead of a wedding.

“I do not want to go,” she wailed. “I’ve not left the mount in fifteen winters. I shan’t leave it now.”

Someone shushed her, impatient. “I’ve not left the mount in thirty, and you don’t see me crying.” This boast became a blubbering wail.

They were most likely servants, chosen to accompany the princess; they weren’t happy about it.

Lothgar of Leok, Aidan of Adyar, and some of their men mounted their horses as well. Apparently the chieftains of the northern clans were riding with the princess as far as the fork. Benjie of Berne was already in the saddle.

He was not nervous. He was drunk. Fumes billowed up around him. He was not the only one. Many of the clanspeople had not stopped drinking since the feast the day before. Few had abandoned their libations since the melee, and the merriment would continue until the people collapsed in drunken piles. It was always thus when the tournament ended.

Hod gripped his bow, shifting behind the ramparts. He was still the only archer on the wall. Odin’s eyes. What a disaster.

The portcullis was raised all the way—the winch squealed and the horses chuffed and danced in anticipation—and the Northmen began to descend the mount.

They were . . . leaving.

When Ghost walked out of the tunnel, squinting against the late-afternoon light, Ghisla and her sisters were waiting for her. But when she stepped forward and clutched their hands, Ghisla knew what she was going to say.

“I’m not going with you,” Ghost said.

Bashti cried out and Juliah gaped, but Ghisla nodded slowly, and Elayne took Ghost’s hand as if she too had expected as much.

“But . . . you cannot stay here,” Dalys cried. “You are in more danger than all of us.”

“No. I can’t stay here,” Ghost agreed.

“You are going with Alba,” Elayne murmured, and Ghost nodded again.

“She is my daughter, and she is alone,” Ghost said, looking at each woman in turn.

“I want to fight,” Juliah insisted suddenly, her impatience billowing around her. “I am staying here.”

“No, Juliah. You are not,” Ghost shot back. “You will fight for them!” She pointed at the women waiting on the hillside. “You will fight for each other.” Ghost pointed at the trees. “Now go.”

Ghisla bit back tears as the others broke down around her.

“Don’t cry,” Ghost begged, her voice shaking. “Please. We must all be strong. If the gods will it, we will see each other again.”

She embraced them fiercely, kissing their cheeks and professing her love before she hastened them toward the Temple Wood, willing them to hurry. Then she set off, cutting across the hillside toward the northern entrance to the mount, the drab brown of her old shepherd’s cloak covering her hair and shielding her face.

Ghisla sang softly, willing the fates to spare her and all the others, and followed her sisters toward the Temple Wood.

Aidan rode on Alba’s right, Lothgar on her left, and Benjie led the way, belching and swaying as though he were already half-asleep. King Gudrun rode at the front, a group of his warriors leading the way, another bringing up the rear.

“Halt!” Aidan of Adyar bellowed suddenly, his voice ringing with tension, but the party continued down the road without him, and a Northman grunted and urged him along. The trumpeters ceased their heraldry, their duties done, and the horses quickened their pace, the downhill pull urging them forward. A handful of clanspeople spilled out the gates behind them, and the portcullis stayed open for the ebb and flow.

They were halfway down the temple mount when Hod heard it. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.

Fire.

Fires were being set. Bodies swarmed from the mouth of the village, rushing up the road toward the North King’s entourage as though they fled the fire behind them.

“Those aren’t villagers,” Aidan shouted.

“Close the gates,” Hod screamed.

“Close the gates!” Lothgar repeated.

But the Northmen were already falling upon the confused clansmen.

Hod began to shoot, letting arrows fly into the climbing horde, doing his best to ignore the clash and the shrieks and the stench. The smell of blood threatened to overwhelm everything else.

Then Bayr was among the throng, his heart thundering, and Hod knew he battled though Hod could not see him fight.

Alba screamed, Bayr roared, and Gudrun laughed.

Hod released one shrieking dart after another, picking off the men around Bayr as best he could before the heartbeats combined to one pulsating swell. It was like a line of drummers, one thumping out the tempo that all the others marched to, and he pulled back, thwarted.

Suddenly there was an archer by his side, and Hod pled for direction.

“I’m no good in a fight like this. I can’t determine which heartbeat to aim at,” he shouted.

Then Bayr was running through the gates, his grunts echoing the slice of his sword.

“There you are,” Hod breathed, relief straightening his aim.

“Is the Dolphys surrounded?” he yelled at the archer beside him.

“Aye. He’s twenty-nine deep, at least,” the archer said.

And Hod could hear them, the rat-at-tat of their hearts striking against the anvil that was Bayr. One by one, Hod started picking them off, hearing the moment each fell and a new one took his place.

“The Northmen are breaking down the temple doors! Do you hear that?” the archer yelled.

Hod nodded with a quick jerk of his head.

“There’s not one of ours near him.”

But Gudrun was among them; Hod knew his heart well.

“Make it rain, blind man. Make it rain!” the archer beside him bellowed.

He let another stream of arrows fly, but Gudrun was inside, the door giving way beneath his axe.

The archer who’d been beside him was racing down the rampart, and Hod turned back to Bayr but didn’t dare shoot.

“I need your eyes, archer,” he bellowed, but the man was gone.

In the cacophony of swords and shrieks, he could not determine the warriors from the Northmen, friend from foe. The stench of blood overwhelmed his senses, and he roared in impotence at his own weakness.

“I need your eyes.”

The trumpets wailed, the sound sitting on the breeze, and the women quickened their pace. Minutes later, another sound rose in the wind, a sound Ghisla could not immediately identify. It was a collective bellow bristling with shrieks and cries, like the sound of gulls caught in a gale or a frenzied crowd at a tournament. She couldn’t see the front of the mount or the northernmost edge of the village, but the sound curled the hair on her nape and curdled the contents of her stomach.

She stopped to listen, eyes turned up to the temple walls, but nothing looked amiss. The sound swelled, and she knew what it was. The attack had begun.

The women began to run, but Ghisla fell to her knees and pulled out her blade.

“Liis,” Dalys shrieked. “Get up.”

But she couldn’t. She had to know. She pricked her finger and traced the star on her hand just the way Hod taught her.

“What are you doing?” Elayne moaned.

She held the rune to her brow and whispered her imperative.

“Show me Hod.”

The square swam in blood. Everywhere blood and bodies—horses and men. A severed head, an arm clutching a sword, and then feet, legs, running, lunging. Sound ricocheted between her ears.

She saw a hand fitting an arrow against a bowstring, and knew it was his, even beneath the blood and dust that coated his skin. It was like she sat beside him, surveying the courtyard below. He was on the wall. She watched the arrow fly, and Hod grunted as it found its mark. He was keeping the Northmen off Bayr, who was bathed in blood and gore. Only the blue of his eyes and his size separated him from the men around him. His braid was gone and his hair, no longer weighted and bound, flew around him, as red and matted as his skin.

Hod nocked another arrow and it pierced the back of the man in Bayr’s path. Bayr raised his eyes to the wall, acknowledging the help, even as he spun with both hands on the hilt of his sword and cut a Northlander—his bone-studded braids rattling with his death throes—in two. The torso flew as the legs collapsed.

“I need your eyes, archer,” Hod shouted, though she couldn’t see to whom he spoke. “I need your eyes,” he begged.

She drew her palm from her brow, and her vision cleared with a dizzying snap.

“He needs my eyes. I have to give him my eyes,” she babbled, trying to make her sisters understand. She traced the rune of the blind god and said Hod’s name.

Her eyes went dark.

Elayne was shouting at her, and Bashti tried to wipe the blood from her palm.

Ghisla kicked out with her legs, the way Bayr had taught them to do so long ago. Willing them to understand, she began to sing:

Take my eyes and give me wisdom.

Take my heart and give him strength.

I will fight beside my brothers.

I will battle with my men.

“Go! I will stay with her,” she heard Juliah shout. “She is singing for them. Let her sing.”

He had eyes. Suddenly he had eyes.

Ghisla.

He raised his bow, exulting, and realized he might have eyes but he was out of arrows.

He crawled, moving along the wall. He could see his hands, and it made him dizzy. He could not make his mind accept the new source of information. He pulled an arrow from the breast of the watchman; the poor sod held a horn in his hand. He found two more and let them fly, the hiss and the pull matching his exhalations.

Hod bellowed, and his eyes—Ghisla’s eyes—followed his flight as he threw himself from the wall into a sea of swords and writhing flesh. He tripped and cursed and rose again, feeling like a man just learning to walk instead of a man trying to see. He wiped his hand across his face. A man ran toward him, sword upraised, and Hod closed Ghisla’s eyes. He was better without them once he knew where to shoot. The man collapsed with a sliding thud, and Hod narrowly missed being hewn in half by the force of his momentum. He opened his eyes again and chose his next battle before it chose him.

A smattering of clansmen fought nearby, their braids swinging, their shields bearing the mark of the wolf. All were sorely outnumbered. Aidan of Adyar fought with the same madness that seemed to beset them all, back to back with a son of Lothgar, hacking and skewering, trying to withstand the assault of too many Northmen. Clusters of clansmen dotted the grounds, treading on their own dead as they struggled to beat back the enemy.

The wide entrance was littered with bodies. Benjie of Berne, recognizable to Hod only because his cloak was made from the fur of a bear, was missing the top half of his head. An old woman lay staring at the indifferent sky, her eyes fixed and her chest gaping.

She had not left the mount after all.

Someone had attempted to lower the portcullis, but there were bodies in the way, and it rested on the backs of two temple guards who’d been hewn down, one on top of the other. From all sides, screams and cries for mercy were interspersed with the clashing of shields and the grunts of men.

A man stood alone and was entirely encircled, though he seemed to be holding his own against the warriors surrounding him. He was awash in blood and gore and armed with an axe in each hand. His hair was short and unadorned—no braids or bones—and for a moment, Hod gaped, dizzied once more. It was Bayr. Of course it was Bayr. He bellowed, bringing his axes together and felling three Northmen simultaneously.

More kept coming.

Hod pulled a quiver of arrows from a crumpled sentry and began to shoot, peeling the Northmen from around his brother. He used his new eyes to pick his target and immediately shut them before he let go. He sensed the motion a hair too late and was missed by the blade of an axe but battered by a Northman’s shield.

“You didn’t hear me coming, Blind Hod?” the man yelled, spittle flying, a moment before Hod ran him through with a fallen clansmen’s sword. He shoved the man off, his hand slick with blood, his head spinning. He dropped the sword, picked up his bow, and sent a dozen more men to their deaths.

When the cobbles buckled beneath his feet, he thought it just another dizzy spell.

Then his eyes—her eyes—caught and held on the temple.

A keeper stood with his hands braced on the pillars of the temple. The image began to shake, bouncing and blurring. Dust billowed and the screaming changed. Hod closed his eyes, listening to the keeper’s heart. He didn’t know faces.

“Dagmar!” he heard someone scream.

It was Dagmar. Of course. The man propped between the pillars was Dagmar, and he was about to bring down the temple.

“Run!” Dagmar roared. “Go!”

The sound was that of a mighty storm, like thunder and lightning, like Thor himself was taking his hammer to the temple walls. Hod stumbled back, the quaking beneath his feet worse than the tossing of the North King’s ship upon an angry sea. The fighting in the courtyard had ceased, the warriors around him more frightened of the quaking mount than the swords of their enemies.

He thought he heard Gudrun yell, cursing the gods, his voice echoing out through the entrance door, and Hod saw Alba and Ghost run, keeping each other upright as the temple continued to buck and break. Northmen began fleeing the mount, racing for the gates as the cobbles beneath them writhed, tossing the dead into the air and the living to their knees.

A groaning arose, inhuman and earsplitting, and the roof of the temple crashed down, abandoning the walls that had once supported it, a cloud of dust and debris mushrooming into the sky and coating the mount in white powder.

And then the world went still.

Hod could not hear the living, if any living remained, and the dead did not have heartbeats. He couldn’t hear, and he couldn’t smell.

The world was white instead of black, shallow instead of deep. Nothing existed but wintery silence.

The silence was almost worse than the screams.

“Bayr?” he whispered, but he could not feel his lips or hear the word when he released it.

“Ghisla?” he tried again.

She would not forgive him. He had fallen after all.