The White Maiden

On midsummer’s eve Queen Ruana came again in sight of the hall where she had once ruled. Irongaard stood alone and abandoned against the sea, the walls dark with age and no fire blazing within. She looked on it and it seemed a dead thing, something slain and left to decay, the heart torn from it. It did not please her to think on what she might find there, but she could not turn away. Years before she had fled this place, with only a stolen sword and the head of a murdered king. Now she returned with an army from legend at her back, and she bore a spear of light that burned away the dark.

They rode up the long slope to the place where the walls lay crumbling, and she looked down and saw the ground was strewn with the bones of the dead. Both men and beasts had been butchered and left to rot, and she felt revulsion at this sign of the careless power o the Undergods. They built nothing, made nothing; they only destroyed and savaged and slaughtered, and men it seemed were only too eager to follow.

No one called to them or hailed them, or sought to bar their way. They crossed the yard where new summer flowers grew through the trampled earth and the discarded bones, and they came to the doors of the hall, hanging open and unguarded.

Ruana swung down from her steed and stood for a long moment, looking into the dark as into a skull. Umun, her councilor, came with her and held high a burning torch, and by that light they entered the black hall of the usurper. They trod on the ancient floorboards, the wood black with smoke. The hearth lay cold and untended, and the beams of the walls and roof stood like the ribs of a dead sea-beast.

She half-thought to find Hror here, awaiting her for a final war, but there was no one. He had escaped her, and it seemed he had fled even his own hall to be free of her revenge. She knew where he would go, and that would be where her eye fell next. She crossed the hall and stood before the throne that had been her husband’s, and she could barely recognize it. It was blackened as if by fire, and the sides were encrusted with what looked like barnacles, or dead white fungi dried and hardened. She smelled the bitter sea among the other odors of death and filth, and it angered her.

“Let the hall be cleansed,” she said. “This place does not belong to the dark, and I will not let them claim it.” She gripped her spear in both hands. “Cleansed.”

o0o

They kindled the fires in the long hearths, and by their light they cleaned the bones and offal from the corners, scraped the strange growths from the walls, and let light into the darkness. What food and drink remained they threw away, and the stained and tattered hangings and bedclothes were taken away and burned. The men who followed them herded sheep and cattle into the paddocks and helped repair them, and soon the smells of baking bread and cooking meat filled the ancient hall.

Ruana stood on the promontory behind the hall and looked south across the sea. The clouds were gathered there over the far shore, and she knew that was where Hror still awaited her. He and his dark patron, still undefeated, and still ready to kill and strip the flesh from the world for nothing but the pleasure of it.

“I cannot encompass the minds of the Undergods,” she said to Umun. “They devour and destroy and leave nothing behind. What do they gain from any of it? What hunger do they sate?”

“They are not men, my queen,” Umun said. “They do not have the drives or the lusts of men. They do not seek wealth or titles or land. They seem to seek power over men, but it only ever seems to goad them to greater abominations. They war so that no one else may have peace, they eat so that others will go hungry, they kill for the grief and sorrow it brings. They take pleasure in cruelty and waste and brutality. It is what pleases them and gives them strength. It is not possible to understand such creatures.”

“I can grasp what they do,” she said. “It is no worse than men do to each other. Yet I do not understand what they gain by it.” She shook her head. “Perhaps it is needless to wonder. They are a force that unmakes, and so they must be destroyed, or they will unmake us all.” She looked to the east and saw the fleet of the giant’s ships coming to join them here, to make ready for the voyage across the sea. The war was not here any longer. “I will hunt Hror in his lair, and I will kill him. I will destroy him and burn him until nothing remains.” She held up her open hand. “And I will slay even gods who come within my grasp.”

o0o

They gathered the armies aboard the great ships, dragon-prowed and girded with shields. They were large enough that the men from the uplands had never seen the like of them and marveled at their size. Ruana caused all those who followed her – men and giants both – to be provisioned and armed and boarded upon her fleet. Like moving fortresses they left the bay beneath the hall and sailed south, across the summer sea, questing for war like hounds upon a scent.

The rowers chanted as they pulled, and they moved through the iron seas into a cold wind that blew from the south. The sky grew darker, and clouds covered the sun. Ruana stood in the prow of her ship and scented the air, and she saw scattered shards of ice driven before the wind. Her gaze narrowed and she saw ice floating in the summer seas, and she knew something fell was coming to meet them.

“Tell the men to prepare,” she said to Umun. “Something comes.”

It was another breath, and then another, and then a wind came on them like a storm out of dead ages, and the sea was a sudden froth of fury and blasting snow. Ruana hunkered down against the gale, trying to see ahead. The rowers pulled hard, trying to keep going, but the wind drove them backwards, began to turn the ships abeam in the suddenly towering seas. The waves washed the deck, rattling with ice like fingerbones.

The onslaught of the storm drove the ships apart, and Ruana lost sight of them quickly as the snow and ice came down harder, scouring exposed skin and freezing eyes shut. With a cry she lifted her spear and drove the spike into the deck itself, so that the blade stood up bright before her. The bronze flamed in the sudden dark, shining out like the glow of a lantern, and the wrath of the storm seemed to recoil from it, as if it were a talisman.

“Hold!” she cried to her men. “Hold against it! It is the work of the Undergods!”

Something moved in the dark ahead of them, and for a moment she felt a fear deep inside her as she thought it was a giant out of the abyss, but instead she saw glinting white ice, and she realized it was an iceberg that towered over the masts and spars of the ship. Jagged like teeth, it moved closer, driven by the wind. Her rowers fought against the storm, and all she could do was cry a warning as the mountain of ice moved closer, and then she felt the terrible impact as the prow of the ship struck and the battle ram clove into the iceberg and stuck fast.

The stroke stopped the ship dead and threw men off their feet. Only Ruana stayed upright, gripping the haft of the spear that blazed like the sun. She squinted hard into the blinding snow, and she saw the mass of ice looming before them, an unearthly light glowing from within it, and by that light she saw another ship, half-frozen in the mountainside, its prow hung with jagged antlers, and she knew then what they faced.

“To arms!” she howled, turning to shout into the wake of the wind, letting it carry her warning to what men she could reach. “It is the Cold Lady! Marrow comes for us! Draw steel and fight for your souls!”

The Azora gave their war-cries and rushed for the rails of the ship, drawing down their shields and the helms stacked below them. They cut the bonds of the sheafs of war-spears and scattered them across the deck, grasped them and raised them up. In moments they had girded themselves with helms and spears, rushed to the sides of the ship in a wall of shields.

It was not too soon. Ruana saw a fire blaze up within the frozen ship, and then the waters around them, thick with ice, began to boil with motion. The giants cried out in revulsion and rage as the sea gave up her dead, and the dead marched.

Corpses green and black with age, hung with rusted mail and dragging corroded swords, dragged themselves up from the water and stood upon the ice. Their eyes glowed with caged witch-fire, and their death-blackened teeth yawned with the hunger for mortal flesh. Lightning cracked the skies above and lit the scene with white blazing. Ruana held up her spear, and a jagged fire of the storm lashed down and touched the burning blade, stoking it white-hot.

“Come, sons of the Death-Maiden!” Ruana screamed. “Come and let us send you down into the true death! Let no man falter, for this is the war of ages!”

The dead rushed upon the rails of the ship, and Ruana and her giants stood to meet them. The golden spear flamed down and tore through unliving flesh, seared the weed-choked limbs and slimed skulls and sent them hurtling back in pieces. The foul assault swarmed up the sides of the ship, the dead crawling over one another like vermin to reach the defenders.

The Azora met them like figures carved from stone, idols out of ancient days with swords of iron and arms of stone. They met the rush with their shields interlocked, battered the enemy back, and then hewed at them with sword and axe and iron spear. Blows hammered upon their plated shields with the strength of the undead, and they struck back with all their fabled power. Giant swords clove flesh and bone and rotten iron, and their spears ripped through and tore the unliving from their feet, cast them back to the pitiless ice below.

At the prow of the ship stood Ruana, like a war-queen with a flaming spear cut from the sun itself in her hands. She struck down at the dead as they came clawing for her, and the white-hot metal pierced them through and split their foul flesh apart. She struck again and again, like a deadly serpent, and every blow destroyed again a walking mockery of mortal life. She and her thanes cast down their enemies and heaped them about the foot of the hull, only to have the next wave climb atop them to reach the deck of the ship that much faster.

There were too many of them, and they began to spill over the rails; they flopped and clawed on the decks, cloven in half, arms and legs hewed off, yet they still fought. They clutched at the warriors and dragged them down, biting out their throats with foul teeth, ripping them limb from limb with the tireless, feral strength of the dead.

Ruana looked up at the frozen ship above, the blue-green witchfire engulfing it, and she knew they could destroy the children of the White Maiden until their arms failed and their swords broke, but they would never win. The power of the Undergod could not be broken this way. She must break it herself, with the power in her hands and in her spear.

Furious, she battered the dead from the prow with her shield, and then she raised her arm, drew it back, and hurled it full force. It streaked the dark like lightning, a star burning across the battlefield, and then it smote full upon the ice that armored the ship of death and shattered it, pierced it, and pinned itself to the horned prow like a bright nail.

The ice fractured and slid down, an avalanche of keen blades, and it scythed across the prow of Ruana’s ship and cut down the dead who clustered there against the hull, clawing their way up. It smashed them aside and washed them away, torn into pieces, and the Spear Queen drew her sword and leaped down from the prow and thundered her footfalls on the ice itself.

The dead tried to stop her and she cut her way through. Her battered shield turned aside rusted blades and corroded spears, and she hacked down the few who came against her. Her bright sword hewed through iron and bone and made a path, and she climbed. She trod on the jagged ice, heedless of the sharp edges that cut her boots and breeches, uncaring of the cold and the ripping wind. She climbed up the side of the mountain of ice until she could reach the ship of the dead.

Hollow-eyed men, ice-white and murderous, poured over the rail and came to stop her, and she bellowed her war-cry and cut them down. These were Marrow’s favored sons – the frost-slain, the dead, the freshly drowned. Those who died with filled lungs and sword in hand, ice in their beards. They had the strength of the dead and knew no fear, and they raged against her. She met their swords and axes until her shield was notched and battered, and she cut them down with her blade until it snapped in two.

She reached the prow and her hand clawed up, caught the haft of her spear, and wrenched it loose from the wood, leaving a flow of blood as from a living wound. The power of it ran through her, sparking in her eyes, and she felt the heat from it as from iron fresh from the forge. It smoked in the air as she cut down two more, three more, and then she vaulted over the rail and boarded the ship of death.

Every part of it was plated in bone. The deck was paved with ribs and fingers, and the mast was heaped high with skulls, the whole of it coated in an armored sheath of ice. She looked to the stern, beyond the mast hung with bones, to the place beside the tiller, where there awaited her the tall still form of the Maiden of Winter.

Here the wind was stilled. Here the ice and snow drifted down like petals from a frozen forest, seeming to hang in the air, and Ruana faced the White Lady with her heart pounding fire. The Maiden was tall and white, robed in pale cloth that glittered. On bare white feet she crossed the deck, and wherever she stepped she left a print of blood. She bore in her hands a long, white spear, delicate as spun frost, and her white hair hung down and covered her face, so it was nothing but shadow.

“Come and kiss me,” she moaned, her mouth unseen. “Come and dance and smile and look into my face. You will know the joys of winter. The pleasures of death.” The White Lady swayed as she approached, as if to music none could hear.

“I will show you that pleasure as well,” Ruana said, and she crossed the funeral ship and met the Lady of Winter spear against spear. The white spear came for her swift and deadly, and she met it with her shield only for the iron and wood to freeze in a moment and shatter apart. She staggered back, cold burning into her side, and Marrow laughed with a musical sound.

“You cannot contest with me, and you cannot cast me down,” the cold goddess said. “Look into my face, and be consumed.” She flung back her white hair, and Ruana saw she had no eyes, no face, only a mouth like a sea-leech. Round and sucking, lined with teeth in a spiral, the mouth of the White Lady beckoned her, leaning close.

Ruana thrust the bright spear upright before her, like a ward, and the light of it blazed like naked fire. Marrow reeled away from it, hissing, and the Spear Queen set both hands on it and advanced in wrath. “I am come to unmake you. You think I cannot cast you down? I can!” She drove the spear in, and the Cold Lady parried with her own shard of winter, and the ice shattered and broke apart. Ruana scored her white arms with the burning spear and the Undergod screamed and drew back, her flesh blackening from the fire that would not be stayed.

“I bring fire to the dark,” Ruana intoned, feeling the ice crack beneath her feet as she walked on the frozen deck. “I bring light to the winter, under the moon. I banish cold with fire!” She leaped in and smote Marrow with the spear, driving the bright blade into her guts and twisting it. Smoke rose up from the wound, and the dark goddess howled. Her long tongue, like a serpent of flesh, lashed from her gaping maw.

“I unmake winter, and the killing cold!” Ruana felt the words come to her unbidden, as though she had always known them, as though a power compelled them. Marrow tried to rush upon her, hands clawed for her face, but she caught the goddess’ chest with the point of the spear and drove her back. They strove together as the blade of the spear hissed and burned in the unclean flesh, and then Ruana set herself and forced her enemy back against the stern of the ship. She forced the spearpoint through until she felt it bite into the wood, and Marrow screamed.

She clawed and fought to be loose, her flesh searing and blackening. Ruana ripped the spear free and struck again, and again, driving bone-deep wounds with every stroke. The white lady began to burn, smoke rising from six wounds, and then nine, and then at last Ruana drove the blazing spearhead through that unclean maw, and the shape of Marrow, the Cold Maiden, began to dissolve and melt away.

Ruana saw cracks spread across the ice of the ship, the bones beneath shattering apart, and she ran the length of the deck back to the prow. The whole thing shifted beneath her, and she hurled herself over the rail and slid down the ice as the mountain began to break up. She reached the bottom just as the peaks began to crack and crumble, and then she was seized by giant hands and pulled aboard her own craft as the rowers began to drive them back, away from the iceberg, into the open sea.

She watched as the ice broke apart. The gale vanished, and the ice in the waters began to melt away. The dead had all fallen back into the black waters, and they sank out of sight and were reclaimed by the dark sea. The clouds above grew tattered, and she watched as the moon gleamed silver from low on the horizon.

Exhausted, she sank down and leaned against the prow of her ship, the spear in her hands cooling as whatever power lived within it sank back into slumber. Now she felt a hundred small hurts and aches, and her arms felt like splintered wood. Umun knelt down beside her.

“Are you wounded, Spear Queen?” he said.

“Not in my body,” she said. “My spirit is wounded by what I have seen, and endured. But my flesh remains strong.” She closed her eyes. “I am weary, though. I am very weary. Gather the ships, as we can. We must go on.” She looked up at the stars as they began to show through the vanishing clouds. “Our war is not yet done.”