mist.
Valdis’s lips part beneath her veil. ‘Go back, Mother, Mother. I told you. I warned you. I will take you down into the grave with me. I will make you suffer without end. You too, boy, go back while you can or I promise you will die a thousand deaths and still live to die again.’
Both Hinrik and the old woman shrink back in dread. They will not stand against him, but just as I fear they are slipping back into the mist, another figure emerges from the mist. She too is old. Her head streams with blood, but she raises her chin defiantly.
‘I stood against men of evil while I lived, I will stand against them in death.’
Hinrik and the old woman edge back out from the mist. I know now that they will stay.
Others are stepping into the space. A man carrying a little boy, both covered with savage slashes. A little girl follows, with blue-black marks about her neck, then a woman holding a baby that has been almost hacked in two. The woman’s mouth is gaping, stuffed with earth, as are her eyes. She has been rendered blind and dumb. Two more men and a woman join them. They too are slashed and mutilated. Their clothes are faded and ragged, smeared with soil. Their eyes are dark, hollow pits. They say nothing, but silently join the circle of the dead around us.
Then, when I think there are no more to come, one last figure emerges from the mist. He is an old man. His clothes are burned almost away. His face and limbs are charred and blistered, the blackened skin cracked, the flesh gaping red-raw to the white bone beneath. His mouth is sealed with a leather gag. Isabela gasps in horror. Throwing her arms up as a shield, she backs away from the ghastly phantasm that is hobbling towards her. But he holds out his hand, palm upwards. And there are hundreds of words written upon it, in blue and scarlet, green and gold. Words that scurry across his hand and tumble from the tips of his burnt fingers to lie in heaps around his blistered feet.
‘Jorge!’ Isabela breathes.
He nods solemnly and takes his place in the circle.
Valdis’s head swivels round to look at each of the dead in turn. I feel the draugr’s agitation, but I feel something else too. Someone is trying to cut through Valdis’s band. The draugr knows it. We must make haste.
‘I bid you welcome,’ I say. ‘You have been summoned as the door-doom, the court which must pass judgment upon one of your own. Your word is law. Your decision is binding. This is the complaint I bring against him. That he has entered the body of my sister without her consent. I have healed his own corpse, but he refuses to leave and return to it. I ask the door-doom to order him to leave my sister’s body and return to his own.’
The grandmother from the forest lifts her battered arm and points at Valdis.
‘Speak, draugr, what have you to say in your defence?’
‘Valdis is dead. She has no need of her corpse, but I have great need of it. I have every right to it, since I was called out of my grave by one who is living. If I return to my corpse, Eydis will destroy it. She will destroy me. She will send me back into the grave. You know how we suffer in the grave, our bodies rotting in the darkness, our loneliness, our despair. I was called out, and now I have tasted life again I will not return. You cannot order me to my own destruction. You are my brothers and sisters in death, you will not suffer the living to destroy us.’
The grandmother nods. ‘We have listened to you. And you, Eydis, you who are of the living, what do you say?’
‘If he remains in Valdis, he will make a draugr of us both, for if he is freed from the iron, he will gather such strength to him that I will not be able to fight against it. Valdis and I are joined, as we have been since we were in our mother’s womb. What he does in her body, he does also in mine. He will rampage throughout the land, bringing terror and destruction, he will make draugar of those he kills and he will torment those already in their graves. All this he will do, in a body