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Athelstan rose on the third day, pushing grotesquely through the sodden soil to breathe. His limbs were cold and stiff, veins taut, and he looked down confused at his hands and feet. For some reason the stigmata scars were bleeding. He realised that someone must have dressed him in Ragnar’s blue tunic, a favourite, but he still wrapped his burial cloth close against the cold. He surveyed his open grave. It was next to the waterfall where he had once taught Ragnar to pray. There was a crude cross held together with rope, with an arm ring looped onto the wood and fastened tight. A smooth stone had tumbled when he had crawled out, but he could still see a handprint in brazen red streaked across it. Athelstan looked out to the wide silent forest, to the bay lit up by the sunset, and followed the stream downwards.
Far below, the bowl remained, continued, each drip drip drip in the silence like a hammer on an anvil. Helga’s arms were shaking with exhaustion. Floki trembled on the balls of his feet and the cold seeped into his bones. The cave smelt putrid and humid, like it was rotting him alive.
It was only when the sun had seeped away from the small cave entrance, leaving them in near darkness, that Ragnar visited. His eyes glinted sharp in the light of the torch, assessing the dried blood around Floki’s shackles, and the ink that ran from his eyes. He looked on, decisively expressionless at Floki, then turned to leave.
Floki raised his head and spat in Ragnar’s direction. ‘What I did was right for our people. He damned our settlement, as he’s damning all of us.’
Ragnar paused for a second, his eyes hollow, then headed for the archway and left them in darkness once more.
Athelstan stumbled most of the way back by following the stream, and the few fires lit at the houses below. He found Ragnar on the outskirts of Kattegat, kneeling in the water and shaving his head with a knife. Blood trickled down his forehead, mixing with the tears falling from his nose. He won’t stop shearing, the knife won’t, can’t stop - there are days old gashes opened back up. He wore Athelstan’s cowl, wrapped like a comfort around him, and blood dripped from the ornate cross round his neck. Athelstan watched, dazed, as Ragnar touched the cross to his lips in a whisper. That’s when, like a beckoning, Athelstan staggered out of the forest cover, but strangely without a sound. He waded into the stream and Ragnar looked up with wide blue eyes, saw the black blood sinking into the river from his hands, saw the paleness to his cheeks, so bright he glowed. He took him for a dream in the moonlight, and smiled up at Athelstan, who cupped his face with a pained expression and washed away the blood.
No one knows which of the gods brought the priest back, but they cannot deny that he is meant to live. It is fated. If anything at all, so people say, the Norse gods have blessed Christ as one of their own. They’ve brought him to their hearth, an oath of safety towards guests, and cursed the discord of faiths. So Floki whispers, eyes wide, while he is strung up inside his cave, ‘I thought I was fulfilling the wishes of the Gods’. And the bowl Helga holds echoes with each drip, drip, drip.