The Ritual

IV

Brida awoke stricken with sheer panic. Standing straight up she let out a scream that would have curdled the blood of the most battle-hardened Dane. Stumbling forward, her eyes had not yet caught up with the rest of her, she fell forward on one knee. Her hand fell to the hilt of her dagger and she pulled it out in front of her in one move, desperately and with the panic still commanding her every movement. Her hair, a whirling mess in front of her, she wiped it from her sweat-soaked brow with her free hand. Like a wild animal, she spun, fearing a strike from any direction. But none came.
Brida’s heart sat in her gullet, throbbing painfully. She tried to still her breathing but her body did not obey. The panic would not let up so easily, it felt like lightning was alive inside of her and as if her bones were trying to escape from her body. It took her a long time to still herself, or at least she thought it did. Her grasp of time was not firm and she felt herself slip from moment to moment as if it was all happening in one single blink of an eye. She still felt as if her mind was not only her own and visions of what had happened to her would flash in her mind.
The blood and gore, the chanting voices, the drums, The Man in the Tree, how he had drank the blood poured on his roots. How was she still alive? Her last memory was that of the crones blade pressed against her throat. She could still hear her laugh, as deep as a distant rockslide but as shrill as the fury of the wind in a storm at sea, before everything had fallen black. As she remembered, the panic rose again and Brida grabbed at her throat, shook her head violently and stabbed the ground in front of her with her dagger.
‘No!’ she exclaimed, and stood. Finally, in that moment it was as if she awoke for a second time, but this time, she took control of herself and looked around. There were no sounds of danger, just the stillness of the dew-drenched glade. The sun was covered in the sky, everything was an even gray. Brida finally took a deep breath and felt her own will return to her with each one that followed.
Brida looked around but saw no signs of anything that had happened the night before, not even the crone’s hut was there. She looked to the tree where she remembered having been tied up, she walked over and put her hand against its trunk. She closed her eyes to try and remember what had happened but when she tried to see it in her mind it was as if the memory would slip from her and fade even more. She stood there, her eyes closed and her hand resting on the trunk, feeling her heart slow to a steady beat. Suddenly, it was as if the beat of her heart had awoken in the tree and she felt its pulse through her hand.
Surprised and frightened she pulled her hand back, but soon her curiosity and fearlessness, the same she had always possessed even as a small girl, took the upper hand and she yet again put her hand on the trunk. First, there was nothing and Brida was about to shrug it off as a figment of her own mind, but then, just as she was about to pull away, there it was again, a slow thudding beat of a heart, that echoed in her own. As she opened her eyes, and the beat of her heart and that of the tree beat once more, like ripples in a still pond, it was as if the whole forest was breathing with her heartbeat. Brida felt how close she had been to death. But now, she instead felt alive.
Brida started to think back to all she had experienced up to this point in her life. All the war, the strife, the sounds of men and women as they died, it was as if what had happened to her the night before was a mirror to all that she had seen before. The chanting of priests, the drums of war, the sacrifices to Odin she had seen just a few nights before. Brida kept searching around her for any trace of what she had seen, what she had experienced. But Brida found nothing, and again, every time she would try to recall the memory of it would slip even further from her. Brida doubted herself. Had it happened at all? But one thing that remained was the feeling she had towards the woods surrounding her. Her heartbeat binding her to the forest around her.
Brida slowly started to leave the glade behind, finding her bundle of herbs and mushrooms in a corner of the glade. It was just that place where she remembered having the soup the crone had handed her. Brida’s mind felt addled, but also more clear than it had ever been.
“Was this a trick of the Gods?” she asked herself in her mind. The next thought that followed was:
“What are they trying to tell me?”
As she step by step slowly left the glade behind her Brida could feel her sanity return, but the feeling of being one with the forest around her did not leave. Suddenly, she was struck by a thought: She had been chosen. Chosen by the Gods to hear them, to feel them, to see their visions. Brida knew then, that the path ahead would be filled with blood, that the drums of war would sound, that the chanting of priests would become ever louder until they took over all parts of this land. That the blood fed to the man in the tree was the blood fed to the ground under her feet and it would please the Gods. With fire in her heart Brida would return to the village, a Skald. The last thing that Brida would hear was the wind in the trees, carrying the laugh of the crone on its breeze.