Lord of Slaughter

by M. D. Lachlan

  Loys did not respond to this. The mention of soothsayers made him recall Isais’ threat to the street magicians.

  ‘I would ask a favour, lady.’

  ‘You who have given so little?’

  ‘Logothetes Isais has mentioned he intends to purge the fortune tellers and amulet sellers. I would ask you to prevent that from happening.’

  ‘I am a noble lady, not a bureaucrat – how can I help?’

  Loys recalled the way Styliane had dismissed Isais with a wave of her hand. She could act if she wanted, he knew.

  ‘I thought you might …’ he searched for the right words ‘… speak to someone.’

  ‘Why not ask your master my brother? Although perhaps not. He has little tolerance for magicians.’

  ‘Even though his mother was a soothsayer?’

  ‘Some say because. Our mother died, you know. Don’t pay attention to any of the silly rumours surrounding that; she died as a result of her devil worship. Seeking oracles in the earth, so they say. The rumours concerning my brother’s role in it are just that. More rubbish from magicians and witches. No one wise pays attention to them. Would you like more wine? Come, you must drink. You’re hardly sipping.’

  Loys took a swig of wine. He needed to – his mouth had become very dry.

  ‘My brother is plagued by rumours. His opposition to any investigation has always been on the grounds it would give credence to silly market talk.’

  Loys swallowed. So the chamberlain had been forced into commissioning him. Right.

  ‘What talk?’

  ‘The sort that attends any man who rises quickly. People can’t believe a man rises on talent. There must always be someone to suggest something untoward. Half of this stuff is spread by his enemies and the other half by idiots. He and the emperor came up together to each other’s mutual benefit. The chamberlain is a holy and devout man. It’s what everyone says.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘In fact, it might be argued they overthrew a witch to obtain power. You know our emperor’s dear mother Theophano seemed to have secured the throne through her lover the former emperor John. And then by God’s grace – it must have been God, who else could it have been? – John took ill suddenly and died.’

  She smiled directly at Loys and took a sip of her water.

  ‘It was huge good fortune that the death brought a bitter, bitter dispute between the chamberlain and Basileios and Emperor John to an end. There is no doubt the death was natural. Why, none at all! People have said all sorts of treason – that Basileios and the chamberlain consorted with demons and are now paying the price. Rot, of course.’

  The lady smiled again.

  ‘So I expect you have been told to direct your attentions to the foreigners.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘An excellent plan. It must be they who have caused all this fuss. Though they weren’t here at the start of Basileios’ illness. I am confident you’ll work out how they conjured something up five years before they got here. There are many powerful men in the palace who will sleep safer once blame has been apportioned.’

  ‘Yes.’ Loys felt like a puppet who had until that moment been under the illusion that he moved of his own accord but who had finally worked out what the strings were for.

  The lady leaned forward and said very quietly, ‘Because if the sky and the comet and the death of the rebel and the emperor’s lamentable condition were shown to be the work of men in this palace … Well, imagine what their enemies would pay for such information. Imagine the privileges and position the scholar who presented such evidence would accrue.’

  Loys was struck dumb. He had no idea of how to deal with this, no notion of how to survive caught between this woman and the chamberlain.

  Beatrice looked at Styliane but past her, conspicuously making no effort to catch what the lady was saying to her husband.

  ‘Be careful,’ said Styliane in a low voice. ‘Many eyes are on you but you have a powerful protector in me. The time will come soon, scholar, when you will need to choose your friends from your enemies. Already people talk about the rightness of a lady being married to a scholar. Can her father have been happy with that marriage? Choose well and wisely.’

  Loys bowed his head.

  Styliane sat back. ‘Now, my dears, I have detained you long enough. Please, Lady Beatrice, you must attend me next week. I have a Bible study group and it’s quite the place to catch up on court gossip.’

  Beatrice thanked the lady. The scholar stood, not knowing what to do with his glass. Beatrice took it from him and put it on a little table. She led him away. A eunuch opened the door and the couple went through. Their servant was waiting outside.

  Loys could see no immediate way of handling the competing pressures he was under. Instead he concentrated on his discomfort in such high company. He didn’t want to show Beatrice he was concerned by the clear threat to him.

  ‘I’m sorry I embarrassed you in there,’ he said in Norman, ‘I’m not used to court niceties.’

  ‘You didn’t embarrass me.’ Beatrice used their native language too. ‘This place has ridiculous protocols. They’re only there to embarrass you – that’s why they exist.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘They make insiders feel more like insiders and outsiders feel more like outsiders. It’s a very elaborate way of looking down their noses. And listen to her with her veiled threats and clunking great hints. That was insupportable behaviour, Loys, I’m surprised she dared be so bold.’

  ‘We are in danger,’ he said.

  ‘A courtier is always in danger,’ said Beatrice. ‘It’s the price of opportunity. Escort us back to our room,’ she said to their eunuch, returning to Greek.

  They made their way back through the corridors, stopping to exchange the formal greetings and replies required by the guards at each door. Loys was weary with it all. Even to a former monk whose life had been ruled by ritual, the demands of the Byzantine court seemed heavy and unnecessary.

  They arrived at their room and went within. Loys immediately noticed all his papers and books were gone.

  ‘Did you clean this chamber?’ he asked the servant.

  ‘No, sir.’ The man didn’t seem quite sorry enough about the burglary for Loys’ tastes. He was about to shout at him, to ask him how this had been allowed to happen but, as he began to speak, he lost the thread of what he was saying and instead concentrated on seeing what had been stolen.

  ‘Is anything else missing?’ said Loys. Beatrice went to the small chest she kept by the bed. The lock had been prised apart.

  ‘My rings are still here,’ she said.

  Loys leaned for support on the wall. Whoever had taken his papers had not even paid him the courtesy of pretending it was a robbery. Beatrice sat quiet and thoughtful on the bed. Loys wondered what her father would do in a situation like this. He would seize the initiative. But how? He had an idea.

  ‘We have been buffeted by hostile winds for long enough. It’s about time we created a storm of our own.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I am the chamberlain’s man, ordered to perform an investigation,’ said Loys, ‘so I will investigate and I will accuse, and we will see what fear brings us that pleasantness did not.’

  17 The Vala

  Bollason sat by the sea’s edge, watching the dark horizon. Behind him stretched the tents of his army, their pennants of ravens and wolves snapping in the breeze. The light was like nothing he had ever seen, the black ocean shining, the sky iron and the air silver-blue.

  The dogs of the camp seemed restless, barking and grumbling at the falling sleet. Two gulls tumbled and brawled over the ocean, crying and screaming as if one said it was day and the other night. Nearby a child howled and would not be comforted.

  ‘Could this be it, Vala?’

  ‘Don’t call me that.’

  The woman beside him was not young but she was very beautiful in the weak blue light.

  ‘It’s true
. I know no one wiser than you.’

  ‘I have no art, Bolli. Your mother had the runes in her heart, not me.’

  ‘And yet you saw.’

  ‘With borrowed eyes. Yes, I saw.’

  ‘This could be the end time, happening here.’

  ‘I don’t know, Bolli.’

  When she turned to him, she revealed an ugly scar covering most of the right side of her face. It was a burn; no knife or sword destroyed flesh like that.

  ‘If the god dies here, then what?’

  She waved her hand, a gesture between exasperation and dismissal. ‘What always happens. Death, agony, rebirth. Always.’

  ‘Elifr has tried to stop it.’

  ‘Elifr is a man. He acts first and thinks later,’ she said.

  ‘He is seeking to protect you.’

  ‘I cannot be protected,’ she said. ‘Elifr has a place in the schemes of the gods, and though he moves to frustrate them, he will only bring destruction on himself and those he seeks to keep from harm.’

  ‘I could protect you, if you’d let me.’

  ‘I am not the one who needs protection. This is where Odin earned wisdom. This is where he went mad. If he returns here then the city will fall.’

  ‘Suits me,’ said Bollason. ‘There’ll be riches for us all then.’

  ‘It must stop, Bolli. I cannot go on.’

  ‘Go on with what?’

  ‘Losing my sons for ever. Putting them away, hiding them to keep them from the mad god’s gaze.’

  ‘Your sons are dead, Vala.’

  The woman looked out to sea.

  ‘I have lived too long,’ she said. ‘The gods think they bless me but I carry a heavy curse.’

  ‘They do bless you. You are the same today as when I first remember you.’

  ‘In my appearance, perhaps,’ she said, ‘but I’m tired. I need to do this.’

  ‘You’re sure the well is where you say?’

  ‘We saw as much.’

  ‘Then let me bribe us into this prison and do your work.’

  She shook her head. ‘The ritual is long and could bring notice. We need to take control of that place Bolli.’

  ‘You talk of ritual but you say you have no art.’

  ‘I have art enough for what I need to do.’ She wouldn’t tell him what would be required of her because he would try to stop her, as the wolfman was trying to stop her. Death – the god’s old price.

  Bollason leaned forward and looked up to the black skies. ‘Your answer will be there?’

  ‘It is as your mother showed me. We are near to the end, Bolli. It will just take a little courage.’

  ‘If that is all it took then I could ask any of my men to do it. I would do it.’

  ‘But you cannot.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Only me.’

  ‘Could my mother have done this?’

  ‘That was a lore-wise woman. But no. This was not her destiny. It is mine, so she told me when …’

  The woman’s voice faltered.

  ‘She died, Vala. I have been a warrior these fifteen years. I am not so tender as you think.’

  She smiled and touched his shoulder. ‘I knew you when you were at your mother’s breast. Your heart is not as hard as you want people to believe.’

  ‘It is hard enough.’

  ‘But you follow me out of tenderness.’

  ‘Yes. And by my mother’s command.’

  ‘And if your mother had not commanded it?’

  ‘I would still follow you, Saitada.’ He sat quiet for a while and then: ‘How will you know you are at the place? If we can take command of the prison and you go down into the earth, how will you recognise the well when you see it?’

  ‘I will know, I’m sure.’

  Bollason said under his breath, ‘Mimir’s Well. Odin gave his eye for lore in those waters.’

  ‘And the fates sit there spinning the fates of men.’

  ‘That well is called Urtharbrunnr.’

  ‘They are the same. And different. One magic well has many manifestations, just as the gods themselves take many bodies in the form of men.’

  ‘So Odin gave his eye. What will you give?’

  ‘More than that. I am a woman, not a god; the waters will want more from me.’

  ‘Will you survive?’ he said.

  ‘My destiny is here. The destiny of the gods is here. I have my part to play.’

  ‘In death?’

  ‘Consider the sky, Bolli. Odin’s magic is unfolding. He will come here to die on the teeth of the wolf so the fates may spare him in the realm of the gods. He must not be allowed to do that. He must die in the realm of the gods. The mad reign of Odin must end. It’s as your mother saw.’

  ‘And it’s the girl we will find at the palace who must die?’

  ‘If it was that simple Elifr could have killed her. I don’t know what needs to happen to her. We need to bring her to the waters.’

  She watched the dark sea and recalled the rhyme that had been born in her mind when the old vala had died. She said the rhyme. She didn’t want to burden Bollason with it but she needed to speak her fears to someone. And besides, he had a right to know what was happening.

  ‘In the east did the old one sit

  She bred the bad brood of Fenrir

  One of these, in a wolf’s fell guise,

  Will soon steal the sun from the sky

  Now he feeds full on dead men’s flesh

  And the sky is reddened with gore

  Dark grows the sun and in summer

  Come weather woe, would you know more?’

  ‘So said my mother,’ said Bollason. ‘Is the prophecy coming true?’

  ‘Fimbulwinter,’ said the woman, ‘when the summer departs and great harm comes to men. This is the sign the death of the gods approaches. This is the sign Ragnarok is here. Look – snow in summer, unexplained deaths on the battlefield.’

  ‘So Odin is riding to meet his fate at the teeth of the wolf?’

  ‘Yes. In this world. So he might live in his own. We will suffer; the world will suffer, but he will live.’

  ‘If the god is on his way to death then what can stop him?’

  Saitada glanced at Bollason and he was a little boy again, caught acting foolishly. No one could tame him when he was a child, not with beating, not with shouting, not with denying him dinner or sending him to bed. Saitada, though, could silence him with just a look, leave him creeping in shame from the scene of his naughtiness.

  He had that feeling now, stupid, desperate to please her but despairing of how it might be done. He’d loved her since he was a child, first as an aunt, later with all the ardour he should have held for women of his age. He hadn’t wanted them. He had travelled the world, become a great war leader, killed many men in battle, forged his destiny with sword and spear. But when he returned home and looked into her eyes he felt unmanned and unworthy of her. Her spirit was greater than his, and in front of her he was only ever a child.

  Saitada threw a pebble down towards the ocean. She remembered the raw dawn, the standing stones stark against a sky of slate. The prophetess had gone seeking an explanation for Saitada’s tormented dreams that had come upon her when her husband died.

  Saitada had watched him go, wasting to nothing in his bed, he who had sailed the world and brought the gold he had won with axe and shield back to their hearth. The disease took him, her sons too.

  The night the third boy died Saitada had wept by his bed until not sleep but a sensation of falling had come to her. She heard names shouted through the darkness, strange but with an echo of familiarity: Vali, Feileg, Jehan, Aelis and her own. Visions sparked in her mind – a leering smith, naked from the waist down, the hot iron with which she had spited her beauty and ruined her face so he would look on her with pleasure no more. She saw a white-haired warrior, his sword a talon of fire; she saw a demented child; and she saw the god, the one who had come to her three times now. The bright, beautiful, burning god who
came to her as a wolf, or who stepped from the corpse of a princess, his skin pale in the moonlight, or who had found her adrift at sea and rescued her in a boat made of dead men’s nails and lain with her on a silver beach under the morning star.

  Three times he had given her sons that she had tried to hide from the notice of the All Father. Twice she had failed. This time she would protect them – her boys, the twins, the ones she kept secret from her husband and kin, the ones she had hidden in the hills and over the sea.

  She’d hoped to make a life away from the notice and schemes of the gods, had gone back to the land of the white-haired king, raised a family and tried to forget. But he wouldn’t let her rest – him, her lover, the father of the twins.

  After that night when she had buried her last son by the farmer she had never slept well again. Always in her sleep strange voices spoke half-remembered names. In her dreams she went to a cave, a low and dark place where something was pinioned and tied, something that seethed and shook, something that longed to be free. An ancient torment was awaking inside her.

  Bolli’s mother, the vala, the prophetess, had said she might help free her from her nightmares. They’d gone to the standing stones, where the iron clouds cast a grey veil of rain upon the hills to perform the ritual.

  Saitada had helped the old woman, lit the fire and sprinkled on the herbs, kept her awake through nine days and nights on that storm-blown hill. The visions came and they had killed her.

  As the sorceress died Saitada had seen too – the magic well, the font of all knowledge, a comet rising above it in the east. She told Bollason his men would win fortune in Kiev and sailed with them there, where they had sold their services to the prince. She spent ten years in the hills, while Bollason fought his wars. With her goats, her staff and her cloak she was happy in her solitude.