Fenrir c-2

by M. D. Lachlan

  What do with the lady? He could disarm her as she slept and tie her up. But he couldn’t transport her bound and gagged all the way to Ladoga. An obvious captive was an incitement to robbery — bandits would try to ransom her themselves. And he couldn’t trick her into going willingly.

  He lay down and tried to sleep, his mind churning over his problems. The horse had wandered around behind him, he thought. He could hear it snorting in the trees. Then he came to himself. No, both animals were there, next to the lady, untied but content.

  It was another horse. He stood.

  ‘Lady, lady.’

  Aelis was on her feet with the shield up and the sword in her hand.

  Leshii could see nothing. He heard Aelis say a word under her breath in her native Roman. His command of that language was poor but it was a word any trader would know: ‘horse’. She was staring into the trees. She said the word again and there was a voice, almost in reply.

  ‘Stay there. Stay there. Hold it. Hold. Ahhh!’

  There was a crash in the dark, the sound of someone falling. Aelis held up the sword. It gave Leshii no confidence at all. She looked exactly what she was — a fine lady dressed up as a warrior. She held the blade upright, the handle high at the side of her ear as if the weapon was a fan and the shield had its face to the ground, her entire chest and head exposed.

  Movement in the trees, something coming at them fast, far too quick to be a man. A riderless horse. As it drew level with the lady, it slowed and went to join the other animals. Leshii watched in wonder as it did so. It was the strangest behaviour he had ever seen from a horse. One second it seemed in a terrible sweat; the next it was rubbing into the other beasts as if they’d shared the same field all their lives.

  He didn’t have time to think about that. He saw a blink of white in the dark and a slower movement, left to right. He had the impression of something creeping, almost crablike.

  ‘That’s a Viking horse,’ said Aelis.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The saddle, see. They’re so badly made, they-’

  He never knew what she was going to say. He saw a face through the trees and, with his merchant’s ability to remember names, immediately knew who it was.

  ‘Saerda, friend, have you taken a fall?’

  The man came forward, snarling like a dog who’d had a bone snatched from him.

  ‘You, lady, owe me weregild,’ he said. ‘You killed a king. What’s the rate for that? More dinars than Paris can hold, I think.’

  ‘She doesn’t speak your language,’ said Leshii, ‘but nothing is beyond negotiation. Work with us to return her to her city and she will see you’re rewarded.’

  He guessed what Saerda had done — watched from afar until the trouble was over and then approached them when there was less chance of others taking his prize.

  ‘I know the reward the Franks would give me,’ said Saerda. ‘Rollo is my king now. He doesn’t want the people to kneel and call him a god. He’s content just to see them kneel. He’ll pay a good price for this girl and then he’ll either marry or ransom her. She can come back with me.’

  ‘Tell him if he takes a step closer I’ll kill him,’ said Aelis.

  ‘The lady invites you to sit a while with us and talk things through,’ said Leshii.

  ‘Yes, it looks like it,’ said Saerda, ‘very much indeed. Do you want to fight, lady, is that what you want?’

  He moved towards her across the glade. Aelis thrust forward the sword but her arm was straight and stiff, her body taut, like she was reaching with a pole for clothes drying high on a hedge. Saerda moved more fluidly. He put his sword up to hers and tapped it a couple of times. His arm was a whip, fast and accurate. Twice she thought he would shake the sword from her hand just with the force of his blow against it.

  He withdrew slightly and she instinctively poked the sword after him. He had been waiting for that, Leshii could see. Saerda caught her blade with his in an enveloping motion. He whirled it round and round in four quick circles before a sudden jerk of his arm sent it singing into the trees. He feinted a blow at her head, and Aelis took the bait, raising her shield to her face. There were two smart smacks on the shield but Saerda’s sword had gone nowhere near it; he’d driven it straight down through the toe of Aelis’s boot. Late and clumsily, Aelis brought the shield to the grass between them. Saerda’s mouth fell open like a gargoyle’s as he saw the two black-feathered arrows protruding from it. He turned to look behind him, and Aelis hammered into him, sending him sprawling. A noise, no more than twenty paces away, a war cry, thought Leshii, a strangled croak of aggression.

  ‘No!’ Aelis’s eyes were wide with terror. She retreated a couple of steps, dropped the shield and then turned and fled through the trees, Sigfrid’s big boot still pinned to the floor by Saerda’s sword.

  Saerda got to his feet and retrieved his weapon but went no further. Just visible through the shadows, twenty paces away, Leshii could see a terrible, lean, naked figure drawing a bow. It was the Raven. How could he aim in the dark? Leshii thought of the shield, stuck with arrows. It had been rare luck that Aelis had moved it in front of her face at the right moment. Leshii picked up a heavy stick and hurled it. He hit the bowman square on the arm, causing him to loose an arrow into the dirt.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Leshii to himself as Hugin turned and lowered the bow. The merchant ran. Leshii couldn’t see where he was going — the moon through the trees robbed the forest floor of all perspective, every shadow containing the possibility of an ankle-breaking depression, a root or stone. He fell and fell again. Then he rose and tripped once more. He was flat exhausted and could not run any further.

  He sat up. The grim figure was coming towards him through the bars of moonlight, his cruel sword drawn. In a frozen instant of terror, Leshii saw his opponent, the thin limbs, the muscles wound onto his bones like creepers around a tree, the face eaten by the self-inflicted torture of the birds to who knew what purpose, that cold weapon, death made steel, which seemed to shimmer and flash in the moonlight.

  The Raven was still twenty paces from him when Leshii fainted to the ground.

  20

  Caught

  Aelis ran too, flat out and blind with terror through the wood. There was a thump, a blinding light and she was down. Witless with fear, she had blundered into a tree.

  She could hear the monster behind her, his pace quick and light. She knew that to hide was suicide. Raven had sunk two arrows into her shield from thirty paces, through the deep darkness of the trees. He would find her, she knew. There was his call again — horrible, almost mocking.

  She ran on, as quickly as before. She couldn’t afford caution, though she stumbled and tripped on roots, sudden dips and unseen rises. She crashed into a thicket of ferns, sensing the river’s cold before she saw its glitter, the moonlight turning the water to a road of sparkling ice. But it was no road you could walk on. The cry was near her now; she had no choice, and she leaped in.

  In her haste she had forgotten the mail coat. It was heavy but not so heavy that she couldn’t keep her head above water. Her brother and his men held races across the Seine in full war gear in times of peace, and she told herself she was of the same stock, though her limbs were tiring quickly.

  Aelis hadn’t expected the current to be so strong. It swept her downstream, and she had to pump her arms to keep her mouth above water. The cold was a serpent, crushing the breath from her body and dragging her down. She kicked for the opposite bank but she was exhausted and couldn’t fight the pull of the freezing river. The black mass of a fallen tree loomed in front of her and she snatched at a branch. No good. Her numb hands couldn’t grasp it. The water took her and spun her, but then the little breath she had in her body was driven from her. Her leg had caught on something submerged. She gulped in an icy mouthful and was certain she was going down. She cried out and beat her hands against the current’s pull.

  Her foot was stuck fast but she managed another breath. As she did,
her hand touched something rough, cold and hard. It was a tree trunk, beneath the water. She hugged it, turning her back to the stream, clinging on. She was pressed against the trunk of the tree, frozen but breathing.

  She looked around. The tree emerged from the water and went under again, but it was attached to the bank. If she could free her foot she could pull herself to the shore. She tugged at her foot. It had become wedged at the ankle between a branch and the trunk. Every time she tried to free it, the bitter cold water threatened to shove her forward and down. There was nothing for it, though, she had to try. Aelis crossed her feet and used her left leg to hook back on her right. The ankle came free, the water tried to tear her from the trunk but she was ready and clung on. She felt her way along the tree to the shore.

  The ravaged face of the sorcerer looked down at her from behind a drawn bow. Aelis looked up at him and realised that all hope was lost. She shook and shivered on the trunk.

  ‘Go on then.’

  The Raven put down the bow and crouched at the side of the river. His eyes were just blank spaces; his face under the moonlight was a moon itself, pitted, torn and unreadable.

  She went to climb onto the bank; she had to get out of that icy water no matter what. Hugin moved his head to one side and looked down at her. Then he drew a long thin knife from his belt. He wasn’t going to let her get out.

  She knew she was going to die. How long would it take?

  Longer than she had expected. It got lighter, and lighter still. She didn’t die, though she shivered and her hands were blue. She knew it was impossible to get across the river, impossible to get past the Raven. How much time passed? The spring hours, the divisions of twelve between sun and dusk, seemed as long as those of high summer. How many had gone by since she entered the river? One? Two? Still he sat there, a great carrion bird, watching her like a crow watches a dying sheep. The sharp moon hung in a sky of duck-egg blue and the sun through the trees turned the air to crystal. It was day, she realised.

  Her vision faded, the moon dancing and wheeling, blurring and finally fading from sight. A sharp crescent of light split the darkness and at first she thought it was the moon again. But it was not. It seemed she was standing inside a cave, and the crescent of light was its mouth. She walked to the mouth and saw that the cave was set in the wall of a dizzying cliff. The air seemed to rush beneath her; wisps of clouds hung like mountain spirits at her feet. She held something heavy in her arms — a man. He was dead and he had died for her. She looked behind her. Somewhere inside the cave was someone else she had loved, she could sense it.

  A thumping, rhythmic song came into her head.

  ‘Then fares Odin to fight with the wolf…’

  She had never heard it before, but she knew its meaning was bound up with her life. The cold sent pins and needles through her body, but it wasn’t just a physical sensation; something seemed to fizz and spit in her mind.

  She could see more now — a huge wolf, its head bloody and its jaws red, was tearing at a fallen warrior beneath a sky of ravens on a wide bleak plain. As it shook and ripped the man’s flesh, shapes seemed to appear in her mind, and she knew them for what they were — magical symbols, expressions of the fundamental relations of the universe, living things that could plant themselves to shine and chime from the dark shadows of the mind.

  She spoke the words in her head:

  Runes I took from the dying god,

  Where the wolf tore men on Vigrid plain.

  She should be dying, she knew, but there were things inside her that did not want to die, and would not let her do so until she had fulfilled a purpose.

  She saw another symbol, a jagged tear in the fabric of the blue sky. It was one of the magical shapes, a rune, as the rhyme had said, but different from the others. What did it mean? A hook, a trap, a trap for a wolf. But it meant more to her than all the other shapes combined, more than the one that seemed to burst with flowers, wither and grow again, the symbol of rebirth, more than the symbol that seemed to her like a shield around her, more even than the one that gabbled and talked, to chuckle at the good fortune that it brought.

  Again, that voice in her head. She seemed to recognise it. It was like a child’s but worn and heavy with experience.

  The fetters shall burst and the wolf run free

  Much do I know and more can see.

  A strange realisation swept over Aelis. She would not die because she was linked to something so much greater than herself through those strange shapes, the runes that had taken root in her in lifetimes she had lived before when she had watched a god die under the teeth of a wolf. One of the symbols emanated in her mind — the horse rune, which sweated and stamped and now careered and galloped. There were others too, growing within her, whispering to her, coming to bloom.

  She came back to herself. She was still on the trunk in the river. The Raven was still crouching, his cruel knife in his hand.

  When he saw her move he stood up and retreated a pace, but she remained within his reach and the knife was pointed towards her. She clawed herself up onto the bank and lay retching and convulsing on the ground. The Raven prodded her with his foot, examining her, almost as if he was trying to understand the woman he had made his enemy. There was a sound in Aelis’s mind like the rushing of blood, like drums to call the wind.

  She didn’t know where the words came from, but she spoke to him: ‘The thread of my fate is woven. It doesn’t end today.’

  The Raven didn’t seem to notice that Aelis had spoken in Norse, a language she barely understood. He just shrugged and took her by the throat.

  21

  Last Rites

  ‘Confessor. Confessor. God. Saint.’

  The voice called him back to consciousness, though Jehan could sense that it would not be for long. He felt as though he was on the brink of an abyss, his thoughts teetering and threatening to fall into nothing.

  Where had he been? In a dark, deep place where the rocks sweated moisture and his enemy waited.

  ‘No, Vali, no. You are a different thing now, trapped by fate. You are the ending, the destruction.’ It was a woman’s voice, speaking in Norse. It was Aelis’s voice. ‘Vali.’ He recognised the name. She had infected his mind with her touch, set a vibration in him that had shaken the mental structures he had built through denials, willing and unwilling. He wanted her and God was showing him a vision of the hell to which that love — no, Jehan, call it by its rightful name — that lust had condemned him. The lady had said she feared she was a witch and, like a witch, with a touch she had turned him into something else.

  ‘Confessor. Priest.’ The voice again. He was in agony, his skin felt too tight for his body. The wounds he had taken were beginning to swell and ache dreadfully. The worst was his eye, throbbing and raw. The pain filled him up; he could think of nearly nothing else. He forced himself to speak, though his jaw was bruised and swollen from where the hanging rope had pulled up under his chin, and he hardly had the strength to move his mouth. His tongue was thick and swollen but his will was strong and the confessor made himself talk.

  ‘You are a Norseman — I know you by your speech. Are you of the faith? Are you a priest? Say mass so I might pass over.’

  The confessor gave a cry as something brushed his torn nose. The Norseman couldn’t hear much of what he was saying and had pressed his ear to Jehan’s mouth.

  ‘What is mass?’

  ‘The body and the blood of Christ. Anoint me in blessed oil and prepare the way.’

  ‘You are dying.’

  ‘Yes. Give me unction so that I may be more certain of heaven.’

  ‘What is unction?’

  ‘You are no man of God. I will die unshriven. Forgive me, God, for I have been a prideful and arrogant servant to you. What is your name, Norseman?’

  ‘Saerda, priest. Your friends have left you.’

  ‘Then be a friend to me. Allow me to bring you to Christ and then pray for me.’

  Even at the last, Jehan want
ed souls for Jesus.

  ‘How shall I come to Christ?’

  ‘Partake of his body and blood with me. Let me bless you as I bless myself.’

  There was a snort from the Norseman. ‘I will help you perform the ritual.’

  ‘You have the bread?’

  ‘That becomes the flesh? Is it true you drink the blood?’

  ‘Yes, the wine that becomes the blood, the bread that becomes the flesh.’

  ‘I have bread.’

  Jehan thought. He didn’t have the oil to anoint and purify the seats of corruption, his hands, forehead, feet and genitals, but he would have to do what he could while he had strength.

  The confessor felt his whole body shaking as he repented his sins, the pride in his holiness, the pride in his strength in accepting his affliction as God’s will, his presumptuous certainty that he was intended for heaven. He asked for pardon and recited the Apostles’ Creed: ‘ Credo in Deum…’

  Jehan could hardly get the words out. He said the Lord’s Prayer and then he was ready for his final mass. Calling on Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God and, amending the words to fit his terrible situation, he said, ‘Bring me the bread to bless it.’

  There was a short laugh, a wet sound and a low groan. Then a noise like the slapping of lips. Jehan, who had to use his ears where his eyes had failed, recognised the sound as the cutting of meat. Then the man came to Jehan and cradled him in his arms.

  ‘Say your words.’

  Jehan spoke: ‘This is the Lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the world. Happy are they that are called to his supper. The body of Christ. Give me the bread so I can bless it and eat it. You must put it to my lips; I cannot raise my hands.’

  Jehan felt something slip into his mouth. It wasn’t bread. It tasted of blood. He choked and coughed.

  ‘Animal flesh will not do!’

  ‘That is not animal flesh,’ said Saerda.

  ‘What is it?’