Aelis could sense its disquiet like a cold wind. She looked for the wolf behind her. There was no wolf, only the confessor lying naked on the ground. Jehan? Where was the wolf? But Jehan was not as she had known him. He was no longer afflicted but whole and handsome. She spoke again:
‘One did I see in the wet woods bound,
A lover of ill, and to Loki like.’
‘This is sorcery,’ said another. ‘Kill her before she bewitches us.’
‘That is not sorcery, or if it is she doesn’t prosper on it,’ said yet another.
The rhyme spoke through Aelis again. The poem was like a wind and she was just a reed through which it sounded.
‘The giantess old in Ironwood sat,
In the east, and bore the brood of Fenrir;
Among these one in monster’s guise
Would soon steal the sun from the sky.
There feeds he full on the flesh of the dead,
And the home of the gods he reddens with blood;
Dark grows the sun, and in summer soon
Come mighty storms: would you know yet more?’
Night was falling. The trees were dark and a wind was in them. How long had the storm been coming? She couldn’t tell. Fat drops of rain fell cold on her skin. The dying sun turned the stormclouds to gold and lead, and the forest seemed to glow around her.
‘Let’s just take them and go. It’s going to be a filthy night.’
‘I’ll have my fun first — it’ll warm me up.’ The man with the broken teeth and a torn ear had a knife.
Her pulse raced and she felt the blood drain from her face. But he seemed so fragile, such a delicate bloom, like a wild flower she could pick at any minute to amuse herself for a moment before casting it away. She felt so strange, as if she existed in many places at once, her mind a wide and several thing.
He touched her.
Aelis was in the forest and not in the forest, in the caverns of her mind where the runes shone and sang and not in that place. Where else? she wondered. In the moon garden of her youth, where the scent of jasmine lay upon the dew and the night air warmed her as she wandered barefoot and dreaming. She saw a tiny candle in a recess in a wall. There were many lamps there, now she came to look. She reached out and extinguished the nearest one to her.
The man in front of her in the forest, the hard young man with the broken teeth, one hand on his knife, the other loosening his trousers, dropped dead.
She felt confusion run through the outlaws, a rustle of thoughts that passed through their minds like the first wind of autumn through the woods of summer.
A couple of the outlaws dropped to their knees and touched the corpse’s face. The man had been dead for only a moment but was already cold. Then weapons were drawn and a word was on their lips: ‘Witch.’ In the moonlit garden she moved her hand; a breeze blew and all the candles went out.
The rain came down hard, turning the leaves to little drums pattering out a rhythm so pleasing it made her want to dance. She went to Jehan, sat him up and lifted his face to the falling rain.
‘Wake now,’ she said. ‘I have washed the wolf away.’
He opened his mouth to the clouds and blinked as the raindrops, each one as big as a berry, burst upon him.
He turned to her and put his hand to her hair. ‘It is me,’ he said, ‘as I was, and as I am. I have travelled so far to find you.’
She knew. In that instant she knew they had lived before and had been lovers whose love had outlived death. What had been her name? What his? She could not recall. The words came to her unbidden: ‘And I have waited so long for you to be here.’
Aelis kissed him and lay down with him among the corpses of the wild men and for the first time since she was a child she did not feel alone.
60
Thought and Memory
Hugin looked down at the body of his sister on the beach. He had taken her head from her shoulders with a single blow and it lay washed by the surf five paces away from where he squatted by her head. He did not go to it.
The enchantment she had laid upon him had broken when he put on the Wolfstone, he thought. But in truth it had been weakened even before that — when he had seen the lady’s face at the river as she struggled and froze in the water. Why hadn’t he killed Aelis then? He had thought it due to curiosity. He had wondered if she could drown, given her place in the schemes of the gods. They had set her a crueller fate than drowning, he’d thought, but would they relent and let her die of cold in those waters? Or would he, Odin’s servant, take her?
There was another reason he hadn’t killed Aelis as soon as he had the chance — he knew that now. He had sought her in his dreams, though the witch he called his sister had usurped her place. Had he sensed that deceit when he looked at Aelis struggling in the river?
Frozen and parched in the mountain cave, groping in the sightless dark, striving to hold on to sanity, to personality, he had dreamed such dreams. He had been a raven flying on the breeze, hunting the wide land for something he could sense but not name. And he had been in that strange avenue of trees, alongside the river and the wall where the ivy grew and where the small shrine of candles shone in the night. And he had searched for someone he could not name through the dead air of the constricting tunnels, above the mountainsides in the wind and the sun, and under the moon where the water was crumpled lead and the bark of the trees seemed shot with quartz. Always his sister had been there, under the ivy, by the shrine. She had made him believe he was bound to her eternally. She had entered the garden of his dreams and taken the place of Aelis.
Hugin felt very bitter. He had killed for his sister, abandoned his home among the monks, taken her to the mountains and lived as a wild animal, shivering through the winters, soaked in the storms, holding her hand in the dark as the first hallucinations came upon her, following her as the magic seemed to possess her, hearing strange voices in a language that was foreign to him but eventually became more familiar than his own. The gods of the Norsemen were speaking to them, and in ritual, privation and darkness he began to understand them. Still, he wanted to leave.
‘Let us go back,’ he had said, ‘away from this wild woman and her sorceries. Let’s go to some lord or farmer and offer ourselves as workers, profess ourselves displaced by war. Let us leave her. Let us leave this magic.’
But his sister had sat, stirring the pebbles in front of her with her feet, looking out from the mountain over the valleys. Then she had swallowed the mushrooms, gone back to the dark, and he, impelled by their bond, had gone with her, had joined her in her sufferings, given his mind to magic as her protector.
He had seen, crammed into the tiny space of the cave, sealed in by rocks that the wild woman piled over its mouth, he had seen. The god had come to him, lain next to him pale in the darkness — the one-eyed god of the shrieking runes, his face blank with madness, the strange hangman’s knot at his neck. Louis — he had still been Louis then — had touched his skin and found it cold. And though the god was dead, his mind was a web into which Louis felt he might fall. He shrank from the corpse god in the tunnel, pressed himself into the wall, but when he opened his eyes, the rocks at the entrance of the cave had been moved away; the weak light of the misty mountain was coming in, and it was only his sister who lay next to him on the stony floor.
When he emerged from the cave he was weeping, but his sister came to him, told him that the path to magic was not easy.
‘What was it in the darkness?’ he’d asked, but his sister said nothing; she just sat holding his hand. Then she had gone back to the dark, and though he loved her, he could not follow her in.
The wild woman had come and sat by him. ‘He is coming here — ’ she tapped the ground with her foot ‘- to die by the teeth of the wolf. The god you met in the darkness will take flesh on earth to fight and die against his eternal enemy. When he does, you die, your sister dies. Many people.’
He tried to ask why but he was raw-headed and tired. A feeling like grief was
inside him.
The woman just looked into his eyes.
‘How shall I prevent this?’ he said.
‘Serve him.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘At the centre of the universe sit the weavers of fate, the Norns, three women beneath the world tree Yggdrasil. All the nine worlds are beholden to them — gods and men. The god is doomed to die at the twilight of the gods. The Norns require it. So the god offers them many deaths in many ages, rehearsing the end to please those fateful women and forestall his own annihilation. You are caught in that grim cycle, part of a ritual the king of gods offers to the fates. Your sister too. You are destined to die.’
‘How do you know this?’
She put her hand to the burn on her face, to her blood-red eye. ‘I gave this and lifetimes of silence to see it. I too am caught in the schemes of the gods.’
‘How can I prevent it?’
‘Protect your sister. While she lives it will be harder for the god to come to earth.’
‘Why?’
‘Some things, Hugin, must be taken as a matter of faith.’
The name seemed resonant to him, to speak to his core. He turned from her and went hunting on the mountain. The thing in the tunnel had wakened something in him. His eyes were sharper, his hand surer, his step quieter. When he drew back his bow and let fly, he couldn’t miss — hare, sheep, even wolves fell to his arrows. He was strong, and when men came, they learned to bring tribute and requests for healing, rather than axes and swords.
He would sit in the dawn watching the darkness drain into the valleys as the sunlight freed the gold in the gorse, and he sat in the evening as the tide of shadow rose from the rivers to submerge the hills once more.
In the winter they built a fire in the mouth of the cave and sheltered from the mountain winds, huddling together beneath furs and fleeces.
The wild woman had sung a song in her native tongue, of two brothers who the gods had destined to kill each other, and he had understood it. The god of the north had awakened the speech of the north in him, connected him to something he had been when he had lived before and that language had been his birthright. The brothers had to dance to a song the gods sang, a song that foretold the death of the gods. The boys’ fate was to die as the gods would die on their final day, by the teeth of the wolf. Their mother hid the boys — one with the wolves in the woods of the east, one with a family in the Valley of Songs — hoping to keep them apart. But a woman, within whom lived an ancient rune feared by the gods, threatened to draw the boys together, so the mother had sent one of them to kill her. He had done this, and though it saddened the boy, his lands and his family prospered.
The darkness of the cave, the presence of the god, the starving and the freezing, had seemed to knock Louis’s mind sideways. The song seemed almost as real as the mountain, the cold and the mist, real as his sister’s affinity for that terrible cave. It was about him, he knew.
‘He is waking in you,’ said the woman, ‘this…’ she touched his arm ‘… and this…’ she touched his eyes to indicate his sight ‘… are him. In you. They are him. You are a raven, flying on the wind.’
‘And Ysabella? What is happening to her?’
‘She is learning what she carries inside her.’
‘She’s having a child?’
‘No child. The runes.’
He had seen them, the strange symbols that glowed and twisted in the blackness of the cave, the runes that chimed and sang, brought light, rain and the smell of the harvest into the tiny space.
‘I’ll go to her.’ He turned and made to go into the back of the cave, to the tunnel in the rock, to remove the pile of stones that he had used to block the passage when he had left.
‘No.’ The woman shook her head. ‘The god walks beside her. She is beyond your help. She will be your guide now. When the weather lifts, I’ll be gone.’
‘Where?’
‘Away. I have other work to do to prevent your death. I will leave you a gift.’
‘What gift?’
‘Something even the wolf fears. When the god is dead, it will kill the wolf. Treat it carefully — it is poisoned with the nightmares of witches.’
Then she had said nothing, just sat staring past the fire, into the mountain mists. He had slept, and in the morning the wild woman had gone. In her place was the sword, the slim curve of steel in its black scabbard. He had drawn it and watched it shine in the morning sun. An echo of his previous life came to him. He thought that from the sale of such a sword he could eat for years, live in comfort if he could find some town or village where he could spend his money without coming to the attention of the nobles. Perhaps he could become a merchant? He had seen the pack trains labouring up through Lombardy on their way to the Frankish kingdoms. They were free men, those merchants, not tied to any count or margrave.
But then his sister had emerged from the cave to sit filthy by the fire. He made her stew, fed her roots he had foraged and baked and tried to make her comfortable, but she had only stayed long enough to regain her strength. Then she had gone back.
He could not bear her to face what was in there alone, so he had gone with her and when he emerged was something different.
He had left Louis sleeping in the darkness. Now he was Hugin, sharp-eyed and strong, bound to the god who had come to him in the tomb dark of the cave. Ritual and self-denial became the basis of his life. He tended to his sister, found the mushrooms and roots she needed for her trances, hunted, fed and grew ever stronger. It was as if the plants of the mountain could speak to him. He knew which to pick to cure, which to send himself spiralling into trances of gods and monsters. Munin shared the magic she dug from the darkness, allowing the god to touch and bless her brother. In the sightless space, the air wet and the rock cold, Hugin felt the corpse god hold him and whisper his name: ‘Odin.’ Hugin knew what that meant. He had been claimed as a servant of death.
He saw things too. The cave seemed to grow and to flicker with the light of candles. He stood before a gigantic wolf, sheltering his sister from its teeth. He saw a huge warrior, one-eyed and fierce, thrusting a spear into the wolf on the final day. It was coming, he knew, the wolf to kill the god, drawn on by a terrible rune. He saw it writhing in the air in front of him and he knew that it lived inside a person, as the runes seemed to live inside his sister. It hissed with threat like the cobras which the merchants had brought to the monastery to delight the monks.
They had been on the mountain four summers when his sister emerged from the cave and gestured to the valley with her eyes. His bond to her was now so strong it was without words. He only had to touch her to feel what she felt and see what she saw.
‘It is waking in her,’ she said, ‘the rune that draws on the god-killer.’ He knew she was talking about the wolf and the girl who led him to his fate.
‘Then she must die,’ Hugin said, as much in his mind as with his voice.
‘Yes.’
Munin had stood up, her body frail and her hair wild, and she had headed down towards the valley. Hugin had followed, wary. He had the sword, he had his bow and he had a spear he had cut and shaped in the fire, but he had not been off the mountain since he was a boy. They went down through the pine and the fir to a wood of birch and ash, where they stayed for a season, his sister calling the birds to her, using her agony as a gateway to insight. Hugin had feared every dusk, black wings falling out of the summer sky to tear and rip at her flesh. Norsemen were in the country, killing and burning, but when they discovered Hugin and his sister in the wood, they bowed down before them and asked for blessing. Then they stayed to protect them, to watch as the birds came down on the body of the sorceress.
Hugin had made a shield for her eyes with wood and twine, but she couldn’t find the woman who held the howling rune, the rune that would draw the wolf. He begged her not to do what he knew she intended. He put himself in her place, suffering and screaming under the beaks of the birds, but it was no good. The de
ad god wanted more, so she had given her eyes, and Munin had found her. She would be in Paris when the town burned. They had travelled to tell Sigfrid his destiny lay at the little town on the Seine and the king had chosen to believe them.
Then the wolfman had begun to harry them. He seemed untouchable by Munin’s magic, though it never occurred to the Raven or his sister that he had the Wolfstone, the fragment of the rock called Scream against which all magic was useless. He was not, however, untouchable by Hugin’s sword. Twice Raven thought he had killed the wolfman but twice he had returned to oppose him.
On the riverbank, where he had caught Aelis, he had fought the wolfman for the final time. Had he known it, he would face a tougher struggle — with himself as he had been and would wish to be. When he had found Aelis something had moved inside him, as if he — Hugin, servant of death — was a clay figure which the sight of the lady had cracked to reveal something else entirely. When he had put on the Wolfstone the Raven had fallen to dust and he, Louis, had stood in the dawn light of the forest with the little merchant at his side and known that his life had been a long deception. His memory was clear now. There had been no fever in his sister when they were young. She had killed her parents with magic and bound him to her will. He had not even been her brother; he was just a monastery boy the wild woman had used.
The wild woman who had demanded he kill the abbot for the cure had actually demanded no such thing. The girl, the little girl, had entered his mind, made him love her and do her will. The wild woman was her servant, not her teacher. The girl had known what was in her — death, suffering, terrible trials — and how to awaken it. And she had brought him with her on that journey. For what?
Ysabella — Munin — had come into his dreams and displaced Aelis of Paris and the women she had been in lives before. But the enchantment had crumbled and Hugin now understood clearly what he had seen during his travels with the dead god. Aelis was the woman he had died for when he had lived before. The thing that had called itself his sister had taken her place and stolen his love for her. And he had helped her, gone willingly into the darkness with her, lain at her side and journeyed in his mind to places where she might deepen her enchantment. All that had crumbled away.
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