He had lived before, he knew, and he had died before — for that girl he had pursued and harried, tortured and nearly killed. Under a witch’s enchantment he had betrayed a bond that was stronger than death.
He sensed the true identity of his sister and who the wild woman had been. He felt that if only his thoughts would clear a little more he would know their names. But they did not clear. All he knew was that, as Munin’s enchantment faded, hate had come into his heart where there had once been love. She had moved to a different agenda, unguessable motivations. Had she wanted to die? Well, now she had.
He guessed what had happened. Munin had set out to control the runes, believing that by suffering and devotion she could possess them without them destroying her, and could devise strategies that might let her live. He had no doubt she had not wanted to die at first. But the eight runes that she had taken from the dead god had lit up in her and called for their sisters, and their longing was not for life but for death. Munin had lost herself in those rituals and woken something else — the fragment of a god that sought to be whole and to die, sacrificing himself to himself, slaughtered in the realm of men so he might live in the realm of gods.
But why had she needed him, Louis? Why keep him so close? He knew that he would die violently; she had foreseen it. But was there a purpose to that death? She had wanted the god to come to earth in her and to die, to have the knowledge of death. What was his part in that? It didn’t matter. She had wanted Aelis dead. So that meant he would strive to keep her alive.
Hugin knelt at the edge of the sea and watched Ofaeti return from the monastery with two horses laden with arms and armour. The Viking wore a long Norman cloak with the richer, shorter cloak of a Frankish nobleman over the top. The rest of his clothes too were Frankish — a blue silk tunic with a vest of ratskin around his shoulders. At his belt he wore a fine sword. Ofaeti might almost have been a Frank, but no Frank was ever that big or that red-haired. He looked like what he was — a pirate in stolen finery. The merchant was behind him, similarly dressed, leading a string of six horses.
Ofaeti waved to Raven and called, ‘I am ready to fulfil my oath to the lady.’
Free of Munin’s enchantment, the Raven’s mind had fallen in on itself through the magical gateways that had opened in the cave at the corpse god’s side. An image came to him. He was on a mountainside; he was holding a woman’s hands, unable to look into her eyes for fear his love for her would show and prompt a rejection. He heard his own voice in his mind, an echo from a lifetime before: I will always protect you.
He nodded to the big Viking. ‘And I am ready to fulfil mine,’ he said.
‘Let’s go and bag us a wolf, then,’ said Ofaeti. He took one last look at the beached ships, shook his head and followed the tracks of the monster across the wet sand and into the trees, the Raven and Leshii close behind.
61
The Devouring Now
Aelis sat next to Jehan in the long light of evening, her fair hair a halo in the low sun. All the colours of autumn were about them, though Jehan was not cold. He had a Lombard’s thick cloak around his shoulders, a good woollen shirt on his body, fine trousers and good boots. They were not the first people the wild men had attacked, though they were the last.
A smudge of memory was in his mind — faint echoes of distant bells, the chanting of prayers, Brother Guillaume’s incessant coughing during mass, the feeling of restriction, of limbs that wanted to move but couldn’t. Other recollections seemed sharper: bright water, a green riverbank and a girl, her hair long, almost white beneath the sun, laughing and splashing. He had loved her for so long, he knew, missed her for so long. Yet none of it mattered. He was there, beside her, the past and the future swallowed by the ravenous present, the sensual instant, the thrill of her touch, her eyes blue against the scarlet autumn, the forest hanging in a million wet jewels of light.
He touched the stone at his neck and she moved her hand onto his to tell him to leave it where it was. A memory of himself came back to him and he had the strong urge to cast it away as an idolatrous image, but he did not. He felt the wolf he had been like a skin he had not quite shed. When he moved he sometimes seemed impelled by a raging force and he had the urge to run snarling through the trees. The stone, though, would save him. Some sense told him this was his lifeline to sanity, the key that had released him from the slaughterhouse of his thoughts.
They hunted together — Aelis taking one of the bandits’ bows, Jehan using stealth and surprise to kill a deer with a spear. That night they cooked the meat and lay in a clearing under the forest stars.
Jehan had a sense of what he had been — a man who had loved a woman so strongly that he had come back from the dead to find her — but could not put it into words. His connection to Aelis was based on a feeling worse than hunger, closer to the fear of suffocation. She was the air to him, and he could not think that he would ever be apart from her.
They had watched the men look for them throughout the summer — the fat one like a giant, the crowman and the merchant — but they had not allowed themselves to be seen, just moved into the trees. The men had stayed a long time searching the woods but had not found them. The lady walked among them unseen, sitting by their fire, stroking their horses, even eating their food, before coming back to join Jehan. She did not want them to be discovered, so they would not be discovered.
Then one day when the air was cold Aelis had kissed him and taken his hand, leading him through the trees for miles. They came to a house, a low hut with a turf roof. No one was inside, though the remains of a life were there — a table overturned, a chair smashed and a straw bed. Someone had left quickly, and Jehan did not wonder why. The forest was a lawless place and the lives lived there were precarious. Aelis found a bow and made a fire for the hearth; Jehan laid down the pack he was carrying and opened it to find the meat and roots inside. Then they cooked their food and sat on the bed late into the evening, falling asleep in each other’s arms.
In the hut Jehan slept and dreamed of nothing — not God, not the wolf, not the cripple he had been, the man he was nor the woman by his side. He was at peace.
He awoke, feeling the late autumn cold on his skin. She had been up before him and was out collecting mushrooms. He heard her at the door, coming down the low step, putting the basket she had found in the hut down on the table.
He stretched out on the bed and opened his eyes. At first he thought the sunlight had bleached his vision away. But there was no sunlight. He was inside.
‘You are awake?’ It was Aelis’s voice.
Jehan blinked and blinked again.
‘Jehan?’
Jehan swallowed. Then he put his hand to the stone at his neck.
‘I cannot see,’ he said.
62
An Impediment to the Journey
They’d searched the forest for far too long. The sorcerer and Ofaeti were relatively young men. Not so Leshii. He would have found the going hard even if he’d had any enthusiasm for the hunt, but with so much plunder in his bags, he was in a state of terror the whole time. The woods were full of bandits and worse. Who knew what monsters lurked in the deep wood? Ofaeti and the Raven had been puzzled and frustrated. They found the wolf’s tracks, even its strange spoor, but never saw the beast itself.
For a couple of days they lay low, aware there were forest men in the area. Leshii had six horses with him, trailing behind his calm, reliable mule. Ofaeti had wanted to cut them free, saying they would draw any bandit with their mess and their noise. The Raven, though, had waved away his objections.
‘Let the merchant keep his plunder,’ he’d said. ‘Our fates are tight woven; woodsmen will not bring us to death.’
So it seemed the next day, when they came upon the bodies.
Ofaeti had bent to examine the dead men, while Leshii checked their bags and pouches.
‘These men did not die warriors’ deaths,’ said Ofaeti.
‘Plague?’ said Leshii, backing away from a
corpse.
‘In a circle, all at once?’ said Ofaeti. ‘A strange plague that does that. Is this Seid magic, sorcerer?’
The Raven shrugged. He crouched in front of the body of a bandit and touched his face.
‘Not your magic?’ said Ofaeti.
‘My magic is of the body and the fight. Not this,’ said Hugin.
‘So what is this?’
The Raven tapped his tongue against his teeth. ‘Women’s magic, but I have never seen so many taken.’
‘Your sister could do this?’ said Leshii to the Raven.
Ofaeti laughed. ‘I’d call it the rarest troll work if any woman could stick her head back on her shoulders and kill these men. We might have ended the siege of Paris and been drunk for a year on Frankish wine if she’d pulled that trick on the ramparts.’
‘I have seen one man killed this way but never as many,’ said Hugin. He sat on his haunches, staring out into the trees. After a while he said, ‘The witch is dead — you saw me cut her head from her shoulders. This is troll work but it can’t be hers.’
‘Then what?’ said Leshii.
‘Something,’ said Hugin. His face was pale.
‘We should stay here and see if it returns,’ said Ofaeti.
‘Agreed,’ said Hugin. ‘Something capable of this might be able to find the lady.’
Leshii rubbed at his ears as if he couldn’t believe they were working properly. ‘We stay here to meet something that has killed forty men and left them cold on the ground?’
‘We need to find the lady. If there is a witch here, we should talk to her,’ said Hugin.
‘And if she kills us?’
Ofaeti shook his head. ‘Why are you afraid to die, little merchant?’
‘Is that something that requires explanation? Why are you not?’
‘I will live on in the halls of the All Father, to battle all day and feast all night. It’s not right for a man to love his life too much because he must lose it one day. Fear of its loss poisons its living. Death is fun, looked at the right way.’
‘I am not afraid to die,’ said Leshii, ‘but I am a merchant as you are a warrior, and I do not want to die before I have done great deeds, won caskets of gold and built great houses. I live as a little man, I would not die as one.’
‘Well spoken,’ said Ofaeti, ‘but wrong. Even the greatest merchant, surrounded by money, women and cattle, is nothing to the man of war. Gold is superior to steel in all regards except one — when it is held in the hand. There the deeds of steel outvalue those of gold a hundred-fold.’
‘You are learned in the ways of steel,’ said Leshii, ‘and for that reason I shall bow to your knowledge and call you the argument’s master.’
Leshii knew the Norsemen and how they argued. Ofaeti’s words had become elevated, even poetic, as all his kinsmen’s did when they considered themselves in a contest of wits. It was as well to let the warrior win, he thought, and praise him for his skill with words.
‘So you are happy to stay here?’
‘Delighted,’ said Leshii. ‘May the lord of lightning forbid that I should be afraid of being murdered in a violent and unpleasant fashion.’
Ofaeti sat back on a log and scratched his head. ‘You are a clever man, merchant. Anyone who can trade without the implied threat of violence to help his haggling has a fair tongue in his head.’
‘My fair tongue has often been aided by bodyguards’ fair swords,’ said Leshii.
‘They speak in a language all men can under-’
‘Quiet!’ The Raven held up his hand. ‘Can you hear?’
‘What?’
‘Laughter,’ said Hugin.
Leshii turned his head from side to side, trying to catch any sound. ‘I hear nothing.’
‘There is laughter here,’ said the Raven, ‘and it is her.’
‘Who?’
‘Aelis.’
‘Is she with the wolf?’ said Ofaeti.
‘This is some tree spirit trying to ensnare you,’ said Leshii. ‘This is-’
And Leshii heard it. A breath, no more, but it was her, he knew it.
Ofaeti’s sword was out and he was looking around.
‘Enchantment?’ said Leshii.
‘Seid,’ said Ofaeti. Leshii had never seen the big man nervous before and that made the merchant very scared indeed.
‘What is Seid?’
‘Magic. Women’s magic.’
‘Weak then?’ Leshii said the words knowing the answer. The Norsemen held their female seers in great regard, he knew.
Ofaeti just gave him a look that seemed to question if the merchant had finally lost the little sense he believed him to have.
And then they saw her. She stepped out of the liquid air of the evening, shimmering into view and disappearing like a trick of the light. She was frightening in her beauty, something too perfect to be of the earth. Aelis, but changed and strange.
‘Lady, we are your protectors,’ said Leshii, Helgi’s reward coming to mind. She had grown so beautiful that Helgi would set him up in his own palace if he brought her to him. The thought suddenly nauseated him. Could he not look on a woman like that without his thoughts immediately turning to selling her? He shook himself. What was happening to the practical man of profit and loss?
She vanished and his head was clear. There was a sound in the distance, the neigh of a horse.
Leshii glanced to his right. The mule was alone, browsing the grass next to Leshii’s treasure of swords. ‘Our horses,’ he said, ‘have gone.’
63
A Choice for Jehan
Aelis put her hand to Jehan’s head. He was cold but sweating. His eyes toured the hut in circles as if they could make up in industry what they lacked in effectiveness.
‘You have a fever.’
‘Yes.’
‘It will pass.’
But it didn’t pass, and Aelis sat watching Jehan weaken on the straw bed. She was not alone. The runes were with her, breathing and singing inside, floating at the edge of her vision. She reached up towards one and allowed it to settle in her hands like a snowflake. It was shaped like a cup, and when she held it she thought it was deep enough to hold the sea. She peered into its depths and saw the cause of Jehan’s fever. The stone. She parted her hands and the rune vanished. Then she took the stone from his neck and set it on the table.
She sat beside him, listening to the chiming, the low wind moan and the ocean crash of the runes. She slept. When she awoke Jehan was gone and it was night.
Aelis felt no alarm but followed him, his trail clear to her in the moonlight of the silver wood. She was no tracker, but the magic inside her told her the way to go, or, rather, made any other way to go seem ridiculous and awkward, like someone who had turned right out of her door to her flock every morning for thirty years might find it strange to have to suddenly turn left.
He was among the corpses, the rotting dead men. She guessed he had come to them by smell because she knew wolves find the dead an irresistible lure.
The confessor was sitting on the ground, his blind eyes moving in mad circles, as if searching for some elusive scrap of light. The head of one of the bandits was on his lap.
‘Do not feed, Jehan. Let the wolf starve inside you.’
Jehan was mumbling to himself in Latin, making the sign of the cross over the head of the dead man.
Aelis recognised the Office for the Dead, translating the words in her mind, as she had been used to doing in church ever since she was a girl: The fear of death confounds me. The cords of death entangled me, the anguish of the grave came upon me, I was overcome by trouble and sorrow, then I called on the name of the Lord. O Lord, save me!
The confessor fell to weeping, holding the head of the corpse as he might have held the head of a lover, as he had held her head.
‘Jehan, come away from this.’
‘You are a sorceress. You have bewitched me!’
His voice was full of anguish rather than hatred.
�
�I have not bewitched you. My love, it has always been the same between us. We are here, flowers of the flesh to wax and then die. But we, like the flowers, only know a seeming death. We go on to bloom again for ever. I have seen it — the runes have shown me.’
‘There is no future life, only the resurrection of the flesh through Christ,’ said Jehan. He collapsed sideways on to the ground, coughing. ‘I will not be this… devourer.’
‘Nor need you be. The fever will pass. Come back and be my love.’
‘It will not pass. It is the stone or the monster. I will weaken or I will eat.’
Aelis looked inside herself. Who was she? Could she really recall? There was a memory of the girl who would have been repulsed by the sight in front of her but it was like the smoke of a campfire in the hills — distant, faint, then gone. Then she saw herself clearly. She was the thing that stood beside him. He made her what she was, like the sea makes the land the shore.
‘God will not let you suffer like this. There is a prince in the east, a sorcerer. Let us go to him.’
‘I will not consort with the worshippers of idols.’ Jehan’s religion had returned, it seemed, along with his infirmity.
‘The magic of the stone saved you from being the wolf. Why cannot magic save you now?’
‘God has made me weak and set this trial to punish me. I will wear no pagan stone, but the wolf will go unfed, muzzled by my will.’
A caul of sweat was about his head, his hands and voice shook.
‘And yet here you are, among the corpses.’
Aelis looked for the runes to help her, to heal him, make him well. But in his presence they seemed to tremble and wither and the sound she heard in her head was of that of searing and burning. She went away from him, walking through the moonlit forest, the trees shining white like a foretaste of winter. She wanted to help him, to comfort him, but she knew that Jehan would only ever find his own way, or rather God’s way.
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