by MD. Lachlan
‘You did it before. Do it again.’
‘What?’
‘Your lover is dead but he will live again. Without you if your courage fails.’
Aelis looked around her. Just the tunnels, just the rock. She couldn’t see where the voice was coming from. Then the tunnel dipped and turned, grew narrow. A gap was to her right, no more than a fissure in the rock. Something glistened and shone on the wall next to it. She put out her hand and touched it. She looked at her fingers. They were wet and shiny. She couldn’t see the red of the blood, the whole cave was bathed in a lead light that turned everything to shades of grey but she sensed red. Aelis went through the crack in the rock, edging herself sideways to get in. She was not a big woman but still it was a breath-crushing push, the fissure so narrow that at points she had to wriggle to get through. But she did get through. She was in a room, a small chamber just high enough to stand in, though after ten paces it began to taper to nothing, the jagged ceiling coming down to a sharp and stony floor like the jaws of a great animal.
It was a scene of carnage. On the floor lay a huge wolf, its eyes vacant, its tongue lolling, its throat cut, a pool of blood about it. It was dying, and the noise it made was a wet rasp that seemed to fill up her mind, leaving her incapable of thinking of anything else. The wolf’s breathing quickened when it saw her and it tried to get up, though it seemed fatally wounded and could not stand. She did not feel afraid and went forward to put her hand on its great head. Its eyes turned to hers and they seemed almost human, full of longing.
Next to it lay three bodies, or the remains of bodies. One was a man with long silver hair, his hand still clasped around the handle of a strange curved sword. She had seen that before. It was the Raven’s sword. The second hardly existed. It was no more than a ripped spinal cord hanging from a skull like a bloody plait. It was female, that was all she could say. The other body she knew. Its face was instantly familiar.
The man wore a dark wolfskin about him, and his muscles were strong and taut, but a gout of flesh had been ripped from his side. She thought of Sindre, who had struggled to rescue her from that thing with the torn face, but this was not Sindre. Though the face was much stronger, more vigorous, not drawn or wasted like that of the monk, still she recognised him. It was Jehan, the confessor. Aelis felt her throat tighten, tears come to her eyes. She heard her own voice speaking: ‘I loved you but the gods did not love us.’
Someone was watching her but she could not see who.
She knelt at the confessor’s side and pulled back the wolfskin from his face. He was dead. She lifted him. His body felt light in her arms. She dragged him through the fissure in the rock, pulling him through until she was back in the larger passageway.
Aelis felt a breeze on her right side and looked to see where it was coming from. An archway of light was there. She walked towards it.
Lady! Lady! Another voice. She recognised it. It was the merchant.
She stepped into the arch and found herself looking out over a broad and beautiful land of mountains and rivers. To her right she saw the ocean, to her left a wide and fertile valley. She was very high up indeed; wisps of cloud hung beneath her. When she looked down, the ground seemed to rush and swim, and she knew that if she stepped forward, she would fall to her death.
‘You did it before; you can do it again.’
Lady, put down the sword. Lady, you will hurt yourself.
‘Do it. For your lover.’
She looked over her shoulder. Behind her was the creature with the defiled and torn face, the woman whose head looked like a gall apple on an oak rather than anything human.
But then she felt a light burning inside her. She felt something manifesting in her mind – a shape, two lines at an angle, like a K but without the vertical line, an arrowhead. It flamed and burned, crackled and shone, and when it shone it threw out a light that illuminated everything before it in a way far beyond sight.
The man in her arms had the confessor’s face, but it was not the confessor.
‘He is not dead,’ she said.
‘He is on the brink. If you go, he will know and he will follow you.’
‘He is not dead. I know who he is and so do you.’
Lady, lady, put it down, for the sake of the lord of the holy lightning. What do you mean to do? Does not your religion forbid it? A Christian must not take his own life. You must not take your own life.
Leshii was gesturing at her with his hands raised as if trying to coax a valuable vase from the hands of a two-year-old. To Aelis he was an insubstantial figure. The reality of the caves seemed stronger.
‘See my lover. Your pretence is undone,’ Aelis said.
She turned and showed the face of the man in her arms to the woman behind her. The creature fell back and clasped the side of the cave, then fell to the floor and screamed, a piercing frightful noise that had within it the tortured cries of foxes in traps that Aelis had heard in the night at Loches, the screams of relatives of thieves hanging on the gallows, the cries of children in the burning buildings of Paris. It was the sound of the collapse of reason and sanity.
She looked down at the face of the man in her arms and now she screamed too. It was the Raven.
Aelis let the sword fall from her hands, and Leshii sprang forward to wipe away the blood where she had been pressing it into her neck beneath her chin.
‘It was the witch. You were enchanted.’
‘Yes.’
‘What is to be done? What is to be done?’ The merchant was talking as much to himself as to her.
Aelis sat back against the prow of the little boat. She was cold beyond measure.
‘Get me to a fire, Leshii.’
‘The night is falling, lady. We cannot risk the birds.’
‘The birds will not come tonight.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘She is scared, Leshii, I felt it. That woman who pursues us, she is terrified. She is acting out of fear.’
The face of the Raven seemed to hover before her. How had she not seen it? His skin was ripped and torn by the beaks of the birds; he was stronger, better fed, healthier than the confessor, but they were like brothers. It was as if they were the same man, his image reflected in some imperfect and distorting mirror.
‘It is wiser to keep moving.’
‘Let me have a fire, Leshii. I am so very cold.’
The merchant nodded and steered the boat into the bank. The mule gave a great sigh of relief and hopped ashore, and the fishermen beached their boat beside them.
‘Problem?’ said one, nodding to the bloody cloth Aelis held beneath her chin. His hair was grey and his face raw with years of wind and sun.
‘No problem,’ said Leshii. ‘The lad is an ascetic.’
‘A what?’
‘A mystic. He seeks pain to put him nearer to God. They have them in every religion; I’m sure they have them in yours – what is it, brother?’
‘We are Christians of the holy Catholic Church,’ said the fisherman.
‘As am I,’ said Leshii. ‘Come on, we’ll have a fire. The lad will join us tonight.’
‘Honoured indeed,’ said the younger fisherman, a man with the slightly surprised look of one of his catches.
They sat together in the night, cooked river trout on the fire and ate it with samphire from the waterside. Aelis was hungry and gobbled it down.
The younger man bit a piece of samphire in two and waved the remaining half towards Leshii and Aelis. ‘Getting near the sea now, as Saint Peter’s plant shows.’
‘We need to go east, brother. Will we pick up a ship there?’
‘Who knows? Tomorrow we’ll see what the Norsemen have left of the land. There’s nothing out towards the coast; all the villagers have come inland. Those bastards were beaten here in the summer but people know they’ll be back. You might find yourself on a boat to the west and north as a slave if you’re not careful. I’m not sure ships go east any more.’
The fisherman’
s words stirred something in Aelis’s memory. She felt she had been a prisoner before – taken north on a ship. The memory was so vivid to her. She saw great dark mountains rising out of a cold black sea, felt the bitter north wind, smelled the greasy wool of a sea cloak, heard the creak of the rigging.
Huddling into the fire, she touched her neck. It was sore from where she had pressed in the tip of the sword. She looked at the faces of the fishermen in the firelight. They seemed like spirits of the underworld to her.
At Loches there had been a little chapel. Her uncle had commissioned a man to paint some biblical scenes for it. She had sat and watched as he mixed his pigment and egg and made the faces of the apostles appear on sheets of wood. Every day Aelis watched him, and eventually he asked her if she would like to be the model for a picture of the child saint Agnes of Rome. He had painted her outside in the clear summer light, on a panel he had used before for an unsuccessful attempt at a depiction of Saint Catherine. She’d been fascinated to watch herself appear from the mess of colours he kept in his little pots and to hear the story of how Agnes had refused to marry the prefect’s son, so the prefect had her put to death. Roman law didn’t allow him to kill a virgin, so he had her dragged naked through the streets to a brothel to be raped. But she prayed, and hair grew all over her body to cover her nakedness, and each man who tried to rape her was struck blind. A pyre was made for her, but the wood would not burn, so a soldier stabbed her through the throat.
When the picture was done Aelis had gone with the artist to the kitchen to eat and flirt with him. When they returned, a shower of rain had blown into the clear blue day, washing part of his painting away. Through the face of the child, the eyes of the woman Catherine peered out. This image had come back to her because the same thing was happening to her now. Memory, or something like memory, was becoming so powerful that the world she walked through seemed no more than an impression, a shimmering of sun on water, a shadow on fog.
And then there was that face, not the woman but the man she had held in her arms. She had looked down at him and known him – the Raven, the thing that stalked her. She had once felt close to him. But when? The wolfman had said she had lived before, which was a belief contrary to holy law but one for which Aelis had a distinct sympathy.
A preacher from the east had been put to death at Loches for saying that Sophia of God’s Left Hand was equal in divinity to Christ. She had heard him speak before he was arrested. Only one thing he had said remained in her mind: ‘And the disciples said, “Tell us clearly how they came down from the invisibilities, from the immortal to the world that dies.”’
His execution had enraged many of the servants, who said rightly that worse heresies were spoken at the table of the count. Aelis had not gone to see the hanging – she was too young and never had the stomach for that sort of thing anyway. The servants had said that he had shown no fear and declared that the world, his flesh, was only related to divine reality in the way a painting is related to the thing it represents. He no more feared to lose it than to see a child’s doll broken.
These recollections chilled Aelis. Her mind seemed like a plundered house, its contents smashed and disordered, but at the same time a new clarity was upon her. She could connect things she had never connected before and sense a truth deeper than anything she had ever known. The preacher had been right, she felt it in her heart. The world was a painting and now the pigments were being washed away. But what was underneath? The caves, that figure in her arms and those terrible symbols that fizzed and spat, shone and chimed inside her mind, and most of all the figure of the man with the wolf’s head who watched her in her dreams and whispered words of love in her ear?
Her heart beat fast and she was sweating despite the cold. She was terrified, though not of the things that stalked her nor the empty night and the strange men who surrounded her. Then of what? She tried to give it a name. Fate? Destiny? Or just time, like a weight that hampered her every movement? She felt a sense of the vast darkness before her birth, something that had been a blank to her but in which ghostly faces now seemed to loom. Everything she had known was wrong, or rather more complicated and dangerous than she had guessed.
And what of the man she had held in her arms in that vision? What of the Raven? There, by the riverbank, with the fire in front of her, the damp of the spring night cold on the back of her head, the discomforts of twigs and stones beneath her, the fishermen in front of her and the merchant nervously scanning the sky for birds, she was terrified of him. But she had had a vision, a vision that had seemed more real than the boat, the river, Leshii or his mule. She felt so strongly she was linked to that man she had seen in her arms by something that went beyond concerns of property, family or social position, the same thing that had made Judith run away with Iron Arm, the same thing the little merchant, the one who sat before her like a spirit of the fire in his turban, wide trousers and tapering beard, had wanted but never felt, the thing that the fishermen had never even contemplated, tied to the facts of net and boat, famine and plenty.
Aelis had felt it in her heart since she was a child. She was incomplete. Now she knew why she had gone wandering in the night at Loches, why her dreams were full of searching and never finding. She had been looking for him. To what purpose? So she might die? No. Then what? She had no idea, or couldn’t name it to herself. Still she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was for him she had walked barefoot by the dark River Indre at night, for him she had run through the corridors and caves of her dreams. That felt more terrible to her than anything she could imagine, and tears ran down her face as she watched the fire.
In the hills a wolf was calling. Somehow Aelis seemed to understand what it was saying. She spoke the words as she watched the fire: ‘I am here. Where are you?’
43 View of a Monster
The Raven’s hands had shaken as he’d nocked the arrow to kill the monk at the door. But he had let fly regardless, and the shaft had gone straight through the man’s throat where the neck meets the chest. His hands had shaken too as he’d led Grettir’s men in to cut down the monks singing at the altar and ended the song of ages with the hacks and slashes of his terrible curved sword. He’d trembled as he’d taken the monks to the pool. Nine of them were to die that way – one for each day Odin hung on the tree at the well of wisdom. He had beaten them, stamped on them, kicked and subdued them until he could tie them to the columns, each one secured at the neck with the tricky, sticky triple knot, the dead lord’s necklace, the knot that slips and sticks, then slips no more.
Nine to die that way, the rest butchered and burned, bludgeoned and stabbed by the war band. He knew the old man, of course he knew him. He had sought him out, told the Vikings that none of the older men were to be killed. They’d found the monk on his knees in the little chapel. Hugin had not wanted to look into his eyes but he had done so anyway. The not wanting to was the point of the magic.
‘Father Michael.’
‘How do you know my name, abomination?’
‘It’s me, Louis.’
‘I know no Louis.’
‘You were my instructor. I killed the abbot and ran away.’
The old man shook his head. ‘Louis? Is it you? What has happened to you, child?’
‘I am a servant of the old gods now. I am your death.’
The monk looked up at him. ‘You will show me kindness. I always showed you kindness. Intercede for me here, boy.’
The Raven had seized him and dragged him to the pool. The old man had taken some time to die, though not as long as the fat cook or the master of scrolls or the boys or the two who were still living when Hugin brought Jehan to the dark waters. Nine to die. The Raven had only killed eight by evening; the war band had got the rest. The traveller, Jehan, made nine – provided, Hugin had no doubt, by the hanged god himself to make up the magical number.
The old man’s death had been very hard on Hugin. Father Michael had taken him under his wing as a boy, turned a blind eye if he slippe
d back down the valley to see his family. But it being hard was the point. Hugin knew that terror, humiliation, horror and shame were gateways through which magic might step. So he had borne the deaths, the thrashing and the choking, the pleading and the desperate psalms sung through throats tormented by rope. And the god had not granted him a vision.
But then, as Hugin sat on the verge of weeping in the dark of the church, the traveller had come, and the Raven had drugged him and taken him to the waters.
Show me my enemy, the sorcerer had thought. And as the bloated faces of the hanged and the drowned stared back at him, as the choked psalm had grated on his ears, the god had granted his wish. The traveller had torn the rope from around his neck as if it was the poorest thread and set upon the monks beside him.
Hugin had heard him speak a name: ‘Fenrisulfr.’
The Raven had known then that it was under way – the twilight of the gods. Ragnarok was playing out on earth again, an event so cataclysmic that its echoes went backwards in time, its conflicts and terrors leaking into the world of men as history spun towards the terrible day when it would happen for real.
The god in his earthly form was to die, Hugin and his sister with him. There, rending the flesh of the fettered monks, was the thing that was to do it. He had thought the wolf would be just that – a wolf – but now he saw its spirit had come to earth as a man. He’d asked Odin to show him his enemy; he’d sacrificed the monks, the war band, his own human feelings to the hanged god and thought he had been shown nothing. Not so. The god had sat the wolf beside him in the church, put him at his mercy, and Hugin had failed to act, failed to save his god, himself and, most importantly, his sister. He knew he could not kill it – that was not his destiny and as much had been revealed to him – but he should have imprisoned the thing when he had the chance, dragged it unconscious through the waters of the pool to the caves beyond and sealed it in there for all time.
