by MD. Lachlan
He ran towards the shouting. When the voices were almost on top of him, he looked to his left and saw a large wooden tower looming above him from the fog. The gatehouse. He knew that entering the town was almost certain death. Helgi had clearly ordered him killed, along with his companions. He crossed the river on the ice. Women, children and old men were pushing in through the gate. Some were crying, others seemed panic-stricken.
Hugin grabbed a woman who was trying to encourage a young child to move faster. ‘What’s happened?’ he said.
‘You are the sorcerer they are looking for you. Get away from me!’
He drew his sword to show a thumb’s width of steel.
‘What has happened?’
‘You should know, troll-witch. Our Helgi is dead. Our protector is dead.’
‘How?’
‘He put her in the earth and she struck at him. The Frankish witch cast a glamour on a man who Helgi had well rewarded. Our prince is dead. Dead, and we must look to our defences.’
Hugin turned away from the gate and ran back along the stream of people. The woman screamed after him that an enemy was among them, but the confusion was too great, the fog too thick. He was just a shape in the mist.
He was running up a hill now. Men’s voices shouting, ‘Witch, witch, kill the witch!’ Hugin knew there was no time for reason, debate or argument. These men had found Aelis and were going to kill her.
Black shadows in front of him. Another four paces and they were men – druzhina with spears, not looking at him but peering down at their feet. He charged, beheading one with a left-to-right diagonal swipe and kicking the man next to him in the small of the back, hoping to put him out of the fight for long enough to deal with his two comrades. Hugin took off the hand of a druzhina who was trying to draw his sword and booted him into the man behind him, sending both warriors sprawling. He then killed the uninjured man with a blow to the head. The sword jammed in the skull. Hugin let it go. The handless man was in shock, staring at his bloody stump. Hugin drew his knife and gutted him then turned to face the druzhina he had kicked at the start of the attack. The man wasn’t there.
Only then did Hugin realise there was a pit in front of him and the man had fallen in. The townswoman’s words came back to him: He put her in the earth.
A face appeared over the lip of the hole and Hugin kicked it as hard as he could. The man fell back and Hugin heard shouting below. He looked down. A druzhina with a torch was looking up – eight or nine more of them in the tiny pit, fearful faces gazing at him. He tried to pull up the ladder but the men grabbed it, though none of them looked as though they wanted to climb it to their deaths.
Working quickly, Hugin shoved the nearest body to the edge of the pit and booted it in. More shouting from below. He could tell the pit was deep but not so deep he couldn’t jump down. He rolled another body to the edge and hurled the corpse down. Then he freed his sword from the warrior’s skull and rolled that man in to the pit too. He was about to leap down himself when he saw something from the corner of his eye. The body of the merchant. He could only really tell it was him from his silk turban because his corpse had been reduced to mere meat by the ferocity of the attack that had killed him.
‘Come on,’ said the Raven. ‘You can join me in a last battle, merchant.’
He rolled the body to the edge of the pit with his foot and then booted it in, jumping in after it without a sound, his long knife drawn. He wanted the druzhina to think that he was just another body, harmless beyond its initial impact. For the first breath when he landed he would be just a corpse. Then he would start to make them.
Men broke his fall – dead and living, the torch hitting the floor and going out as he smashed into the warriors. Hugin went wild, slashing and stabbing as he had never done before. No one could see, but Hugin had eight targets, his opponents only one. Swords were too big, axes useless, but the druzhina used them anyway. Friend killed friend in the tiny space, Rus axe struck Rus flesh, Rus sword tore Rus guts. At last it was quiet and the Raven stood on his corpse mound, not knowing whether to hold his shoulder or his face. Both were cut and his tongue came out of the wound in his cheek all the way to his back teeth. Never mind, his sword arm was in good order.
Light came from a tunnel at his feet.
He hauled the bodies out of the way and crawled into the tiny space. It was about ten body lengths long and tight as a coffin. He wriggled forward, hoping there was no druzhina coming the other way. If there was one with a spear then Hugin was dead. There was no druzhina; only a torch burning weakly on the floor of the tunnel. Hugin shouldered his way forward. The torch was near the lip of a shaft that disappeared into darkness. He could see nothing down there.
Then he heard a voice: ‘Witch! Where are you, witch?’
There was a woman’s scream and a man’s roar.
Hugin pulled himself forward. The ceiling was a little higher over the pit and he managed to sit upright. He sheathed his knife, checked the tie on his sword and jumped into the darkness, into the cold black water.
77 The Dread Wolf Fenrir
Black, freezing water, so cold and dark it numbed all sense of where the surface was. Aelis kicked up, breathed in and choked, kicked again in panic and finally took air into her lungs. Her limbs were dead, her heart pounding. She could see nothing and the water was deep. And then a tiny light, wavering in the darkness. She kicked towards it, taking in mouthfuls of icy water, flailing her arms.
Her hand hit something solid. A shelf of some sort. She blinked the water out of her eyes and looked around her. She seemed to be in a large cavern, the water ending at a ledge that had clearly been cut rather than formed by nature.
A man dropped into the pool behind her and panic took over. She couldn’t lift herself out of the water. She had hit her head when she fell. Pain spread across her forehead and she feared she would pass out. She glanced over her shoulder. The man behind her was much taller than she was and had found the bottom with his feet. He was walking towards her, his head out of the water. She was trembling, her hands unable to grasp her knife.
A searing pain shot into her guts. She reached down to feel something hard and sharp protruding from her belly. The man had a spear and he had thrust it straight through her, she realised. She retched and and cried out, one hand reaching for the bank, the other grasping the spearhead.
And then from above her she felt hands reaching down about her neck.
‘It is time,’ said a childish voice. ‘The stone has protected your deliverers. Its task is over.’ The pendant was untied and the runes lit up all around her again.
The warrior leaped at her, pushing her head underwater. The spear twisted as their bodies came together and the runes shrieked and sang as they spun in three orbits of eight around Aelis and around the figure on the side of the pool.
Aelis tried to go to the garden of her mind, to that place at Loches where the candles burned, but the runes were dancing, and she could not make them send her there. She gulped in freezing mouthfuls. Then it was quiet. She heard a girl’s voice in her head: I have waited so long in the dark for you. The runes showed me you would come here if I led the wolf to you.’
Who are you?
My name is your name.
Who are you?
Odin.
I am not a god, said Aelis.
The runes are inside you. Sixteen strong. When they become twenty-four you and I will be the god.
How shall they become twenty-four?
In Odin’s old way. Death, said the voice.
Do not give in to him.
He is you. This is our destiny. Three will become one, the knot will be retied and the dead lord will live to die in Middle Earth, to make his sacrifice to fate. We are three, made whole and new again in death, tied in the knot of death.
The god is in us but he is not us. Let him wait for death, let him not live to die. If I live then you can live too.
But you will not live.
I will live.
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You will not live, said the voice.
The runes in Aelis were singing, answering voices in perfect counterpoint to the other ones in the chamber.
I am not what I was.
What were you? said the voice.
A woman in a garden.
And I am not what I was.
What were you?
A child beneath a bench.
What have we become?
Little broken things.
Parts of a whole, said Aelis.
The runes spun and danced, and Aelis felt herself returning – Aelis, the frightened girl who had run from Paris, she of the line of Robert the Strong who only wanted to go back to that garden at Loches and see the moths dancing in the torchlight. But the moths weren’t dancing, she remembered; they were burning and dying.
She was underwater, Aelis realised, not breathing. The connection with her runes was weak. They were grouping together, eight, eight and eight, a triple knot forming in her mind, a knot older than the gods. Aelis felt behind her and put her fingers to the shaft of the spear that impaled her. She felt as if she had eaten too much, stuffed herself with an agonisingly enormous amount of food. She felt the runes’ departure like a tugging on her skin. She heard a noise like tearing gristle, smelled burning and knew that the thing with the childish voice intended her to die.
But there was one rune the child-thing that spoke to her had not seen, did not want. In her agony Aelis felt something step from the shadows of her mind and watched the rune slink forward, like a hunting wolf, low and lithe. Aelis heard a howl rupture the dead air of the cavern – like a wolf’s but wilder, more distressed. The rune snaked and pulsed in front of her, a dark slash in the fabric of reality. It was older than all the others, and it said so many things, but loudest of all it said, Wolf trap.
It spoke to Aelis, and she saw that it had been in her far longer than the other runes, stretching back many lives. And Aelis realised the voice was wrong: she did not have sixteen runes within her. She had seventeen. This rune did not dance in the orbits of eight, this rune did not chime or cheep or sing, but slunk and crept in the shadows of her mind. It was the rune that seemed like a rip in the daylight, the rune that howled.
‘Vali! Help me! Jehan, as you have become, help me!’
The rune’s darkness intensified inside her and a cold howl seemed to splinter her mind. All the fragments of what she had been rushed in on her. A girl by a hut by the water, a captive travelling north to be the instrument of sorcerers, a traveller rushing south in the snow, a girl in a garden by a river, a lady kneeling in the dark of a church, a fugitive, hunted and harried, a vessel, a cup to hold magical and perilous powers.
Breath! She was up from the water and in the air. Hands were around her waist, trying to push her out of the pool, but the spear that impaled her was too much of an encumbrance. The water was warmer, she noticed, and the warrior who had tried to drown her was gone.
‘Who?’
‘Hugin. Yours. I am he that protected you before, come for you. Feileg.’
The last word was a name, spoken uncertainly. It stirred memories in her, as the wind brings sound from the smoke vent of a house. She had been there before, in such a place underground, facing a terrible and murderous child. Words came back to her said in regret and misery, but words that she meant more than anything she had ever said in her life before.
‘I will live again without you, Vali. You are hated by the dead god.’
In the garden at Loches, where the moon metalled the trees and the river lay like a bridge of light between the darkness it came from and the darkness into which it disappeared, something had chased her. Now she could turn to face it. She saw him standing there. The confessor, Jehan, the man who, when she looked again, was a wolf. Ahead of her on the path through the trees stood another man, almost identical, his face untorn by scars or welts, a man who beckoned her with love in his eyes. It was Hugin, the Raven – Feileg as she had known him in the life before. The truth was clear to anyone. The two men were brothers.
In the underground chamber there was a crash and the ceiling shook, sending stalactites crashing into the water.
‘He is coming.’ The childish voice again. ‘Kill her.’ Sua’va spoke to Hugin. But the runes were still locked in their embrace, not listening to what she said.
There was another enormous crash and part of the ceiling collapsed into the pool.
Sua’va shouted,
‘A ship sails from across the sea,
And Loki is steering.
There with the wolf
Comes the lord of lies.’
There was a shuddering blow stronger than that of a gale sea into a headland – Aelis felt it in her chest – and the ceiling collapsed. Grey daylight flooded in, and with it a terrible howl, a sound from the dungeons where the mind buries its fears.
The voice was nearly screaming now:
‘Stone cliffs tumble
And troll-witches stumble.
Men tread the road to hell
And the sky is sundered.’
The wolf’s head came drooling through the gap in the ceiling, snapping and biting at the air, dislodging a torrent of soil.
‘Will it harm us?’
‘It is here to kill us,’ said the voice, ‘but it needs a littler murder first.’
The wolf dropped into the pool with a huge splash and Aelis clung to Hugin as the water swept over her head. He had her and, despite the spear, pushed her up onto the lip of the pool. She thought she would black out with the agony. Her vision blurred and she vomited blood. When she regained her sight she looked up to see two figures beside her. One was Hugin. He’d dragged her from the water, away from those huge jaws, which opened to the height of a man. The other was the emaciated figure of a woman or a child, it was difficult to tell which. Her body was terribly thin and her face was the face of the drowned.
‘Stop!’ Aelis screamed at the wolf as it fixed the child with a stare, drawing its lips back from its dripping jaws.
It turned its great head. ‘Aelis,’ it said, ‘I am here for you. I am here to protect you.’
‘I am dying and you cannot.’ Another piece of the ceiling fell into the pool. The rest was crumbling and looked ready to cave in.
‘I am a healer. I can help you.’
‘Do you know yourself, Confessor? You are a killer and a slayer of many.’
‘I am lost, Aelis.’
The runes were humming around her like moths and butterflies, bees and sparrows. They were uniting, she could feel, and she knew for sure she was dying. ‘This is our destiny,’ she said. ‘It has always been and will always be. You are the killer and I draw you to the kill.’
‘We will oppose it,’ said Hugin. In future lives perhaps we will know ourselves and avoid this fate.’
‘Then we all must die,’ said the wolf, ‘so we all might live again.’ It leaned out of the water, its head over the shelf of rock.
‘This is the skein that is woven,’ said Sváva, ‘again and again and again. The slaughter-fond god will come and he will have his death.’
‘Then let us die,’ said Hugin.
‘No!’ Aelis cried out but Hugin came forward and struck the wolf across the muzzle with his sword, sheering away a great flap of flesh and exposing the teeth beneath.
The great wolf howled and shook. Jehan could no longer control the animal he was.
Hugin raised his blade for a second blow but the wolf was too quick. It drove its jaws into his body, seized him about the waist, tearing a handspan of flesh from his side, and threw him behind it into the water, the sword still gripped in his hand, slashing wildly. Hugin tried to get up, but there was a rumble and a great slab of ceiling fell away, crashing down on top of him.
Ofaeti, standing deep inside the hole the wolf had torn in the barrow, watched Hugin sink. He swung himself down on a tree root onto the pile of rock and earth that had fallen from the ceiling and groped in the water. He gripped something. A hand, still
holding that curved sword. Ofaeti pulled and the Raven came free, gasping and choking into the air.
The wolf stared down at Aelis. ‘I will not kill you.’
‘There will be no need,’ said Aelis.
‘I have loved you.’
‘And I have loved you, but this destiny is too terrible. If I live again, Jehan, you must never come near me.’
‘I will find a way to come to you in safety.’
‘There is none.’
‘Our destiny is death, torture and suffering, again and again, into eternity,’ said Sváva.
‘No!’ said the wolf and drove its teeth towards her. She threw out her girl’s arms to fend off his jaws but he caught her by them, pulling her forward, tearing off both limbs and then snapping her body in two with a bite.
The runes came shrieking in, filling Aelis with delight. She saw fire and battle, smelled grave earth and rot, heard the creaking of hangmen’s nooses, felt the cold skin of the dead on her fingers, tasted the ashes of funeral pyres in her mouth, and all these things seemed wonderful to her. She pulled the spear from her body and held it above her head. Magic filled her in waves of ecstasy. With her free hand, she tore out her right eye.
The chamber had gone. She stood on a burning plain full of the battle dead, surrounded by numberless flies. The spear was in her hand; she wore a hauberk and helmet and carried a shield. To her side lay an eight-legged horse, dead and torn. The runes were around her no more; they were her, who she was – she was just an expression of their unity.
‘Brother has killed brother – the prophecy is fulfilled. Now I fare to fight with the wolf,’ she said and advanced upon the creature.
The wolf fixed her with burning green eyes. ‘I am Fenrir, devourer of the gods.’
‘And I am Odin, one-eye, master of poetry and magic, who you exist to kill. This is our destiny – let us honour it.’
