Valkyrie's Song

by M. D. Lachlan

  The violent men had respected her and called her ‘shieldmaiden’. She went with them to Constantinople. She remembered seeing the city for the first time, vast and white in the autumn sun. When Styliane had told her the gods were dead she had believed it. Mankind had surpassed their achievements, built a monument to itself in stone and marble.

  In the desert camp, she took out her little cross and studied it. Christ had hung there when his father demanded his blood. Odin – all father – had hung on a tree too, for wisdom. The path to paradise was suffering, there was no question of that.

  The tribesmen made a fire to cook with and the smell of roasting goat seeped over the hot ground to the sweltering canopy where she lay. They were celebrating the rune going into the child. She remembered what Styliane had said – that the girl was the ideal candidate to receive the rune. She was a baby, so it would be many years before the magic flowered in her and snared her mind in its roots. She was a member of a tribe that was shunned by its countrymen and who kept away from all contact and civilisation. More than this, women were only so much chattel to the. . A¯d, expected to do nothing beyond serve men and raise children. She would know nothing of the world, have no experience of how to travel outside her desert home. Eventually, though, the rune would shape her mind to seek its fellows, to become the god again by murdering Styliane.

  Freydis traced the shape of the rune in her mind. It was an arrow, flying against a clear blue sky. The rune said its name. Tiwaz – the symbol of the sky god Tyr, lord of battles, binder of the Fenris Wolf whose destiny it was to kill the gods on their final day. The arrow wanted blood – Styliane’s, she could feel it. Well, it wouldn’t have it.

  That lady had given her so much. Money, yes, and a trusted position within the guard. But more than that, she’d given her companionship. Freydis had escorted her everywhere. She remembered down by the Galata Bridge, the moon on the Bosphorus, the city’s domes seeming to smoke with the fires driving off the autumn chill. Styliane had confessed to Freydis there how long she had lived, what she had seen in that city and in Baghdad. She had lived for many lives, won her magic with pain and grief in the well of all the worlds that sat below their Constantinople, the world city.

  It had never occurred to Freydis to disbelieve her. The lady was too grand, too noble, to bother lying to a servant. And besides, Freydis knew it to be true. Styliane was not like other people. Her beauty was like that of the city itself – ancient, deepened by time.

  Styliane valued Freydis as someone simple and direct, unswayed by the currents of politics that eddied and swirled through the empire’s court. She told her stories she had heard at the court of Baghdad – one of a prince who went mad with love for a girl whose tribe forbade her to see him.

  Freydis remembered the beautiful words about a boy lit up by love. ‘As a ray of light penetrates the water, so the jewel of love shone through the veil of his body,’ and about a girl ‘caught between the water of her tears and the fire of her love’. By Styliane’s side, Freydis was a thing transformed, a medium like glass or diamond, through which love might shine and attain its full beauty.

  She remembered most what Styliane had told her the boy had written in his letters to his lover.

  ‘For how long then do you want to deceive yourself? For how long will you refuse to see yourself as you are and as you will be? Each grain of sand takes its own length and breadth as the measure of the world; yet beside a mountain range it is as nothing. You yourself are the grain of sand; you are your own prisoner.’

  No one she had ever met had spoken to her like that. The people from her farms were of the earth, regarding the earth; their conversation limited to the privations of their existence and as much gossip as could be mustered between eight farmsteads. Styliane was of the stars, talking of gods and goddesses, of magic and love. Freydis loved Styliane and would die for her; she’d known that within a month of working for her. Now she must live for her, keep the thing inside her quiet, away from her mistress. Her rune would seek Styliane’s runes. She could not allow it to succeed in its quest.

  She needed to put as much distance between her and Styliane as possible. Freydis’s tears had dried up years before yet she felt close to weeping at that thought. But Freydis had lived a life of hard choices. She would do what needed to be done.

  The heat told her where to go – to the cold. She needed to feel it in her bones again. She’d return home, buy back her farm with the plunder she had won in the east, and live for as long as she could, knowing that she would see Styliane again at least once before she died. She would need to call on the lady, or the lady on her, to ensure the rune did not ensnare its sisters. The ritual at the well would be repeated but it would be Freydis drowned in the water.

  The men finished with the goat and it was the women’s turn to eat. She wished these people could be hurried but she knew they could not, not under that sun. She’d go back with the . . A¯d to the edge of the Empty Quarter, then strike for Jeddah. From there she could take a boat north on the Red Sea, strike overland for Alexandria and on to Constantinople; pick up her pay and plunder and head up the Dneiper to Novgorod to find a trading boat home. Surviving that journey as a lone woman would be a challenge but her face was so weathered, her nose so broken and her shape so angular she could pass for a man. People rarely looked beyond the sword and the shield anyway. Still, a man would find it hard enough.

  She stood and went to eat. She didn’t like these tribesmen of . . A¯d, particularly the hard little man who seemed to be their leader. She could see by his eyes that he disapproved of her warrior’s dress, of the sword at her side. She’d be glad to be gone. Something inside her shuddered. The rune. A great longing sprang up in her, a desire to stand with Styliane in the umber light of Hagia Sophia again, feeling the presence of Christ, the hanged god, floating in the air. The lady, and the runes inside her, must be awake. She crossed herself and prayed.

  ‘Let me live, for her, and die for her. Grant me the strength to stay away.’

  She looked down into the bowl of goat’s bones and picked one up to gnaw at the remaining meat.

  7 Mask of Fear

  ‘What is your name?’ Tola asked the wildman.

  ‘Ithamar.’

  ‘You are from the past the woods?’

  Tola knew only the few farms on which she had been raised. ‘Past the woods’ was her term for anything beyond a day’s walk from her house. The man led her horse down the hill. He could not ride, he said, but she could sit on the horse, take in its warmth and rest. The Normans had food with them and she’d eaten as much as she could of the bread and ham. She was wrapped in two of the Normans’ fine cloaks. If they found her with them, she was dead. It didn’t matter, she was dead anyway. Hals was dead. She could hardly take it in and allowed her mind to be consumed by her bare need for survival.

  ‘I am of the woods.’

  ‘A wildman?’

  ‘A man of the woods.’

  ‘A wildman.’

  ‘So what should we call you, girl? You who pull demons from the air to save you?’

  ‘Those ladies are the protectors of the dale. They would come to the help of anyone who knew how to ask.’

  ‘And what do we call those who know how to ask?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Have a think,’ he said. ‘Until you think of the word “witch”’.

  She felt his fear of her, as strong as that of a bird in a snare at the approach of a hunter. Why fear her, of all people, in this burning land, this ruin?

  They dropped off the side of the fell. The clouds were thick and there was no moon but the fires of the farms cast some light and told her where they were. To the right, Nan Elswite’s; above that Hunfrith the weaver and his family; to the left, Winfrith the cooper; and below them Aylmer’s farm. All burning, a constellation of terror marked out in the dark.

  ‘Where are we
going?’

  ‘To the woods first, and then from there we’ll have a ponder,’ said the wildman. ‘I have people who would speak to you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The lords who would throw the invader from our lands.’

  ‘What can lords want with me?’

  ‘You saw what you called on the hill. They want that.’

  Again, fear. It came off him like the smoke from the burning houses. She let her mind wander away from her.

  ‘I want to go to my farm.’

  They had all fled when news of the riders’ approach had reached them. Her brothers went to the woods to set an ambush and her mother bid Tola and Hals run on without her. She could not feel her out there in the darkness – no scent of mint and soil, no warmth or comfort. She knew she was dead. Yet still she needed to see.

  ‘Your farm is gone.’

  ‘I want to go.’

  ‘Not with me and my horse,’ said Ithamar.

  ‘Then on my own.’

  She slid down from the horse.

  ‘Or my cloaks.’

  He spoke harshly but the fear was still there. When she allowed herself to sense someone’s feelings or attitudes she saw them as images or sensations. In front of this man, she sensed herself. To him she was the shape moving at the edge of the firelight, the night noise that is neither owl nor fox, the thing unremembered from a dream that leaves you only with the sweat and your thumping heart to remind you of its presence.

  ‘I will take the cloaks,’ she said. ‘You may keep the horse.’

  She walked on down the dark hillside.

  ‘Get back on the horse,’ he said. ‘I will take you to your farm.’

  It was three hours in the darkness to get to where they needed to be. The Normans on one farm had found some ale it seemed, because they were singing, drunk. A girl screamed over the song, a desperate wail like the trumpet that heralds the end of the world. Then she was quiet. Tola did not want to think about who it was, though she knew the cooper’s girl Eldreda lived on that farm. Her friend.

  ‘A bad business,’ whispered Ithamar.

  It was. Tola kept her feelings locked down tight. She could not think on what was happening or she would go mad.

  They kept silent around the farms. The horse’s hooves were not loud on the wet earth.

  The Normans would have heard the battle on the hilltop, even if they couldn’t see it, and would be expecting their men down soon.

  They found the little lane between the fields that led up to her house.

  ‘They have gone,’ said Ithamar.

  ‘How do you know?’ Her voice was low.

  ‘They’ve burned the house to nothing. It would be mad to do that if they were staying. They’d want to sleep in it and shelter their animals.’

  They trod carefully down the lane, she dismounting in case the fire picked out her shape and the Normans saw her on the horse. She was wearing a Norman cloak but she knew no Norman carried himself as poorly in the saddle as she did, especially with her broken ribs.

  The firelight was low by the time they arrived at her house. No Normans were there but everything had been smashed, to the smallest detail. The body of Lar the dog lay in the yard, an ugly wound in his side. Tola had cut him free but he was old and had preferred to lie before the house instead of run with them. They couldn’t make him move and hadn’t had time to drag the dog across the fields. He had a good bark on him but was a sweet old thing. He would have greeted the intruders wagging his tail.

  They moved around the back of the farm, keeping low. Ithamar warned her that as the farm was on a hill they would be easy to spot, black against the red, by any watching Normans. She picked up something from the floor. The ashen remains of a knife. It had been her mother’s, made all of wood, though the handle had survived the fire. She took it. One day, she would come back with men and make one of them push it through a Norman’s heart.

  She looked at the outline of the house, broken in, her mind providing its shape, true and whole. The house had sunk a little at one end and that outline was home to her, a beautiful slow collapse that they always vowed to fix in the summer but somehow never had by the autumn. The flames were low now, little dancing ghosts where her mother had sat, her brothers, friends, around a fire, sometimes long after sunset.

  ‘That is past,’ said Ithamar, his face gaunt in the firelight. ‘Burned now. Only future.’

  ‘The past is a blade in my hands,’ said Tola. ‘Forged anew and stronger by the fires the Normans lit.’

  ‘Fine words for country girl.’ Again the wave of fear from him.

  You can lead me to men who would avenge this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She let her mind wander the land. Only drunkenness, hatred, wariness. There were no living kinsmen in the dale. She couldn’t even find the girl who had been screaming.

  ‘My mother is dead, my brothers too. Death has served me, now I will serve death.’

  Ithamar looked into the flames.

  ‘We should cook the dog,’ he said.

  8 A Senseless Rescue

  Loys touched the stone at his neck as he moved with his Norman companions through the burning farm. The horse underneath him felt skittish and frightened. It was not a warhorse like those ridden by the Norman warriors around him, and the screams of the dying men and animals set its flesh quivering.

  He turned his eyes from what he saw – all the degradation and slaughter of war, yet this was no war. It was a massacre, the like of which he had never seen before. The Norman conquerors were putting their mark on the land, teaching the English the cost of rebellion.

  His belly trembled, his bones felt rotten and his flesh old. Human then – disgusted, vulnerable among this carnage, the wolf locked away inside him. He tried to stop himself feeling good about that. It had cost him a lot to regain such control.

  A gritty wind sprang up and he covered his face with his scarf. He remembered his Bible:

  ‘Have you entered the treasury of snow,

  Or have you seen the treasury of hail,

  Which God has reserved for the time of trouble,

  For the day of battle and war?’

  A gut-churning squeal from his right; a pig gushed blood into the snow. They threw its carcass onto the fire of the farmhouse. There was a glut of plunder in this land, too much to carry, so the Normans destroyed everything. Even the better men among them grinned at how wealthy they felt: ‘So rich we used fine robes for kindling,’ they’d tell people later. There was a joy in waste. A confirmation. They had two carts, heaving with what they had robbed from the farms – grain sacks mainly, some spades, metalwork, even a bed. These were not rich people they robbed. They did not bother to drive the pigs or cattle – they were moving too quickly and there were no markets nearby. Not any more.

  He touched his stone again and kicked his horse on. Was she here? Or was she already dead, the girl from the vision?

  In the Dneiper Woods he’d fled north after he’d killed the Pechenegs and found the wolf stone. He needed to go quickly, quicker than any horse, so he had not put on the stone. He ran hard, though to nothing. Through the vast woods towards Kiev he went, running with the wolf packs beside the roaring Dneiper, hunting like a man with his bow, eating like a wolf – the meat raw, still as warm as when it had lived. As a man he risked bandits and ambush but with the wolf unfettered inside him, he could slip through the trees as softly as the shadow of a stoat, unseen but seeing.

  His mind was a cave as he ran, full only of moonlight and sunlight, of the voice of the waters and the song of the woods. When he stopped, he forced himself to wear the stone again in case he gave in completely to the wolf. So by night the memories of his humanity came flooding back.

  There had been a woman, Beatrice. He saw her now only in glimpses – her bone-blond hair, her smile, her body na
ked beside him in the bed in the little inn beside the water when they’d first come to Constantinople. It had all changed there, in the catacombs beneath the city. A century before? More? Time was a parchment left out to the rain, its meaning smudged.

  He had buried his sword, thrown away his clothes and lived in the great forests with only his wolf brothers for company. Their bodies warmed him by night and their cries filled his mind by day. Beatrice was a memory, a shade who seemed to watch him through the trees, her eyes reproachful. ‘You are not a wolf,’ she seemed to say.

  ‘Then what am I?’

  ‘A man.’

  ‘You gave me life. Can you give me death?’

  ‘If you can find me.’

  The other woman had found him in the woods and he’d thought she had come to kill him. No, she had come to make him live. The symbols danced around her, silver, some like darting fish, some moving with the sound of the rain, others chuckling or fluttering by like a tumble of sparrows’ wings. He raised his head and, in her sight, he knew it was the head of a great wolf. The symbols around her shrieked and tumbled as he settled his gaze upon her. She was not there. She was somewhere else. In a desert, mind blown with magic before a mystic well.

  She had summoned him to her presence, called forth the vision of Beatrice and with it the certain knowledge his wife had been reborn, to offer him the chance of release from life.