Valkyrie's Song

by M. D. Lachlan

  The first man, younger than the rest, drew his dagger from his belt. She stayed looking at him, still as a woman listening to a fireside story. The rune sang and screamed, the spear burning bright in the darkness. He smirked and turned his head to glance at the others for approval. By the time he turned it back, half his jaw was missing as she brought the sword up from the straw and cut him in one movement.

  The men behind him took a heartbeat to realise what was happening. They had no heartbeats to spare. She thrust the sword up under the next warrior’s hauberk, sticking half of its length into his belly. The remaining man jumped backwards out of the house, trying to get the time to free his sword. His hands were cold, though, and he was surprised and scared. He fumbled for his blade but she had the spear, the weapon that embodied the rune. She charged but the man stepped back, stumbled and the spear missed. He scrambled to his feet and jumped on to his horse, digging in his heels so the animal leaped forward as if scalded. She threw the spear and missed, catching the animal instead in its rump. It bucked and kicked, terrified, throwing the rider down into the snow on his head. He went down hard and heavy, not even getting out a hand to break his fall.

  She looked at her hand. The spear was still in it. She hadn’t thrown it at all but sent the rune forward with her mind. She walked over to the man. He looked up at her from the snow. She jabbed him with the spear. His eyes were full of panic but he didn’t move. It was obvious he had broken something, maybe his neck. It was very cold and near dark. There might be others behind him but she doubted it. She brought the horses inside the house through the animal door and stripped the bodies inside. The man outside moaned, his voice wet with blood. When night fell he became quiet.

  Her own kit had suffered badly in her months in the open. It was good to get into the Norman’s warm padded gambeson. Few of the invaders had bothered with full mail and were wearing the sort of coat made to act as armour all on its own – big enough to fit over her own underarmour, greased against the snow and very warm. She ate some of the provisions the Normans had with them – good bread, cheese, smoked ham, legs of chicken and chicken breast. The land was bountiful and they had taken what they wanted.

  She ate, wrapped in the Normans’ cloaks, and thought how easily she could have been these men’s allies. There had been Normans at Novgorod, urgent, excited men who said that the English king was sick and the throne promised to their lord. They were heading back to Normandy with gifts for Duke William – rare spices, fine clothes and slaves, hoping that their generosity would be rewarded with gifts of lands in the new country.

  They were curious people, the Normans, like her own – some even speaking Norse still – but very different in many ways. More Gallic, less flexible. They were convinced they were right, those people, and looked to teach the world, not to learn from it. Their tales were fascinating, and they listened respectfully to hers but always they told her what she should have done, how a Norman would have handled the situation. ‘So simple,’ they’d say. She admired their confidence, even if it did make her want to pitch them into the sea now and again.

  So she could have gone to William’s court and been with the victors in the south rather than the losers in the north when England was attacked. She might have even earned her keep and plunder with the men whose bodies now lay outside in the snow.

  But no. She bit into the bread. Outside the wolf was calling. She’d follow it in the morning.

  11 Breaking Free

  The boy was a lousy cook, or if he wasn’t, the Normans made him one.

  He shivered and hogged the fire as he roasted the meat in the farmhouse and Giroie thought him too eager to be warm. The Normans, all twenty of them, were packed into the longhouse, each man a devil in the firelight.

  ‘Get away from that fire, boy. You check the meat every little while, not all the time like that.’

  He kicked the boy backwards. They’d tied his legs so he couldn’t run and he fell heavily on his arse. Robert followed in with kick after kick, driving him away on his belly.

  ‘You’ll kill the boy,’ said Loys. His hand was agony, swollen and already blackening to a bruise. He swallowed and tried to ignore it.

  ‘You’re right, I will,’ said Giroie. ‘That is, after all, why we’re here.’ His Norman was rough for a knight – one of those who’d won his rank at Hastings rather than inheriting it. In a generation, thought Loys, his children would speak like courtiers. In ten generations, what? Would there even be a court then?

  ‘Well, try not to do it before we’re served. And he has to mend the hole he made in my coat.’

  ‘If you were half a man you’d make a hole in him for that.’

  Loys smiled. Half a man. There were times when he hadn’t even been that.

  He touched the wolfstone.

  ‘What is that you’re always fiddling with?’

  Loys said nothing. It was only the fact Loys had paid a good sum to be taken and offered a sum more if he was brought back that he was there at all.

  ‘Looks unholy to me. The wolf is the sign of the northerners and some of those have no more knowledge of god than …’ He paused, presumably thinking of the right comparison. ‘The devil.’

  ‘I should have thought the devil would have a very good knowledge of God,’ said Loys. He had never lost his scholar’s habit of thinking that statements invited debate. Among warriors, generally they did not.

  ‘Why did we bring this smart arse with us?’ said one of the warriors. Loys hadn’t bothered to learn his name.

  ‘Just let the boy cook.’ He held his hand.

  ‘Maybe you should cook. You haven’t earned your keep by killing.’

  ‘I asked to accompany you, not to join you,’ said Loys. ‘What plunder have I taken?’

  ‘What are you doing here, foreigner?’

  Loys said nothing.

  ‘Perhaps we should cut you lose.’

  ‘Or just cut him.’

  Maybe it was time. He wouldn’t get the young woman back to London in one piece in this company. London was where he needed to be. The well manifested there, its waters nourishing the city, helping it grow. There he would go to the waters to help him understand what he needed to do with her.

  ‘I’ll go tomorrow,’ said Loys. He wondered how he would survive, even if he found the woman. He was a Norman, or had been a century before, but that would not protect him when he came across other bands of warriors scouring the land. If he had something they wanted, and they would want a woman, they would take it and kill him to do so. If there were enough of them. If he let the wolf free inside him, he would be a danger to the woman himself.

  ‘Not so easy. You owe me when we’re back in London.’

  ‘You’ll be paid.’

  ‘We have only your word.’

  ‘My father was a northerner, of the Ice Lands, a Viking true. When we give our word, we give it sincerely. You will be paid.’

  ‘The vow of a northerner means nothing. How many times have the people of this country and ours paid them silver to leave, only to find them back next summer?’

  Loys didn’t bother pointing out that paying off one band of Vikings was hardly likely to carry much weight with any entirely separate group that turned up.

  ‘What, then?’ said Loys.

  Giroie shrugged. ‘Leave some token we might reclaim.’

  ‘I have nothing save my sword, which I will not give up.’

  ‘I don’t want that bent bit of iron,’ said Giroie. ‘Perhaps you’d have more fight in you if you had a straight sword like a man.’ He pondered for an instant.

  ‘Give me that stone you wear about your neck. It is precious to you, I can see.’

  Loys touched the stone again. It was his anchor to normality, to thought rather than instinct, to reason rather than rage.

  ‘Ask for something else, Robert.’

&nb
sp; ‘Don’t Robert me. I’m sir to you. I demand the stone. Hand it over.’

  Loys touched the pendant at his neck with his broken hand.

  ‘I cannot undo it. Why don’t you take it?’

  Giroie understood the challenge.

  ‘Filocé, take that stone off the foreigner.’

  Filocé, the pale-faced Norman warrior who had won his scars at Hastings, came up behind Loys with a knife. He snicked away the cord and took the stone, holding it up to the firelight. The pebble was secured by a strange triple knot woven into a kind of cradle. He swung it over to Giroie, who caught it and inspected it.

  ‘Pagan?’

  Loys’s face was impassive. The brawl of smells, colour and sound scrambled and thumped in his head as the wolf inside him opened an eye.

  ‘Yes. I had you for an idolater the moment I saw you with that cloth wrapped around your head like you were afraid your brains would fall out. Your brains haven’t fallen out, have they?’

  Loys still said nothing.

  ‘Well, now we have something you want I’ll let you go and take your little bugger boy with you. You can have it back when I get my pay. Make him serve the pork!’ Giroie took a big swig from a wineskin and Loys gestured for the boy to serve the meat. It was burned but not so black that it was inedible. The warriors seemed satisfied with their victory in obtaining the stone and ceased their bullying of Loys. He nursed his bad hand and watched them drink. The time for horses was over. He would have to walk and the boy would have to walk with him. Who would have to die? Whoever kept watch. If his boots were decent then perhaps he would be the only one. If they weren’t, then a warrior of near the boy’s size would need to go too.

  The men drank and ate what they had – which was plenty, because most of the winter stores were still intact. The people had been too hurried to spoil whatever food they couldn’t take. They drank well, though Loys only took a little ale. Smoke and fire, red against black but in the way Loys preferred. The comforts of the hearth were dearest to him, though he had lived much of his life in the east where a night fire was not necessary for half the year.

  He remembered Beatrice, when they had come to the palace at Constantinople, marvelling at the hot baths, the heated floor. What it had been to live as a Roman.

  The warriors slept all in a pile, drunk for the most part. The boy wisely stuck to the animal pens, under the same roof, separated from the fighting men only by a low wall. They were empty of beasts now but not their shit or their stink.

  Loys let himself doze. He would kill Giroie and the watchman. When the air was thick with snores and farts, he rose as if to piss. He was careful in opening the door and shut it quickly. The icy draught might wake the men as easily as a noise might and he didn’t want to have to try to kill them all. He felt sure he could not take so many. The Normans were not the Pechenegs and knew that, if you are losing when you face your enemy directly, the situation will not improve if you turn your back. They lacked the insight to recognise what he was and the good fortune to be scared of it.

  The man outside was stamping around the remains of the fire.

  ‘Come to relieve me, foreigner?’

  Loys was on him in half a breath, crushing his throat with his good hand. The scent of death filled his nostrils, the cinnamon-sweet kidney-and-onions succulent aroma of slaughter. He laid the man to the ground as gently as a mother would a child. His boots were the right size, he felt certain. The huddled horses fretted. Murder would call forth the wolf, for sure. He looked down at his victim, the expression wide-eyed as if he were surprised to be dead. He was recognisably human. Four, five more days and the corpses would begin to look like food. Loys could not be in this dead land without the stone.

  He returned to the hut. Giroie was wedged in between two of his men. Stepping light as a deer, Loys approached him. He thought to kill him, to leave him dead among the sleepers in the morning, a lesson that they should not follow. No. Hold back from unnecessary killing. Preserve the human and deny the wolf. Loys reached inside the Norman’s big coat and took out his stone. He would not put it on yet. The nimbleness he possessed without it was too valuable.

  He roused the boy in the byre, putting his hand across his mouth to prevent him crying out. Then he cut the bonds and shoved the boots into his hands. The boy took them and put them on. He seemed to understand well that his time in the company of Normans was very limited.

  They went out through the animal gate, pausing to strip the cloak from the corpse. The boy’s eyes widened when he saw the body. Loys gave him the Norman’s sword and the boy quickly pulled off the man’s breeches, so much better than his own. Loys let him – no point in rescuing the kid if he was going to freeze to death.

  No time to put them on. They made their way out into the flat dark. The clouds hid the moon and there was no light at all. Loys took the boy’s hand, leading him out towards the woods. He smelled the leaf mould, the dens of squirrels, the warm bodies of the things that slept in hole and burrow. They trod carefully but made good progress.

  In the morning, Giroie would come to search for them. The only answer to the humiliation he had suffered was death. Even if he discovered the killing with the change of watch, he couldn’t hope to follow when he couldn’t see.

  Loys walked on, the boy’s breath rasping in his ear. He had saved him, and slowed himself. Giroie would track them easily on the snowy fields but Loys doubted he would risk the woods. The English were hiding in there and they knew the paths. Perhaps he would find her there. He put his nose to the air. She was about somewhere in this country, he had her scent – not a scent just of the nose but of the mind. He would find her.

  In the long distance a wolf howled out its thread of sound. He understood perfectly what it meant: ‘This is my land, a land of the dead, where I am king.’

  They heard the shouting from the farmhouse behind them. The boy almost whinnied in fright but Loys pulled him on.

  ‘It will be all right,’ said Loys, in Norse, which was as near to Old English as he knew. ‘They won’t harm you.’

  ‘I’m frightened,’ the boy replied in the same language. ‘I should never have come on the boat.’

  12 To York

  They left the cave and went south – five men travelling with Tola, the women and a guard left behind with the children. Tola wondered how the families would eat so high up. She didn’t think about it for long. They wouldn’t. She put it from her mind after that. Death confronted her daily in those hills, face to face, no terror-summoned spectre but something that could be smelled and touched – the burned remains of a house or the bodies of those who had died in the open.

  Her companions knew the way to York across the hills but the progress was slow. They couldn’t risk getting caught without shelter so they would only walk from dawn until early afternoon.

  On that first day, the wind died and stillness came over the valleys – a low mist clinging to the farms, purple in the morning sun. Smoke was still on the air and they could not risk going down. It was as if the whole valley before them was a great cauldron full of a milky broth. That was her hunger talking to her again. To the south a patch of the mist changed from purple to black. As they walked the morning it glowed red, a dragon’s eye looking up at her. It was a fire, another farm.

  Tola walked as well as any of the men, not showing the pain of her ribs. The dark shape she saw in her mind crawled after her, hurrying her on. She didn’t like her travelling companions. The stooped man – who she now knew was called Ceoluulf – was easy to read. He hoped to gain from his association with her. On him she smelled the smoke of the ruinous fires in the valley. He moved, she thought, with a slinking, creeping gait and she imagined a fox approaching a hen house, a wolf creeping around the edge of a flock.

  Except he was not a wolf. The wolf followed behind, troubling her dreams, such as they were. It was impossible to sleep properly, wedged
into some crag on a hillside, where she accepted the proximity of these rough men or she froze to death. Hands were on her in the night and the only thing that saved her was that an argument broke out about who should have her first. Ceoluulf and Ithamar agreed that the answer was no one. It caused too many arguments, she was too valuable a commodity.

  ‘To whom am I sold?’ she asked.

  ‘Who said you were sold?’ said Ithamar, invisible behind his wall of fear.

  ‘I feel it.’

  ‘You are mistaken. You are going to meet great men and help throw these Normans from our lands.’

  ‘You do not care who your masters are. What does it matter to you if you steal from a Norman or an Englishman? You’re still in the woods, freezing or baking, haunting the roads.’

  ‘I am no bandit, lady,’ said Ithamar.

  She could see she had wounded his pride.

  ‘Then what are you?’

  ‘Just a man.’

  ‘Bandits are men too,’ said Ceoluulf. ‘He’s a magician, or says he is.’

  ‘I hear the gods of the wood,’ said Ithamar.

  ‘Men can’t hold magic, so my mother said.’

  ‘Not as a woman can. To see magic, to hear it, is not to hold it.’

  ‘Make it summer,’ said Ceoluulf. ‘If you’re so clever.’

  ‘If I did that the Normans might think it good to come up to the hills,’ said Ithamar. ‘The cold keeps them locked in the valleys.’

  Ceoluulf shrank into his furs.

  ‘When this is done, I shall travel south. They say it’s warmer there.’

  ‘Couldn’t be any colder,’ said one of the men.

  Tola thought of escape, but to what? These men had some provisions with them, at least, and their bodies kept her warm in the night. The evening sky was a sword, the colour of dirty iron. As the sun fell it was as if the light froze, dropping cold on the hills. They lit fires where they could and pressed around them like misers around a hoard of treasure.