Flat across the water came the howl of the wolf, binding her to it with its long tether of sound. It chilled her, more than Styliane, more than Ithamar or any of the bandits. She would have to move. But where to? She tried to free herself from the grip of the wolf ’s howl. Close by she felt the mass of water, lapping through her thoughts, submerging them almost. There were bright things in those waters, the symbols she had seen in Styliane. They were submerged there yet also in Styliane, simultaneously existing in the water of the well and growing in the mulch of the lady’s thoughts. That something could be in two places at once struck her as strange, fascinating almost. It absorbed her for a while. Odd ideas sparked in her. That shape was such a horsey, stampy shape. Here’s another that was the mother of the world, yet one more that thrived on mould – a bright, living thing sprouting from the bodies of the dead.
There were corpses in the water. She could not see them clearly, only catch glimpses of their pale fishy flesh, bleached and bloated by long immersion.
Soldier’s boots were on the road. She flattened herself. They were searching the houses. She stilled her breathing, tried to keep silent but she was fighting panic, the urge to run away. The Norman’s harsh voices came closer. Only the fog protected her now but it wasn’t enough. Boots in front of the cart. A hand rattled it.
A cry came from down by the river, footsteps sprinting away. There was a shout from very near her and the boots in front of her turned and disappeared. She heard more men running down the hill. More screaming, shouting and calling through the fog. The Normans had seen someone.
Again the howl, winding through her thoughts. Could anyone else hear that? She had no one to ask. She was alone but for the dark shapes which still seemed to hover in the fog.
18 A Beggar God
Tola had to do something before dawn. She couldn’t stay for the whole of the day freezing beneath that cart so near to the water. The fog thinned and she could see glimpses of the town under a smudged moon. The only intact houses were the ones right about her. Everything else was charred and burned. In the grey river the shattered hull of a longboat raised its dragon prow above the water, casting its malignant eye out over the mist. The Danes had been here, then. She sat watching for a long time. There were corpses in the river, she was sure, floating face down, only their white necks showing. The mist moved over the moon again and it was very dark. She was glad of it.
She could not be certain of remaining unseen now, so had to stay where she was for at least a while. It was dreadfully cold and very hard to keep still but she endured it. She tried to distract herself by saying the names of all her kin. Alta, Ceade, Evoric. All dead. It didn’t work.
She let her mind float free of her body, seeking Styliane or Dýri. They were the nearest she had to allies now. She could not sense them and she guessed they must be dead. All around her the Normans fussed and bothered.
Something hummed and groaned beneath the ground. She felt as if she was sitting on the back of a great sleeping beast. She put her hands to the earth. It felt very cold, but not the sitting, sucking cold of the ground in the forest or in the hills. This had the tug of current, moving away from her, down towards the river. Could this be the well?
Why go there? Why go anywhere? She had been lied to, she was sure, but why not believe the lie, even for a while? It was better than the truth of the world now, a truth burned into the land like a great black scab: that death was the ruler of all peoples and that all were equal before him, being nothing.
She would go to the well for the same reason she had come to York. She had nowhere else to go. Go south and she was a foreigner, a lone woman at the mercy of whoever might claim her. She had no idea what those lands were like. People from the farms said they were packed with charlatans who would part you from your money in a wink. And if she did go south, who would want her? Perhaps she should have responded to Ithamar’s advances, become his wife and lived in the wilds.
No. She could not abide him, even if the alternative was death.
But where to go? Already she had moved further away from her home than she had ever been in her life. All future and purpose had ceased to exist, been burned into the ground with the crops, the houses, the cattle. She sought the well because she sought the well, just as she lived because she had not died.
The clouds thinned and the moon came back into view, gazing down with its white, rotted corpse face. All around her she heard the sound of men and horses but it was still very dark. There was no song or laughter, just hushed voices. They’d lost friends that day and no one was in the mood for jokes. She wished she could understand what they said so she might hear news of Styliane or even Ithamar. A door was opened and firelight flickered. It closed again and only the moon gave her any light to see by.
She put her hand to the stamped earth, feeling the movement of the waters. It led north. The ground sang with its flow.
The houses were only intact for thirty paces. After that, all was burned all the way to the solid stone block of a great church. This, she thought, must be the minster – famous throughout the world. It was enormous, bigger than any building she had ever seen, though it had not escaped the fire. Its arched windows were stained with soot, giving them the appearance of black eye sockets staring out of a stone skull, and the sloping roof that faced her had caved in. The great church was a long way away – five hundred paces through the rubble of the city. She had to get there or freeze. At the very least it would provide some shelter.
She stooped forward through the houses, the ash dry in her nose. A scrabbling from her right. She stood very still. A dog stood looking at her, not twenty yards away. It was a mangy creature, though not thin. God knew there were enough corpses around for it to feed on. It came towards her, its head bowed low, its tail wagging. She glanced around her. No one in sight. She put out her hand and it nuzzled its head against it.
‘There, boy, there.’ She said it so quietly it was almost a thought.
Tola’s gift of reading people did not extend to animals, though it was plain enough what this dog was looking for. Affection. Love. Someone to make order out of the chaos that had engulfed its life. She couldn’t wait, it was so cold, her breath was freezing in the moonlight.
‘Go on. Go on.’
She crept away from the dog but it kept following her, nudging her with its nose.
‘Go away! Go away!’ She shoved the dog away but it wouldn’t go, thinking it a game and shoving back at her, its tail wagging. ‘Hsst. Hsss! Go ‘way!’
She shoved it again and now the dog barked, a great loud woof far louder than she would have thought it capable of producing.
‘Go away!”
She ran but this was great sport to the dog, which ran after her, jumping up at her skirts and barking in excitement. It was a game she might have played with it on a summer day on her farm. She felt the Normans’ curiosity spark before she saw them. The minster was still over two hundred paces away, the nearest house only a hundred.
They would be upon her in an instant. She had no choice. One of the burned houses had a sunken floor. She dropped down into that and lay flat. The dog stood above her barking madly, pushing its two front paws into her side as if it would dig her up. Norman voices.
‘Chen! Chen!’
They were calling the dog. She felt hostility like the sting of a nettle from one of the men, simple curiosity from the other.
‘Chen! Chen!’
The dog turned from her and pricked up its ears.
‘Chen! Chen!’
Something more was said in Norman. She had a winter feeling inside her – that of days spent locked in the house, aching to go out but forced to stay in by wind and rain. One of the men was deeply irritated by the dog’s barking. The other had come out simply because he had been bored by the fireside and wanted to stretch his legs.
‘Chen! Chen!’
She wanted
to grab the dog, to make it stay, but she couldn’t. It had to go to die if she was to live. She lay absolutely still, trying to quell the dog’s interest. It lolloped over the bank of earth that had once been part of the house’s foundations and went wagging up to the men.
The men made cooing noises, trying to attract it, but one man was seething, the other laughing. He was a bully and smirking as the dog snuffled unsuspecting to its fate. One said something to the other. She couldn’t understand it but the emotion washed over her. ‘Finish it,’ he meant.
For an instant she thought she had stood up, begged them not to hurt it, appealed to their gentler nature. It seemed stupid to feel sorry for a dog when so many people had died, but she did. It had come looking for human comfort and was to receive only cruelty.
Another voice. Someone else had arrived. She heard a sigh, a long note like a grandmother might make when she saw a bonny child, though a man’s voice. Then a long whistle. From the sounds of chuckling she guessed the dog had approached someone and was presenting itself to be patted. More words were exchanged and she heard some very like ‘no, no, no!”
A wave of resignation, resentment. Someone had been denied another kill. The cold of the ground was excruciating and she needed to move. One of the men took a long piss and she heard another calling and whistling to the dog. ‘Coo, coo. Coo, coo.’
He was encouraging it to go with him. She felt like crying in thanks. She had thought all kindness burned out of the world. To see someone, even an enemy, show any delight in life, to welcome in the dog for the companionship it would bring, gave her hope that all the destruction would one day be at an end. One day the invaders must put away their swords, as the Danes had done before them, settle down, farm and restore the land. There would come a moment when peace returned to the dales and, even if she wasn’t there to see it, the idea made her glad.
She waited for a long time, her hands and knees numbed by the cold earth. She tried to control her shivering but couldn’t. It was intolerable now. She had to move or die of the cold.
Tola looked up above the bank of earth. No movement from the houses.
She crawled up, so cold she felt on the verge of passing out. Her vision was blurred and her hearing was subtly altered. It was as if her ears were blocked by water, a heavy feeling inside her head.
She wondered if she was dying, but not with any great anxiety, only curiosity. The minster loomed above her. She thought it might fall, it almost seemed to totter. It could have been a tree, she thought, a gigantic tree stretching up to the heavens.
No, this was God’s house, and God needed a big house because God was so big.
God was not at home. He had given up on England and left it to the hordes of the devil.
A man walked towards her through the frosty night. She hadn’t the strength left to run. He was a strange figure, very tall and pale, red hair burned to patches on his scalp, great welts covering his face, blood everywhere. He wore a tattered cloak made of feathers, which he wrapped around him tightly. He was shivering deeply as he came on. This must be some poor Englishman, left for dead by the Normans, now coming to his senses among all this desolation.
‘Hello, sir.’
It seemed natural to address him so calmly, even in the midst of the Norman camp.
‘I’m so cold,’ said the man.
‘I am too. You have been used badly by these men of Normandy,’ said Tola.
‘I have been used worse by what follows.’
‘And what does follow?’
‘Follow who?’
‘Follow …’ Tola’s mind felt fuzzy, half asleep, as if in that just-woken moment where the world is seen but not interpreted, where familiar things seem strange.
‘I don’t follow.’
‘You don’t follow?’
‘No, lady, I am followed but only by my followers, of whom he is not one, though he follows. A follower, rather than my follower, if you follow. Let me explain. Though you do not follow me, you may yet follow me. Well, he’s not the same. He doesn’t follow me not because he doesn’t follow me but because he follows me all too well. He had faith but now no longer follows. That follows.’
The minster loomed above her like a thunderhead.
‘Who does he follow?’
‘You. Do try to follow, though you are, strictly speaking, more followed than following. Listen to the following. He is following as night follows day, that is to say to eat it.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He is the wolf. The land is fallow because of that fellow, which follows because the fellow is followed by fallow, that is to say death, who follows all humanity, save him who follows even death, that is to say he who pursues it. Death is the only thing he really follows. So what follows from that, you who he follows?’
The man’s words made some kind of sense to her. He was a victim of the wolf she could hear howling in her mind.
‘You are a god.’
‘I am wounded and bitten, though no sinners were saved by me. I could not even save myself.’ The red-haired man seemed very sad at this idea. ‘What do you do when your anger is slaked, your revenge complete?’
‘I would not know. My anger is frozen in ice. One day it will thaw and then pour hot over these Normans.’
‘And when they are gone, what if hating has become a habit and all joy is gone from the world?’
‘All joy has gone. I cannot replace it for myself. I can only make sure I destroy it for my enemies. The Normans planted a weed in me that will grow to choke the garden of their delight.’
‘Oh, that wasn’t the Normans who planted that, not by a long way.’ He laughed at this, his bloody, torn hand coming up to his face. He pointed at her. ‘Your inheritance is death.’
‘Isn’t that everyone’s inheritance?’
‘Not Wolfie. His father is immortal and his mother, well, to be frank I haven’t heard from her in years. Spawning a monstrous brood tends to put quite a strain on relationships. I mean, a wolf! She said he had my eyes!’
Tola looked into the man’s eyes and they were indeed those of a wolf, a burning yellow like polished amber.
‘Why are you here, sir?’
‘As always, lady, you cut to the nub of it, which is apt as you are the nub of it and this is next to the nub of it, it being one of those words that can mean many things, so does it.’
‘Answer me.’
He smiled and crouched to his haunches, put his hands upon the ground as if he was searching for something on it, or beneath it.
‘Three times nine girls, but one girl rode ahead,
White skinned under her helmet.
The horses were trembling, from their manes
Dew fell into the deep valleys,
Hail in the high woods.’
‘I do not understand you, Sir.’
He smiled and said,
‘May the first bite you in the back,
The second bite you in the breast,
The third turn hate and envy upon you.’
The words were glorious to her. She imagined herself high above the clouds, a spear of lightning in her hand, a horse of thunder beneath her.
‘What am I?’
‘A spinner of fate.’
‘What is my fate?’
‘You are one of the few to whom it is given to spin their own. That is what it is to be a god.’
‘I am not a god.’
‘Which brings me to the reason I’m here. I need someone to kill a wolf and I think you can do it.’
Tola didn’t know what to make of this.
‘Let me explain,’ said the man. ‘My time has gone. I would like to die. My former magnificence is dimmed and passed. But the time of the gods of the North has not finished. The wolf has not been killed. He needs to be killed. Things will not move on. The world will always be
locked in strife.’
‘The wolf?’
‘The very same. He is destruction. Now I know there’s always been rather a lot of that when Odin was hopping around the place but it had something of a creative aspect. One civilisation destroys another. I weep for the loss of a particular sort of beauty, whether of the face of a Scythian boy, or the curve of one of their vases, or of the Egyptians who flattered me and called me the Typhonic Beast but I did not see that this allowed other things to flourish. Odin the mad, Odin the wise, Odin the king of magic and, yes, Father Death. But he had a sliding, slippery nature that made the death of one civilisation the manure that fertilised the achievements of another. I saw him as one thing but he was many. He couldn’t be pinned down, which was one of the reasons he was always popping up as a woman. Your fellow, however. Oh dear …’
‘My fellow?’
‘The following wolf we talked about precedingly. He has no dual nature. He is one thing only – a cavern, a space into which everything falls. He is an end to things. Look around you. He is here. He’s been sleeping awhile but when he wakes, he howls, and the world howls with him.’
‘The Normans did this.’
‘And he came with them. I have glimpsed the future and there are many more of these destructions to come. He drags them in his wake. So we need him to die. And you are the one who can kill him.’
Tola wondered if she was dying, if this was a vision of the devil brought on by the cold.
‘How?’
‘You may have to hang on the tree for a while to find that out,’ said the man. He gestured to the wall. In sparkling lines the image of a huge tree stretched up the walls of the minster, its roots reaching down beneath her feet. The ground was insubstantial, invisible, and the roots merged in a ball of light which she thought, strangely, might be the well she was looking for, then stretched away to become rivers. She felt them running away, some freezing, others with a close, sultry heat she had never experienced before, one that summoned strange cries inside her head and sparked visions of fabulous birds with feathers the colour of church jewels.
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