Valkyrie's Song

by M. D. Lachlan

  The tree sprang from the well, the well was the tree, all of a single shining substance. She looked up to see the silver leaves spreading out as stars.

  ‘We are the light of this tree,’ said the god.

  ‘And he?’ She meant the wolf.

  ‘The darkness.’

  ‘What must I do?’

  ‘Kill,’ said the man. ‘Kill her, kill others. All of them to die.’

  ‘All of who? You are the devil,’ said Tola.

  ‘Well, one man’s god is another’s devil,’ said the man. ‘Look at these Normans, marching under the cross. Whose work do they do? If it is a god’s, ask how a devil’s could be worse.’

  ‘I think you are the devil. I will not listen to what you say.’

  ‘I am trying to help you. You carry a heavy burden inside you, lady. Even now I can feel it writhing.’

  He put his hand to her belly but she drew back. The man bowed his head. When he looked up, he was weeping.

  ‘You recoil from my touch. No mortal woman has ever done that. There was a time when the offer of my kiss would have been an irresistible lure to you. My powers have waned. My light was only borrowed, it all sprang from him. Oh Father, oh deceiver, you even tricked me in your death. I did not know it would make me beg for my own.’

  She was convinced this was a fever, brought on by the cold. Still, she had to run away.

  She went up the steps to the minster, turning round to glance behind her before she turned back to open the door.

  ‘All is broken,’ said the man. ‘It is for you to fix it. You must kill him, for I tell you true, he will kill you.’

  The wolf ’s howl called cold across the burned city.

  She shoved at the door of the minster.

  ‘You will be here again if you don’t act,’ said the man. ‘You will stand in rubble, weeping the loss of everything you love again and again, endlessly pursued, bringing misery and destruction behind you. The story must end!’

  ‘Get behind me, Satan!’

  The man pulled the cloak about him and hobbled off through the ruins.

  The minster was vast but almost lightless, its windows high and small, just daubs of moonlight on the blank face of the wall, the hole in the roof dropping a veil of shifting silver.

  Careful, she moved on. The building seemed to intensify the darkness, to boil it down to a solid and glutinous thing. She could not see and felt for the wall. There it was.

  Now a little light seeped in from the windows. A flat-faced angel looked down at her from an arch, its feet ensnared in vines. The stones of the great church’s floor seemed to murmur, as if water flowed beneath them.

  She was cold, so she drew the cloaks tight about her.

  On and on she walked, past the dark mouths of arches that lined the walls. The great altar was quite bare. A body lay there, but she didn’t stop to look at the horrible thing. A priest? A man? A woman? None of those things now. The current under the stones led her to beneath the hole in the roof. Ten paces further on was a broad flight of steps descending into deeper darkness. The waters were coming from there. Could she go down into the dark?

  A noise behind her. Someone was coming into the church. She hurried as quietly as she could to the steps and went down out of the light, lying flat to the stones, just beyond the lip of the first step. Whoever had come in had no light either but they didn’t need it – they stepped confidently forward. A spark, a glint; like sunlight on water. Tola peered over the step.

  It was Styliane, a rune shining from her like a beacon – the shape of an arrow head. Tola didn’t know if she could really see the rune floating there in the darkness or if she imagined it. It seemed very real, a torch shining out, but other things too – it was the fire of the hearth, of the smith’s creation, something to shape and mould. Styliane was using it, Tola could sense, to encourage herself, to beat out the iron of her thoughts as if on an anvil. Dýri was behind Styliane. He moved more hesitantly. Tola could feel his worry bleeding from him.

  The rune seemed very bright. Around the walls the flat faces of angels, saints and beasts looked down, all their eyes on her.

  Styliane walked on, past the great altar. From deep behind Tola a noise sounded, like the rush of great waters. The light appeared at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Lady,’ said Tola, standing.

  ‘Take her,’ said Styliane to Dýri and the big Viking ran down to grab Tola.

  19 Breaking the Seal

  Styliane had seen him, of course – the sly one, Loki, skulking by the steps of the church. So battered and cut now. When she’d last gone to the well he had been magnificent – a pale giant, his hair red as fire, whose gaze brought fear and excitement all in one; a heartstopping creature. He had come to her, of course, at the well and tried to reason with her, stood shaking and bleeding in the desert night.

  Reason, though, was not his strength. In his pomp, he had begun where reason ended. He was abandon, he was wildness, he was a future thrown away for the pleasure of destruction alone. To see him stammer, to hear him talk of how the story needed to finish, how she should find a way to kill the wolf was almost pathetic. She had told him so. And Odin himself, master of magic, had not killed Fenrir. How could she do it? He had wept then and spoken of the story breaking, of how it needed to end for good or be mended. There was a girl who bore a dark rune. She could kill the wolf, the story could end and all the old god’s mad magic would leave the world.

  And if that girl died?

  ‘The story goes on, broken,’ said Loki. ‘The rune flies into the world to be reborn.’

  That would suit Styliane very well. A broken story had kept her alive and young for over a century.

  ‘But the girl will not die,’ he had said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘As you are a fragment of a god, she is the expression of a Norn. To kill her is to kill fate. That cannot be done easily.’

  ‘Fates are shaped in the water of these wells,’ said Styliane. Was it an insight, was it something the god had put into her mind? ‘I will find her and take her to the magic waters. They reveal all secrets and will offer me the secret of her death.’

  ‘You have been twice,’ said Loki. ‘Three is Odin’s number.’

  ‘Odin is dead.’

  ‘He gave his life to the Norns. What will you give?’

  ‘Best not ponder that,’ said Styliane. ‘I am wedded to these magics. I can have no other course.’

  She was almost sad to see the god so beaten. Once Loki had flown among the stars, burned the heavens like a comet. Now he ran from the church steps like a beggar who had got enough for a loaf.

  The Normans were asleep. She had summoned the runes to hide from them and regretted it had been necessary. She could feel them like a whirlpool, tugging others in. There was at least one rune nearby, maybe more, aching to join its sisters. No to that too. The Norse gods were not her gods and, though she would use them, she would not serve them unless it suited her.

  The sly one knew better than to approach her. Once her runes would not have been enough to cow him. Now he feared her and fled her. He was a servant of fate, a servant of the story of the Norns that said on the last day of the old gods the wolf would slay Odin and then die. Well, she was an enemy of fate. She would be no one’s sacrifice. If she had been more certain of the outcome she would have used the runes to kill him. Gods, though, could split, as Odin had split, sending pieces of their mind into mortals. Alive and whole, Loki could not harm her. She would not risk killing him. Too much uncertainty.

  Dýri behind her shivered deeply. He had lost two good friends but showed no sign of grief. She knew how these Varangians thought. His friends had died a good death, surrounded by enemies, killing many. It would make a good story, should he survive to tell it, and they would be famous – a prize greater than gold to their people. He was quiet,
though. It was not grief he felt but, she thought, a slight shame that he hadn’t shared their fate.

  ‘You’ll get the chance to prove yourself, Dýri,’ she said.

  ‘Sooner than we might like if we stand in the open like this,’ he replied. ‘The Normans piss like any man and will be out and about to see us if we’re not careful.’

  ‘Inside then. Follow the girl.’

  They went up the steps, Dýri first, his sword drawn. She doubted there would be any warriors in there and she had no intention of letting them see her if there were but Dýri would be needed to help with the ritual and, if it made him feel better to draw his sword, so be it.

  Inside, the church did not seem big compared to the magnificent cathedrals of Constantinople. It was, however, dark. The presence of Loki showed her the time for discretion was over. The die would be cast here. She allowed the Kenaz rune to come forward in her mind and the church was bathed in a fiery light.

  Dýri murmured under his breath ‘Volva.’ It was his people’s word for ‘sorceress’. The gold had been well plundered but the altars remained in their arches and the faces of saints peered down at her. It was called a ‘great church’ by the people of England. It seemed a poor, boxy, ill-finished thing to her – five of them would fit inside the Church of Holy Wisdom at Constantinople. However, the world well manifested here, so the stones were not silent. They almost breathed as she passed, humming with the spawning power of the well. Men built things to honour it even if they knew nothing of it – great cities sprang up around the well’s manifestations, civilisations expressed themselves in art and violence. The wolf was coming, though. The devourer.

  The rune bred insight and she sensed the girl was in there, sensed her sensing her. The rune inside her seethed and spat. The little Saxon was so dangerous; the thing she carried inside her offered her huge protection. Styliane felt the Kenaz rune gutter as the growl of the wolf rune rumbled.

  Killing her would not be easy; banishing the rune to the realm of the gods would be even harder. The ordeal would be very great. Styliane touched her arms. She bore the scars of many rituals there. The lesson of her own god, Hecate, was that there was no creation without pain. The goddess presided over childbirth and magic, death and darkness. All those things were linked in fundamental ways, a knot of agony. Men could not hold magic because their natures were not attuned to the eternal rhythms suffering and begetting. When a man made, he did so with the smith’s hammer or the saw and sword, beating, cutting and killing to achieve his ends. These were not the ways of magic. It came from inside, like a child, and with pain.

  The well was like a vortex here, a whirlpool to the river eddies of her runes. The girl stood on the steps, her breath a plume. There was no point tricking her now, this was the time for speed. She told Dýri to seize her and he did, picking her up in one arm like a father might a child.

  The girl was too scared and cold to resist. The steps went down to a crypt. Six stone sarcophagi were in there, their knot patterns writhing like snakes in the runelight. The well was below the floor. There were no more stairs down. Dýri put the girl into a corner. She was beaten, Styliane could see, and just curled in on herself, pressing into the wall.

  Styliane felt the sucking of the well. Its centre was beneath the flagstones set between the two biggest sarcophagi. She pointed to it and Dýri set his pick into a crack, to lever up a stone. It did not come easily.

  ‘I could smash it,’ he said. ‘But …’

  Styliane held up her hand to silence him. He didn’t need to tell her the effect the noise of excavation might have on a still, cold night full of sleeping warriors. She summoned up a rune, one that stamped and snorted like a bull, that shone with umber light and stank like an animal stall. She sent it to him, not to enter him but to shine upon him, to empower him.

  Dýri staggered as the rune worked its influence upon him. He recovered himself, glanced at Styliane and snorted, then inserted the pick beneath the stones again, this time shoving it much harder. It sank in and he levered up a stone easily.

  ‘By Thor’s cock, lady, I wish you’d done that for my friends when we faced the Normans at the bridge.’

  ‘There is a cost to this magic,’ said Styliane. ‘Remove the stone.’

  He levered the stone aside. There was flat earth underneath it, dark and pungent.

  ‘Dig,’ said Styliane. ‘Quietly.’

  Dýri worked the pick in, not swinging it but rather scraping with it. He went down a forearm’s length, then an arm, loosening the soil with the pick and then scooping it away in handfuls. The girl in the corner didn’t move but the rune inside her seethed like a cornered wolf. He dug. How long had it taken? About as long as she’d thought. It was not yet midnight and there was no reason to expect the Normans would come into the church, even at dawn. They’d had what there was to be taken. She listened for the wolf outside but heard nothing. Dýri was now leaning into the hole, scraping away.

  ‘I can’t go any further in without taking out another stone, ma’am. There’s no room to work.’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘To get down to this level, the same again if you don’t want me swinging the pick.’

  ‘It’s near.’ The girl spoke.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can hear the water. Can’t you?’

  Styliane crouched by the hole, though it was beneath her dignity to do so. Yes, it was almost as if the current of the river pulled at her hand. Its cold flow was very near.

  ‘Hit the soil,’ she said to Dýri. ‘Strike it with the butt of your pick.’

  Dýri reversed the pick and drove it into the hole.

  A rattle of falling soil. He stepped back and Styliane leaned in. By the light of the rune fire she saw the soil had fallen through. There was a cavern below and in it glinted a stream of what looked like fire.

  20 The Oathbreaker’s Cavern

  The Viking tied off his length of rope around one of the pillars that supported the roof. Tola thought she should run but the rune Styliane had lit in herself was warm and its light comforting. She could no longer feel what Styliane planned – when she sent her mind towards the lady all she saw was the bright rune, casting its beams up into the sky as if the stone of the cathedral was no more than a veil.

  Dýri was not hostile. He had an almost fatherly aspect to him. She felt he was afraid on her behalf, wanting to protect her, but she felt too his efforts to dismiss those tender thoughts.

  The waters pulled and sucked beneath the floor. She would not leave, even if she was to die in that place. The wastes of the dales were too wide, the rest of the country too unknown for her to carry on alone. This was where she was meant to be. It was important, she could feel it.

  Dýri approached her.

  ‘There’s no need to grab me,’ she said. ‘Where am I to go? What better destiny is out there than the one you have for me in here? I cannot defy my fate so I will walk to it without the need for you to drag me.’

  ‘Good girl,’ said Dýri. ‘A warrior’s answer, even if you are a woman.’

  She approached the hole and looked down. There was a trickle of water down there, going across the floor of a sloping cave.

  ‘Can you climb down the rope?’ said Styliane.

  ‘Yes.’

  Tola tried to take hold of the rope but her hands were still too cold to grip it properly. Instead she wound it around her forearm, then around her body. She lowered herself down, a stifled cry of pain on her lips as the rope cut her arm.

  Styliane came down after her, followed by the big Viking.

  They were in a low passage – just about big enough to crawl down. The water ran in a channel through the centre. She saw the tunnel was not natural – too square, carved. On the wall a winding serpent was etched into the grainy rock.

  ‘Down,’ said Styliane.

  Tola coul
d no longer see the rune. It was Styliane who emitted light. Was she the rune herself? An expression in flesh of an eternal magic?

  She crawled through the tunnel, the others behind her. It was colder here. She couldn’t feel her hands. The Viking moaned as he came on. He was a big man and, where the women could crawl, he had to slither on his belly.

  The water on the floor of the tunnel flowed down but it had a weight to it that seemed disproportionate to the size of the stream. Tola seemed drawn by it as she clambered down the passage. The way became narrow, the ceiling low. She went on, wriggling on her belly.

  ‘I can go no further,’ said Dýri.

  ‘Wait at the top, then. Kill any who try to come down. Kill her if she emerges without me.

  ‘Yes, lady.’

  Dýri backed away.

  Tola thought of the words of the bloody devil. She should kill this woman. But she was not sure she could even go on, let alone commit murder. Styliane was her enemy, she sensed that, but the devil’s instruction – and her own nature – made her draw back from attacking her. Ithamar had said there would be something for her in York and she had sensed he was telling the truth – or rather a truth, even if he believed it to be a lie. Here, beneath the stones of the minster, was something very important to her.

  Styliane squeezed through after her, her fine dress now filthy in the mud. The passage extended into a darkness not even the rune light penetrated.

  ‘There is something down there,’ said Tola. ‘I can feel it pulling.’

  ‘It pushes too,’ said Styliane. ‘As this river flows in, there are others that flow out.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It is the heart of the world.’

  ‘In Yorkshire?’ The idea struck Tola as almost funny.

  ‘Wherever it chooses to be. In many places. I have found it in the desert and at the centre of the world in Constantinople. I will find it here. In what aspect, I don’t know.’