Valkyrie's Song

by M. D. Lachlan

  No. No need for more killing. Or rather, a need not to kill. A wounded enemy was more of a drain than a dead one. The calmer man found the steps, reaching backwards with his foot to confirm where he was. She brought the sword down hard over the back of his leg, cutting in deep. He cried out and fell, cursing.

  The other Normans fell to panic and one caught the other a glancing blow with his sword, the blade biting into his arm. The man immediately retaliated, cutting a violent arc with his sword that took his fellow at the throat. The man fell, holding his neck and calling out, oaths or curses she couldn’t tell. He might be mortally injured, he might be scratched. Freydis knew that wounds to the neck filled men with fear. Hit a man in the arm or the chest, cut him deeply, and he might fight harder. Catch the neck, part the skin and draw blood and his fingers would seek the wound. Only heroes, those in the songs of the Skalds, smiled to take such wounds and threw themselves harder into the scrap.

  She took her knife from the leg of the now dead man at the hole. Then she stabbed the only standing warrior hard in the buttocks. He screamed and she kicked his legs from under him.

  ‘Quick,’ she said down into the hole. ‘We need to go.’

  Styliane climbed up on Gylfa’s shoulders and she lifted her out, light as a bird. The lady shook and shivered, the shock of her ordeal engulfing her. Gylfa was a harder pull but she got him up well enough. She wondered why she bothered. He was slow and he couldn’t fight.

  Perhaps for that reason. He would be easily caught, which would give her and the Lady Styliane more of a chance to slip away.

  ‘I can’t see,’ said Gylfa.

  Freydis had no time to wonder why that was but she welcomed the fact. She stripped off one of the Norman’s cloaks for Styliane, then one for herself. The lady had fainted away but she was still breathing. The runes kept them warm for the moment but she wouldn’t be able to rely on that.

  She picked up Styliane and carried her up the steps, leaving Gylfa crying and howling in the dark, asking where she was and weeping that he would die.

  28 Lights

  Gylfa lay on the floor of the crypt, the cries of wounded men all around him. He called out for Loys and for Freydis and then he cursed them both for abandoning him.

  The woman in particular, if one could call her a woman, he hated. Until she showed up he’d had a good thing going with Loys. The man had saved him from persecution, might have taken him south, during which time the good warrior might have revealed his secrets to him.

  He crawled around the floor, the flagstones hard and cold on his palms and on his knees but he couldn’t find the stairs to the crypt and was afraid he’d bump into one of the screaming Normans. They could still defend themselves, he was sure.

  He had gone to the ships too soon and all because of the taunts of his brothers. They had grown up tall and strong, easy with spear and axe. He had grown up tall, but that was where the similarity ended. He was given to fat, though he only ate what they did. He was as much a danger to himself as to an opponent with a spear, and the name they had for him had tormented him. Little girl. So he had begged to prove his worth.

  ‘I am as tall as any man, Father,’ he’d said. ‘Let me do a man’s job by coming raiding with you.’

  His father had let him, not for any tender feeling for his son. Gylfa knew why. His father was ashamed of him and thought that, if his son could not make a famous warrior, he could at least make an honourable corpse. They had sailed with Hardrada.

  He remembered the ships on the ocean. Hundreds of them sailed from the flat waters of the Sognefjord, like swans, his father had said, flocking to a feast. They reminded him more of rats: dark, low to the water, full of sinister purpose. He should not have come. He should not have come.

  ‘So mighty,’ his father had said, gesturing to the fleet.

  ‘So fragile,’ he had felt like saying, though he only nodded.

  ‘You’re doing right, Gylfa,’ his father said. ‘You’ll feast at King Hardrada’s bench or at Christ’s in heaven before the winter comes.’

  ‘Will I feast with the king?’

  ‘You do mighty deeds and maybe. Though likely not. You’ll at least feast with your brothers and be able to look them in the eye as you drink.’

  ‘Will I look Christ in the eye?’

  ‘Fight well and you will. This god blesses those who fight in his name.’

  ‘Some of the men call on Odin.’

  ‘Odin is a treacherous god. Christ stands behind you. Call on Christ to strengthen your arm. Odin asks too much in return.’

  ‘You pray to Odin.’

  His father smiled. ‘I pray to both. Too long a merchant. I want the gods competing for my soul.’

  They travelled as much by oar as by sail – the wind was forever too high or too low. Shetland, Orkney, Scotland, picking up troops all the way. He’d thought then that no one could stand against so many men.

  They’d made landfall easy. The country was a funny one, no mountains but rolling hills that bore all the menace of mountains, though little of their splendour; squat things hunched like beaten dogs on the horizon. It was cold too. Not the biting cold of Hordaland, the deep-locked snows and ices, but just a nagging dishonest chill that never quite left, even at the fireside. Why had they come so late? His father said other plunderers were in the south of the country and that, unless they got there quick, there would be nothing left to conquer.

  ‘We’ll all be lords!’ Hardrada had screamed when he’d addressed the army. He was a magnificent man, a head taller than any of his fellows, arms that looked strong enough to pick up the sea in a bucket.

  They’d had an easy victory at Fulford and took York without a fight but it had bred slackness among the men. At Stamford Bridge – he now knew its name – the English king had found them far from their ships and armour. He had come down on them like the tide upon a sand bar. They had not expected him; the scouts had said he was far away. Yet Harold had moved quickly.

  He had lost his father that day. He’d hadn’t seen him killed and, for all he knew, he had made the ships. Gylfa only wanted to return to his lands, to hug his mother again, sit by the fire and tell stories of war. He’d had enough of participating in it. These men, that woman, they’d all called him coward, or implied as much. But he was not a coward. A coward would still be on his farm, shoving some resentful cow out to pasture, tilling the stony soil. He almost laughed. His ambition now was to be a coward, to live a coward’s life.

  He crawled forward. He felt something, a little disturbance in the ground. The start of the steps? The warrior beside him cried out. A voice answered in the same language. They were coming. There would be torches and he would be discovered and blamed for the carnage here. He edged forward, the ground gave way and he fell.

  He had blundered into the hole in the floor and fallen into the sightless black tunnel. All the breath left him, his straight arm was driven up hard and he gasped in pain. There were shouts above him. He felt his shoulder. It was very painful and he thought he might have dislocated it. Where to go, where to go? He tried to stand but his head was spinning from the fall.

  A torch came into the black space above him like a terrible comet presaging doom.

  He couldn’t see the faces of the warriors behind the brightness of the torch but he heard one of them spit at him. The torch moved away and its light was softer. He saw a glowing rectangle of light above him where the slab had been removed.

  He wondered what the scraping was at first. It was dull, loud, near. A Norman face peered down at him, smiling. He didn’t understand the word the man spoke but it issued through a smile and he knew that smile was not friendly.

  The scrape. A brief squabble, as among workmen who disagree how best to bang in a nail, and then the scrape again. At the left hand edge of the rectangle of light, darkness encroached, darkness with a regular, hard edge.

&n
bsp; ‘No!’

  They were putting the slab back across. He tried to stand but too late. The slab thudded into place and it was dark. On his feet, he shoved at the rock with his good arm but it was at the very limit of his reach, he could do no more than put fingertips on it. And what if he did push it aside? It was only the Normans waiting for him.

  His heart thumped like a fish on a deck.

  ‘No! No! No!’

  He heard no reply. He kicked at the walls, tore at them but it was no good. He just brought earth down on himself, clogging his nostrils and gritting his mouth. He had to think; think like a brave man.

  What thoughts did the brave have that cowards did not in such situations? Gylfa thought of his mother on the farm. He thought of his dog and of his sister; the hunger of July, the bounty of September; all the mild torments and pleasures of a man who had not tried too much.

  What would a brave man have thought? Not much different. Or perhaps he would have envisaged them less powerfully. Gylfa could almost see his mother there on the hillside; he could hear the shush of the summer sea; he could feel his sister’s hand in his, the bones more delicate and precious than anything he had known or could imagine in this world or the next. The brave man would be less imaginative and less hopeful. He would think, ‘I have had a good life. I have held my son’s hand and known that I will be remembered and that my kin go on. I have piled the plunder I got from the sea at the door of my house and seen the respect and the envy of my neighbours, narrow-eyed on their faces. I have done enough and I do not hope to do more.’

  Gylfa lay for a long time. He did not hope for a swift death. He was not afraid of pain but of extinction.

  He touched something embedded in the wall and realised it was a skull, its teeth still in its head.

  ‘Here I lie. Bones among bones,’ he thought.

  He was cold, though not as cold as he had been on the hills, and he was thirsty. There had been water down here, he was sure. That gave him hope. He would wait a while here and then he would scrape the mud from the walls, use the soil and bricks that had fallen in when the excavation was made, to make a pile. He could stand on that and then push away the slab.

  It was a large one and beyond his power to move on its own but maybe he could dig around it, do … What? Something. No, nothing. Black despair came down on him like grave dust. He would never get out, never be free and he would die a coward’s death and pass to Hell or to the dead lands where the sick and feeble go, where women go, cut off from Odin’s mead bench and the eternal life of a great warrior.

  Stupid thoughts. What if Hell was like this? What if Hell was not dying but living forever in this blind tomb? Gylfa cried for a while before he mastered himself.

  Brave men did things, his father had told him. When others dithered, they acted. But anyone would be brave in such a place. There was only the desire to get out of it and that begged action. He began to make his pile, shovelling bricks and mud with his cold hands, swallowing down the pain of his shoulder. Even as he removed the bricks of the wall, he feared he would bring the ceiling down. He piled as many as he could find without losing his way in the blackness and then packed them with mud. Leaning carefully on the wall, he stood. He could not afford to push now, only to test if he could hear anything. He reached the slab. He would not test its weight. To do so was to risk it moving and drawing the attention of the Normans. He listened. How futile. If he heard anything he would not lift the slab. If he heard nothing, he still would not lift the slab. He sat back down again.

  After a while he began to get very thirsty. He was used to being hungry, so much so that a few days without food were no discomfort to him. Thirst, though, could not be denied. If he could drink, it would be a little victory against the circumstances. There was a well down there. He knew it was stupid to move but he didn’t see how he could fail to find his way back to the pile of earth and the slab in such a tight tunnel, retracing his way.

  He crawled down the tunnel, counting his elbow steps. His shoulder was painful but not dislocated or smashed, he guessed, or he wouldn’t have been able to move. Five, six, seven. He got to thirty before he heard water.

  He swallowed, his dry throat commanding him forward, all his common sense saying go back. The tunnel dropped here, it was definitely on a slope. What if it fell to nothing? He stretched forward his arm, patting at the earth, wary as a cat trying a lily pad.

  The ground was solid. He crawled forward, trembling. ‘Odin, you are lord of the dead and I am among the dead, preserve me. Christ, you rose from a tomb. Show me how you achieved that feat, oh great magician. Help me here. Please help me. Jesus Odin, Odin Jesus. Saint Thor and Saint Michael, angels and elves, help me here!’

  A few body lengths on, he felt moisture on the floor. He put his hand to the wall to test it there. Yes, wet. He slithered on. The earth of the floor gave way to slick rock. He could hear the water trickling now. Forward again. The rock dipped sharply. He stopped, stretched out his good arm again to test the way. The water was louder – a waterfall? Now a further drop and, just on his fingertips, water.

  He leaned forward to scoop it up but he was not quite near enough to do more than wet his fingers. He licked at them but that only provoked his thirst. He wriggled forward, got a good scoopful of water, raised it to his lips, slipped and plunged headlong into the pool.

  Gylfa did not know if his head had struck something. He saw a white light, breathed in water, spluttered and hacked it out. He was underwater, no sense of up or down, no air to cough into.

  He thrashed and kicked, the cold a bear squeezing his chest. Something thumped against his hand. He had gone down when he had thought to go up, he breathed in, only water. He was dying, he was sure, and he did not want to die. Raging for air, he turned, kicked again and struck the bottom once more. No. Up! One thrust of the legs and he thought he broke the surface. He couldn’t tell. His face was numb with cold, he couldn’t see or feel that he had left the water. He coughed, breathed in, coughed. He was in the air, he thought, he must be in the air. He breathed in, rasping, wheezing. Yes, he was alive. No sight, no other sense, no idea of where he came in or how he might leave, he said the word that brave men and cowards alike find easiest on their death beds.

  ‘Mother!’

  Above him, a tiny glow, no more than a distant candle in the darkness.

  ‘Help! Help!’ Oh, the horrid cold.

  No one replied. He moved towards the light. A peculiar thought struck him. This was the oldest instinct, to move out of the darkness into the light. As he got nearer to it, the glow got bigger, more diffuse. He made out a faint archway, a depth that said this was another tunnel. He swam forward towards it, gaining the side of the pool. Yes, a light. And somewhere, in the tunnel’s distance, someone was singing.

  29 Unknown Enemies

  Tola stepped out of the church into the misty night. It was very dark but a moon looked down at her, its face blurred as if seen through ice. She had escaped but now she had no idea where to go. For a few moments she couldn’t even place where she was in the town. Everything was unfamiliar. She seemed to be at the bottom of a hill whereas she had been sure she’d come up one. It was then she realised she’d exited through a different door to the one she’d come in through. The houses here were more or less intact, though some had been burned.

  Away in the darkness she heard shouts and more shouts answering them. The slaughter in the cathedral was drawing warriors. She crouched and ran a little way, then stepped over a burned wall and lay down, trying to marshal her thoughts. All around was confusion, anger, fear. She had escaped the terrible warrior with his presence like the deep water of meres, like the darkness of the forest and the tomb, but now she didn’t know where to go or what to do.

  She tried not to think of what she had seen at the well. Styliane. Oh Jesus save me. Had she killed her? She didn’t know.

  A press of warriors came tow
ards the great church. She watched them, peeking above the ruined wall. Already she was cold – her hair wet and freezing against her face. She couldn’t stay there all night but where else to go? Perhaps back to the church. It was huge and full of dark nooks to hide in. It wouldn’t be warm but it would have to be warmer than these frozen ashes.

  The wolf rune stirred inside her, crawling and slinking. It wanted to go back, to meet with that man, that non-thing. Even unpleasant people came with resonances she could understand. Ina the traveller had come to the farms with his goods and a stink of fox. He had the sly eye of a fox and when she remembered him she envisaged him prowling, fox-footed, around the farms, looking for what he could loot. She had no idea if Ina ever had stolen anything and she doubted that he had. He’d have been mad to. One man – only occasionally did he travel with a woman or some children – alone in the farms would be the first to take the blame should anything valuable go missing. In fact, were anyone planning to steal something, the appearance of a pedlar was as good a time to do it as any because people naturally distrusted outsiders.

  She hadn’t liked Ina but she had understood him. Other people she disliked brought resonances of burned hair, mithering weather, sticky and warm, even the feelings of an annoying puppy, forever tugging on her skirts.

  The warrior brought almost nothing. Just a weight, like a rock, like the sea.

  She could not go to him. Alone for almost the first time since the burning of her farm, all the horrible sensations of memory came back to her. Pleasant memories were the hardest to bear: a sunny day with Hals at the start of July, too soon to go hungry, too early for the toil of harvest; a butterfly landing on her breast like a bright blue brooch, a piece of the sky fallen just for her – those memories were the memories of the mind. The memory of the burning was a memory of the body and it was as if her bones and flesh could only hold so much. She shook as she recalled the cry of alarm from the bottom farms, the panic of the flight north – running beyond endurance over hard, cold fields up to the hills, not because the hills offered safety but because there was nowhere else to go. She relived the sensations of the scramble up the fell, climbing slopes she would have thought too steep or too perilous not a day before. Hiding behind the wall now it was as if her body wanted to keep running, re-enacting the movements that had so far kept her safe. Tola knew that tactic was no longer open to her. The dales would kill her if she couldn’t find better protection than these oversized warriors’ clothes. She would need more cloaks, someone who knew how to live in the open, other bodies to lie next to for warmth in the night.