Valkyrie's Song

by M. D. Lachlan

  35 Insight

  Tola was being carried when the cold released its grip on her mind. He had her across his shoulder, striding forward as if she was no heavier than a cloak.

  The night was darker here, the clouds had buried the moon and she saw very little. They were crossing a marsh, she could smell that, wet grass, frost. Behind her was distress, humiliation and fear. Hearts beat quickly, the bodies were warm but cooling beneath wet clothes. She imagined him, the leader, his pride shattered, desperate for revenge, angry at his own impotence.

  She felt nothing from the man who carried her. He was a void still, a falling away into darkness, and when she tried to assume his thoughts, she feared to step into that darkness. He moved so quickly, almost running, and she knew, if she had not known before, that she had stepped into a story where fantastical things were everyday and all the certainties of life were gone.

  Her body convulsed in a big shiver and he gripped her more tightly. The heat of his body brought her out of her numbness and she realised how uncomfortable she was, his shoulder pushing into her belly, her legs cramping.

  ‘I must stop.’

  He kept going, jogging and bashing her.

  ‘I must stop!’

  ‘There’s blood in the water. There’s a river of blood.’

  ‘They will not find us in this night. Stop and let me get my breath.’

  ‘I have killed,’ said Loys. ‘I have heard the Valkyries’ song as they choose the slain from the living.’

  ‘Set me down!’

  He stopped and dropped her to the ground. Her legs would not support her and she stumbled but he caught her. He trembled as he held her and he could not look at her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I am slipping away. I cannot defend you. I killed them.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The ones in the boat. They came for me. I cannot defend you.’

  ‘And yet you have.’

  ‘From enemies without, yes. But I have an enemy in here.’ He thumped his chest. ‘He is waking and he is hungry. If he eats, his hunger grows.’

  ‘You have not killed me yet,’ she said.

  ‘But death surrounds us here. Soon we will have to defend ourselves again and that will call him out. The teeth. In the darkness. In here.’ Again he thumped his chest. ‘I must leave you where it is safe.’ Loys gently let her go to stand without support.

  ‘Don’t leave me. It’s safe nowhere.’

  ‘I need to seek the man who took my stone. I can smell him on the air. He is near enough. Two days and I will find him, reclaim myself.’

  Something moved in the darkness. Loys turned and crouched. He didn’t draw his knife, as a warrior might have, but rocked forward onto his hands, like a wild animal ready to pounce.

  Heavy sawing breath in the dark, a splashing and plodding.

  ‘Hold, hold! I can’t see where I’m going!’ She did not know the voice.

  ‘Run from me,’ said Loys. ‘I cannot answer for what I do if I kill again.’

  ‘I can’t run. I can’t move!’

  ‘Run! I am a monster. Run!’

  She tried to get away but her legs would not carry her. All the strength had gone.

  Three short, gulping barks, a low answering growl from Loys.

  At first she thought he was another creature from a story, many-legged, short and squat, but then she saw, in the gloom, that it was a man, almost dragged by a dog.

  ‘Lord Loys, is that you?’ he said.

  ‘Gylfa!’ said Loys. His body shook and Tola guessed he was trying to master himself.

  Closer, she could see the man was soaking wet, shivering deeply.

  ‘They forced me,’ said Gylfa. ‘They forced me to lead them to you. I was glad to do it. I know your fame, lord, I knew you would free me.’

  Tola could think of only one thing.

  ‘Do you have a flint? Steel?’

  ‘Yes, but my tinder is soaked!’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘A fire will reveal us!’ said Gylfa.

  ‘But the cold will kill us. We need fear nothing in this fog. You took your plunder, I see.’

  At Gylfa’s side was the strange curved sword.

  ‘I brought it for him. I knew we would find the lord again. He has cured me. I have things inside me but he frightened them away.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Runes,’ said Gylfa. ‘They fell into me at the well but I do not like them.’

  ‘You are a man, you can’t bear runes,’ said Loys.

  ‘Well.’ Gylfa smiled. ‘Perhaps you have reminded them of that and they have gone away. I am glad of it, they pain me.’

  ‘Draw them,’ said Loys. ‘Here in the mud.’

  So Gylfa drew. The Algiz, tree roots reaching down into the ground; Fehu, the two short staves propping up the long one; and Dagaz, two triangles kissing at their point.

  ‘Merkstave,’ said Loys.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘They’re upside down. The day rune is the only one you have used?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It is the only one that cannot be reversed, though it can oppose the other runes. Do not open your mind to the others. You have been cursed and you carry the curse inside you.’

  ‘But they are gone.’

  ‘With me here, yes. When I leave they will return.’

  ‘I would not be cursed!’ said Gylfa.

  Loys smiled. ‘Me neither. Though you may be part of my curse.’

  ‘Don’t cut me free, lord. I am a man better owned than owning, better told than telling.’

  ‘I have never seen the runes reversed before,’ said Loys.

  ‘That sounds like a bad thing!’ Gylfa grinned, though he wrung his hands.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Loys. ‘Most people who carry them the right way round die. It may be a sign of good fortune.’

  ‘You said it was a curse.’

  ‘For you, not me.’

  ‘You were leading them to us,’ said Tola.

  ‘No, I swear, they forced me to follow.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t speak their language.’

  ‘Why did they let you keep the sword?’ said Tola.

  ‘I took it from the boat. I need to defend myself. Without you, lord, I need to defend myself.’

  He untied the sword and passed it to Loys.

  ‘It’s good you brought it,’ he said. ‘This is the needful weapon.’

  ‘For what?’

  Loys did not reply, just sat down on the floor. She wondered that he did not shiver or complain of the cold, or seem ashamed of his nakedness. She distrusted Gylfa but his fear of Loys was palpable. He would do nothing to her while she was under his protection.

  Tola took her knife to a birch and stripped it of its oily bark, feathering it to take the flame. She collected twigs and, because the grass was damp and useless, cut a piece from the stuffing of the Norman tunic she wore.

  They chose a thicket of trees for their camp and hoped that would be cover enough.The fire didn’t come easy but it came, a strange, gaudy thing in that grey land, something that played and danced in the stillness.

  ‘How long before the rest follow?’ said Tola. She had not known how cold she was until the fire began to warm her.

  ‘Giroie and another survived,’ said Gylfa. ‘But they have been chastened. They were shouting “Fen Monster”. Sir, they couldn’t believe they fought an ordinary man. I’m sure they will not dare to face you alone.’

  Loys sat naked in the firelight, the light of the flames shifting on his pale skin. Tola crossed herself. His eyes had changed. The irises were big and deeply coloured – difficult to see what in the firelight, maybe green, maybe amber. He had a watchful expression and
sometimes inclined his head as if hearing something. She could hear nothing beyond the crackle of the fire. The dog was wary of him now, though it came to the fire on the opposite side to Loys, not sleeping or resting, but nervous, its fur steaming, stinking. It was restless, its legs half creeping forwards, half back, pulled on by the warmth of the fire, wary of the man who sat beside it.

  ‘I need to find the stone,’ said Loys.

  ‘Can you not sniff it on the air?’ said Gylfa. He had taken off his cloak and was holding it up to the fire to dry it.

  ‘No. It is invisible to me, as is the man who took it. He must have put it on.’

  His breath was heavy and his mouth was wet with drool.

  ‘So where does that leave us?’ said Gylfa.

  ‘Dead,’ said Loys, ‘if we are attacked again. I have a wolf in me and his hungers grow with feeding.’

  ‘So what do we do? We will not survive without you.’

  ‘I survived without him before,’ said Tola.

  Tola, now the cold began to leave her bones, could concentrate on this little man. He had a huge fear in him but not like Ithamar. This was not a wall of fear, put up to block thought, it was fear that sparkled like sun on the morning fields, a shifting, sharp thing. This man was afraid of so much that it almost over-rode any other emotion in him. She felt an animosity towards her but only that which many cowardly men felt with death all around them; a despair at the evil of the world but no desire to oppose it, only surrender to it; a willingness to become its instrument even as it destroyed them. It wasn’t rape she saw in his mind. Something else. She couldn’t quite understand it. It was a feeling half between wanting to protect her and wanting to harm her. She’d had that before from the young men of the dale, as she felt their minds hover between desire and fear of rejection. So that? Maybe? The man was very young and perhaps unused to the company of women. She saw him as a river thistle, clinging to hard places; a burr, an irritation that snagged you as you passed, something to be picked out and discarded. It did not bother her. There were no friends left and she had been in the company of hostile men ever since the Normans had burned her home.

  ‘We go north in the morning,’ said Loys.

  ‘Why? The land is in flames and the Normans are all around,’ said Tola.

  ‘It is where you were. Where I was looking for you.’

  ‘And where you search, that is where I must be?’

  ‘Yes. It’s the way of it. We need to go back and to consult, to find the appointed place.’

  ‘What appointed place?’

  ‘Where we will both be free. You of me and me of everything.’

  ‘How will you find this place? By magic?’

  ‘I am the end of magic, a hole into which it sinks. I can’t do any magic. Women and gods do magic. I am neither.’

  Tola leaned in to the fire. ‘You think I can?’

  ‘You know you can. Why are you alive among this slaughter, in this cold? You survive because the god’s story, or the fragment of it you are enacting, says you survive, because he has put his magic in you like a seed.’

  ‘Then I don’t need you.’ She didn’t believe those words. She needed Loys because he offered a purpose, a place to go, an idea that the running and hiding might end.

  ‘This story does not end well, lady, for any of us.’

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Tola watched the fire. As a child it had seemed to her that an invisible river flowed through her valley beside the real one. It swept over her, trying to carry her away. Sometimes she dreamed that it was not a river but a sparkling yarn of gold and silver, soft to the hand. She followed it through the dale, out and away over strange lands. She knew now that it was the thread of her destiny that had led back to the well at York.

  She nodded into the heat of the fire, searching for it again. All men are spun. All men. She saw the yarn that stretched over Gylfa, a net of red jewels; she saw her own stretching away from York, like spun ice, twisted with tiny diamonds. All men are spun. All men. There was no net for Loys, no thread either, just a sense of unseen depths, like a cave that plunges into fathomless darkness.

  She took up the thread in her hands. The hill. The women, with their skins of beaten leather, their hair of spun gold.

  ‘I know where to go,’ she said.

  36 Abomination

  She led them back the way they had came, over the hills. There was warmth at the White Horse cave at least.

  ‘This way we have shelter,’ she said, ‘to break our journey.’

  The cold had lost some of its grip on the land and only the high hills were touched with white but the wind was bitter. While they moved she was all right but rest sent her muscles writhing on her bones. She built the fire as Ithamar had shown her, in the lee of a great rock, the small hole feeding the bigger one, and Gylfa marvelled at it. Had it not been for him, they would have frozen. He had the knife, he had the tinder.

  There was nothing to cook. Movement kept the hunger at bay but, in front of the fire, the memories of the hearth at home sharp in her mind, it came back, burning in her guts as if she’d swallowed the embers of the fire. She felt irritable and restless and could sense that Gylfa felt the same. Loys, as ever, was dark to her.

  ‘There’s something following you,’ she said to Gylfa as they crested a stony ridge.

  ‘There’s something following us all,’ said Gylfa.

  ‘Yes. But magic things.’

  She saw them in the night, catching the edge of her vision only to fall away when she turned to see them properly. Bright flashes came with whispers of birdsong, movement that suggested tumbling water.

  ‘It’s to be expected,’ said Loys.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We are together. The story has moved on.’

  ‘You said the story was broken.’

  ‘I believe it has been and it may be told differently this time. But still its parts seek each other. That is what you’re seeing in the darkness. Something that is trying to be.’

  ‘You are something that is trying not to be,’ she said.

  ‘You have a great magic in you.’

  She said nothing, too numb to think about what that meant.

  The hill lay out before her like a collapsed animal, dead of cold. The dog followed behind, at a distance, skulking forward at night to lie by their fire, always wary of Loys, its eyes never leaving him. In the daylight she saw he had changed again. His blue eyes were now shot with amber, the muscles on his neck stood out like the roots of a hill. The boy Gylfa offered him his cloak but Loys refused it. The priests said the first man was naked and knew no shame. Perhaps Loys was the last man, returning to the way he had been in Eden.

  He constantly craned his head and sniffed at the air.

  Tola had to ask him directly. ‘Is this the end of the world?’

  ‘I think the world is ending,’ said Loys. ‘But it may not yet be the moment of the end.’

  ‘Will it pass, the danger to us? Your danger?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know. If we meet an enemy you must run and keep running. I will face them. After that, hide from me.’

  ‘You will harm me?’

  ‘I will try not to. But I cannot swear it.’

  Fog came down again on the high hills and Tola moved as if blind. Loys led them, his hand in hers, Gylfa taking her cloak.

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ said the boy.

  ‘Then neither can our enemies,’ said Loys.

  Sight gone, she found herself counting her breaths. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. She timed them with her footsteps, a step a breath. In the greyness it was the only thing that convinced her she was alive. She saw an arm’s length in front of her, no more. The going was slow, even with Loys leading. Something brushed her leg. The dog. It was comin
g nearer. She felt Loys shiver.

  ‘You’re cold?’ she said.

  ‘At last,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t stay naked in this.’

  ‘No. Let’s find your cave. I can smell it. There’s a fire.’

  ‘How do you know it’s the cave fire?’

  ‘It’s not a free breathing fire. It’s enclosed,’ said Loys.

  ‘Not much further, then?’

  ‘A day.’

  ‘You can smell a fire a day away?’

  ‘For now. I can smell the drop at our side too. Don’t go any more that way, the air deepens so there will be a fall.’

  Gylfa shot back as though the fall might leap on him and bite him.

  The hills were heartbreaking – she had no idea how long they went on for. Always as a child when she had climbed the long rise to her Gran’s she had glanced at the summit and then not allowed herself to look up again for a while, surprising herself with how much nearer she was. She couldn’t do that here so there was no way of knowing when the effort would subside. When it did, the cold came on again, and she longed for the warmth of another climb.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ said Gylfa.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We need food soon or we will starve. I haven’t eaten properly in weeks.’

  ‘We’re all in the same mess,’ said Tola. ‘Talking about it makes it worse.’

  ‘Are you hungry, lord?’ said Gylfa.

  Loys said nothing.

  The fog did not lift, a grey day became a black night and they built what fire they could from the sparse bushes. It was not much but it kept the cold at bay for most of the night and after it faded, they all slept huddled together in the way of travellers, the dog made confident enough to lie beside them, its fear of Loys overcome by the promise of warmth.