Valkyrie's Song

by M. D. Lachlan

  She dreamed that she was in another place, lying with her arms around Loys, a very strange place near blue water, the sun strong in the sky. The warmth made her happy but she shivered herself awake with the dawn, to find Loys shaking too. The hunger had receded now, though her throat was raw from the wind.

  ‘You need clothing,’ she said.

  ‘No. Not yet. Pain is man’s burden. I will be a man, not an animal.’

  They walked on for a long time, though she couldn’t say if it was morning or afternoon when Loys sank to his knees.

  ‘It’s gone,’ he said. ‘The wolf is gone, for now. It’s asleep.’

  ‘We’re out of danger?’

  ‘I can’t lead any more. My senses are muted.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘We have to wait for the fog to lift.’

  ‘We could die here,’ said Gylfa.

  ‘I think so,’ said Loys. ‘Perhaps the story is broken beyond repair. Perhaps this is as much as there is.’

  ‘Then you’ve led us here for no reason.’

  The hound stabbed out its short bay, its black body sliding into the fog like an eel into water.

  After a while they heard it barking and something else – a distant word.

  ‘Steady!’

  ‘People?’ said Gylfa. ‘What language?’

  ‘English,’ said Tola. ‘Our people.’

  ‘I am Norse, he is Norman and you are English. We can be certain of finding friends and enemies in anyone we meet.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Loys. His jaw chattered as he spoke.

  They trod carefully up the hill. After thirty or forty paces, they smelled the fire, a tinge on the fog. Still the dog barked. Tola felt its excitement in its voice. Someone else was there too – a man, pleased to see the creature. She felt the man’s long pain and the relief to see the dog. It was more than the end to loneliness, to him the presence of the dog was the kindling of hope. Then came fear.

  They heard him stamping down the fire, the sound carrying on the sodden air. Loys held up his hand and gestured to Gylfa.

  ‘Me? You are the great warrior.’

  ‘Go,’ said Loys. ‘If it’s trouble, come running. I can’t risk a fight. It will wake the wolf. You go. Go!’

  Gylfa nodded and stepped forward into the fog like a man unsure if his next step would send him hurtling from the mountain.

  Loys shivered deeply and Tola went to him, wrapped her cloak around him and hugged him.

  ‘Can you die?’ she said.

  ‘I think so.’

  She felt his body trembling.

  ‘Help! Help!’

  An angry voice screamed out in English. ‘You’ll keep away. Keep away or die!’

  ‘If I draw blood …’ said Loys.

  ‘I will try.’

  ‘Friend. We are friends!’ she shouted.

  ‘No friends of mine!’

  ‘We mean no harm, we’re looking only for shelter.’

  ‘There’s none here!’

  ‘He’s a liar, there’s a great cave!’ came Gylfa’s voice. ‘Come on!’

  The hound barked and she heard a skittering of stones. Gylfa was going into the cave.

  She felt his excitement, the man in the cave’s fear. More than fear. Shame too.

  She scrambled up through the fog, guided by the barking of the hound, Loys beside her.

  A waft of hot air came from the cave, like a rancid breath, a dirty, fetid air but sweetened by the smell of a heather fire.

  A loud sobbing came from inside.

  ‘What is this?’ Gylfa’s voice.

  ‘Do not judge me,’ said the man. ‘We were facing starvation.’

  Tola scrambled down the scree slope and into the cave. Its mouth breathed with warmth, hot and fetid as a dog’s.

  Loys came down too. A fire was within. And carnage.

  Gylfa was already by the fire, kneeling to warm himself, his head bowed to avoid the sight of the bodies.

  There were three of them – one larger, two smaller. The smaller figures had their faces turned to the floor. The larger figure had been stripped for meat. It had the flesh cut away at its arm. The pot on the floor bore a hand, the flesh boiled and picked at.

  ‘We were left here too long,’ said the man. She recognised him from her first visit to the cave. He was no thinner. ‘They said they’d come back. There’s no food in the land. There was no choice.’

  ‘All of them?’ said Gylfa.

  ‘Could you eat a mother in front of her children? Or children in front of their mother? I killed them in their sleep, they never knew.’ He gestured to the bodies. Even in death, he had turned the children’s eyes away.

  ‘Tender feelings,’ said Gylfa.

  ‘So you’ll be wanting none of the meat?’

  Tola shook her head.

  ‘We should bury them,’ she said. ‘It’s the Christian way’.

  ‘I don’t think I could stomach it,’ said Gylfa.

  ‘Of course you could. You can eat a pig, a horse, a dog or a rat. Why not a man?’

  ‘I am hungry,’ said Gylfa.

  ‘I would rather starve,’ said Tola.

  ‘Good. More for me. There’s a deal of meat left on even them that have died of hunger,’ said the man.

  ‘Loys. Speak to them!’ said Tola.

  There was no reply. Loys was gone.

  Tola walked outside the cave. The light was dying and Loys was crouching on the grass, his head in his hand.

  ‘There are clothes for you inside,’ she said.

  ‘I am cold.’

  ‘Then come in. There is a fire. I will take the bodies outside if you can’t face it.’

  ‘It’s good to be cold,’ he said. ‘The wolf is never cold.’

  The moon lit the low fog and she looked down the long granite scar of the hillside, disappearing into murk. The heather tufted from the snow, like ash. It was as if all the world was burning and this was the only place left.

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘Looking for you,’said Loys.

  ‘To die?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You would have thought it would be easy here. Everything I have is gone. Everyone is dead. Will you come back inside the cave? I will move the bodies.’

  ‘I cannot face them.’

  ‘They are a horror to you, after all you have seen in the dales?’

  ‘I am a horror to me.’

  ‘You are the only thing I am not afraid of,’ she said. ‘Though my body trembles when I see you, though my legs want to run, I am not afraid inside.’ She was surprised at herself for the question that came to her. ‘What do you hope for?’

  He looked puzzled. ‘Hope seems a strange word for it. I don’t know. I aim for death. Do I hope for it? I don’t know. And you?’

  ‘Not this,’ she said. ‘Anything but this. I could have fallen into Hell. I wonder if I was killed with Hals on that hill and it is part of my torment not to know it is torment, to think I can escape, to hope for better things. We cannot go back to what was. What will I do when I have helped you fulfil your purpose?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She studied his face, the wolf ’s eyes, the skin smooth and young, his naked body pale against the snow.

  ‘Not without the stone. The smell torments me, even here. I must remain on the hill until you move on.’

  ‘Let me fetch you clothes.’

  ‘I need the cold.’

  ‘And the clothes. They will offer little protection but if you look like a man, you might begin to think as a man.’

  She slid down the slope to the cave. Gylfa smiled at her through the firelight, his mouth greasy.

  She only took what clothes remained – a big pair of hose, a shirt and a tunic. Sh
e tore the woman’s dress to make a cloak. The corpses did not bother her. How quickly, she thought, we can bear things, how quickly a dead child looks no more horrifying than a slaughtered pig.

  She brought the clothes back out to Loys.

  ‘Put them on.’

  ‘They smell of meat.’

  ‘We all smell of meat. You too, very likely.’

  He climbed into the hose, then the shirt and the tunic. Finally she gave him a blanket. He looked like any other refugee from the Normans, dressed in scavenged or torn things, things made to serve the wrong purpose. She was the same in her huge cloak, her man’s breeches. It was as if a flood had swept through their lives, jumbling and overturning everything and, when it had receded, the detritus had clung to the living like weed to rocks.

  A horse breathed down in the valley. Then many others, as if it was a speaker and the other horses were murmuring their agreement with his words. A dog barked as if in disagreement, throwing great scoops of sound through the dead air.

  ‘We need to move,’ said Tola. ‘They’ll find the cave if they have dogs.

  ‘They’ll find us anyway if they’ve got a dog. Fetch me my sword,’ said Loys. ‘I’ll try to use that. The rest of you, run!’

  37 Run to Earth

  Who do you pray to? To the gods you have seen and who you know hate you? To the god you have never seen who says he loves you? Loys did not pray, nor even cross himself. It was hard to be a god, or a devil, and to have no one to call to for help beyond himself.

  Tola and Gylfa scrambled up the hillside, away from the main track, the man they had found in the cave huffing behind them.

  The world around him seemed to sizzle with the scent of excitement, men, dog, horses, as the hound gave voice and bayed towards them.

  He heard the girl’s voice. ‘Come on!’ and sensed its panic. Her breath was loud to him, like an answer to the hound’s questing sniffs. The dog said, ‘Where are you?’ She said, ‘Here’, with every breath.

  He weighed the sword in his hand. The dog would have to die, it made tracking them too easy. The animal broke from the mist at about twenty paces and Loys was disappointed to see that it wasn’t some fierce fighter but a flop-eared thing, low to the ground, its face expectant as if he was going to give it a morsel of meat.

  He edged towards it, not raising the sword, only cooing to it. Grey and green spun before his eyes, the smell of blood was in his nose and his ears rang. He was on the wet ground, his senses clearing enough to know he had been struck by a charging horse. The smell of its sweat and the wet leather of a strap or saddle clung to him, gave a flavour to his pain.

  Four more riders came bursting from the mist, hooves trailing spumes of bitter soil, the dark smell of the animal bodies filling his mind.

  ‘Up there! Up there!’

  The Normans were pointing to where Tola and her companions were making a run for it.

  ‘Where?’

  Tola shouted out. ‘My ankle!’

  Loys stood, the ground like the deck of a storm-tossed ship to him. A horseman rounded on him, levelled his lance. Loys’s head was not clear, his nose was full of blood. The deathbeat of the hooves commanded his legs to run, the point of the lance bobbed like a distant seal’s head on a field of grey. He stepped under it and swung his sword hard. Another thump and he flew backwards – the horse had struck him again, his body humming like a door struck by a ram.

  The horse wheeled and spun. It was as if the rider was turning tricks in a square for the amusement of a crowd, nearly falling off, throwing his legs high to cast them back and fall slumped onto the saddle. The horse screamed and collapsed. He had put an ugly wound into its head.

  Loys thought he had broken his collarbone – the pain was awful sharp there – but he had no time to think of it. Age did not wither him, he could take ten times the shock of an ordinary man, but he suspected he was far from unkillable.

  Another charge might put him down so hard he could not get up. What then? Rebirth, finding himself anew, misery and death forever. The sword was gone, knocked from his hand.

  Tola had gone up the hill, so he needed to lead the men down where their horses could not go. He scrambled down the scree to the mouth of the cave. More riders now, nine or ten of them. He ran inside, ducking under the low ceiling until it opened out into the higher cavern.

  ‘Halloos’ and ‘hoys!’ Some speech in bad English.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Up!’

  He recognised the tone of voice. It was the man who had taken the stone.

  A spear poked through the cave opening.

  ‘This is a rebel dwelling!’ said a Norman. ‘It’s warm in there!’

  ‘Whoever goes through will be risking a royal clout on the head,’ said another voice.

  ‘So how are we going to get him out? The boss won’t be happy now we’ve had sight of him if we don’t come back with him.’

  ‘Five at a time,’ said the first voice. ‘He can’t do for us all, and if we go in spear-first we can drive him back. I don’t think he’s armed anyway.’

  ‘As good as any plan.’

  Loys did not want to risk killing now. Already the wolf seemed bright-eyed inside him and the only blood he’d smelled was his own. He couldn’t stay in the cave either.

  The dead here, stripped like so many pig carcasses, were too much of an incitement.

  He sniffed. Water and the smell of the deep earth below the aroma of human butchery. There might be a hiding place there at least, where he with his sensitive ears and nose could find his way more easily than the Normans, staggering on in darkness or by the uncertain light of a torch.

  He went past the small fire and down into the shadows at the back of the cave. He sensed an exit, a colder area among the fire-warmed stone.

  ‘Here we go then!’

  Clattering from the entrance as the Normans rolled into the cave with screams and curses.

  Then: ‘My God, these people are savages, look what’s happened here!’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In there. He certainly didn’t come out.’

  ‘God, I’m going to retch. That’s a thumb joint in that bowl.

  ‘I’d rather starve! Do you think he’s been up to this? Let’s find him!’

  Loys crawled into the deeper darkness. No sword now, only the animal weapons to defend him. He hoped he wouldn’t need them.

  Through the rock of the cave ceiling, through the soil and grass that covered them, he heard the call. The long rune was howling. Tola was in danger. If she died all his plans, and her chance of peace, were gone.

  He needed to get to her but he couldn’t risk the wolf emerging. His instinct told him to go down into the dark, so he did, slithering on his belly into the sightless blackness. One of the Normans brought a burning ember from the fire nearby but the light was not enough to see by.

  ‘Can we find him?’

  ‘No. Wait until he comes out.’

  ‘That could be forever.’

  ‘Now there’s an idea.’

  Loys heard them rolling the rock into the mouth of the cave. It took a lot of them to get it there by the sound of it. Should he attack? No. He’d have enough strength left from his partial transformation to shift it when they were gone. He hoped.

  38 A Prisoner

  The excitement of the riders was all about her, buzzing like a swarm of wasps. The Normans had to go the long way around the hill as their horses wouldn’t climb the steep rocky section above the cave.

  ‘What shall we do?’ said Gylfa.

  ‘We’re going to have to fight them,’ said the bandit. They had not asked his name and he had not offered it.

  ‘With what?’

  ‘You have a sword. I have a knife. He has a knife,’ said Tola.

  ‘They’re mounted horsemen, veterans of
battle, we can’t face them!’

  ‘We have to. If you don’t want to use the sword, give it to me!’

  ‘Here!’

  Gylfa passed her his sword. It felt too heavy, too unwieldy in her hand. Her people had been poor and the only time she had seen a sword before was worn by a Norman.

  ‘I’m going to offer myself as a slave,’ he said.

  ‘A lot of good that did my countrymen,’ said Tola.

  ‘Give me the sword,’ said the man from the cave.

  She passed it to him.

  ‘Now let’s see if they catch me!’ he said. ‘The enemy never looks where he’s been.’

  He bounded down the hill, on the edge of falling all the way.

  At the bottom he rolled onto the valley floor, turned and gave them a wave of ‘goodbye’. He looked over his shoulder. He’d heard something. Hooves. The warhorse hit him hard, the rider not even bothering to use his lance, the man completely surprised as the Norman emerged from the mist.

  The sword flew from his hand. To Tola he seemed to strike the ground in little slices of movement. First the horse struck, then his head snapped back, his left arm not registering the attack and appearing to continue to wave and he slammed into the earth. As the rider turned to face her through the mist, it seemed that all the little slices of the bandit’s death were pressed together and he had died in an instant in a jumble of limbs, human and horse.

  She screamed, against herself, and the rider pointed at her with the spear and ran his horse around the path. Men were dropping down the slope from above her now. Gylfa curled up into a ball; she waved her knife but a Norman warrior was on her, smashing her in the belly with the butt of his spear, sending her sprawling down the hillside.

  She lost her knife, she lost her bearings. She stood, finally knowing up from down. A white light exploded above her eye. She’d been punched and she fell to her knees. The Normans were barking at her in their strange language. One of them hit her again but she was beyond pain. A warrior had her by the hair, dragged her up the slope.

  She tried to kick at him but all the strength had gone from her legs, and she only stumbled, screaming as she was dragged to her feet by her hair.