Valkyrie's Song

by M. D. Lachlan

  ‘The Valkyries do not carry people there any more. Those they choose come here. Our camp is mighty but our reward is scant. Where is my mead? Where my meat? Where the giants I should battle and the songs I should sing of it?’

  ‘And how will the goddess release the god in the mire?’

  ‘When runes are brought back to him. When another takes his place.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A goddess.’

  ‘We have none of those.’

  ‘I’d say we do,’ said the dead man. ‘I can see you, if you cannot see yourself, lady.’

  ‘I am here to find my mistress and bring her back.’

  ‘You are here because you are a god.’

  Freydis smiled. ‘Not I.’

  ‘We see gods here, lady. You are a god, or a dream of a god.’

  ‘Which god? How a god? She got torn in two pretty easy for a goddess!’ said Giroie.

  ‘The gods’ dreams take flesh,’ said the dead man. ‘When the goddess Freya dreams of death she dreams of you.’

  ‘You are wise in lore for a warrior.’

  ‘I have been a long time here and heard many tales from many men. I have seen the dead dreams of gods collecting on the shore, as I now see you, the mortal dream of an immortal.’

  ‘All very well,’ said Giroie. ‘But is there a way out of here?’

  ‘If the goddess lets you go,’ said the man.

  ‘And where might the goddess be?’

  ‘Go to the god in the mire. She won’t be far away. Your friend can lead you. And be brave, both of you. An army of men are waiting for Valhalla’s gates to open again.’

  Freydis shook her head. ‘I care only for my lady. I have come for her.’ She held out the finger. ‘Do you see a woman here, one to whom this belongs?’

  ‘Ask the goddess,’ said the man. ‘Go to the mire.’

  Freydis glanced at the silent dead man. He turned and walked through the dark trees. She and Giroie followed and, as they did, Freydis offered a prayer that she was not a god. But a prayer to whom? To Freya? To herself?

  ‘It seems you have a great destiny,’ said Giroie.

  ‘I don’t want a great destiny,’ said Freydis. ‘I only want Styliane.’

  50 An Army for Styliane

  Styliane walked out onto the corpse hill, through the cold dusk. The wolf was gone, the girl with him. All around was the litter of battle – dead men, dead horses, broken spears, the gore-stained earth.

  She took her knife, her little key to pain and to magic. Long before a rune had entered her she’d worked her spells and her body bore the scars to show it. A length of rough hemp rope was coiled at the saddle of a fallen horse. She took it.

  ‘The story must be told again,’ she said to herself and cut a good length of rope – a man’s height. She spent a long time looking at the rope, teasing the strands with her fingers. A wind stirred, sharp with the promise of rawness to come.

  It would take an army to overwhelm the wolf. Even then, she bore no hope he himself could be killed, at least not in his animal form. The girl should have been vulnerable. The runes had shown that. Freydis had at least taken the runes to the god. Now Styliane had to follow her, to show in pain and denial that she was worthy to strike a bargain with the goddess who ruled the lands of the dead.

  She made the knot, three loops. Three the number of Odin, with his three circles of eight runes; three for the Norns; three for Hecate, triple faced; three for Christ, father, son, spirit.

  For an instant, she saw herself as she used to be – a girl of the court under her brother’s patronage, running through the sunlight in the olive groves of Constantinople. That girl would have shuddered to think of what came next. The rope. The water. The journey through death’s gate and, with luck, with hope, with faith, the return.

  A century before, she had learned the art of falling in on her mind, falling away from the body and the human senses to glimpse the gods. She put the rope around her neck, waded into the mire, the cold like a dragon sinking its teeth into her thighs, sending spasms through her body. She mumbled to herself and it seemed to her that she could hear a song on the breeze, a song that told of lovers who died so a god could live. But the song would not finish, the last verse was unsung.

  The words swept over her, through her, and her bones hummed like reeds in a breeze. Her skin was the skin of a drum, her heartbeat the rhythm it kept.

  She pulled tight the rope and fell forward into the water. She was immediately human, choking in the filthy mire, desperate for air and light, frozen, panicking – a terrified woman, not a sorceress. She clawed at the rope but the knot was tied so that it only slipped one way. She cast her hands about her, feeling the cold limbs of dead men, their cold hair like weeds, their cold hands the claws of grave monsters dragging her down.

  She let them, tumbling through blackness and light, through wide fields of the battle-dead where ravens cried in ecstasy, where blood rivers flowed through islands of corpses.

  She was a warrior struck by a spear, a woman dragged to a ship then executed on the sand because there was no more room for cargo, a child among ashes.

  ‘You’ve returned.’

  The half-faced lady was on her stool, a bowl at her feet, the hut of snake spines sea- and wind-white behind her.

  ‘I said I would not be long.’

  ‘You’re dying. The way back is closing behind you.’

  ‘You can keep it open a while.’

  ‘This is the land of the dead, lady. You have visited twice. There is no return journey a third time.’

  ‘I do not ask for one.’

  ‘Then what do you ask?’

  ‘I have sent you a gift. Runes to raise the god and allow him to pay his price to the Norns again. He will return to his halls. Hel will be at peace.’

  Styliane looked at her hands. Bubbles clung to them and she could feel the mud of the mire’s bottom, though she could not see it.

  ‘I thank you for it.’

  ‘But the promise to the Norns cannot be fulfilled if the wolf dies first.’

  ‘This too may be what the Norns want. They are more powerful than any god. Perhaps the time of the old gods is truly gone.’

  ‘Then the lands of the dead are never peaceful. Hel is a place of war.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘No living army could fight the girl. Eight valkyries attend her. Grant me an army of the dead. Let me lead them back to the world of men down the paths I have travelled. Let the warriors fight so their king might make his sacrifice and live again.’

  Hel took up her bowl and dipped in her fingers. ‘They are in my charge.’

  ‘Release them. The god will wake soon. You do not want the wolf here, lady. He will not lie in any mire. These will be his lands, not yours.’

  Hel flicked the water from the bowl into Styliane’s face.

  ‘I bless you,’ she said. ‘The girl is death’s servant and his enemy. She should be here where I can watch her.’

  The distant trees stirred and moved and, all along their line, helmets glinted, spears shone in the cold moonlight.

  ‘Go!’ said Hel.

  The bubbles on Styliane’s hands streamed upwards, the great host of men ran towards her. The moon was huge in the sky, the stars all rushing, smearing across blackness. Styliane had the knife at the rope at her neck, the freezing waters of the mire all around her. She cut through the rope but the cold gripped her. She staggered and splashed towards solid ground, falling and stumbling on again. She sat on the bank, convulsing with cold, retching from the pain at her neck.

  The stars slowed and defined themselves, condensing to diamonds. The moon stopped dancing in the sky. She touched the bloodstone, held it to her, cradled its warmth.

  At the rim of the mire the dead men stood, the blood on their faces black
in the moonlight, their armour dripping mire water. There were a hundred of them, Normans and English, a united army of corpses.

  Styliane crossed herself, said a prayer to Hecate. She could scarcely believe what she had achieved and fought down the glow of pride within her. Nothing had been achieved yet.

  ‘Find Tola,’ she said. ‘Find the lady with the wolf and bring me her head.’

  She gestured to a big Englishman who bore a wound at his neck. He instantly understood her and helped her on to her fretting horse.

  ‘Calm,’ she said to the animal. ‘They are with us.’ She pointed east and the host ran down the hillside, as many and as quick as rats from a fire.

  51 A Battle of Nightmares

  Loys vomited the stone on the third day towards the sea. From the coast they would find one of the great rivers of the world – the Esk or the Humber or one of the nameless rivers that must exist above or below those two – and from there a port. A port would have a ship and a ship would take them to the island.

  ‘How will we sail it?’ said Gylfa.

  ‘You hold the runes?’

  ‘But they don’t sit well in me, they’re all backwards and jumbled.’

  ‘Because you are a man,’ said Loys, his great tongue rough on his teeth, which seemed to him like so many swords. ‘They will suffice. You will be able to use them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They want to be free of you. They will take you to a place where that escape is possible. You came to the mire. You will go to the island.’

  ‘Will I die?’ said Gylfa.

  ‘It does not matter in the schemes of the gods.’ The wolf held the stone in its talons, studying it.

  ‘It very well matters in the schemes of the me!’ said Gylfa.

  ‘I would have been glad to have been beneath the notice of the Norns. A twist of the fate yarn, a knot and a cut, then done. Be thankful for death,’ said Loys.

  ‘Well, being dead, I’m not going to be able to be thankful for anything, am I?’ said Gylfa.

  ‘Die well. Hope for eternal life in the halls of the All-father.’

  ‘You have been such jolly company,’ said Gylfa. ‘I’m sure the company of dead men will seem festive by comparison.’

  They camped against the lea of a hill, Tola and Gylfa huddled against the wolf ’s side for warmth.

  ‘Dare we risk a fire?’ said Tola.

  ‘We can risk anything,’ said Gylfa. ‘We’ve got death on paws with us. I’d like to see the Normans face this.’

  ‘Then I would need to drop the stone,’ said Loys. ‘My fury is weak when I have it. Human thoughts beset me.’

  ‘What thoughts?’

  ‘I think of my enemies at home in their fields or at their fires. I think of the people who wait for them to return.’

  ‘And when you don’t have the stone?’

  Loys bowed his head. ‘Then I glimpse myself as a shadow among trees. I am an echo of a voice, swamped by the noise of great waters. I am a leaf blown on a breeze and that breeze’s name is hunger.’

  ‘Best keep the stone, then,’ said Gylfa, edging slightly away from the wolf.

  Tola took Loys’s great clawed hand in hers. ‘With that stone, you could be human forever.’

  The wolf fixed her with its huge green eyes. ‘Human and forever are different things. What lives forever is not human. The inner man dies though the outer goes on. I loved you on a hillside full of flowers – or someone within me, something that entered me at the well did. I loved you when I took you to the caves beneath the earth, planting you like a seed that sprouted death. I loved you in a house in the forest and most of all by the docks of Constantinople, the sun on the water and, like this, your hand in mine. But you die and are lost and I remain, wanting you. I cannot do that forever.’

  ‘I was promised to Hals,’ said Tola. ‘You couldn’t have had me, even if I had been willing.’

  ‘This is the curse of eternal life,’ said Loys. ‘I am the same man. You are born again, or the story tells you again, but you are told differently. Once you were promised to me, once I was promised to God, once we were married. Now …’ He took his hand from hers. ‘Sundered,’ he said.

  They spoke no more after that.

  At night they built fires where they could find valleys or depressions deep enough to hide them, kept walking if they could not.

  Loys slept fitfully, clinging to the stone as a man caught in a roaring flood clings to a branch. He was so much the wolf now, his teeth big in his head, his hands big and strong, claws like knives. The scent of the blood was less enticing, that was good, his rage on hold, but there was a dangerous resentment in him – why should he hold this stone? Why, when he was a god on earth, should he dampen his appetites, choose dull senses over sharp ones, weakness over strength?

  Because. Because. Echoes of what had been and would never be again sounded in the vault of his mind. The Lady Beatrice, all those lives ago, holding his hand in the little cell. The child he had abandoned for its own safety, brought to its mother’s court, given to its aunties. He was afraid for it, afraid of himself and what he might do to it; afraid of the gods. He could not raise it under their eyes. But still he had fallen into the mire of human attachment, with all its rot and decay, the faces of friends and lovers looming at him like the drowned from the black water of memory.

  Even if he could be only and forever a wolf, he would not have wanted to live. That sort of extinction was unthinkable while he had even a chewed tendon of humanity securing his mind to that of the wolf. His ancestors had named the creature well: ‘Slaughter-beast’. Loys, though he had killed many, was not a willing killer, nor would he be. One last murder. Himself.

  He did want to put down the stone, just to hear the voices of his wolf brothers in the hills, to smell the fires on the wind and let the human smoke coat his tongue.

  He was not falling out of his wolf form quickly enough. They would be at the coast and his body would still be this monstrous size, a terror to all men. He had no idea how long it would take. It was as if he was dozing on a boat on a summer river, awaking every now and then pleased to find he was still drifting, vowing to stay awake but quickly nodding off again. He was a passenger in the ship of the wolf, shouting directions to a helmsman above the roar of a storm.

  He wanted to kill the girl very badly and he wanted to stop, be a man, ask her to come with him to the sun of the east and spend his days with her on a farm on a mountain.

  ‘No. No. Neither course. Let her go. Free her of the curse of you.’

  The first of the dead found them by the riverbank on the second day. Loys would not have heard them coming if Gylfa had not woken him. The stone was dulling his senses, quietening the wolf piece by piece.

  ‘Get up. There are things out there.’

  The young man had been unable to sleep, terrified. Loys the man might have called the boy’s leaping and jumping at every sound cowardice once. Now, having lived with the wolf inside him for so long, he saw it simply as he saw the caution of a bird – sensible, life preserving. Gylfa even hopped like a bird, his sword cutting at invisible enemies.

  ‘There!’ Tola’s voice was a raw rasp of fear.

  Loys was not even two steps on the journey to being a man again and his wolf senses pricked as he looked for the enemy. He smelled their rot, sweet as fermenting wine. He swallowed the stone again, gulping it down easy as the pip of an orange.

  A shadow moved through the night and he touched it. He had caught a spear. The violence was a spark to the tinder of his rage. He had moved, there was a head in his hands and the head was not attached to a body any more. Three sword cuts, curious slow things, and he tore a warrior apart like a man breaking bread. A spear struck him from behind and then his mouth was full of meat, a mist of piss, shit and cold blood filling his nostrils. He smashed the last dead man on the top of his hea
d, pulping the bones from his skull to his shoulders.

  ‘We need to go!’ shouted Gylfa. ‘Odin’s nuts, let’s go! Look, the flesh is still moving!’

  Blind blood slugs crawled on the ground, pieces of slick muscle dragging fragments of bone.

  ‘I would stay a while,’ said Loys.

  He picked up a hand, felt it spasm in his teeth before he crunched it to nothing and swallowed.

  ‘What were those things?’ The girl spoke.

  ‘Horrible,’ said Gylfa. He hacked at a crawling torso, spilling its bowels like steaming worms into the cold air.

  Loys lay down on his front, gnawing at a bone.

  ‘Are you all right, Loys?’ She spoke to him as if he were waking from a dream. He could hear her words, understand them even, but they were no more important than the rustle of the trees.

  ‘Enemies?’ said Loys. The two in front of him smelled less appetising than the dead flesh. Should he kill them and let them rot? Maybe they would walk again and he could tear them to pieces, have the fun of feeling their meat squirm in his mouth.

  ‘Loys. It’s me. Tola.’

  She had a purpose but he couldn’t remember what it was. Food?

  He had her off the ground, lifting her from the waist in his massive talons.

  ‘Loys!’

  In Constantinople she – or someone like her – had called him like that before. He recalled sun, water, the smell of the fish cooking on the docks.

  He put her down.

  ‘Doesn’t the stone help you?’ The man spoke.

  ‘Murder is sweet to me now, though the stone may cool my tempers in time. Run ahead to the sea. When you are there, call the rune from within you, Tola. I will come. I will wait for these dead things here.’

  ‘We will die without you,’ said Gylfa.

  ‘You will die with me. Go. Now.’

  Gylfa took Tola’s hand.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Keep these things from us, wolf.’

  But Loys was lost to his feeding.

  52 The Sea