‘It’s a rune,’ said Gylfa. ‘I can feel the others calling to it.’
‘Use one of yours,’ said Tola.
‘Which one?’
‘I don’t know. They are stronger than you. Let them choose.’
She heard Styliane calling, her voice flat in the fog.
‘Talk to me, Tola, I know where you are.’ The dead men jabbered and rattled their shields as if in agreement. ‘I won’t pretend that I mean you no harm but you will live again if you die. If the wolf gets what he wants, it’s over forever. Come to me. Die quickly.’
Gylfa gave a great groan and the Norman reached for his knife.
‘No!’ said Tola, but too loudly. Styliane called to the longship crew, the red light of the blood rune flashing through the water. Tola felt Styliane’s elation like a lurch in the stomach, even though she could not see her.
Tola tried to pray but could not. She felt the wolf rune stirring inside her, answering the rune that cast the red light.
‘There. There you are!’
The blood light shone strongly on Tola. Then, from the mist, the prow of a longship knifing through the flat haze, dead men jabbering at the oars. The Wolf ’s hook rune howled out its note of terror.
‘I am dying!’ groaned Gylfa. ‘I am …’
The rune was big now, floating in front of the longship. Tola felt it as a sensation of prickling skin. Thorns, which made blood. Tola saw Christ on the cross, his blood dripping in beads from his head. Each bead trapping a rune? Was that a sacrifice too? Had Odin walked the earth as a man in Galilee?
Runes could call runes. She knew the runes could fall in love with each other. She had seen them dancing in their orbits at the well.
‘Call to it!’ she said to Gylfa.
‘I cannot!’
‘Call to it.’
She sat him up and the blood light of the rune caught him in the face.
‘Merkstave,’ he said. ‘All reversed. All wrong.’
The dead men rattled their shields. Styliane held up the bloodstone, the rune floating above it, half seen, half imagined. The Norman was a skilled rower, the boat nimble and he ran around the bows of the longship, to its stern, putting distance between them and Styliane. But the lady ran to the back of her boat through the corpse warriors and shone the light on them again.
Thurisaz, the thorn rune. It seemed to speak a poem to her.
‘Thurisaz causes anguish to women, misfortune makes few men cheerful.’
The blood light shone on Gylfa.
‘All reversed,’ he said. ‘All wrong.’
Gylfa’s body opened, it seemed, spilling images of men in chains, of lightning shattering a great tree, of a blind man staggering through an empty landscape. Styliane dropped the stone and she was soaked in the blood light.
Another poem washed over Tola in a voice like the rustle of fire in the gorse.
‘The thorn is exceedingly sharp, an evil thing for any to touch,uncommonly severe on all who sit among them.’
Styliane screamed, falling, clutching at her neck. ‘Thorns! Thorns!’ she shouted. The dead men howled and yammered, jumping into the sea in their armour.
A wind sprang up and Tola saw it was no normal breeze. It was filled with dark shapes like leaves but all the same, tumbling stick shapes whispering and calling to her.
‘Get the sail up! Get the sail up!’ Tola shouted at the Norman, pulling at the sail on the deck.
He needed no translation and set to work. Soon the sail filled and the little boat lurched forward, powered by the magical wind.
Tola crossed herself. There were two more longships somewhere around and they could sail as well as she could.
‘This is the wind of destiny,’ she said. ‘This is the breath of a god.’
Styliane’s voice shouted across the water, her voice full of anguish.
‘You cannot fight the Norns! You cannot fight destiny! I will kill you but I promise to be swift!’
Tola glanced at the Moonsword by Gylfa’s side. She took it from him.
‘Perhaps,’ she said, to the air. ‘And perhaps I will tell the tale differently.’
55 The God’s Grave
Tola found the island by instinct. A heavy sun in the east; heavy clouds. It seemed as if the sea was tilted and the little boat ran on like a cart down a hill. The Norman was fearful of her. She saw now he was very young, maybe not yet sixteen, and he could not meet her eye, though he periodically clung to a little crucifix he wore at his neck.
When the fog cleared they saw the longships, bobbing on the horizon like caterpillars crawling on a dirty green leaf.
The rune wind kept them ahead, though they heard the strain of the dead at the oars across the water. Three ships. They could not fight. All Tola could hope was that Loys would come to rescue her.
They travelled for days, the rain sustaining but chilling them. There was no question of taking down the sail to stretch it across the boat as a shelter while the dead relentlessly pursued them.
The boat bogged down with water and they bailed as best they could, she with her hands, the Norman with his helm. Gylfa just lay, mumbling, rune-tormented, his face pale, his clothes wet with rain and sweat.
‘I cannot keep it going night and day,’ he said.
‘Hold fast,’ said Tola. ‘It is but a little way now.’
‘They are plants,’ said Gylfa. ‘I am the earth and they feed on me.’
Again the Norman crossed himself. No one had eaten in three days now. The nights were vast and full of stars, the dawns bright and blinding. At midday the sun scorched them, unless the black clouds bubbled in the sky, when it rained and they shivered.
They lost sight of the longships and she was glad of that, though they sometimes still heard the beat of the oars carried across the water.
It was at dusk that they sighted the island, grey and flat, rising no more than three man heights above the waves, its limestone cliffs crumbling. To the south of the island a grove of trees rose and, at its centre, a single bare ash stood, its dark branches made shadows by the sun. Something was near the base of the tree. She couldn’t make out its shape. A house? No. A ship? Perhaps.
The beat of the oars was distant but Tola was under no illusions: the dead would come. But here was safety, or a sensation of it, like when her mother had come to her in the night to tell her there were no mire beasts lurking in the corner of the room, when she had snuggled herself beneath the blankets between her parents and slept, warm in the winter night. That feeling of safety had been an illusion. In her life there had been no safety, just a suspension of the day of awful danger.
Tola gestured to the Norman to take the boat in but he shook his head, drove his fist into his hand and made a crunching noise. ‘Bad place,’ he said. ‘Rochet.’ He picked up a tiny stone from the bottom of the boat. He made a gesture of circling and she understood he wanted to find a safe place to land.
Gylfa’s eyes were glassy and his breathing shallow. What now if he died? The rune wind would die too, as well as any protection the runes might offer from the hordes of dead men.
The Norman steered the boat around the island, looking for a place to land. At the south, just down from the trees, was a rough beach of stones and pebbles. The Norman steered the boat into it and it grounded with a lurch.
She felt the terror coming from the boy. He spoke. ‘What now?’ he seemed to say.
She didn’t know, only that this place felt right, where she would make her stand. How, she didn’t know.
‘Him,’ said Tola, gesturing to Gylfa. ‘Carry him.’
The Norman struggled to get Gylfa out of the boat but, when she helped too, they got him on to the beach. Between them they could carry him only as far as the grove. It was some sort of cover.
Big spots of cold rain fell from the black sky. God, let’s hav
e a storm. Let Jesus sink these demons of hell that pursue me. She wanted to go up the island, to examine the shape she had seen from the sea, but night was falling fast, clouds had eaten the moon and it was very dark. It was safer to stay in the grove.
Jesus did not sink the dead men. In the black of the night she saw a red light floating. How far or near she could not tell, but she knew it was Styliane.
She felt sick with fear. Could dead men see in the dark? She sat frozen in the glade. The Norman was terrified and he hugged her like a child hugs its mother.
The woman’s voice sounded across the water, backed by the beat of the oars on the water like some terrifying song.
‘Tola! We are here. Your rune calls to us.’
Tola crossed herself. The oars’ beat quickened and she saw the light shine over the low cliffs. They were looking for a place to land.
‘Wait! Hold your oars.’
Silence. And then a sweet voice drifting down from above the grove, up towards the single ash. A woman, singing. In the darkness there was a flash. Someone, there on the island, had lit a fire.
56 The Fire Ship
Tola ran towards the fire, the young Norman behind her. Down on the shore the blood rune shone and she ran between two converging points of light.
It was so dark and she stumbled as she ran, falling and rising again.
The young Norman cried out and fell but she wouldn’t wait for him. He had despoiled her land and, though circumstance had drawn them together, she was his sworn enemy.
At the top of the ridge she saw the fire. Beside it, a bright torch in her hand, stood a woman, terribly thin, half her face burned away, clothed in rags. Tola sensed a rune inside her, a deep, dark thing that crackled with madness, with poetry and with death. Beside the woman, she now saw what was beside the ash. A longship, eaten and bleached by the weather, its sail ragged, its mast warped. She gripped the Moonsword. Its presence made her feel no better. She could not fight or kill, she was a farm girl, not a warrior.
‘Dead men,’ said Tola. ‘Dead men!’ She didn’t know what she expected this starved castaway to do about it.
‘This island is full of them,’ said the woman. She spoke in Norse but with an accent Tola had never heard.
‘You understand me.’
‘Odin is the lord of words and his rune is within me.’
‘Use your rune to defend us.’
‘I cannot.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t wish to.’
‘Then we will die.’
The woman said nothing. The fire played on her face and it seemed to Tola that she was a spirit, perhaps even a vision born of madness.
‘I have spent a long time singing to bring you here,’ said the woman.
‘You are a witch?’
‘No more than you. You are the greatest of witches, for you spin fate.’
A great scream came from down the slope. The dead men had found the young Norman. There was no time now.
The woman took her hand.
‘Go to the god. You can lead him from the land of the dead. This is your task. Your rune unites the others and unties them again. You are the storyteller and must go to where your rune can be heard.’
‘How?’
‘Go to the land of the dead. Bring the god here and he will release your land from its yoke of pain.’
‘Must I die to go there?’
‘How did the old kings travel there? On ships of fire.’
Tola looked at the boat. Ancient shields rotted on its rail, the mast was bleached by sun and salt, the whole deck piled with wood.
‘Free Odin, let him come to the land of men to die, to pay the price to fate and be born again in eternal time,’ said the woman.
The first of the dead men appeared over the ridge – a Norman, his face white and puffy from his time in the mire, his drowned-man’s eyes upon her, terrible in the firelight.
Another ran up beside him. An Englishman, a great axe in his hand, his head half missing. She could not face them. Better death by fire than to be taken by these horrors.
‘Hals is in the land of the dead,’ said Tola. ‘I will go to him.’ She ran to the ship, jumping in beside the piled deadwood inside it.
The woman put her brand to the wood. It caught quickly. A dead Norman made the rail of the ship but the fire was taking hold. He tried to leap aboard but Tola struck at him with a branch and he fell backwards.
Tola spluttered and fell too, hot ash and flame burning at her face and hands.
‘Help me!’ she cried.
Her mouth was flame, her words were flame. The ship burst around her, dead men clawing at its rails, burning and falling back.
‘Hals,’ said Tola. ‘Hals, I am coming to you.’
She had expected to die. But the ship groaned, lurched and turned, slipping forward, pushed by a billowing sail of flame.
The ash tree glowed white and the ship plunged down, as if falling through the earth. The clouds rolled away and above her the stars wheeled, the moon blurred, quick as a fish in the water. The ship turned and jolted, falling through black voids, the only light the fire of its own combustion.
Wreathes of flame blazed about her body but she did not burn. Tola went to the tiller and steered as she had seen the Norman do on the little boat. In front of her was a dark headland, a black river between mountains. She turned the boat that way.
The ship lit the dark water beneath the prow and it floated on as if on a wake of fire.
‘Am I dying?’ said Tola. No one answered.
A headland appeared, a pale light picking out the bulk of a hill. All along the shore, fires were burning, figures moving.
An army of dead men lined the shores, some exultant and cheering, others with heads bowed. The river opened into a broad reach. By the banks the dead were firing their ships.
The black shore was near, warriors with their torches thronging to meet her. So she had run from one army of dead men to another. The ship did not respond to her tiller now but fell towards the beach.
The boat beached and the warriors parted. Tola did not know the way to go but she had no real choice. The throng offered her but one road through them. She walked for a long time, through dark woods and fields. Dead men ran ahead of her with torches, lighting the way, strange women riding the fog of the air. They were the ladies of the vale, who she had summoned to save her up on Black Scar Tor.
‘We are the maidens of death
The halters of heartbeats
The stoppers of breath.’
‘Get away from me!’
But still the faces loomed at her, as if from the fog of a dream.
In the wood, by the mire, they stopped. Freydis and Giroie stood waiting. The dead men assembled around them, their torches blazing. Above them the strange women danced and swooped. And there, by the black trunk of a rotted tree, was Hals.
She could not speak to him, had no words, but he reached out his hand. She took it and kissed it. So cold.
She found her voice. ‘I will not leave here without you,’ she said.
‘Who are these who travel with you?’ said Freydis.
‘Dark ladies. They wish me harm,’ said Tola.
‘You look like one of them to me, girl.’
Tola looked down at herself. Her clothes were black and tattered. She felt for her neck. At it was a noose. No, not a noose. A weft of yarn cast around her shoulders. Her fingers itched. She had a great urge to tease it, to find a spindle and spin it. All she had in her hand was the Moonsword. A spindle of sorts, to weave a weft of blood.
‘I am not one of them.’
‘So why are you here?’
‘I ran from the dead men.’
‘You picked a bad place to run, then. Here there’s nothing else,’ said Giroie.
�
��I am not dead,’ said Tola.
‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ said Freydis. ‘I cannot find my lady Styliane. Have you seen her?’
‘She is still in the realm of men,’ said Tola.
‘Then I too have come to the wrong place,’ said Freydis.
Beside her was a woman. Tola had not noticed her before, though how she didn’t know. Her worm-eaten face was stark in the moonlight. Tola recognised her from her father’s stories. Hel, goddess of the underworld.
‘Am I dead?’ she asked the goddess.
‘You are in the lands of the dead.’
‘Can I leave?’
‘Few ever have.’
‘The men who followed me did. The dead warriors.’
‘They hover between this world and the realm of men.’
‘And us?’ said Giroie.
Hel ignored him. Instead she spoke to Freydis. ‘I see what you are. A dream of a fierce goddess. You are Freya, first among the gods of women. Such as you will serve well to take the All-Father’s place in the mire.’
Freydis wept. ‘I am a simple woman. I have tried to follow my love Styliane but I have fled from her.’
‘She offered you to me to take the god’s place in the water,’ said Hel. ‘That is your destiny. Ask the lady of fate.’ She pointed to Tola.
‘Styliane wouldn’t do that,’ said Freydis. ‘She would not betray my love.’ Tola saw something she had never thought to see. Tears streamed down Freydis’s face.
‘No. She seeks eternal life,’ said Hel. ‘She loves you dearly and so gives you up. That is the nature of sacrifice.’
‘You are dishonoured by her betrayal,’ said Giroie. ‘Take the god’s place in the water.’
‘If she does not want me, then any torment is bearable,’ said Freydis.
‘This is your task. To release the god,’ said Hel to Freydis. The Norn brought you here. She …’ She jabbed a finger at Tola. ‘Is the mistress of destinies.’
‘And if the God rises?’ said Giroie.
Hel pointed to the Moonsword.
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