Fenrir (50 page)

‘Is that a yes?’

‘Yes. On my oath, if you save us.’

She nodded. The battle was over. There was laughter. Two Frankish knights were chasing a Viking up and down the beach. The man had no weapon, and the riders kept cutting him off, slapping him with the flats of their swords, making him turn and turn again.

A rider came alongside the boat and looked in.

‘Moselle! It’s me, Lady Aelis. It’s me. Put down your sword.’

‘Lady! You’re hard to find! We lost word of you halfway down the Somme. It’s only by the grace of God we came up here. We heard downriver there were Normans at the monastery and thought we might as well take a look. We’ve been watching them here for days looking for our chance and then God gave it to us on a golden plate. It’s good to have seen such a day!’

His face was flecked with sand and blood, his horse sweating up a lather, but he was grinning like an imbecile on the steps of a monastery.

‘Well, you caught them.’

‘You’ve seen your error, I take it. Shall I free you from these barbarians? You can die easy or hard, Norman. Touch the lady and you’ll suffer for a month, I vouch that.’

‘He doesn’t understand you, Moselle,’ said Aelis, ‘but he won’t harm me. These men are my paid protectors.’

‘You have a preference for foreigners over your own men, lady. A Frank would die before he took money to fight against his kin.’

‘A wonder then that we find so many of our fine swords sold to the enemy, and that the Norsemen have any spies at all. Let’s thank God for the help these Danes have offered me. They are good men. Look, this one carries the cross chalked on his shield. He is of Christ.’

‘Then I can have even fewer qualms about killing him if his soul is sure of heavenly reward.’

‘You will not kill him because, by the right of my family, I command you not to. Do you have any food?’

Moselle nodded and glanced behind him. As a man of the aristocracy he did not find it at all odd that Aelis, from a better family, should demand his unquestioning deference. He would have found it odd if she did not, and would certainly have expected any one baser born than him to obey his orders without question.

‘The monastery’s as good a place as any to spend the night. My God, when I think what these heathens have done to this land I should rather crucify the lot of them – make that abbey a new Golgotha – than share my fire with them.’ Moselle’s attention had shifted to shelter and a meal.

‘I ask again,’ she said, ‘do you have food?’

‘Plenty. Let’s go up to the monastery. They’ll have a warming room, and it’ll be good to sit by a fire and tell the deeds of the day. Not a man of us dead.’ He smiled and pointed his sword at Ofaeti. ‘All my life I’ve dreamed of catching these bastards in open order, and tonight that dream came true. If we could fight all our battles on sand like this there’d be no Norman threat. I’ll allow myself a cup of wine, I think.’

‘Good,’ said Aelis. ‘Lead the way. And tell your men not to harm my Danes.’

Moselle nodded. ‘I’ll tell them, though the northerners don’t eat with us or share our fire. They can sit apart in their own stink.’

‘Very good,’ said Aelis.

‘End your game!’ he shouted to the men chasing the Viking along the beach. One of the horsemen drew his sword and tried to behead the tormented man with a stroke. The Viking raised his arms and blocked the blow but at a terrible cost. His right hand was severed at the wrist. He sank to his knees, and the second horseman trotted in behind him, impaling him with his sword by hanging off his saddle and stabbing it through him with a scooping motion. The knight leaped into a dismount to bow to Aelis, then he and his companion joined their fellows looting the dead.

Ofaeti watched them. Aelis could see he was longing to rifle a few bodies himself but knew it would anger the Frankish knights.

‘Keep ready,’ said Aelis in Norse to the big man. ‘We’ll leave tonight.’

Ofaeti nodded. ‘Might as well be warm before we go then,’ he said and turned towards the monastery. Aelis sensed Ofaeti’s desire for a good fire – more than a fire, for the hearth, for home. He was sick of travelling, this Viking, and wanted to be among his people. That was why he would take her to Helgi and the Rus, the Normans of the east, to sit down in safety for a while among people he understood.

She looked up at the monastery. That sensation was gone: no more of that cold and silver rain that she had seen from the ship, no longer even the call of the wolf. But they would be back. The monsters were still hunting her, and she knew something had taken root in her mind, was growing there, sustaining her and being sustained – those symbols that seemed to burn and fizz, to chime and howl inside her. Their presence disturbed her. How had she controlled Moselle’s horse? How had she survived on that beach while around her Death feasted? How had Moselle found her? Had she called to him without knowing it? Was she a witch, unknown to herself, claimed by the devil? The thought nauseated her.

Aelis followed Ofaeti across the sand and up towards the monastery. She still needed his protection, no matter how uncomfortable that made her feel.

There were large advantages to travelling with the Raven. The first was that the man had a fire steel and flint, so it was possible to get warm and to cook. The second was that he was an experienced trapper and fisherman, so they actually had something to cook. The third, of course, was protection from bandits.

The wolfman had been able to sense most ambushes miles ahead and the Raven was no different. The similarity between the two ended there, though. Chakhlyk would put up his hand, motion for silence and then turn off the main track and find a way around the bandits to avoid confrontation. Hugin employed a more direct approach. They were three days into the forest when he put up his hand and motioned for Leshii to stay where he was. Then he dismounted and passed him the reins of his horse.

It was noon when he left and an hour before dusk when he returned and mounted again. They followed the trail down. Six men lay in the bushes. One still had a piece of bread in his hand and was sitting upright, a black-plumed arrow through his eye. Two others had fallen directly back off the log they had been sitting on. Only the legs of one were visible but the other had a big wound at the neck. The others had clearly had time to get their weapons – two staves and a spear. It had done them no good. They lay butchered on the trail.

‘Are there others?’ said Leshii.

‘No.’

‘How do you know?’

Hugin gestured to one of the corpses, the one with only his legs visible. Leshii steered his mule over and looked down. The man had been mutilated, great gouges taken from his face, his eyes sucking pits of scarlet.

Leshii glanced at Hugin. ‘I guess he gave you his assurance.’

The Raven said nothing, just pressed on.

Leshii, of course, had asked to see the silver dihrams, and the Raven had shown them to him one evening as they camped. To Leshii silver had a beauty that was deeper than gold’s. He let the money run through his fingers, listened to the satisfying rain of coins that had come to end his drought, felt the delicious tickle as they fell back into the bag like bright little fishes into water.

What, thought Leshii, was to stop him cutting the Raven’s throat in his sleep and taking everything he had? He looked at the man, the torn ruin of his face, the slim sword that lay at his side, the cruel bow he carried on his back. He thought of the desperation with which the wolfman – Chakhlyk, the man who had slaughtered five men before they got him to the ground – had fought him on the riverbank.

‘You’re laughing, merchant, why?’

‘Occasionally,’ said Leshii, ‘I amuse myself with my own stupidity.’

They sat for a while in silence while Leshii munched on a duck the Raven had caught in a dead fall trap. The fire they’d used to roast it was a risk as it could attract attention, but Leshii thought it was worth it to feel warm and dry for once.

‘You haven’t asked for a story,’ said Leshii. Merchants, with their travels, were noted as story-tellers, and people commonly pressed them for tales of faraway lands.

The Raven said nothing.

‘Then tell me one,’ said Leshii. ‘Come on. I am always telling my tales. I bore myself with them.’

The Raven picked at the wing of the duck he had in his fingers. ‘I have no talent for them,’ he said.

‘You need no talent. Just tell me about yourself. How did you come to be such a mighty man?’

The Raven threw the remains of the wing into the fire. It was almost as if the merchant had read his mind. He was thinking of the mountains, of how he had stolen away from the monastery and his home in the valley to go with his sister and the strange woman with the burned face to the heights where no one ever went.

The paths were steep, the boulder fields draining. They climbed small cliffs, trudged over swampy ground, crossed perilous slopes where they were just a slip from falling into nothing, moved on across snow fields, up and up into the mists. It was dawn when they came to the cave, the light frogspawn grey. They approached it along a perilous path by a great waterfall. She had fed them there, bread, salt beef and strange pale mushrooms, almost translucent, that reminded him of the pale skin of the abbot as he’d lain on his bed, the dead god’s necklace at his throat.

He had looked out at the land beneath him. No one ever climbed the mountains – the danger of falling and the presence of the hill spirits would have put them off even if there had been any good pasture up there. Looking out he had a sense of the vastness of creation and his tiny place within it. His valley home had been all he knew, but here he could see the great lake that stretched like a sea to the north; he could look down on the massive chain of mountains that stretched west, see hints of other places, other valleys. And there was the forest, the vast forest.

‘Here,’ said the woman, ‘the gods will talk to you.’

‘I cannot understand. You say our words wrongly.’

The woman spoke slowly: ‘The gods are here.’

‘I am scared,’ said his sister. She’d used his name. What was it? Louis. Every second boy in the valley was called that. She usually called him Wolf, for his hunting skill and for his black hair.

‘You will have your brother to cling to,’ said the woman. ‘Now go inside the cave. You will come to no harm. This is the first step on your path to service.’

‘To serve what?’ he’d said. He’d been the bold one in those days.

‘You will see,’ said the woman. ‘He will speak to you. The darkness is a soil. You are seeds within it.’

They were just children and they’d trusted her so they’d entered the cave. And then she had piled up the stones, to seal them in. The woman had said they would cling to each other and they did, terrified by the darkness and the cold, by noises from the earth, which seemed to groan and wail about them, to creak like a house in a storm, and by the flashes and glimmers that danced at the corners of their eyes but which gave them no light to see by. They sobbed, desperate for food, desperate for water, licking the rocks for moisture, weeping but without tears.

It had been quiet for a long time when his sister broke the silence.

‘Wolf.’

‘Yes.’ His voice was hoarse.

‘Who is in here with us?’

‘We are alone.’

‘No. There is someone else in here. Feel.’

She took his hand and put it out, but he felt only a rock, smooth and cold.

‘It is nothing.’

‘It is a corpse. Can’t you feel the rope at his neck? Touch his cold eyes. Here. Can’t you feel? There is a dead thing in here with us.’

‘There is only stone and darkness, Ysabella.’

He heard his sister swallow, felt her hand trembling in his.

‘He is here.’

‘Who is here?’

‘The dead god. The lord of the hanged.’

‘There is nothing.’

‘He’s singing. Listen.’ She chanted a strange off-key melody.

‘Three times deceived, I was,

Those treacherous knots,

One thing inside another,

Inside another held tight.

Unseen,

Unheard,

The dead god’s necklace

Closes to open the way to magic.’

He heard her scrabbling in the dark, her hands pulling at something. Only when he heard her begin to choke did he know what it was. The rope. He reached for her in desperation, hands tearing at the three knots at her neck, trying to loosen or untie them, but his fingers were raw and numbed by the cold. He tore and he ripped and he screamed and still she kept on choking. He felt around him with desperate hands, trying to find a stone sharp enough to cut the rope, but it was useless. Tug and tear as he might, there was no way to get it off her.

Desperation, starvation and tiredness overwhelmed his mind. He coughed and retched with the thirst in his throat. And then she stood before him bathed in the light of strange symbols that shone and spoke. He heard their voices, sounds like the wind over water, thunder and rain, the rattle of hail against the roof of a house – he heard the growing of the plants and the decay of the autumn, felt summer sun and winter ice.