Fenrir (65 page)

‘He said to tell the
khagan
that Sindre was here with the merchant and they had urgent business with him. They have a Viking with them – fat and tall. A great warrior, I should say.’

Helgi looked at the girl. Could this be the one that was prophesied? The half-god, looking to be complete? Odin, god of the hanged, of the spear, of magic and poetry, come to kill him and steal his crown.

‘The merchant is outside?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Take the lady to the gate by the back door of this hall. Do not let him see you. Leave her there and come back.’

Aelis was led out. She wanted to protest, but with the stone about her neck she was torpid and dull-witted; her limbs were heavy and her head ached.

‘Bring the merchant in.’

Leshii hobbled into the great hall feeling as if he might be sick. His leg was very painful despite the Raven’s artful splints and herbs, and it was beginning to swell and blacken. It had been shattered, and had it not been for the Raven’s medicines Leshii would have been unable to stand. The Raven had offered to remove the leg but Leshii had refused. He knew his time was up and saw no reason to spend what he had left in any more pain than he needed to.

Still, he could not quite bring himself to leave his swords and used the bundle in which they were tied as a sort of cumbersome crutch as he came before the king.

The murderous thing stalking the fog meant that no stranger would be allowed in to town. Leshii, however, had known the guards and been led to the king to bargain for his companion’s entrance while they waited on the ice. He was not hopeful.

Only the certainty of his death had given him the courage to enter the town. He still had to find the lady for the Raven and Ofaeti if he could but he was glad he would not have to sell her. He would be protecting her, saving her from the teeth of the wolf. And if the Raven fulfilled his threat to kill Helgi? So what? Leshii knew he did not have long and Helgi, he felt sure, would punish him for returning empty-handed.

But he would die at home, after a life on the trail. No foreign sands would cover his bones; he would lie in no perilous forest or high mountain pass. He would die within a few paces of the market where he had traded for thirty years, within an apple-pip spit of the land upon which he had hoped to build his comfortable house and fuck his dancing girls.

Helgi was seated on his big chair, the one he used on market days to judge the people’s disputes.

‘Dread
khagan
,’ said Leshii, attempting a bow.

‘You have the girl?’

‘No, lord.’

‘Then you are a bold fellow, returning here. What is your purpose?’

‘I seek news of her. She should be here by now – I sent her ahead.’

Helgi’s face was a mask. ‘You do not fear the wrath of your lord?’

‘I do,
khagan
, but I am old and I tried very hard to bring her here. We were separated to the north of Francia and I have not seen her since. I was with her on a boat but was washed overboard in a high sea. Thankfully a whale delivered me to the shore and I was saved, but the lady was gone.’

Leshii did not want to admit he had been thrown off the ship by the Vikings because that would have made him look weak. Neither did he want to start mentioning werewolves as he knew there were those in the town who might think he had brought the fog monster with him.

‘A whale?’

‘Yes, lord.’

Helgi nodded. ‘I have heard it said they will sometimes save a drowning man.’

‘And so it proved for me, lord. But I set the lady on a ship with paid guards. I am surprised she is not here by now.’

‘Did you not fear for a lady on a ship full of strangers?’

‘She is a powerful sorcerer, lord. Men move against her and die like mayflies. She appears from the shimmering air; kings fall dead before her, and evil powers cannot touch her.’

Helgi nodded. ‘These are the signs I expected. It was your doing that she came by boat to Aldeigjuborg?’

‘Yes,
khagan
.’

‘And the wolfman?’

‘Dead in north Francia.’

Helgi turned to a
druzhina
. ‘Bring the merchant a bench – can’t you see he’s wounded. And a cup of hot wine.’

Leshii had to resist the temptation to rub his ears. He couldn’t quite believe what he had just heard.

The bench was provided and Leshii gulped the wine down. Then he knocked back another cup.

‘A third,’ said Helgi, and the merchant’s cup was refreshed again. The prince was staring at Leshii like a money changer who suspects a coin to be false but can see no proof that it actually is.

‘But who are the two who travel with you?’

Leshii thought he should stress the fine qualities of Ofaeti and Hugin in order that Helgi might find them some service if their mission to find Aelis failed. ‘They helped me on my journey here. One is a mighty warrior of the north, a prince in his own realm. He is the most formidable warrior I have ever seen – next to yourself,
khagan
.’

‘Bring him in and let’s test that claim,’ said one of the
druzhina
. Helgi waved his hand to silence him.

‘On a ship here he was unarmed and yet went unflinching into a battle with five men and emerged the victor. He throws a spear well enough to pin a fly to the wall and is a mighty and formidable poet. His name is Ofaeti but he has many others that speak flatteringly of his battle prowess.’

‘And the other, his companion?’

‘A sorcerer and servant to your northern gods. He bears a message for you and would seek an audience.’

‘What is his name?’

‘Hugin, my lord.’

Helgi swallowed. ‘Did he travel with another?’

‘His sister, my lord. The witch Munin, though she is dead.’

Again Helgi swallowed and called for wine himself. Then he stood and spoke:

‘Over the spacious earth each day

Hugin and Munin set forth to fly.

For Hugin I fear lest he not come home,

But for Munin my care is more.’

He sipped at his cup. ‘Do you know the rhyme, merchant?’

‘I have heard it at the fire,
khagan
.’

‘Do you know where it comes from?’

Leshii didn’t want to belittle the northerners’ religion by calling it a story, so he said, ‘Is it not holy lore?’

‘It is the sayings of the mad god Odin, god of kings, magic and the hanged. So Munin is dead.’

‘The sorceress died in Flanders.’

Helgi nodded. ‘I had never thought that verse could be a prophecy too.’

Leshii knew better than to question kings uninvited but he wondered to himself what exactly it might prophesy.

‘The signs are all here,’ said Helgi, ‘all of them. This fog is not natural and a mighty warrior walks out of the ice in the company of ravens.’

‘That is not as mysterious as it sounds,’ said Leshii. ‘We met another sorcerer on the boat, a man of great power. He guided us here, helped us on our way.’

‘How?’

‘He caused the wind to blow and the frost to melt away. We sailed past the lake and a good way up the river before he took the ship and turned back.’

Helgi went white. ‘No man has power like that. Magic is a woman’s art. Only the gods in man’s form can perform such feats.’

‘This was a man, sir, tall and pale. One of your people, by his hair.’

‘What of his hair?’

‘It was bright red. As red as the comb on a cock, all stood up in a shock. He steered us here himself and kept us from the shore, which was a good thing because the Franks and the Jomsvikings have the whole coast in flames between them.’

The prince threw his cup down. The god, the one who had wandered in from the blizzard – Loki, on a ship. Helgi recalled the prophecy:

A ship journeys from the east
.

The people of the land of fire are coming over the waves
,

And Loki steers
.

There are the monstrous brood with all the raveners
.

It was a prediction of what would happen in the end time, before Odin fought the wolf on the Gods’ final day.
This ship came from the west, though. But what was west? It had come through the Eastern Lake
. Prophecies, he knew, were rarely clear.

The
khagan
regained his temper. ‘See the merchant is rewarded,’ he said. ‘Give him fifty dinars and he may stay in our hall if he wishes. Or wherever he chooses. I expect he wants a bed slave, and these Slavs have a peculiar love of solitude in such matters.’ He turned to a
druzhina
. ‘It is time,’ he said. ‘Bring the girl to the gate.’

‘And the foreigners on the ice, lord?’

‘Kill them. Take sixty men.’

‘Yes,
khagan
,’ said the warrior, and ran from the hall.

The shaft had been very difficult to construct and had already cost the lives of three eastern slaves when it collapsed half dug. Now it was done, smooth-sided, the depth of three men, sunk down to where Gillingr’s tomb had been.

Aelis was led forward, a spear at her back. The pebble was a dead weight and she stumbled forward through the fog. There was no need to bind her. Since the stone had been placed around her neck her mind had felt slow, her limbs heavy. She could not have run if she had tried. The runes were silent inside her. At the mouth of the shaft she stood and looked around. The fog had sucked all the colour out of the landscape; black rocks lay on a grey hillside.

A straggle of people followed – curious women and children glad to get out of the town under the protection of the
druzhina
after so long locked in by the fog. The merchant came along too, on his mule, though he had finally given up on his swords and left them in the hall. He had heard what was to happen to Aelis and had no appetite for profit.

At the mouth of the shaft he dismounted and hobbled over to Helgi. He seemed to be imploring the king or asking him something, but she didn’t understand what. Her Norse had faded. However, she had lived before, she knew, and she remembered much of what had happened to her then, not as a story but as flashes of images, faces looming at her, visions of ships, of a burning village, of someone she cared for dead, butchered on a bed.

‘What is to happen to me, merchant?’ she asked in Roman.

Leshii was pale. ‘You are to go down the ladder. I am sorry, lady. I took you from your home for profit. I thought you would be his bride. I did not think this fate awaited you.’

Aelis looked around her. She turned to Helgi. ‘Is this the island?’ She spoke in Roman.

Helgi replied in Norse and she did not understand him.

He saw by her blank look that she did not and tried again in rough Roman: ‘What island?’

‘The island where you buried me before.’

‘You make no sense. Have you lost your Norse?’ Helgi was more certain than ever that he was following the right course of action.

‘He came for me then. He will come for me again.’

‘What is she saying?’ He turned to Leshii beside him.

‘She says he came for her before and will come for her again.’

‘Who?’

‘The wolf.’

‘You are the only wolf, lady.’

‘You will not kill me.’

Helgi rattled off something in Norse to the merchant who repeated slowly, ‘He does not intend to kill you. He intends you to live.’

‘In there?’

‘In there. For protection,’ said Helgi.

‘To the dark?’

‘To the dark. Though you are …’ He couldn’t think of the right Roman word so he gestured to some baskets containing blankets, food, flint and candles.

‘How long must I stay there?’

‘Until things are put right.’

‘For ever?’

Helgi spoke to Leshii again, and the little merchant translated: ‘Do you know who you are?’

‘A little broken thing,’ said Aelis.

‘Three would become one,’ said Helgi in ponderous Roman. ‘Cannot happen. One conqueror, one lord. Odin must wait.’

‘If I am so magical, how can you constrain me?’

Leshii translated and Helgi tapped the pebble at her neck. ‘Loki, Odin. Great wolf. No magic,’ he said.

Aelis had seen the stone’s effect on Jehan and knew what he was trying to say. What had happened to the confessor without it? Was he dead or, worse, transformed, his jaws red with murder? She felt more connected to the gods Helgi had mentioned than she did to the faith in which she had been raised. Her faith had always been one of duty rather than passion – she spent dull Sundays in church more interested in catching up on the gossip than hearing the works of Jesus. When Helgi spoke of the wolf and of Odin, she felt the truth of it in her bones.
Look around at the world
, she thought,
and say it was made in the image of a gentle god
.