Fenrir (43 page)

‘But will they give it?’ said Astarth.

‘Willingly,’ said Ofaeti. ‘No one’s as willing as a dead man.’

At that each of the Vikings smirked and nodded. This, Jehan could see, was the sort of wit that impressed them, though it made the confessor feel ill.

The river was now wide and calm, opening into a large lake and then winding through low islands and marshes. There were few people about, just occasional fishermen who kept their distance. Then they saw, on a promontory of land, tall buildings, black against the oystershell sky.

‘What is that place, lord?’

‘A monastery. I do not know it,’ said Jehan. He was speaking the truth. His head was now heavy, his thoughts jumbled. It was as if he was watching himself without any conscious knowledge that he was controlling what he did or said.

They moored the boat and walked across the salt marshes to the buildings. Ofaeti was right. There was no one there. The place had been burned within the past year or so. The roofs were gone and no attempt had been made to replace them. Graves had been dug in the cemetery and the grass had not yet grown over them. There were signs that the monastery had been used for shelter over the winter, but whoever had been there had left, not wanting to fall victim to the raiders.

‘So what do we do now?’ said Astarth.

‘Wait,’ said Ofaeti. ‘We’ve got food for a few weeks, a nice sea full of fish. There’ll be vegetables and mussels along the coast. We just wait for our boat home.’

‘Ofaeti,’ said Fastarr, ‘when we go raiding we take five ships. That could be three hundred men.’

‘Well let’s hope it’s not,’ said Ofaeti. ‘Look, the siege at Paris is going badly and a few of the lads will be coming back empty-handed. I think they’ll have a look down the coast before they head home. It’ll probably be Scylfings because this is on their way home. They stop to have a look at the church; we walk about outside without our weapons, looking like monks; they run up from the ship; we come down the back of these dunes and steal their ship.’

‘With nine of us against a force of – how many? One, two, three hundred?’

‘We distract them,’ said Ofaeti. ‘Wander about with our hands together like monks. They see us, they’ll charge up like dogs after a hare.’

The pale girl at his side squeezed Jehan’s hand and he spoke. He didn’t know where the words came from but they seemed true to him. ‘You have to wait for the right ship.’

‘Lord, I’m not going to say no because it’s got a bear on the prow and I’d prefer a dragon,’ said Ofaeti.

‘You have to wait for the right ship.’

‘We’ll take the first ship we see,’ said Ofaeti.

‘You want the lady?’ said Jehan.

‘Which lady.’

‘The one you took at Paris.’

‘If we could find her. She’d be a rare gift for Helgi, wouldn’t she? It’s well known he covets her.’

‘Well, then you will wait for the right ship. Have I brought you fortune?’

‘You have, lord.’

‘Would you be Christ’s men?’

‘We would.’

‘Then heed my word and wait for the right ship.’

The Vikings looked at him strangely but Jehan wasn’t worried about them. He was certain of only two things. The first was that Aelis was near. The second was that he was becoming hungry.

The first boat to check the monastery was a battered Danish karvi, a tiny vessel with only sixteen oars. It was ideal, and Ofaeti had to work hard to restrain the Vikings. But then Jehan told them to leave it, and leave it they did. They had seen what he had done to the Burgundians and now his word was good enough for them.

The next raiders who came, a week later, were in seven big longships, two of them fast, sleek drakkar, out-and-out fighting vessels. The berserkers needed no encouragement to leave them alone and withdrew while the raiders searched the monastery. They spent the night ashore and sailed away the next day.

Two weeks went by, and there was no sign of further ships. Jehan sat in the ruined church, looking up at the bare altar. He was hungry and no mistake, and he prayed for strength to hold on to his appetites. Prayer took him deep within himself, searching for God, searching for instructions to which he might offer his obedience. He found only her, the Virgin – on the shore with the sun in her hair, by the hearth cocooned in the light of a low fire in a house that seemed at once strange and familiar. And then he saw her differently, lying broken on rocks in a narrow cavern. He knew it for a sign of what his thoughts were doing to her immaculate heart. He wanted her, body and soul. The spiritual desire was noble but the physical was not. He struggled against the blasphemy of his thoughts, against using his mind to defile the Lady of Grace.

The pale girl sat close by him, clinging to him, unwilling to be parted from him for a second. He prayed that he might be freed from her presence. She was a demon, a tender, comforting, attentive demon. The devil was a subtle fellow. Had Jehan expected him to come with smoke and flame? No, he came as the child who sat by him as he slept and watched him when he woke.

The girl motioned to him to follow her out of the church. A moon like a dihram hung in the sky stretching a silver path across the void of the ocean. She stood by a mound of earth and he understood that beneath it was the wolf, the thing that gurgled and growled in his mind, drowning out thought, drowning out personality.

He heard a voice, a hacking, coughing voice with a scrape to it like the fall of earth on a coffin lid. ‘With my nails I’ll dig for him.’ Whose voice was it? His own but changed. He felt thicker in the limb and the body but not at all slow or torpid. His muscles rippled with a new power, and the world of the dark was lovely, the heavy moon, the road of light on the ocean, the pallor of the girl next to him and all the night scents of the awakening spring.

‘In there? The wolf, in there?’

The pale girl said nothing.

‘Yes, in there. They have bound him deeply but I’ll scratch him out.’

He tore at the earth, pulling it out in wet clumps, his hands filthy, muddying his clothes on the soft damp soil.

‘Lord, sails. Sails!’ It was Ofaeti’s voice. ‘They’re red! It’s Grettir, who was at the siege. Three ships only. This could be our chance!’

Jehan could hear a low growling from beneath the earth accompanied by a terrible note of protest, the awful cry of an animal in distress. He dug and dug until his hands bled, but they had not buried the corpse deep. The raw snarl of the wolf was in his mind, the hunger eddying through his belly, his arms, his legs, hunger like a whirlpool sucking him down. His heart beat in flurries like rain on a tent. His mouth was wet, his senses keen. He needed to eat, so he ate.

‘Lord, sails! This is our chance … What are you doing. By Freyr’s holy poke pole, what are you doing? Are you eating that? What are you doing? Egil, Fastarr, the monk’s gone mad! He’s dug up a corpse!’ In the graveyard of the church, Ofaeti, a man who had fought in many battles and seen ten men die on the point of his sword, retched as he watched the monk crouching, spitting and howling above the ruined, rotten body at his feet.

Jehan tried to swallow the snarl that was inside him but remembered why he had refused to baptise the Vikings. But he would not do it, would not tear the man down. Ofaeti had been good to Jehan, in his way, and the confessor looked inside himself, to God who dwelled within him, to resist his body’s impulse to murder. There were others to kill, righteous enemies.

He stood and looked over the bay. There was the ship, one of three. The boats under the moon seemed tiny and fragile as they put out their oars and pulled towards the beach. He threw down what he had in his hands, and as he looked towards the ships something seemed to flare in the darkness, a light like a second moon on the water, a symbol that seemed to rattle like hail, to chill like ice. Something was on that ship that meant him no good.

Jehan remembered the girl, the water, the sunlight, and then the shadow, the shadow of the wolf that blotted it all out, the shadow that he threw himself. He heard no howls; he heard only his own voice, crying out into the night, calling for Aelis, for whoever that girl was he saw in his memory: ‘I am here. Where are you?’

Kylfa sat glowering at Aelis in the light of the fire. There were too many to fit in the warming house so Aelis had opted to spend the night under the covered walkway at the corner of the cloister.

Leshii was inside, amusing the Vikings with a story. She heard some words in Latin – camel, gonads – and guessed that he was telling his usual tale of how a Saracen had lost his balls to a kick from a camel he was trying to castrate. She heard the nervousness in his voice, though the Vikings seemed not to notice it, and she could tell that he was at the limit of his endurance. He sounded old. He wanted his fire and his mug, his friends about him and his dog at his feet, not the company of strangers. She had watched him in the mornings, getting up from his place in front of the embers of the fire, creaking to his feet, crouching, resting again, stretching a leg, moving up to almost stand, his legs not quite straight and his back bent. Once he had relit the fire and sat in the morning sun, he was fine, able to continue the trip. But he was a man tired of moving, she could see.

What of herself? That sensitivity she’d had since a girl, the one that allowed her to hear people like music, to sense them as colours and textures, had rarely been used to look inward. She looked at Kylfa brooding in the corner, his axe across his knees. His brother was by him, huge and stupid with upper arms the girth of her thighs. Was she afraid of death? Yes. She heard a voice whispering inside her:
It happened before
.

Whose voice was that? A child’s or a woman’s, she couldn’t tell. It was cracked and hoarse, full of suffering.

Aelis too was tired of moving, tired of the sensation of shadows watching her, of terrors lurking just beyond her everyday senses, of sleep being a kingdom of monsters that sweated and slavered in the dark.

Tomorrow she would die, she knew. But her maid at Loches had told her that before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes. Hers had not. What had she been? A woman to be married off, a token that a state might offer to another, her beauty just a way of making an advantageous trade, allying a count to a duke or even a king, something to make armies move one way or another. Important then. But she didn’t feel important. She felt like a scrap of cloth blown on the wind.

Her memories came to her not as stories or even pictures but as colours, sounds and sensations. The green and gold of the summers at Loches, the metalled leaves of moon-dipped trees, the feel of river water and the smell of damp earth, the song of the skylark and the voice of the owl. From her window she had been able to hear the wolves calling to each other in the hills, and their voices had chilled her. A shadow now lay on her, the shadow of a wolf. She saw it, picked out by the swollen moon in front of her on the flagstones of the monastery, there on the eve of her death.

It happened before
. That voice again.

She stood.

‘Hey, you. Don’t think you’re sneaking off. If you want to piss or shit you do it where I can see you.’ It was Kylfa, his axe in his hand. A squall of laughter came from the warming house. Leshii was saying something.

The shadow of the wolf. She wondered if it was another trick of those terrible things that lived inside her, those symbols that seemed to live off her like magic leeches, like mistletoe on the oak.

‘Is this a vision?’

‘It’s an axe, my friend, as you’ll find out tomorrow.’

The shadow moved. It was tracking behind Kylfa.

She looked up and, without thinking, said a name: ‘Sindre!’

Something dropped to meet the shadow and Kylfa turned.

The wolfman brushed him aside and went for Aelis’s throat. Her hands flew up to defend herself, to push him away, but he had her. His fingers crushed her neck. She tried to peel them off but it was no good. Seven heartbeats and she was no longer in the cloister.

She looked about her. That place again, the cave of blood. The wolf, the presence of her lover, death, death everywhere, her muscles tight on her head, as if the skull beneath was trying to break through to burst grinning from her skin.

‘No,’ she said, and the arrowhead rune, which shone like the moon shines when it is small and sharp in the sky, burst into fire.

She was back in the cloister, gasping on the floor. The wolfman had dropped her. The first thing she saw was a raven, looking down at her from the roof of the covered walkway, its cold glassy eye fixed on her. There was screaming and shouting. Three Vikings were grappling with Sindre, more pouring from the warming house. A big Norseman lay puking on the ground, his great axe, its haft smashed in two, beside him.

Four Vikings, five, were on Sindre but still he stood. A man’s neck was broken, then the staggering mass fell into a wall, Sindre driving a Norseman’s head into it as he went. Another had his feet swept from under him and sprawled on the stones. Sindre came back towards Aelis, dragging two men behind him. Vikings were everywhere – some laughing, some angry, all drunk. One aimed a kick at Sindre but only succeeded in thumping his foot into the side of one of his kinsmen.