Fenrir (55 page)

She had been looking for something beyond mushrooms, she sensed, and was chased by something more than the rays of the sun. There was a menace to the birth of morning, she felt it in her core. She walked as the deer walks, in fear of the wolf.

Vali
.

The name conjured something from her. She saw herself in a place she had never known, by some strange houses that were low and mean, turf roofs not waist-high, a bright river below her down a small hill. She heard the excited cries of children and looked down to see them bathing in the sunlight. Someone was at her side. When she turned to him his face was familiar but she couldn’t place it. It was as if she had seen it before but only through an imperfect glass, its features distorted and blurred.

She looked at her hand. It was the same hand she had always known. The runes had reunited but she had not become a god, nor had she died as the witch had predicted. She made herself calm down and saw the runes all around her in two spinning orbits of eight, the howling rune at their centre, twisting and slinking like a crawling wolf. That one seemed more important to her than all the others put together. But something was missing. A third orbit. While that was not in her she was human still.

She still had not let go of the stone the Raven had given her; in her panic she had hardly noticed it was in her hand. She held it up to examine it, and nearly dropped it. It was just a pebble tied within an elaborate knot on to a thong, but it was etched with the face of a wolf. A phrase came to her:
When the gods saw that the wolf was fully bound, they took a fetter and lashed it to a rock called Scream
. In her mind she saw a huge wolf, its jaws stretched wide by a cruel sword, tied to an enormous rock by a rope as fine as a ribbon. It thrashed and groaned and howled but could not get free. It was night and a man came to the rock. He was tall and pale with a shock of red hair and he tried to break the fetters. But the fetters would not break. So the man took up a pebble that lay at the bottom of the rock, of the same stone as that to which the wolf was bound. And then, as the day came up, he stole away to inscribe something on it – the head of a wolf.

The runes were showing her these things. The runes knew.

She drove the horse on through the trees. Eventually the animal tired and she stopped to let it forage and rest. The spring was lovely, the forest full of flowers, thick with full-leafed sycamore, birch and oak. The sun dappled through the leaves and turned the light to water; the bark of pale trees flashed from the deep green like the skins of silver fish; mustard lichen changed the carcass of a fallen oak to a chest of gold; flowers of yellow and white seemed to dance on the branches as if caught on unseen currents.

Suddenly the effects of her ordeal by water swept over her. She was aching everywhere, her skin cut from the ropes, sore from the salt water. She was terribly thirsty too. Aelis looked around for water. There was no stream but the woods were damp and it had rained recently. She licked the moisture from leaves and when she found a muddy puddle put her head in and lapped like a dog. She was too exhausted to forage for anything to eat. Spectres of tiredness loomed at her from the trees. She thought she saw movement, heard noises. She was full of fear and remounted, walking the horse on through the forest.

The greens and the golds blurred and she slumped down on the horse’s mane, jolting back to wakefulness for a moment before falling forward again. For a second she would think there was a threat, the runes would wake in her and all tiredness leave her. Then, as the horse plodded forward, she would feel more secure and start to doze. She drifted awake. The horse had stopped, she noticed. It was cold, though the low sun split the trees in blinding rays.

‘It will devour me.’ A voice terrible and guttural. Suddenly she was fully awake. The wolf was in front of her, its great jaws red with the blood of her countrymen.

She kicked the horse around and sent it leaping away from the creature, but it was no good. The dread wolf had her, springing forward to take her from the horse’s back and drag her to the ground. As she hit the forest floor it was as if all the tiredness she had been holding at bay came back to her and she fainted into unconsciousness.

When she came to, her horse was nowhere to be seen and the creature was on all fours above her, its great muzzle thrust into her face.

‘It will devour me,’ it said again. Its voice was like a fall of hail, like the scrape of the keel of a boat on a beach.

Aelis could not speak. She looked for the runes. They were nowhere. It was as if they had run from the wolf.

She tried to back away but it held her by the leg with one great clawed hand.

‘I have struggled,’ it said. ‘Do you not know me?’

‘You are a monster.’

‘I am Jehan, the confessor. I tried to help you, to save you from the thing that pursues you.’

‘Then why did you not kill him on the beach?’

The beast bowed its head. ‘I saw only you. You. I have tried to protect you, but I cannot be near you. The rage I feel will consume me.’

It stood upright and turned from her as if to walk away then dropped to all fours, snapping and spinning as if tormented by a fly. It crouched and snarled out through bared teeth, ‘Leave me. Walk away because I have a wolf inside me that I cannot quiet.’

‘Then why did you come?’

‘To see you. To touch you.’

Aelis looked down at the pebble she held in her hand. The Raven had lengthened the leather thong so it would go around the wolf’s neck. She did not believe it would work but had no other option. She edged towards the writhing wolf. It crouched, seething like a dog beneath a table who fears someone will take its bone. She reached forward to tie the stone around the creature’s neck but it bared its huge yellow teeth. Aelis recoiled. The stink of death was on its breath.

It spoke in that growling voice that sounded like the crunching of cartilage, of a joint being torn apart. ‘I will not wear it. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.” Show mercy on me now, God. Show mercy on me now!’

She put out her hand to comfort the great animal but it flinched away, rolled and snapped. Then it came for her with paralysing speed. It threw her to the earth, stood over her keening for a few moments and then bounded off into the trees. It was gone in a few strides. Aelis was alone in the deep forest with the night falling, starving and cold. But suddenly she wasn’t alone, nor was she hungry, and an odd warmth sprang up in her. She saw a sunrise in her mind, filling the forest with a crisp, clear light; she saw the track of the wolf in the darkness bright and clear. A rune had lit up inside her.

Aelis followed the track through the trees. It was night, she knew, and yet it was not night. The light in her mind made everything as clear as full day but it didn’t quite banish the reality of the dark forest. It was as if she was walking through two forests at the same time, one light and one dark, existing equally in both.

She walked on and on, the perfumes of the forest all about her – wet earth and grass, the resin that clung to her hands from the tree trunks she touched as she passed. Moths moved in the dark; things burrowed and sighed in the loam and the deeper earth beneath it. As the sky moved from pitch to silver there was birdsong, warmth and spears of light shot through the trees.

It was just after dawn when she came upon the sleeping wolf. It had wedged itself against a fallen tree and covered itself with earth. Asleep, the creature did not seem to terrify the runes in the same way that it did when awake. Her mind was alive with the crawling and glimmering symbols. Aelis looked down at the pendant. Like the night that she could see as day, like the wolf she had seen as a man, it seemed two things. One was a stone with a wolf’s head on it; the other was a pocket of darkness, as if torn from the night sky, much bigger than the pebble she saw in the real world.

She knew it for magic and she knew it for a sin, but the runes filled her with exhilaration. She felt stronger than she ever had in her life, though the nightmare land she had fallen into in her dreams as a young girl was coming into being about her, the trees seeming more like carvings than living things, the sky metal, more a roof than a natural creation, the grass sticking up like shards of dark glass. She was not afraid. She felt safe in that place between reality and hallucination with the runes as her guides.

She peered into the darkness that was the pebble and saw that she could not tell how big it was. It seemed as if it would fit into her hand but it was as wide as the stars. The world was a strange and beautiful place. The wolf seemed an entrancing thing, not frightening at all. It lay in the dusk like another long shadow among the shadows of the ancient trees. She tied the pendant around the wolf’s neck and then lay down to sleep against its side, putting her head onto its flank, feeling safe in its animal warmth.

The creature did not wake – not that morning, nor that afternoon, nor in the evening when the shadows of the trees stretched towards her and bars of light spread from the setting sun. Night did not wake it, not the buzz of insects by its ears, nor the damp mist that clung to its fur in the dawn. The morning sun was strong but the wolf did not stir.

Aelis stayed beside it. Her clothes were just rags, but she did not feel cold nor scarcely hungry. The runes kept her warm. She sank into them, searching for them in the dark of her mind, learning how to find them at the little drop where consciousness becomes sleep, and to allow them to emerge to consume her. She was a horse racing under the sun, a sunset stretching fingers of light to the dark hills, a hawthorn bristling with spikes, a hailstorm battering the land, a river feeding and shaping the terrain that fed and shaped it.

In the evenings she sat by the wolf, watching the colours of the forest die their long deaths, greens, reds, purples and lilacs falling to grey under the dusk. But when night came, new colours were born – the brilliant silver of the moonstruck leaves, the inky blue of the far distance, the soft mauve light of things near to her. She had never seen nights like them, though she had dreamed of them often. She slept by the wolf, seeing herself as a shield, keeping him from harm, and woke to walk the woods, sometimes as herself, sometimes as an expression of a rune, to stand before a birch and see the light of spring burning within it.

She could not say how long she was there nor what she ate. The days grew longer but the day of her mind seemed never to end. She was the day, a warming force calling the woods to song, a thing that looked up to the night moon and saw itself reflected in its bright surface. She felt renewed. Berries stained her fingers; she had the taste of mushrooms in her mouth. Only sometimes, when drinking from a stream, would the cold hit her. She would look up into the wood and see the world as if it had just been made, shining new, green and brilliant.

The first to come were two boys, curious and fearful. She saw them in so many ways: their sweat-slick skin shining with life, the colours they brought splitting in her mind like light through a glass bead. She heard them as music, fragile and wavering as might be made by a child on a pipe. It was if her sight was itself attuned in a musical way, able to see in many registers, and to Aelis it appeared that each boy had a light inside him like a candle glow illuminating the darkness of his mortal flesh.

They returned with men in numbers, and the echo of her former self, the Lady Aelis to whom they were peril, went through her mind. The inner voice of panic that told her to run was like a noise in the distance, faint and almost inaudible. There were about forty of them – a robber band. It was evening, she realised. The dusk was dying in tonight and it was cold.

‘They’ve been robbed before. Look at them.’ It was her language, just. The men were Franks but not her brother’s nor any ruler’s. They were outlaws, some dressed in rags, others wearing finer stuff, obviously stolen.

‘That one would be pretty enough with a good meal inside her.’

‘She’d be pretty enough with something else inside her. What are we waiting for? There are two good slaves here. Let’s fuck her for a bit and then get them sold.’ It was a young man who spoke, small and hard with skin baked brown by the sun. He had broken teeth and a torn ear, and seemed to Aelis to sizzle with colours and sounds – the green stains of mosses at his knees, gold pollen on his sleeves, a sound like burning wood that seemed to express his personality. He was fascinating to her.

She spoke:

‘Alone I sat when the Old One sought me,

That terror of gods, who gazed in my eyes:

“What hast thou to ask? Why comest thou hither?”

“Odin,” said he, “I know you are from yourself hidden.’”

‘Is that the Normans’ tongue? She’s a Viking slut. Danes! We’ll get a good price for them.’

‘We’re far from the sea.’ Another voice.

Aelis could sense its disquiet like a cold wind. She looked for the wolf behind her. There was no wolf, only the confessor lying naked on the ground.
Jehan? Where was the wolf?
But Jehan was not as she had known him. He was no longer afflicted but whole and handsome. She spoke again: