Fenrir (58 page)

‘Not your magic?’ said Ofaeti.

‘My magic is of the body and the fight. Not this,’ said Hugin.

‘So what is this?’

The Raven tapped his tongue against his teeth. ‘Women’s magic, but I have never seen so many taken.’

‘Your sister could do this?’ said Leshii to the Raven.

Ofaeti laughed. ‘I’d call it the rarest troll work if any woman could stick her head back on her shoulders and kill these men. We might have ended the siege of Paris and been drunk for a year on Frankish wine if she’d pulled that trick on the ramparts.’

‘I have seen one man killed this way but never as many,’ said Hugin. He sat on his haunches, staring out into the trees. After a while he said, ‘The witch is dead – you saw me cut her head from her shoulders. This is troll work but it can’t be hers.’

‘Then what?’ said Leshii.

‘Something,’ said Hugin. His face was pale.

‘We should stay here and see if it returns,’ said Ofaeti.

‘Agreed,’ said Hugin. ‘Something capable of this might be able to find the lady.’

Leshii rubbed at his ears as if he couldn’t believe they were working properly. ‘We stay here to meet something that has killed forty men and left them cold on the ground?’

‘We need to find the lady. If there is a witch here, we should talk to her,’ said Hugin.

‘And if she kills us?’

Ofaeti shook his head. ‘Why are you afraid to die, little merchant?’

‘Is that something that requires explanation? Why are you not?’

‘I will live on in the halls of the All Father, to battle all day and feast all night. It’s not right for a man to love his life too much because he must lose it one day. Fear of its loss poisons its living. Death is fun, looked at the right way.’

‘I am not afraid to die,’ said Leshii, ‘but I am a merchant as you are a warrior, and I do not want to die before I have done great deeds, won caskets of gold and built great houses. I live as a little man, I would not die as one.’

‘Well spoken,’ said Ofaeti, ‘but wrong. Even the greatest merchant, surrounded by money, women and cattle, is nothing to the man of war. Gold is superior to steel in all regards except one – when it is held in the hand. There the deeds of steel outvalue those of gold a hundred-fold.’

‘You are learned in the ways of steel,’ said Leshii, ‘and for that reason I shall bow to your knowledge and call you the argument’s master.’

Leshii knew the Norsemen and how they argued. Ofaeti’s words had become elevated, even poetic, as all his kinsmen’s did when they considered themselves in a contest of wits. It was as well to let the warrior win, he thought, and praise him for his skill with words.

‘So you are happy to stay here?’

‘Delighted,’ said Leshii. ‘May the lord of lightning forbid that I should be afraid of being murdered in a violent and unpleasant fashion.’

Ofaeti sat back on a log and scratched his head. ‘You are a clever man, merchant. Anyone who can trade without the implied threat of violence to help his haggling has a fair tongue in his head.’

‘My fair tongue has often been aided by bodyguards’ fair swords,’ said Leshii.

‘They speak in a language all men can under—’

‘Quiet!’ The Raven held up his hand. ‘Can you hear?’

‘What?’

‘Laughter,’ said Hugin.

Leshii turned his head from side to side, trying to catch any sound. ‘I hear nothing.’

‘There is laughter here,’ said the Raven, ‘and it is her.’

‘Who?’

‘Aelis.’

‘Is she with the wolf?’ said Ofaeti.

‘This is some tree spirit trying to ensnare you,’ said Leshii. ‘This is—’

And Leshii heard it. A breath, no more, but it was her, he knew it.

Ofaeti’s sword was out and he was looking around.

‘Enchantment?’ said Leshii.

‘Seid,’ said Ofaeti. Leshii had never seen the big man nervous before and that made the merchant very scared indeed.

‘What is Seid?’

‘Magic. Women’s magic.’

‘Weak then?’ Leshii said the words knowing the answer. The Norsemen held their female seers in great regard, he knew.

Ofaeti just gave him a look that seemed to question if the merchant had finally lost the little sense he believed him to have.

And then they saw her. She stepped out of the liquid air of the evening, shimmering into view and disappearing like a trick of the light. She was frightening in her beauty, something too perfect to be of the earth. Aelis, but changed and strange.

‘Lady, we are your protectors,’ said Leshii, Helgi’s reward coming to mind. She had grown so beautiful that Helgi would set him up in his own palace if he brought her to him. The thought suddenly nauseated him. Could he not look on a woman like that without his thoughts immediately turning to selling her? He shook himself. What was happening to the practical man of profit and loss?

She vanished and his head was clear. There was a sound in the distance, the neigh of a horse.

Leshii glanced to his right. The mule was alone, browsing the grass next to Leshii’s treasure of swords. ‘Our horses,’ he said, ‘have gone.’

Aelis put her hand to Jehan’s head. He was cold but sweating. His eyes toured the hut in circles as if they could make up in industry what they lacked in effectiveness.

‘You have a fever.’

‘Yes.’

‘It will pass.’

But it didn’t pass, and Aelis sat watching Jehan weaken on the straw bed. She was not alone. The runes were with her, breathing and singing inside, floating at the edge of her vision. She reached up towards one and allowed it to settle in her hands like a snowflake. It was shaped like a cup, and when she held it she thought it was deep enough to hold the sea. She peered into its depths and saw the cause of Jehan’s fever. The stone. She parted her hands and the rune vanished. Then she took the stone from his neck and set it on the table.

She sat beside him, listening to the chiming, the low wind moan and the ocean crash of the runes. She slept. When she awoke Jehan was gone and it was night.

Aelis felt no alarm but followed him, his trail clear to her in the moonlight of the silver wood. She was no tracker, but the magic inside her told her the way to go, or, rather, made any other way to go seem ridiculous and awkward, like someone who had turned right out of her door to her flock every morning for thirty years might find it strange to have to suddenly turn left.

He was among the corpses, the rotting dead men. She guessed he had come to them by smell because she knew wolves find the dead an irresistible lure.

The confessor was sitting on the ground, his blind eyes moving in mad circles, as if searching for some elusive scrap of light. The head of one of the bandits was on his lap.

‘Do not feed, Jehan. Let the wolf starve inside you.’

Jehan was mumbling to himself in Latin, making the sign of the cross over the head of the dead man.

Aelis recognised the Office for the Dead, translating the words in her mind, as she had been used to doing in church ever since she was a girl:
The fear of death confounds me. The cords of death entangled me, the anguish of the grave came upon me, I was overcome by trouble and sorrow, then I called on the name of the Lord. O Lord, save me!

The confessor fell to weeping, holding the head of the corpse as he might have held the head of a lover, as he had held her head.

‘Jehan, come away from this.’

‘You are a sorceress. You have bewitched me!’

His voice was full of anguish rather than hatred.

‘I have not bewitched you. My love, it has always been the same between us. We are here, flowers of the flesh to wax and then die. But we, like the flowers, only know a seeming death. We go on to bloom again for ever. I have seen it – the runes have shown me.’

‘There is no future life, only the resurrection of the flesh through Christ,’ said Jehan. He collapsed sideways on to the ground, coughing. ‘I will not be this … devourer.’

‘Nor need you be. The fever will pass. Come back and be my love.’

‘It will not pass. It is the stone or the monster. I will weaken or I will eat.’

Aelis looked inside herself. Who was she? Could she really recall? There was a memory of the girl who would have been repulsed by the sight in front of her but it was like the smoke of a campfire in the hills – distant, faint, then gone. Then she saw herself clearly. She was the thing that stood beside him. He made her what she was, like the sea makes the land the shore.

‘God will not let you suffer like this. There is a prince in the east, a sorcerer. Let us go to him.’

‘I will not consort with the worshippers of idols.’ Jehan’s religion had returned, it seemed, along with his infirmity.

‘The magic of the stone saved you from being the wolf. Why cannot magic save you now?’

‘God has made me weak and set this trial to punish me. I will wear no pagan stone, but the wolf will go unfed, muzzled by my will.’

A caul of sweat was about his head, his hands and voice shook.

‘And yet here you are, among the corpses.’

Aelis looked for the runes to help her, to heal him, make him well. But in his presence they seemed to tremble and wither and the sound she heard in her head was of that of searing and burning. She went away from him, walking through the moonlit forest, the trees shining white like a foretaste of winter. She wanted to help him, to comfort him, but she knew that Jehan would only ever find his own way, or rather God’s way.

When she returned, Jehan was still kneeling among the corpses, drooling out his psalms. There was blood on his lips and the corpse in front of him was torn and ripped, its guts spilled.

‘I cannot command it. I am a man, not an angel. I cannot command it. It is my love for you that has weakened me.’

‘I would be your strength.’

‘Our love has been a sin against my deepest vows. God has turned his face against me.’

‘How can He hate you for loving?’

Jehan had tears in his eyes. ‘I do not know, but He does.’

Still she felt his will, the strength of his soul.

‘What will you do?’

‘The choice is infirmity or abomination, the unholy and proscribed use of magic or to be the victim of magic. One way or another I am bound for hell. The choice that faces my mortal body is its pain or the world’s. In imitation of Christ, I choose my own. I will be what I was. Tie on the stone.’

She put it about his neck. As she did so, the runes returned to her, shining, chiming, melodious. ‘You can remove it when you become too weak.’

‘I will not remove it.’ He swallowed hard and stiffened his jaw.

‘Then what of us?’

‘It cannot be. It cannot be.’ Tears were in his eyes and he was panting great reedy breaths like a man dying of consumption.

‘Whatever you become, I will be by your side,’ she said. ‘I will take you to Helgi. He will make us both whole again, free us from the magic that holds us in its grip.’

She reached out with her mind to the horse rune, its golden lustre colouring her sight, turning the silver trees to a breathing bronze.

‘We will need,’ she said, ‘an animal.’

It quickly became clear that there was no way through by land for Leshii, Ofaeti and Hugin. The road to the east was alive with hostile warriors – Franks and Norsemen hard at war with each other. If they went far enough someone from either side would decide to kill them for their possessions.

The rain poured down and the three struck for the coast under heavy skies, Ofaeti and Hugin trudging through the mud and Leshii riding the mule. There had been no sign of the horses. When the weather cleared the land seemed fresh and there was smoke on the breeze. This was pleasant to Hugin. On his high mountain he had often caught the scent of fires in the valleys below and wondered what it would be like to live his life around home and hearth.

The Raven knew that when Sigfrid had died a large contingent of the Vikings besieging Paris had decided to head off and try their luck in the lands of Arnulf, the East Frankish king, so that was where they headed, hoping to pick up a boat. There should be either local Frankish craft to be bought or stolen and the chance of Viking ships with room for passengers.

He had quit the woods in frustration, though his every instinct told him that was where she was. When all sign of her or the wolf had ceased he had given in and decided to try with Helgi, reasoning that she may still seek out the prince. And if she wasn’t there? If he was right in his suspicions she had to be. Could he kill Helgi? Perhaps, if the god did not yet know himself. But should he? Perhaps it would be better to protect Helgi from the wolf. But the god had a way of finding his chosen death, he suspected. So what options did that leave him? Find Aelis and protect her from the wolf, from the god and whatever other perils lay in her path. Defy the will of fate.