The Reluctant Berserker (24 page)

Wulfstan stumbled to a halt, hearing the ripples of his footsteps rustle away into silence. The dome of the sky above him was dark, and the earth beneath was black. The wind was cold on his face, and the smell dank. Wet soil, wet flowers, reeds rotting in the pools. Something moved by his foot—or perhaps he only thought it did—but there was no Leofgar to turn his thoughts to joy. He was alone again with the thing that followed him, and it was stronger for the repeated betrayal.

He croaked out Fealo’s name, hoping the horse would hear his voice and whicker. His throat had closed and his breath trembled in his mouth. There was something—he felt it—something watching him. Quite close, he could almost hear it breathing. The sense of its presence pushed at him, squeezed him like a louse between fingernails. His mind filled with thoughts of himself cracking, the blood-burst and the bones sinking in this unconsecrated ground to be gnawed on by eels.

Drawing his sword, he turned a full circle, wanting to see the thing that followed him. It would almost be a relief, by now, to see it full in the face. No more hiding, no more pictures in his head. No more… It could not possibly be as bad as the things he conjured up in his own mind.

Or could it? He wanted to see, but he did not want to see. His horror sat bitter on the tongue, coppery-sickening like blood. Because it could be worse than he thought. It stood to reason it would be worse than he thought, by the same measure that a demon’s thoughts are worse than those of a man.

The sword-hilt slipped in his grasp, and he felt that the marsh boiled beneath him, as though he stood in a nursery of dragons, slippery bodies writhing between his ankles.

Behind him, the cloud opened slowly, and the moon’s colourless light slipped through. He had time for the mere wraith of relief before he saw them moving towards them—silver things flying above the water. Long, sinuous silver things, rolling and twisting like wyrms above the dark mirror of the mere.

“Ah!” he shouted, and splashed backwards before they could touch him. Stumbling, he turned on his heel and ran, ran like the coward he was, fighting for each step through sucking mud as high as his knee. Filth splattered him and terror drove him on beyond his endurance. The wetland sloped a little upwards, and he came swaying, near to swooning, up onto another island.

There he fell to his knees, raised his head to thank God for small mercies, and saw it rise like a gash in the world, a pillar of Hell, right in front of him. Flies swarmed around its long pole, stirring so that the stake seemed to move, and the runes carved there flickered between black and rust. On top of it—his gaze drawn up against his will—the severed horse’s head still had a fringe of neck. Its eyes were fly-bitten, but its mouth was open as though it screamed.

The moonlight grew stronger, but around the spite stake he thought that darkness twisted like smoke and issued out of its mouth in a cloud.

“Nnh!” Wulfstan said again, a shameful whimper and, curling into a ball, he covered his face, waiting for the land spirits to tear him apart piece by bleeding piece. His throat felt raw and pain stabbed him deep under the shoulder blade, deeper yet between the lips of his wound and under the heart. A weight crushed his chest and his breath came shallow and painful, while nausea and dread combined prickled his clammy skin.

Tiny silver lights, elves perhaps, encased his head, floated everywhere he looked, and he thought desperately of his pilgrimage, clung on to the holy lady with all his strength.

Aethelthryth, noble lady, holy lady, lend me your aid. Permit me to live until I can ask for your forgiveness.

He waited for an answer, and as he waited, the light picked out the decaying thing on its tree of evil with an ever more gruesome hand.

Do you even know what you’re seeking forgiveness for?
The thought came clearly to him, in a bright, fierce tone he was sure was not his own. He would not be thinking this now. He would simply be cowering, waiting for the blow to strike. Startled into life, his mind stirred sluggishly after an answer.

For being nithing. For being like a woman.

The other voice in his head was most unimpressed.
Oh, it is a terrible thing, surely, to be a woman. Perhaps I should go and leave you to handle this like a man.

“No!” he shouted aloud. “No. Lady, please, not that.”

She did not speak again, and he was not surprised. But his thoughts, once diverted into this strange channel continued to flow in it, taking him to places new and unexplored.

God had, for some reason, chosen to make him nithing—to make him soft, like a woman. It followed then, didn’t it—his thoughts were slow and troubling, leading him to a place quite opposite from what everyone else believed—but it
did
follow, that to deny God’s will for him was a sin. To kill to cover it up, that was a sin too. God had made him the way he was, and it therefore could not be so very evil. To lie about it, however, to conceal his nature from Leofgar, that was the sin.

Gradually, as he remained uneaten, undestroyed, the pains in his chest eased. He found he could raise his head. Sitting back on his haunches, hands on his thighs, he looked at the spite stake with a new eye. It stared back, helping him see himself more clearly, helping him understand.

He had not meant to kill Cenred. Ecgbert knew that, everyone knew that. Even
he
knew it, though he had not allowed himself to feel it. Saewyn should have accepted the weregild, and he…

He should have admitted what he was.

The thought came with a moment of lightness, as though a fire leaped up in him, warm and golden. In that moment the spite stake was nothing more than a piece of carrion held up by a stick. He could see where the uncanny open jaw was propped that way by a couple of stout twigs driven into the roof of the mouth.

Very daring indeed, he got up and on tiptoe poked the skull with his scabbard. Nothing happened, so he wedged the metal tip of it beneath the head and pushed hard. It slid stickily upwards, teetered at the sharpened top of the stake and fell with a splat. It broke open on the ground, cold matter and brains leaking out.

Stunned, Wulfstan drew his sword and made a tentative cut, and another. Before long, he was stabbing and stamping on the thing with fierce joy. All his life he’d believed these things could kill. All his life! What else had he believed that had now been proved to be utterly wrong?

The thought of Aethelthryth recurred. The holy lady! She had answered his prayer. By her strength he had done this, and she was a woman. Why, if a woman could be so mighty, should anyone consider it shameful to be womanlike? Why should he?

It felt like hours he knelt with his heart and mind afire with these new thoughts. At last they burned down from flames to embers, and he saw how filthy his hands and arms were, how covered in cold horsemeat his stamping feet. Walking down to the marsh, he washed himself clean, and in the friendly silver light saw the hog’s back of the road go winding past towards Cotanham on his left. On his right stood the small wooded hillock on which he had left his horse.

By the time he had waded back to Fealo, rooted in his saddlebags for the last of the bread, he was ready to sleep. He wrapped himself in his cloak, stretched out on the pile of logs, which was a little less damp than the ground, and told himself he would find Leofgar tomorrow, under the sun.

As he lay, becoming slowly aware of an absence of fear, the fretful breeze teased at his long hair and tugged at the edge of his cloak. The night was silent around him, silent enough so that when the wind on his cheek began to bring music, he heard it quite clearly.

It would have curdled the blood in his veins—such a desolate music, without rhythm or reason, changing from joy to despair between one note and the next. This was devil’s music, he thought for a moment, with a brief stab of accustomed panic, the sound of fiends pretending to make merry in the distance, their sorrow constantly breaking through their pretense at joy.

He would have thought all of these things—he did, briefly—and then his sleep-muzzied head remembered that it had heard this music before. Elegant hands had drawn its witchery out of a box of wood and gut as he lay trying not to die of the stab wound in his shoulder. Leofgar’s song.

His fear became joy, and he rose and followed the sound, knee deep through the sucking marsh, slogging onward with all his strength returned to him and nothing but thankfulness left in his heart.

Ere long, the ground raised into carr woods. There the night was pitch-black, and Wulfstan walked with his arms outstretched, feeling like a blind man for obstacles. The song came louder now. He turned, following, and walked hard into a tree, losing his footing and stumbling with a crash into the undergrowth.

“What the hell was that?” A voice whispered it from just ahead of him. Not a voice he knew.

“Shut up!” but this one was. A wave of outrage and anger lifted the hairs on the back of Wulfstan’s neck as he recognised the lazy, confident, well-spoken voice of the youth whose wolfshead band had attacked him mere days ago. Leofgar had told him he had offered the boy mercy, a chance to go away and heal, and yet here he was again, skulking through the night to kill and steal like the vermin he was. “It’s probably one of the lads. I can’t see a fucking thing.”

“I don’t…” the other man whined, while above their heads the music stepped from height to height into a screech that set a distant wolf pack ahowl. “Ceorl. I don’t like it. There are creatures about—you can hear them, they’re everywhere. I don’t…I want…let’s just forget about this lot, they’re protected. It’s not worth—”

“You fucking coward.” The crack of a blow was followed by the harsh breathing of an injured man and a very angry one. “We’re doomed and damned already. If these are fiends, well, so are we. Let them be afraid of us! It’s three men, with horses and mail and swords, and two of them are asleep already. Easy prey and we can live off the spoils for years. I’m not letting elves or fiends or anything get between me and it.”

“But…”

A soft sound and the other man took in a breath like shock, like betrayal. “You’d draw steel on me?”

“I’m not having you get in my way either, understand?”

“Oh yes.” A whole world of understanding in the tone. “I get it now. Always were too fucking good for the rest of us.”

The crashing of a scuffle. Wulfstan wished he could see clearly enough to put his sword through both of them while they were distracted, but though he strained his eyes until ghost stars swarmed in them, the night was sounds and smells and cold and nothing more.

He took the chance to walk away, following the music, and as he did so, the cover of the wood thinned a little and enough light sifted down from the clouded sky for him to see the loom of trees before he blundered into them. Oddly, this improvement in his sight made him more afraid rather than less. Shadows could be guessed now, and there was only enough light to see the shadows, not enough to tell whether they had moved.

Something spoke in his ear in a long wailing ululation of nonsense words that made him think of Saewyn, but this was not her voice. It was tantalisingly familiar, beneath a veneer of horrifying strangeness. His blood turned to water for a moment, but the saint must have been with him, for his mind was clear, and into it there came a memory of Leofgar laughing, casting his voice out to speak in places where he was not.

“Leofgar?” he whispered, with a leap of the heart like a tongue of fire, “Is that you? Where are you?”

At the same time, light bloomed on the world—a great, silent unveiling of the moon and an unfurling into existence of everything around Wulfstan. Now he could see the little clearing in which a single guard stood watching over a campaign shelter and a well-appointed tent. He could see the dozen glints of light from spearheads and knives that ringed the clearing, and he could see as a dozen different gazes suddenly locked on the source of the music—a cloak-swathed shape with a bone whistle in one hand and a slingshot in the other, unwisely come out into the open while the night was so dark and betrayed now by the sky itself.

Leofgar stood like a stag at bay in front of the hunters, while Wulfstan shook off shock and shoved through grasping brambles, trying to come to his side. He had yet not pushed out of the tangle of trees when Leofgar tipped his head up and the moon made him all steel from those metallic curls to the wide grey eyes. Wulfstan hesitated, hidden there on the eaves of the wood, because Leofgar looked unearthly, in solitude drenched in silver.

Then in a voice too bull-like to come from his slight form he shouted, “Deala, Tatwine, awake! Hunlaf awake! Your enemies surround you, awake.” He broke, long legged like a fleeing deer, towards the shelter of the trees, at least three of the outlaw band following.

Chapter Sixteen

A thrown spear buried itself in the earth just behind Leofgar’s heel. He almost turned and picked it up, his instincts screaming at him to find something to defend himself with—aware of all the eyes on him and the unfriendly light. Yet he was no warrior, his talents lay in other areas, and he would be no match in plain fight for any of these brawl-hardened outlaws.

He wished vainly for his bow, but a backward glance showed Tatwine emerging from his tent, armed and armoured in steel. Their gazes locked and he felt as though he’d run out over a cliff and ran on still, fruitlessly, with only a long drop under him. He was not going back for the bow, not even if it meant his death.