Fenrir (20 page)

Hugin was standing again almost before he’d gone down, slashing up and around with the knife with a terrible speed. At first, as the two figures grappled in front of the sharp morning sun, Aelis thought it was a wolf. It sounded like a wolf and was as quick, but she saw, as an arm flashed out to block the knife, that it was a man, the same man who had come for her in the church.

‘Run, run,’ he was screaming. ‘He will kill me soon and then he will come for you again. Run!’

She tried to stand but her legs wouldn’t obey her; they were frozen dead. She got half to her feet but fell like a drunk, grabbing for a tree with an arm that was numb with cold. She fell, head smacking into the ground. Then she tried again, but she couldn’t even feel her limbs, let alone use them.

‘Run, run!’

Aelis heard that sound in her head – like a great rushing of water, the movement of wind in the mouth of a cave, the tide of the blood in the ears, but it was none of those things.

The Raven was on top of the wolfman. He had his knife in both his hands and was straining to get the point into his opponent’s neck. The wolfman had caught the blade, the blood on his fingers bright in the dawn light. Hugin gave a great hoarse cry and drove the knife down, but the wolfman snapped it and used the Raven’s downward momentum to drive his head into his opponent’s nose. Then he was on him, screaming and biting and punching and tearing. The sorcerer went for his sword but the wolfman pinned his arm, making it impossible to draw. The men were on their feet now in a brawling embrace, staggering from tree to tree. They fell, broke, got up again, but the wolfman never let Hugin get far enough away to free his sword. But the Raven didn’t need a weapon. With ferocious speed he smashed his knee upwards into the wolfman’s midriff, driving him up into the air. The wolfman hit the ground like something wet.

Aelis thought her mind was going to split. That sound was within her and without her, coming from that pulsing, breathing, running rune. What was it?

The Raven reached for his sword; the wolfman lunged to stop him, and for a second they stood swaying together by the river’s edge. Then the big horse smashed them both into the water. Aelis finally placed the sound. It wasn’t water, blood, wind or drums. It was hooves.

Leshii came running. The Raven was gone, but the wolfman was clinging by one hand to the branch of the tree that had saved Aelis. Leshii could see he wouldn’t last long. The horse had knocked him almost senseless and he was groaning. Leshii had never heard him acknowledge any hardship before. The wolfman was twenty paces out in the powerful current; Leshii was old, he couldn’t save him. But he had to. It was not heroism or fellow feeling that drove him on but, as ever, practicality. He needed a protector and he needed someone to help complete his mission. Chakhlyk was his only hope.

‘I am coming, dry one, I am coming.’

The king’s horse had knelt down beside Aelis, lightly pressing its body into hers, offering her its warmth. The other animals had come in too – Saerda’s horse and the mule. Leshii knew what he needed to do. The mule was a pack animal and wouldn’t like to be ridden, but it would be led. He took its halter and walked it out into the rushing water, standing upstream so his weight pushed into its side. He knew there was no creature on earth as sure-footed as a mule, and the animal went out into the river with a slow confidence.

About ten paces in, the pressure of the water became too much for Leshii and he draped himself over the mule’s back, driving it on with a slap on the rump. The water was only up to the top of its legs when they reached the wolfman, but the flow was so strong that the merchant knew he wouldn’t be able to stand unsupported. His plan was to wedge himself against the mule to resist the current. He dropped into the water and immediately realised he’d been too hopeful. The water caught his feet as the mule skipped free and back to the bank. Leshii slipped and grabbed for the wolfman on instinct, pulling him from the branch. The water took both of them, and drove them backwards but Leshii got some purchase on the riverbed and with a great heave shoved himself and the wolfman towards the bank.

The current pulled and turned them and then it had them, surging them on. For a few seconds they were lost, but then Leshii felt a great crack on his side, solid ground beneath his feet and grass in his hands. He’d been smashed into the bank fifty paces from the tree, where a bend narrowed the course of the river. He and the wolfman were alive. From across the river he heard something between a croak and scream. He peered across the bright water. On the opposite bank a naked figure with something tied to its back was pulling itself onto dry land.

Leshii coughed and stood, almost laughing.

‘Well, he won’t be coming back over here in a hurry. Chakhlyk, my dry one, you’re wet enough now.’

The wolfman heaved himself up onto his bleeding hands. Now Leshii could see the wound in his side, a thumb’s width of broken arrow shaft protruding from just below his last rib. No wonder people were scared of him, thought Leshii. He had fought the Raven with that in his guts. But the wolfman couldn’t be long from death.

‘He is calling to his sister,’ said the wolfman. ‘We need to go, and now. He has seen the lady and she is in great danger.’

There were sounds through the trees – shouting, lots of men.

‘No time,’ said the wolfman. ‘Come on.’

Aelis was trembling as the blood returned to her limbs. ‘What about the confessor and the monk?’

‘Murderers! King-slayers! They have his clothes, they have his clothes!’

There was one Viking, a boy, fifty paces off, just visible between the trees and the river.

‘Go,’ said the wolfman. ‘Now. I will find you. Merchant, get on that animal and take the lady to Helgi.’

‘I am going to my people,’ said Aelis.

‘No. You have very little time. The wolf is coming into flesh – it is foreseen. You must get to Helgi; only he can save you from what stalks you.’

‘What stalks me?’

‘Death, destruction, again and again in many lives.’

He lifted the lady onto the horse and Leshii got up behind.

Aelis looked down at the wolfman and stammered, ‘W-why are you doing this?’

‘For love,’ he said. ‘I will find you. Aelis, Adisla, I will find you. Now go!’

A shadow sang across the light. The wolfman stepped forward and took it from the air. It was a spear.

‘Go. They are near.’

He slapped the animal’s rump, and it took off through the trees with the Norsemen at its back.

Paris was still unscorched, Sigfrid living and the confessor still a lost child grubbing in the great forest of the Rhine when Helgi went up to the roof of the loading tower to survey his new lands at Aldeigjuborg, or Ladoga as he was learning to call it to please his subjects. He had something else to celebrate beyond taking possession of the town – the birth of a daughter.

The Viking king looked out over his lands and waters. Stretching out in front of him in the clear day was the river leading to the trembling blue of Lake Ladoga, its green islands just specks in the distance. Spread out around it like stars around the moon were the turquoise flashes of other lakes, so many he had never managed to count them. He looked at the winding rivers that connected them – some like threads, others more like blue roots, all reaching out from the great shimmering boss of the lake, stretching east to Miklagard and the steppes, west to the Eastern Lake, and north to home.

His men, the northerners, were lords of the water, kings of ships. No wonder the native tribes of Slavs and the Finns had asked him to rule over them. He had been surprised when he received their ambassadors asking him to be their king, but when he came to think about it, it was only a just reward. Who had warred more than he had? Who had stocked the All Father’s halls with so many dead warriors that his armies would stretch from horizon to horizon? Who had sacrificed slaves and cattle at summer
blöt
and winter feast? Helgi. Odin was his god, the god of kings, and he had rewarded him handsomely.

Years before, his people had come in conquest, ruled for a while and been overthrown. But the chaos that followed was so bad and the memory of their easy and liberal rule so good that within twenty years a tribal faction, too weak to make a bid for power on its own, had invited them back.

It felt good to be king –
khagan
– of such a fertile land. Helgi climbed down the tower to take in the celebrations going on below. The Slavs might have some funny customs but they liked a
blöt
– a celebration and feast – as well as any man of the north. Helgi took to the streets, his bodyguard closing in behind him. He stood for a while watching some sacrificed slaves, naked and painted, swinging from a gallows under the wide blue sky. The sight of this proof of his power and riches was pleasing to him. The smell of the piss and shit that had fallen from the dead men as they choked mingled with the temple incense, the stink of the animals, the perfume of the garlands that the young girls wore, the herbs of the beer in the horn he drank from. He found the sensation rich and intoxicating.

Summer in the lands of the Rus was a beautiful thing – you could almost smell the heat, although there was a freshness to it that blew in off the river and made even the midday sun bearable. This was an abundant land: wheat in the fields, the nets of the fishermen on the lake heavy with fish, furs and honey in great supply and fine forests for hunting and firewood.

The nine dead men dangled from the scaffold in the temple to Svarog, master of wolves, who was Odin by another name, as far as Helgi could see. The ruler’s concessions to Slav culture stopped at changing the names of his own gods, who had brought him such fortune, and he had actually sacrificed the dead men to Odin, lord of the hanged. By that stage the locals were so drunk they assumed the sacrifice was to Svarog. But Helgi had been careful to honour the native gods too. The temple of Perun had even been given a new statue of the god, with his great hammer raised, ready to strike the blows that split the sky with thunder and lightning.

Their creeds were very similar, thought Helgi, especially the belief in a world tree on which sat the various realms of existence. The Slavs were wrong to believe it was as oak because Helgi knew very well that it was an ash called Yggdrasil, but the difference in detail was so small that the
khagan
had taken it for confirmation of the compatibility of the northern and Slavic peoples and evidence of the truth of their beliefs. Even the
blöt
was a Slav tradition. They called it a
bratchina
– a brothering – but they were talking about the same thing. Drink, women, sacrifice and a good scrap to round it off in all likelihood.

Ladoga was thronging that day. The harvest was shaping up to be a good one; the
khagan
had donated ten prize cows to be slaughtered, and the army was in fine shape. Helgi’s own men from Skania had accepted the name the Slavs had given them as the ruler’s bodyguard –
druzhina
– and a good fleet was moored on the river and out on Lake Ladoga. Khazars had joined the force too, and the farmers and fishermen of the wider countryside were behind him, keen to move south and east for a taste of plunder. They were all in town, happy to throw flowers upon the river by day and drink and fuck their way into their gods’ favour by night.

Helgi paraded the streets, handing out small gifts of money and loaves to the people, conspicuously directing his heir Ingvar to assist him. He needed to be seen to direct Ingvar because the boy was not his son, only his nephew. Part of the bargain that had seen him gain the loyalty of his
druzhina
– four hundred men – was that his own sons would be overlooked.

The arrangement was not unusual, and the Norsemen had no tradition that the first son, or any son, should immediately take the throne when a king died, but Helgi was a modern man. He saw the virtue of a clear heir and of that heir being beyond dispute. However, Ingvar was not subject to the special curses the gods held in reserve for those who killed their fathers. A blood heir might be more patient than a named successor in waiting for the current king to die. Ingvar was now six. In ten years, maybe as little as six, he would seek his inheritance. And Helgi was only
khagan
thanks to the Slavs. They remembered his father Rurik and had backed him for the throne. Ingvar, his dead uncle’s child, had as many warriors from Skania as Helgi, and the boy’s own uncles had forced oaths from Helgi that he would be his heir.

Helgi touched his sword and remembered the words he had spoken to his sons on the days of their birth as he placed it between their infant hands: ‘I shall bequeath you no wealth and you will have nothing except what you gain for yourself by this sword.’ It was supposed to be a formality, an encouragement to be self-reliant. But Helgi had started with nothing himself and had hoped to give more than that to his boys.

The king, though, had schemes. The cities to the south and the east, Novgorod and Kiev, were tiny and barbarous. He intended to take them and to give Ingvar the task of ruling them. He’d call Novgorod his capital first, and when he was ready to strike at Kiev would say it was time to move on there. Ingvar could spend his time fending off the mad Pechenegs and the incursions of the Greeks from Miklagard. When the boy failed, as he would, his authority would be fatally undermined and Helgi could step in to take over with the support of Ingvar’s own kinsmen. Perhaps Ingvar would even be killed fighting the maniac southerners.