Fenrir (28 page)

‘Who is he?’

‘He is three.’

‘Three what?’

‘People!’ He cuffed the healer across the back of the head. ‘A triple knot like this, waiting to be tied. And what is a knot that is not tied? Not a knot? Not so. For if a rope is not a knot then all things are not knots that are not knots and that is not a useful distinction. However, a rope that has been a knot but is a knot no more is more not a knot that one that has never been tied, which nevertheless is still not a knot. So we have degrees of notness matching our degrees of knotness, former, present or future, the triple knot of time. When something has once been something else, can it ever be what it once was again? I think knots. And what is a knot unknotted? Not a knot. And if the knot is retied? It becomes not not a knot, that is a knot once more. This is not a knotty problem, though it does concern knots, does it not? Three of them.’ The creature seemed exasperated, as if he had explained the obvious to the healer and found him simply too dim-witted to understand.

‘You are a man of the Christian god. I have heard their tales of three in one but I prefer my own gods for the luck they have brought me,’ said the healer.

‘Who are your gods?’

‘The sky and the blue of the sky.’

‘How conveniently ungraspable,’ said the wolf. ‘They’re all at it nowadays – mysteries and cant. What would you say to a god who gave you something actually useful? A solid god, a big pale, beautiful flame-haired immortal who occasionally likes to appear as a wolf?’

‘I would follow him.’

‘And if he didn’t want scabby scratchy followers like you?’

‘I would … I would …’

The half-wolf put his fingers to the healer’s mouth and slapped him on the back with the other hand so that he coughed out air.

‘I would say thank you,’ said the healer as the creature manipulated his lips to form the words.

‘I will offer you a charm.’

‘And what must I do to get it?’

‘Go to Helgi, take his gold. But let his little girl, the one fierce in heart, drink this.’

‘Drink what?’

The wolf took a bottle from the healer’s pack and poured its contents onto the floor. Then he bit deeply into his hand until blood dripped into the bottle.

‘I offer rare bargains to those who please me.’

‘I will take your charm.’

The creature put the bung of cloth back into the bottle.

‘Here is the charm,’ he said. ‘Congratulations. You are an instrument of destruction. But be of good cheer. It is death that we destroy. We are its enemies.’

He scratched something onto a piece of birch bark and passed it to the healer.

‘This one must the sons of men know, those who would heal and help. Carve it once when you need it most. It calls forth the fever.’

On the roof, under the stars, the healer didn’t know how he had forgotten that night. How had he forgotten the fever charm? It had not seemed at all strange to him to sit talking to a man who was also a wolf. It had not seemed strange when he had given the girl the blood for a fainting fit she had suffered one day. And it had been alarming, but not strange, when the fever had fallen upon her shortly afterwards.

He stripped a piece of bark from the roof with his little knife and carved the sign the stranger had given him. He didn’t know what to do with it so he just put it on the girl’s chest.

The girl spoke – ‘Liar. Where are you, liar?’ – and sat upright, clutching the bark to her, staring wide-eyed over the town.

Then he was no longer alone on the roof. Beside him, squatting next to the girl, was the pale flame-haired man.

He smiled at the merchant and chanted,

‘When I see up in a tree

A corpse swinging from a noose,

I can so carve and colour the runes

That he walks and talks with me.’

‘Who are you?’ said the healer.

‘I am a fever,’ said the pale man, ‘a fire to light the bones within you.’

‘You are a man. I have seen you before.’

‘House-rider, troll-witch,’ said the man to the healer, ‘make your way back to your shape.’

The little girl did not understand the literal meaning of his words but understood the man was telling the healer to return to being something he had once been before.

The healer climbed down through the hole in the roof and the pale man sat holding the girl’s hand. She stirred and looked up at him.

‘I have dreamed of you,’ she said.

‘And I of you. What did I say in your dream?’

‘My home is in the darkness,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘I am of the dark.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is there a darkness near here?’

‘They have found one under Gillingr’s barrow,’ said the pale man. ‘Would you like to see it?’

‘I would see it,’ said Sváva. ‘I know you. You are the wolf’s father. The begetter of death.’

‘Yes.’

‘I have a fierce heart, everyone says it. I am not afraid of you.’

‘No.’

‘What am I?’

‘A little broken thing,’ said the man, hugging the girl to him.

‘Will I ever be mended?’

‘First you need a little darkness, where the lights inside you can shine,’ said the pale man. ‘Do you fear the dark?’

‘No.’

‘Then come with me.’

Sváva went down the ladder in the loading tower, past the winch that pulled up the goods, where the healer now hung from a rope like a forgotten sack, and out of the town, hand in hand with the pale man.

They went to the barrow, the naked grave, its black mouth open to the stars. The height of two men down was a deeper darkness, a hole.

‘The Romans mined here,’ said the man, ‘but bad luck dogged them. Many men were sacrificed, by accident and design. Mercury was worshipped here. He lived here. Old man Odin, to you modern people. This is the place.’

‘What place?’

‘The appointed place. Here the things that need to be seen can be seen.’

‘These tunnels are a city beneath the earth and its people are the dead,’ said Sváva.

‘You can see that already?’ said the man.

‘Yes.’

The pale figure trembled and let go of her hand. ‘You are sure you are not afraid of the dark?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I think rather it is afraid of me. See how it shrinks from me. Even in there it dare not face me.’

‘The dark is a wolf who runs from fire.’

‘I am a fire.’

‘You are a fire.’

‘I would talk with these dead fellows,’ she said. ‘The ghosts must be merry now they have no lives to lose.’

‘Then go in.’

The little girl walked forward and bent to the mouth of the hole. Then she crouched down and crawled inside. The god smiled his wolf smile and turned away.

In his great hall, Helgi was dreaming of the vast offerings he had given to Odin – the warriors he had taken in battle, the slaves and the cattle, the gold cast into mires. He saw himself piling them up – the bodies of animals and men, the treasures of silver and gold – but every time he looked away from the pile it seemed to shrink, requiring ever more corpses, ever more jewels to make it look right again. Dreams have their own sense of right and wrong, and to Helgi it seemed that a body hoard was only satisfactory when it challenged the mountains with the shadow it cast.

In his dream Sváva stood in front of him, a pale child in a dirt-stained shift.

She spoke: ‘Better not to pray than to sacrifice too much. One gift always calls for another.’

Had he killed too many, been too keen in his wars, given too many slaves to the gods? What were they asking for now?

‘My darling,’ he said, ‘I did not think he would ask for you. I did not think the god would take you.’

The girl moved her right hand from where it rested on her left hip, up across her body, a back-handed gesture almost of dismissal.

All around him strange symbols sang and hummed in the air. Runes. He counted them. There were eight. He was in his bed and wet with sweat. He could not get up. It was as if he was oppressed by a vast weight, and his chest could not rise.

Something was crawling across his skin like a snake – a rune, a single upright stave with two others sloping away from it. It creaked and groaned like a rope on a ship, like a rope taut with a dead man’s weight. He knew its name. Ansuz. He lifted his hand to touch it where it writhed on his face. He saw gallows, black lines on a hill against an angry dusk. Phrases of poetry went screaming through his head like hurled spears. He saw a rider hurtling across a plain, a girl in a garden under a metal moon, a well and, next to it, the headless corpse of a man. Mimir’s well, the well of prophecy. He knew that this was no ordinary dream; this was a communication from the gods.

The rhymes rattled through his mind like pebbles down a staircase, the runes singing around him, calling out to him to embrace them.

Know how to cut them, know how to read them
,

Know how to stain them, know how to prove them
,

Know how to call them, know how to score them
,

Know how to send them, know how to send them
.

He looked at the rune, the gallows rune, creaking and twisting on his skin and within his thoughts. The rune was wrapped around him, constricting him, crushing the breath from his body. He felt a tightness at his throat, all his weight, all his consciousness, suspended from his neck. He knew whose rune that was. Odin, Odin the treacherous, Odin the ruination, lord of the burned earth.

‘This is the meaningful letter,’ said Sváva, ‘though it is not what it seems. This is the deceiver’s rune. Your rune, for you deceived me.’

‘Sváva, I did not know.’

He was reaching out for his girl but he could not touch her. He could not sit up no matter how hard he tried.

‘I have your prophecy, father, the one the god promised you.’

‘Sváva, Sváva!’

The pale child looked down at him. ‘If three become one, then the ravener will come,’ she said. ‘Find her and give her the protection of the dark.’

Sváva turned back to the darkness and sleep pulled Helgi down.

As Jehan headed east, the rain was unceasing, turning the fields to mires and the trade tracks to swamps. The Seine was in flood, the current too strong to row against for long, even if the Vikings could have scouted out a decent boat. The stars were invisible under the cloud by night, so when they came to forks in the river they either guessed the way or waited for day and took direction from the sun. Jehan knew that the Vikings might be seen as raiders and told Fastarr to hide his splendid shield with its hammer motif and on the plainer shields chalked the sign of the cross. The berserkers agreed to this but would not cut their cloaks in the Frankish fashion. Ofaeti said he’d rather die of a spear than a frozen arse.

The Transversale to Lyon was a good old Roman road but fraught with danger. When they met travellers he told them the Norsemen were Christian converts, protecting him on a pilgrimage to Rome. The eleven proved their worth. Bandits lurked on the road, and about forty of them barred the way near Auxerre, too scared to attack but testing the northerners mettle. They found the mettle in good order and scattered when Ofaeti screamed for his men to charge. There were easier targets than a troop of well-armed and battle-bold northerners, and the thieves disappeared as quickly as they had come. But it was all Jehan could do to talk one group of merchants – a hundred or so strong – from attacking the Norsemen, so when they got to the Saône, which flowed in the right direction, they took the broad river south.

Huddled on a stolen river barge – hardly more than a glorified raft – wrapped in their cloaks and travelling by night when the moon allowed, the Norsemen were less conspicuous than they had been on the open highway. The abbeys they passed were poor and mean-looking and the Vikings took Jehan’s word that there were no great bargains to be made there. They didn’t even make use of the pilgrim hostelries the abbeys kept for travellers both religious and secular; they were too wary of the reception they might get. The human remains they carried with them were kept in a sack which was towed on an improvised raft of branches because of the smell. Jehan had to admire the Vikings’ woodworking skills. The little raft took them next to no time to make and even he – who had spent most of his life inside a monastery – could see it was better built than the one they had stolen from the riverbank.

The Vikings fed him nothing, but he wasn’t at all hungry. He drank from the river and felt he needed nothing more to sustain him. This was just part of God’s blessing, the same one that had cured him of his affliction, he was sure. The words of Romans 14: 17 came to him
: For why the realm of God is not meat and drink but rightwiseness and joy in the Holy Spirit
. The Holy Spirit did really seem to be filling him. Sometimes the rain was so heavy it was almost painful, but he was not cold and he put back his head to drink it in, enjoy its taste and delight in the looseness and power of his limbs.