Fenrir (39 page)

Her heart beat fast and she was sweating despite the cold. She was terrified, though not of the things that stalked her nor the empty night and the strange men who surrounded her. Then of what? She tried to give it a name. Fate? Destiny? Or just time, like a weight that hampered her every movement? She felt a sense of the vast darkness before her birth, something that had been a blank to her but in which ghostly faces now seemed to loom. Everything she had known was wrong, or rather more complicated and dangerous than she had guessed.

And what of the man she had held in her arms in that vision? What of the Raven? There, by the riverbank, with the fire in front of her, the damp of the spring night cold on the back of her head, the discomforts of twigs and stones beneath her, the fishermen in front of her and the merchant nervously scanning the sky for birds, she was terrified of him. But she had had a vision, a vision that had seemed more real than the boat, the river, Leshii or his mule. She felt so strongly she was linked to that man she had seen in her arms by something that went beyond concerns of property, family or social position, the same thing that had made Judith run away with Iron Arm, the same thing the little merchant, the one who sat before her like a spirit of the fire in his turban, wide trousers and tapering beard, had wanted but never felt, the thing that the fishermen had never even contemplated, tied to the facts of net and boat, famine and plenty.

Aelis had felt it in her heart since she was a child. She was incomplete. Now she knew why she had gone wandering in the night at Loches, why her dreams were full of searching and never finding. She had been looking for him. To what purpose? So she might die? No. Then what? She had no idea, or couldn’t name it to herself. Still she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was for him she had walked barefoot by the dark River Indre at night, for him she had run through the corridors and caves of her dreams. That felt more terrible to her than anything she could imagine, and tears ran down her face as she watched the fire.

In the hills a wolf was calling. Somehow Aelis seemed to understand what it was saying. She spoke the words as she watched the fire: ‘I am here. Where are you?’

The Raven’s hands had shaken as he’d nocked the arrow to kill the monk at the door. But he had let fly regardless, and the shaft had gone straight through the man’s throat where the neck meets the chest. His hands had shaken too as he’d led Grettir’s men in to cut down the monks singing at the altar and ended the song of ages with the hacks and slashes of his terrible curved sword. He’d trembled as he’d taken the monks to the pool. Nine of them were to die that way – one for each day Odin hung on the tree at the well of wisdom. He had beaten them, stamped on them, kicked and subdued them until he could tie them to the columns, each one secured at the neck with the tricky, sticky triple knot, the dead lord’s necklace, the knot that slips and sticks, then slips no more.

Nine to die that way, the rest butchered and burned, bludgeoned and stabbed by the war band. He knew the old man, of course he knew him. He had sought him out, told the Vikings that none of the older men were to be killed. They’d found the monk on his knees in the little chapel. Hugin had not wanted to look into his eyes but he had done so anyway. The not wanting to was the point of the magic.

‘Father Michael.’

‘How do you know my name, abomination?’

‘It’s me, Louis.’

‘I know no Louis.’

‘You were my instructor. I killed the abbot and ran away.’

The old man shook his head. ‘Louis? Is it you? What has happened to you, child?’

‘I am a servant of the old gods now. I am your death.’

The monk looked up at him. ‘You will show me kindness. I always showed you kindness. Intercede for me here, boy.’

The Raven had seized him and dragged him to the pool. The old man had taken some time to die, though not as long as the fat cook or the master of scrolls or the boys or the two who were still living when Hugin brought Jehan to the dark waters. Nine to die. The Raven had only killed eight by evening; the war band had got the rest. The traveller, Jehan, made nine – provided, Hugin had no doubt, by the hanged god himself to make up the magical number.

The old man’s death had been very hard on Hugin. Father Michael had taken him under his wing as a boy, turned a blind eye if he slipped back down the valley to see his family. But it being hard was the point. Hugin knew that terror, humiliation, horror and shame were gateways through which magic might step. So he had borne the deaths, the thrashing and the choking, the pleading and the desperate psalms sung through throats tormented by rope. And the god had not granted him a vision.

But then, as Hugin sat on the verge of weeping in the dark of the church, the traveller had come, and the Raven had drugged him and taken him to the waters.

Show me my enemy, the sorcerer had thought. And as the bloated faces of the hanged and the drowned stared back at him, as the choked psalm had grated on his ears, the god had granted his wish. The traveller had torn the rope from around his neck as if it was the poorest thread and set upon the monks beside him.

Hugin had heard him speak a name: ‘Fenrisulfr.’

The Raven had known then that it was under way – the twilight of the gods. Ragnarok was playing out on earth again, an event so cataclysmic that its echoes went backwards in time, its conflicts and terrors leaking into the world of men as history spun towards the terrible day when it would happen for real.

The god in his earthly form was to die, Hugin and his sister with him. There, rending the flesh of the fettered monks, was the thing that was to do it. He had thought the wolf would be just that – a wolf – but now he saw its spirit had come to earth as a man. He’d asked Odin to show him his enemy; he’d sacrificed the monks, the war band, his own human feelings to the hanged god and thought he had been shown nothing. Not so. The god had sat the wolf beside him in the church, put him at his mercy, and Hugin had failed to act, failed to save his god, himself and, most importantly, his sister. He knew he could not kill it – that was not his destiny and as much had been revealed to him – but he should have imprisoned the thing when he had the chance, dragged it unconscious through the waters of the pool to the caves beyond and sealed it in there for all time.

The prophecy his sister had given her eyes to see was clear. The girl would lead the wolf to the god then the god would die. The wolf had torn, the monks had screamed and their screams had rippled onto the waters of the pool sacred to Christ, sacred to Odin, Mercury, Wodanaz and whatever other names those who sensed the god’s power had attributed to it down the centuries.

Munin had heard the screams, sitting in front of her fire of oak and ash in the forest outside Paris, and she had allowed her mind to travel through the wide darkness to settle inside her brother’s thoughts, for the two to be one person.

‘Sister?’ Hugin sensed her presence, a fleeting idea of that torn and bloody face in his mind but, stronger than that, of things that lived inside her, the runes. Her runes were there. He felt a prickle on his skin. His movements seemed hampered and painful; his head ached and the image of Christ on the cross came to him, the crown of thorns about his head.

A sensation of distress swept over him and he knew his sister had failed to kill the girl.

‘Sister?’

It was her. He felt warm and comforted by her presence. He saw a picture in his mind, a wagon with a bright star above it. He knew this was Odin’s Wagon, the name of the pattern of stars next to which the Lodestar shone, the one that indicated the way north. An image of Aelis and of a city on a promontory at the junction of two rivers came to him. He had been there before, he was sure, or passed through. Yes, he recognised it; how could he not? It was the settlement at Aldeigjuborg in Gardarike, the realm of towns, to the east. He had been there once, at the invitation of the ruler Helgi, to try to help him interpret his dreams. His sister had refused to go with him and Hugin had not thought that strange at the time.

Nothing had come of the meeting but he couldn’t forget the town, with its huge earth ramparts and walls of wood. He recalled the massive burial mounds behind it, which were both the graves of its kings and defensive works, and the people, who had greeted him as a friend and an ally, and not run from him or shrank away. So the girl had gone there? In which case there was a chance of killing her. Since Helgi had once sought the advice of Hugin, and through him of his sister, he might be persuaded to hand the Parisian woman over.

The Raven thought of Helgi. He sought the lady. He was known as the prophet. Could he be the god come to earth? Hugin thought he would have recognised him when he met him but what if the god hadn’t discovered his own identity yet. If Odin’s true nature was hidden from himself, how could a mortal be expected to discover it? Helgi might be the one. And he had made efforts to bring her to him, hadn’t he, sent envoys to Eudes? If the lady went to Ladoga disaster could ensue. The wolf would surely follow. He needed to intercept her somehow.

He looked into the waters. The wolf was feeding. A rhyme from an ancient prophecy came into his head:

I saw there wading in black waters

Oath breakers, murderers and workers of ill
,

There the dread biter sucked the blood of the slain

And the wolf tore men, would you know yet more?

It was coming true, the prophecy that had been told to him by the woman who had led him and his sister to the hills, awakened what was within them and led them to the dead god. The wolf was free. He had missed his chance with him, maybe even failed to recognise Odin himself. That meant there was very little time now. It had occurred to him to put an arrow into the thing that guzzled, snuffled and sucked at the flesh of the bound monks. He knew it would be useless, though. The wolf was to kill a god, and the Raven and his sister, as that god’s servants, would die with him. Arrows couldn’t harm it. To protect his sister, to keep her from dying with the god, he needed to kill the lady as quickly as he could. He had horses; he knew where the lady was going; there was no reason to delay.

All he could have hoped for at Saint-Maurice was to see the wolf, to know his enemy. He had achieved that, and not in any vision, as he had anticipated. He ran from the crypt without looking back.

‘We should go to Miklagard. We could exchange this lot for coin there. We’d get the best deal by far.’

It was dreadfully cold and the horses had laboured for a day into a stiff north wind, sharp with sleet. Now they had found some shelter in a turn of the valley and had decided to camp. They made a fire from the wood they had split from the monastery benches, piled on the clothes they had stolen and sat eating some fowl they had decided were free of poison.

‘At Miklagard the merchants wouldn’t even bother to barter. We’d be up to our nuts in dihrams,’ said Egil.

‘No,’ said Ofaeti. ‘If the men of the church there discover these treasures in our hands, they will just kill us. The whole thing is fraught with peril. Home, I say, then to Haithabu with enough men to make any pirates or churchmen think twice. Shit!’

‘Shit what?’

‘Franks! Someone must have escaped the abbey and got word to them.’

Two hundred paces away, where the valley twisted to resume its main course, seven horsemen were approaching at the trot.

‘Shield wall?’

‘With ten of us? We’d be skittled. Bollocks to that. Get up the slope – they can’t ride up there.’

‘What about the stuff?’

The Norsemen had their minds made up for them by the charge of the knights.

To Jehan the whole action happened as if in a dream. He saw the Norsemen flailing and cursing, trying to drag the gold-laden packhorses up the side of the valley; he heard the hooves of the charge thumping through the ground, the cries of the riders, the whistling wind. Then the horses were upon them, upon him.

Jehan was the only one who hadn’t moved. He just stood there transfixed. Stupid thoughts came into his head.
These are rich men. They have fine mail coats. Their shields carry the red and white thorny cross of Richard the Justiciar. These are not Franks but Burgundians
. Small details seemed more important than the fact that a fully mailed warrior was charging towards him with a sharp spear levelled at his head. Jehan had a sword at his belt but he didn’t draw it. At the last second the knight thought better of risking breaking his spear on an unarmed opponent and raised it. An enormous thump drove all the wind from Jehan’s body, snapped back his head and smashed him to the ground. The man had spurred his horse on at a flat-out gallop and ridden Jehan down. Two other horses followed the first and both struck him, one with a hoof to the ribs and the other on his head.

For a second Jehan was convinced he was dead. He felt torpid and slow, as if he’d eaten and drunk too much at a monastery lunch. He was sated, full to bursting with food. And yet he couldn’t remember eating. He had a headache and felt drowsy, although he was sure these weren’t the effects of being knocked down and trampled. The cold didn’t mean anything to him – the spikes of ice in the biting rain, the stinging wind, all meant nothing. He was sleepy. He had eaten, he was sure, and now he needed to rest.