Fenrir (53 page)

And then the runes came shrieking upon her, the wolf crashed in, and the world went wild.

In the penitential cell Jehan’s chest was wet with drool. The odours of the battles on the beach were all he smelled – iron on the breeze, a salt that didn’t come from the sea but from blood. Horses were there, the deep smell of their sweat seeming so strong that it clung to his skin.

He broke free of his bonds, tearing them with his nails, biting them, gulping down mouthfuls of rope, unable to stop the instinct to swallow what he bit. Jehan scrabbled on the floor, rolled and stretched, turning his head round and round as if that might clear his thoughts. He stood but that felt wrong. Instead he crawled on all fours around the cell. Something was happening to his legs. His knees felt very odd, too flexible, as if they could bend the wrong way; the whole geometry of his body seemed unfamiliar and strange. He couldn’t stop stretching his back, which felt too long for his body. His shoulders too seemed wrong, restricted, though large and powerful.

He stroked the thick hair on his arms. His teeth were large, and he ran his tongue back and forth in his mouth, picking out the shape of the canines. It was as if he had a mouth full of boat nails. Jehan put his hand to his brow and ran his fingers through his hair. When he brought his hand down he could smell blood on it. He examined his fingers. They had become long and muscular, the nails talons. He had cut himself just by touching his head.

Jehan was unaccountably hot. He panted and slavered, writhing on the flagstones trying to take their coolness in. His skin crawled on his skull; his cock was hard and he seethed with lust, though he fought to force it from his mind. And he was thirsty, terribly thirsty. When had he last drunk? He couldn’t remember. Days before.

The confessor breathed deeply, trying to find himself in the thought storm. There was a screaming inside him, a sound like that of an animal caught in a trap, of something scraped and scratched, like metal on stone. An aggression he had never known was in him. He laughed.

‘I am such a thing that will tear the enemies of God.’

No
, he told himself. He fought for clarity. The truth, when it came to him, was terrible. He had been cursed. Some pagan, perhaps the one who had forced that vile and bloody mass on him, had cursed him, and he was powerless to resist. And God had let this happen to him.
Why?
Because he had not been holy enough, not tried hard enough, not sacrificed enough of his mind to Jesus.

He came up to a crouch, feeling the strength in his limbs. He could break the door, he knew, splinter it to nothing, but he would not. How long had he been in that cell? The question came into his head and vanished again, meaning nothing to him any more.

The power in him was from the devil and he would not use it. It was a test. His senses sang. His teeth were spikes, sharp and ready and his nails were blades, itching to tear and kill. He stretched and clenched his fingers – they were tense with the desire for murder.

But he would not.

‘I will not be this thing,’ he said out loud, his voice rasping like a rain-swollen door on the flagstones. He prayed: ‘Jesus, hear me now. Jesus, strike me down. Afflict me again, Lord. Blind me and wither my limbs. These hands turn only to evil, these eyes profit me nothing. Return me to the piety of darkness.’

From down on the beach he could hear someone calling.

‘Vali, help me! Feileg, I am dying.’

He recognised the voice. It was the Lady Aelis. He remembered the Viking camp, her touch on his shoulder.

‘Help me now!’

She was calling him, he knew. And then something seemed to break open his consciousness like it was a walnut. The scream, the animal howl, shaking his thoughts to nothing.

‘Vali!’ He saw himself as the fit young man he had never been, walking on a hillside hand in hand with a girl. She was blonde but he couldn’t see her face. The sun was on the meadows, and the buzz of bees was in the air. He heard voices.

‘Prince, prince!’ A man was next to him – a big old Norseman with a battle-scarred face – but he didn’t recognise him. ‘Where is your spear? Where is your bow?’

The man looked angry but Jehan was not afraid. Was this a vision sent by the devil? It felt so real.

The mountain seemed to fade away and he was by a waterfront, a small landing stage. Out to sea three Viking ships sped towards the shore. She was in front of him again, the blonde girl, holding his hands, looking into his eyes.

‘Kill a hundred of them for me,’ she said.

‘I have known you before.’

‘I have always known you.’

‘I will find you.’

‘That is your destiny,’ she said.

Jehan came back to himself. The corner of the cell was rank with shit and piss; vomited blood lay all over the floor. How long had he been there? A long time, he sensed. He heard the woman’s voice: ‘I am dying.’ He felt tormented and hot as if he had a head full of flies. ‘I am dying.’

It was time to leave. The door cracked under his first blow. He hit it again and the wood gave some more. The effort of smashing the door bored and frustrated him, and he looked up at the broken roof. It had not occurred to him to climb before. The walls were smooth so Jehan jumped, his strong, long fingers forcing their way through the thatch. He pulled himself up and through it.

The fat moon hung above him, the sky swarmed with stars and he felt as if all of creation had turned out to watch him, as if the night was a city and he was its champion going out to battle under its anxious eyes. The thick beat of his heart was in his ears, the scent of blood in his nostrils and the thatch cool beneath him.

He looked out over the silver sand. Something was happening. Figures were on the beach. His eyes were sharp and he saw clearly in the dark. A man struggled with a large burden. Jehan’s ears picked up the man’s exertion, the coughs and retches of the woman in his arms. Next to him stood six figures, upright but their presences dull. It was the sense that had awoken in him in the cloister, the ability to feel the quality and the direction of attention of all those around him, to feel the focus of their thoughts without even looking at them. In some strange way, he knew, the men down there were different to normal humans. If he closed his eyes he could feel how focused the man who was pulling the woman from the water was, feel the desperation of the woman in his arms, almost as if she was fighting to regain her senses and bring her mind back to the beach and sanity. The men who waited by the water, though, the six who watched impassively as the figures struggled in front of them, were not there. In some sense, the werewolf knew, they were both present and not.

Across the sand strode a man, a curved sword flashing in the light of the moon. And there was a woman, her body reeking with blood and filth, her hands stretched to the couple who staggered from the water.

Jehan leaped from the roof into the dunes and made his way down to the beach under the burning moon, Slinking low to the sand, he moved forward as swiftly as the shadow of a bird in flight.

Aelis fell back under the collision of images. She seemed to tumble through a thicket of thorns, her skin lighting up in agony. Fear was now a sensation she could touch, cold and hard. She saw a brilliant blue sky above her, felt the pull of the tide as it sucked at the sand beneath her feet, saw visions of a man sacrificed, hanging from a tree whose branches were the darkness of night and whose leaves were the stars. She felt his expiring heart beating as her heart and a need, stronger than hunger, stronger than thirst, a compulsion, to become what she could be. There were faces on the beach, and she knew that she knew them, but she couldn’t remember who they were under the runes that fell on her like a torrent. Eight found eight to become sixteen – purring, singing, shouting and rejoicing inside her.

On the River Indre there had been a sort of rapids in the river a morning’s walk from her hall. In the summer the children loved to swim in them, to shoot down the river in the rush of white water, shoving off from the rocks with arms and feet, the world flashing by in glimpses of sunlight. They were terrified and ecstatic all at once. One summer, though, after heavy rain, she had gone there with her cousin Matilde. Matilde wasn’t brave enough to swim in such a flow but Aelis had gone in. She’d quickly realised that swimming was impossible as she was forced forwards through the raging water, throwing up her arms to protect her head, hoping to live. She had the same feeling there on the beach but magnified many many times – that of being caught in a terrible flood that tore and pulled at her, driving all thought away other than the bursting need to survive. Here, though, it was not one flow that battered and tormented her but many, sixteen flows, surging to meet each other in the pool of her mind. The runes inside her were calling to the runes that had lived in the witch and a rush of bright symbols poured towards her through the dark. She could not distinguish, in that frenzied moment, the visions from the real, the past from the present, nor recall exactly what had happened on the beach.

The wolf, the thing, had killed Moselle, she thought. The knight had slumped to the sand at the moment Hugin had decapitated his own sister. Moselle had then tried to stand, to fling himself at Hugin. Aelis felt sure he had thought the sorcerer was going to attack her and, brave Moselle, he had tried to throw his drained and starving body between her and the Raven’s sword. Something else took him, though, dragging him into the sea in an explosion of flailing limbs, water and blood. The wolf. The wolf seemed crazed by the kill, tearing into the knight’s body, oblivious of everything around it.

A figure came into Aelis’s view. It was Ofaeti, his eyes vacant, the big man staggering about like a hungover drunk awaking in an unrecognised place. There were shouts from up the beach. The Franks who had been bewitched had woken up and were pouring onto the shore, swinging their swords as they came. There were Vikings too – the fat one’s companions.

Aelis looked down at her feet. There was the head of the witch, like a worm-eaten nub of wood. Against herself she bent to touch it. Her body felt sore and broken, her mind overwhelmed by the cascade of sensations tumbling through it.

Hugin took off his sword belt and lay it on the sand. He had something around his neck – a pebble worn as a pendant. He undid it and used the cords that tied his scabbard to his sword belt to extend the length of the thong that held the pebble. The berserkers had recovered from their enchantment and were circling the great wolf, Astarth moving left in the water, Egil to the right, Fastarr facing it, while Ofaeti hunted through the bodies on the beach for a weapon.

‘A fine time for weaving, crowman,’ said Ofaeti.

‘This is a wolf-fetter,’ said Raven.

He finished his work then sprinted towards the wolf through the water. The creature was too concerned with feeding to see him coming. Hugin leaped on its back, trying to tie the pendant about its neck, but was flung off, flying clear of the water to land on the sand with a heavy thump.

‘What a death this will be!’ said Astarth, sidling towards the wolf. ‘Come on, come on. My place in a thousand sagas beckons me!’

Now Aelis saw the werewolf properly, its night-black fur and green-disc eyes, like something made not born, standing on its back legs, its front limbs more like arms, its hands talons. It was tall, half as big again as even Ofaeti.

‘Come on!’ called Fastarr. ‘This death will see me at Odin’s right hand, to feast for ever.’

Fastarr talked of living for ever but the wolf’s snarl brought out the mortal in him, sent the chill of oblivion shivering through his bones. He dropped the spear from his hand, his shaking fingers traitors to his will.

The wolf sprang.

Fastarr recovered himself enough to swing a punch at the animal’s head but was too late. A blood geyser burst in the surf. Astarth died next, a rag of meat in the jaws of the snarling wolf, which shook the life from him as easily as a gull shakes water from seaweed. It threw him down to guzzle at his ravaged body, driving its muzzle into his chest, ripping away his flesh with its terrible teeth.

Now the Franks came howling in, their swords and spears at the ready, around fifteen on foot and a couple bareback on their horses. They smashed through the bloody waves towards the creature. It picked the first to arrive from the sand and flung him back towards the rest, knocking two men down. A horsemen hit it at the gallop, but the spear was torn from his hand, his horse sent crashing back down, its limbs broken.

The knights were brave and fell in to the attack, but the wolf was like a demon, thought Aelis. It was huge, twice her size, its twisted body like the unbaked clay figure of a man that had been stretched and pulled by a naughty child. She knew it from her dreams.

Egil had arrived. He stood at the water’s edge, weighing his sword in his hand. He took a pace back and pointed at the werewolf.

‘I know that I am to die but know this slaughter beast that seasons many have I …’ The fine words would not come. ‘Bollocks,’ he said, ‘let’s have it.’ He leapt at the wolf but the creature rounded on him, biting away his head and the shoulder of his sword arm as its muzzle drove him down into the bloody water.

Ofaeti had picked up the Raven’s sword and plunged towards the fight howling out the name of his father and grandfather, telling the wolf he was from a noble line of killers. ‘This day, creature, you have met your match!’