Fenrir (57 page)

He had left Louis sleeping in the darkness. Now he was Hugin, sharp-eyed and strong, bound to the god who had come to him in the tomb dark of the cave. Ritual and self-denial became the basis of his life. He tended to his sister, found the mushrooms and roots she needed for her trances, hunted, fed and grew ever stronger. It was as if the plants of the mountain could speak to him. He knew which to pick to cure, which to send himself spiralling into trances of gods and monsters. Munin shared the magic she dug from the darkness, allowing the god to touch and bless her brother. In the sightless space, the air wet and the rock cold, Hugin felt the corpse god hold him and whisper his name: ‘Odin.’ Hugin knew what that meant. He had been claimed as a servant of death.

He saw things too. The cave seemed to grow and to flicker with the light of candles. He stood before a gigantic wolf, sheltering his sister from its teeth. He saw a huge warrior, one-eyed and fierce, thrusting a spear into the wolf on the final day. It was coming, he knew, the wolf to kill the god, drawn on by a terrible rune. He saw it writhing in the air in front of him and he knew that it lived inside a person, as the runes seemed to live inside his sister. It hissed with threat like the cobras which the merchants had brought to the monastery to delight the monks.

They had been on the mountain four summers when his sister emerged from the cave and gestured to the valley with her eyes. His bond to her was now so strong it was without words. He only had to touch her to feel what she felt and see what she saw.

‘It is waking in her,’ she said, ‘the rune that draws on the god-killer.’ He knew she was talking about the wolf and the girl who led him to his fate.

‘Then she must die,’ Hugin said, as much in his mind as with his voice.

‘Yes.’

Munin had stood up, her body frail and her hair wild, and she had headed down towards the valley. Hugin had followed, wary. He had the sword, he had his bow and he had a spear he had cut and shaped in the fire, but he had not been off the mountain since he was a boy. They went down through the pine and the fir to a wood of birch and ash, where they stayed for a season, his sister calling the birds to her, using her agony as a gateway to insight. Hugin had feared every dusk, black wings falling out of the summer sky to tear and rip at her flesh. Norsemen were in the country, killing and burning, but when they discovered Hugin and his sister in the wood, they bowed down before them and asked for blessing. Then they stayed to protect them, to watch as the birds came down on the body of the sorceress.

Hugin had made a shield for her eyes with wood and twine, but she couldn’t find the woman who held the howling rune, the rune that would draw the wolf. He begged her not to do what he knew she intended. He put himself in her place, suffering and screaming under the beaks of the birds, but it was no good. The dead god wanted more, so she had given her eyes, and Munin had found her. She would be in Paris when the town burned. They had travelled to tell Sigfrid his destiny lay at the little town on the Seine and the king had chosen to believe them.

Then the wolfman had begun to harry them. He seemed untouchable by Munin’s magic, though it never occurred to the Raven or his sister that he had the Wolfstone, the fragment of the rock called Scream against which all magic was useless. He was not, however, untouchable by Hugin’s sword. Twice Raven thought he had killed the wolfman but twice he had returned to oppose him.

On the riverbank, where he had caught Aelis, he had fought the wolfman for the final time. Had he known it, he would face a tougher struggle – with himself as he had been and would wish to be. When he had found Aelis something had moved inside him, as if he – Hugin, servant of death – was a clay figure which the sight of the lady had cracked to reveal something else entirely. When he had put on the Wolfstone the Raven had fallen to dust and he, Louis, had stood in the dawn light of the forest with the little merchant at his side and known that his life had been a long deception. His memory was clear now. There had been no fever in his sister when they were young. She had killed her parents with magic and bound him to her will. He had not even been her brother; he was just a monastery boy the wild woman had used.

The wild woman who had demanded he kill the abbot for the cure had actually demanded no such thing. The girl, the little girl, had entered his mind, made him love her and do her will. The wild woman was her servant, not her teacher. The girl had known what was in her – death, suffering, terrible trials – and how to awaken it. And she had brought him with her on that journey. For what?

Ysabella – Munin – had come into his dreams and displaced Aelis of Paris and the women she had been in lives before. But the enchantment had crumbled and Hugin now understood clearly what he had seen during his travels with the dead god. Aelis was the woman he had died for when he had lived before. The thing that had called itself his sister had taken her place and stolen his love for her. And he had helped her, gone willingly into the darkness with her, lain at her side and journeyed in his mind to places where she might deepen her enchantment. All that had crumbled away.

He had lived before, he knew, and he had died before – for that girl he had pursued and harried, tortured and nearly killed. Under a witch’s enchantment he had betrayed a bond that was stronger than death.

He sensed the true identity of his sister and who the wild woman had been. He felt that if only his thoughts would clear a little more he would know their names. But they did not clear. All he knew was that, as Munin’s enchantment faded, hate had come into his heart where there had once been love. She had moved to a different agenda, unguessable motivations. Had she wanted to die? Well, now she had.

He guessed what had happened. Munin had set out to control the runes, believing that by suffering and devotion she could possess them without them destroying her, and could devise strategies that might let her live. He had no doubt she had not wanted to die at first. But the eight runes that she had taken from the dead god had lit up in her and called for their sisters, and their longing was not for life but for death. Munin had lost herself in those rituals and woken something else – the fragment of a god that sought to be whole and to die, sacrificing himself to himself, slaughtered in the realm of men so he might live in the realm of gods.

But why had she needed him, Louis? Why keep him so close? He knew that he would die violently; she had foreseen it. But was there a purpose to that death? She had wanted the god to come to earth in her and to die, to have the knowledge of death. What was his part in that? It didn’t matter. She had wanted Aelis dead. So that meant he would strive to keep her alive.

Hugin knelt at the edge of the sea and watched Ofaeti return from the monastery with two horses laden with arms and armour. The Viking wore a long Norman cloak with the richer, shorter cloak of a Frankish nobleman over the top. The rest of his clothes too were Frankish – a blue silk tunic with a vest of ratskin around his shoulders. At his belt he wore a fine sword. Ofaeti might almost have been a Frank, but no Frank was ever that big or that red-haired. He looked like what he was – a pirate in stolen finery. The merchant was behind him, similarly dressed, leading a string of six horses.

Ofaeti waved to Raven and called, ‘I am ready to fulfil my oath to the lady.’

Free of Munin’s enchantment, the Raven’s mind had fallen in on itself through the magical gateways that had opened in the cave at the corpse god’s side. An image came to him. He was on a mountainside; he was holding a woman’s hands, unable to look into her eyes for fear his love for her would show and prompt a rejection. He heard his own voice in his mind, an echo from a lifetime before:
I will always protect you
.

He nodded to the big Viking. ‘And I am ready to fulfil mine,’ he said.

‘Let’s go and bag us a wolf, then,’ said Ofaeti. He took one last look at the beached ships, shook his head and followed the tracks of the monster across the wet sand and into the trees, the Raven and Leshii close behind.

Aelis sat next to Jehan in the long light of evening, her fair hair a halo in the low sun. All the colours of autumn were about them, though Jehan was not cold. He had a Lombard’s thick cloak around his shoulders, a good woollen shirt on his body, fine trousers and good boots. They were not the first people the wild men had attacked, though they were the last.

A smudge of memory was in his mind – faint echoes of distant bells, the chanting of prayers, Brother Guillaume’s incessant coughing during mass, the feeling of restriction, of limbs that wanted to move but couldn’t. Other recollections seemed sharper: bright water, a green riverbank and a girl, her hair long, almost white beneath the sun, laughing and splashing. He had loved her for so long, he knew, missed her for so long. Yet none of it mattered. He was there, beside her, the past and the future swallowed by the ravenous present, the sensual instant, the thrill of her touch, her eyes blue against the scarlet autumn, the forest hanging in a million wet jewels of light.

He touched the stone at his neck and she moved her hand onto his to tell him to leave it where it was. A memory of himself came back to him and he had the strong urge to cast it away as an idolatrous image, but he did not. He felt the wolf he had been like a skin he had not quite shed. When he moved he sometimes seemed impelled by a raging force and he had the urge to run snarling through the trees. The stone, though, would save him. Some sense told him this was his lifeline to sanity, the key that had released him from the slaughterhouse of his thoughts.

They hunted together – Aelis taking one of the bandits’ bows, Jehan using stealth and surprise to kill a deer with a spear. That night they cooked the meat and lay in a clearing under the forest stars.

Jehan had a sense of what he had been – a man who had loved a woman so strongly that he had come back from the dead to find her – but could not put it into words. His connection to Aelis was based on a feeling worse than hunger, closer to the fear of suffocation. She was the air to him, and he could not think that he would ever be apart from her.

They had watched the men look for them throughout the summer – the fat one like a giant, the crowman and the merchant – but they had not allowed themselves to be seen, just moved into the trees. The men had stayed a long time searching the woods but had not found them. The lady walked among them unseen, sitting by their fire, stroking their horses, even eating their food, before coming back to join Jehan. She did not want them to be discovered, so they would not be discovered.

Then one day when the air was cold Aelis had kissed him and taken his hand, leading him through the trees for miles. They came to a house, a low hut with a turf roof. No one was inside, though the remains of a life were there – a table overturned, a chair smashed and a straw bed. Someone had left quickly, and Jehan did not wonder why. The forest was a lawless place and the lives lived there were precarious. Aelis found a bow and made a fire for the hearth; Jehan laid down the pack he was carrying and opened it to find the meat and roots inside. Then they cooked their food and sat on the bed late into the evening, falling asleep in each other’s arms.

In the hut Jehan slept and dreamed of nothing – not God, not the wolf, not the cripple he had been, the man he was nor the woman by his side. He was at peace.

He awoke, feeling the late autumn cold on his skin. She had been up before him and was out collecting mushrooms. He heard her at the door, coming down the low step, putting the basket she had found in the hut down on the table.

He stretched out on the bed and opened his eyes. At first he thought the sunlight had bleached his vision away. But there was no sunlight. He was inside.

‘You are awake?’ It was Aelis’s voice.

Jehan blinked and blinked again.

‘Jehan?’

Jehan swallowed. Then he put his hand to the stone at his neck.

‘I cannot see,’ he said.

They’d searched the forest for far too long. The sorcerer and Ofaeti were relatively young men. Not so Leshii. He would have found the going hard even if he’d had any enthusiasm for the hunt, but with so much plunder in his bags, he was in a state of terror the whole time. The woods were full of bandits and worse. Who knew what monsters lurked in the deep wood? Ofaeti and the Raven had been puzzled and frustrated. They found the wolf’s tracks, even its strange spoor, but never saw the beast itself.

For a couple of days they lay low, aware there were forest men in the area. Leshii had six horses with him, trailing behind his calm, reliable mule. Ofaeti had wanted to cut them free, saying they would draw any bandit with their mess and their noise. The Raven, though, had waved away his objections.

‘Let the merchant keep his plunder,’ he’d said. ‘Our fates are tight woven; woodsmen will not bring us to death.’

So it seemed the next day, when they came upon the bodies.

Ofaeti had bent to examine the dead men, while Leshii checked their bags and pouches.

‘These men did not die warriors’ deaths,’ said Ofaeti.

‘Plague?’ said Leshii, backing away from a corpse.

‘In a circle, all at once?’ said Ofaeti. ‘A strange plague that does that. Is this Seid magic, sorcerer?’

The Raven shrugged. He crouched in front of the body of a bandit and touched his face.