Wolfsangel (6 page)

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Authors: M. D. Lachlan

BOOK: Wolfsangel
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They tried to flee, but Authun, even at thirty-five, was too fast for them. The king had noticed as soon as the men appeared that both were wearing costly byrnies. Thus encumbered, they died before they had run twenty paces.
He cleaned his sword on the fallen men’s clothes and returned to Saitada and the bleeding bandit. Working quickly, he took out a length of walrus cord from his pouch and tied off the man’s arm to stop the bleeding. The bandit was unconscious, which suited Authun. Saitada looked at the two bodies and then at the king. He found himself explaining.
‘If I’d let them go they would have come back when we were sleeping, perhaps in numbers,’ he said, though he knew she couldn’t understand. ‘They’re scavengers. They never paid for those horses. See the byrnies? They’re taken from the bodies of brave fools who came to steal the witches’ treasure, treasure that is only there to draw fools on to death. They use them in their magic then they throw them from the rock.’
The rock. In the distance they could see it, already huge three days’ march away. It was their destination: the Troll Wall, as tall as a thousand men standing on each other’s shoulders. It was a monstrous overhanging cliff, like something from a dream, an obstacle which blocks all further progress, something symbolic, with a resonance far beyond its daunting physical mass. He looked up at it. It was impossible, he thought, to imagine climbing it, though he had done so before. It was the only way into the witches’ caves that the sisters were willing to reveal to outsiders. The back of the mountain was even more impassable, swathed in permanent ice and perilous loose boulders, and defended by hill tribes under the witches’ thrall.
So they would have to climb - almost to the top of the Wall and then into it, to the caves. Authun knew, though, that the Wall would not be the greatest impediment to seeing the witch queen. That would be the witches themselves.
4 The Troll Wall
Between the hour of the dog
And the hour of the wolf
Between waking and sleeping
Between the light and the dark
Is the doorway of shadows
Step on, traveller,
Do not tarry on that grim threshold.
Authun read the runes someone had carved into a boulder. He was below the dizzying overhang of the Troll Wall, a cliff so high that the top was invisible in clouds. Human bones and rotting clothing lay about him but it was the inscription that made him shiver. Mundane perils of bandits and falling rocks were bad enough without thinking of what other horrors waited in the dark.
The Wall would take even the fittest warrior two weeks to climb, even if he found one of the shifting routes around the overhang at the first attempt. But no one was that lucky. It was impossible to reach the caves in one go. Rock slides moved old paths, opened new ones and closed others in a blink. You could climb almost to within touching distance of the top and then have to turn, your way impassable, another route needed. The paths were becoming fewer too, as if the mountain begrudged them and sought to shrug them off. How long would it be before there were none? Would the witches eventually be marooned and left to rot in their caves? Or were there other, hidden entrances that the sisters and their servants used?
The climb, though, wasn’t the biggest problem. The problem was, as the runes warned, sleep. For that tiny fall between waking and unconsciousness was where the witches were. People came to steal their treasure and died; people came to seek their advice and died. Very few, armed with charms and acceptable tribute, ever came back alive, and of those no one was ever stupid enough to seek a second audience. No one but Authun and his ancestors, who by divine right, it was said, could hold regular counsel with the witches. Even to the wolf king though, the prospect was daunting. This was his second visit, and he hoped he would never have to make a third.
They would have to wait for a guide, he knew, dangerous as that might be. Authun saw no point in exhausting himself and the woman by attempting the climb unaided. At the base there was the risk of bandits, but better that than the children should fall to their deaths. He made a fire, drank water from a skin, fed bread and salted fish to Saitada and made sure the bandit was just about alive.
Then he lay down and pretended to sleep for a bit to see what the woman would do. She fed her children and settled down to sleep herself. She was, as he guessed, no idiot. She wasn’t going to kill her only protector in a strange and hostile wilderness or even run away from him. The bandit was too badly injured to attempt anything. Authun wanted to take the precaution of breaking his remaining arm but feared that the shock might kill him. So instead he just tied him with walrus cord to a tree. Then he prepared for sleep properly and waited for the witch to come.
If it was the witch queen, all well and good. If it was one of the stranger sisters, well . . . Authun was a warrior so he concentrated on what he would
do
if the worst came to the worst, not what would become of him. He would try to give her the bandit, then the woman, after that himself. With luck the witch queen would appear in time to save the children.
But sleep wouldn’t come for him. The night was fine and temperate, and he was warm in his cloak, but little irritations seemed to keep him awake: a cold nose, a pebble in the small of the back, the smell of the moss on the rock, the taste of the rock even. Then he realised he was not awake but neither was he dreaming. Some of his senses seemed heightened - he could taste the cold on the air like iron, smell the difference between the flowers and the grasses; he could smell the tar and the dirt of a puddle. It was as if his hearing was slightly muted, his vision reattuned so that in the bright moon glare he could see new colours - deep metalled blues, sparkling dark greens and seams of gold on the side of the rock. He was where the witches were, he knew, in that place between waking and sleeping. He went to the tree and cut loose the bandit in preparation for what was to come.
Cries in the dark like a baby wailing. Authun wanted to prepare the woman for the arrival of the witch but they shared no language. She would just have to suffer it. He heard a voice through the rain. Where had the rain come from? He tasted it on his lips - more iron, like the way the hand smells after handling a sword, like blood.
Mother in the pen,
Mother in the pen.
It was a child’s voice, high and piping but clearly audible.
Authun didn’t want to look but knew that he must. If it was the witch queen then she would have to see him. He pulled the semi-conscious bandit to him, ready to throw him to the witch.
Down along the rock face he could see a young woman bent over as she tried to shield herself from the driving rain. She had something in her arms. It was a baby. Authun turned to Saitada. She was holding both her children close to her.
The woman staggered out from the cliff face with the baby and laid it on the ground. She took off its swaddling clothes and exposed it naked to the elements. Then she ran off into the night.
Authun stayed where he was. The witches had all sorts of tricks and he wasn’t about to fall for one so easily.
He watched as the child died. After a short while it stopped moving and then seemed to disappear. So this was magic. Authun kept his hand on his sword.
And then the rain stopped and it seemed that it was a lovely summer evening. The same woman who had left the baby appeared but this time dressed in farm girl’s finery, as if she was going to a dance. A man, also in his country best, walked past her, kissed her hand and seemed to tell her not to be late. Authun recognised the story. It was a fairy tale about an unmarried woman who had exposed her child to die rather than face the hardship of raising it. How did the story end? He couldn’t remember.
The woman smiled and sat on a stool that had appeared from somewhere. She was combing her hair. She finished and got up. Authun recalled that the story told she had gone to check on the pigs before leaving for the dance. She looked into a trough and from within it took something cold and blue. It was a baby, and Authun knew it was dead. The woman held the dead child up and looked at it as it began to move, kicking out its legs as if attempting a jig. And then the rhyme began, a rhyme that seemed to come from inside his head.
Mother in the pen,
Mother in the pen,
Primp and preen to charm the men
Take my swaddling clothes and dance in them.
As the rhyme split its way through his mind all he could see was Varrin’s face, bloated, white and drowned. What had he done? What had he done? The rain came down again, straight and hard in the windless evening.
Suddenly it was night, pitch black, and the young woman, her face pale with madness, clasping the dead child to her, was at Authun’s side. Even the king screamed, though he didn’t forget to push the wounded bandit towards the witch. It was as if the man’s body was swallowed by the night. The king knew that he wasn’t facing the witch queen. She would have recognised him. It was a patrolling witch mistaking him for another plunderer, or worse it was one of the truly terrible sisters, her mind simmering with magic, some half-demon who leaked delusions and madness to those around her and who could kill them without even noticing they were there.
‘Gullveig, Gullveig!’ shouted Authun at the top of his voice. ‘Help us, lady!’
The Moonsword was out, and he looked around for whatever would come next. The light was so inconstant, one instant flat dark, the next the pale washed-out murk of a rain-soaked dusk. He wanted to find Saitada, to throw her to the witch, but she was not there.
‘Authun the Wolf,’ said a child’s voice in his head, ‘mightiest warrior in Midgard, is there no one who can defeat you in arms?’
‘Gullveig! Gullveig!’ Authun screamed, trying to make the witch queen hear him. He must not reply, he knew. He must not accept the delusion, enter into it and become consumed by it.
I know one who can lay you low,
I know one who can prick you so.
If you defeat this one I know
Then, King Wolf, I will let you go.
No mortal had ever challenged him and lived. He did what he had sworn not to: he answered the voice. ‘Bring forth your champion!’
Behind the veil of rain there was a shimmering and the shape of a man took form. It seemed to Authun that the witch had underestimated him. His opponent was a man of near forty with long white hair and a straggly beard. He looked careworn and beaten by his years but there was something in his hand that shone with a cold fire. It was a sword, curved, slim and wicked. Even in the dullness of the rain it gleamed. Authun recognised it at the same time he recognised his opponent. It was the Moonsword. His opponent was himself.
As the realisation hit him something very strange happened. He saw himself with his back to the rock and he saw himself advancing towards the rock. He seemed to be both warriors at the same time, looking out through both men’s eyes. He could see a white figure with a woman and two babies at his back but at the same time he could see the same white figure advancing from the rock and hear the cry of the boys behind him. Authun did not know which warrior he was and in some way he was both.
More reflective men might have wondered what to do, but Authun, both Authuns, had been brought up to value swift action. The kings closed with each other and began to fight. It was a hopeless struggle, each man guessing the other’s moves, each anticipating blows and ducking beneath them or stepping away so their swords sliced through thin air. All things being equal they could have fought like that for ever. But all things are not equal. What we do and how we react is not the same when we are facing up a slope as when we are facing down. Authun might instinctively know his opposing self might offer three feints and then a strike to the legs, but he couldn’t know by how much the ground had raised one of his attacker’s legs higher than the other, where the disposition of his weight lay - largely on one foot, largely on the other or spread. He could not guess when the rain would blind his eyes or when it would clear from his opponent’s. Also, what you do facing a rock, looking only at blackness, is different to what you do facing a man with a moving background of trees. We are not the same people facing north as we are facing south: humans are a inconstant and contingent race. So the king did strike himself, a glancing blow to his flank.
Authun felt pleased he had drawn first blood but was also alarmed that he had been wounded. But then the king who struck the blow felt something in his side. An identical wound to the one he had inflicted had appeared. The king could not stop, could not back down, he was incapable of even having such an idea. So he struck again and hit again and both kings took a wound to the forearm. Then one to the ear, then the hand. Who hit and who received the blows became unclear, but Authun kept fighting because that was the only option for someone raised to believe the sword was the answer to everything.

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