Fenrir

25

It was not the wind that awoke Jehan, nor the clear blue cold of the spring day. It was the voices of the Norsemen. He heard them shouting, one phrase heard many times: ‘King-slayer, king-slayer, we will find you!’

He had an intense pain in his eyes, a searing ache. He put his hands up to his face and blinked. The agony of his torn eyelid was gone. This was another sort of pain. He blinked again and again.

He had a sensation of light, swimming brown and green and gold. There was a broad vertical line in front of him. What was it? A tree, a big oak. Jehan coughed and tasted blood. He turned to his left. There was a flash of bright gold. The river.

He breathed out, leaned back on his hands and realised it wasn’t a dream. He could move. He could see.

He got up and staggered against a tree, unused for so long to standing. At his feet was the body of Saerda, his head twisted almost to face the opposite way nature intended. Jehan sank to his knees in prayer.

‘Dear Lord God almighty and father everlasting, who hast safely brought me to the beginning of this day, by thy holy power, grant that this day I fall into no sin but that by thy restraining care my thoughts be set to keep thy holy laws and do thy holy will.’

Jehan had never cried, not as long as he had lived, but he cried then. God had granted him release from the bondage of his body, and Jehan had used it immediately to kill. The commandment was clear: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ But the Viking had been a devil, an enemy of Christ.

Jehan put his hands to his head. He felt in such confusion. What was happening to him?

‘A Frank!’

Three men were dashing towards him, two with spears, one with an axe. He wanted to wait for them, wanted to accept the punishment of God’s will, but he couldn’t. His legs began to move, haltingly at first but with increasing fluidity. He was running, for the first time since he was very young, he was running.

The sensations were nearly overwhelming — the feel of the forest floor digging into his tender and uncalloused bare feet, the dazzle of the light through the trees, the rush of greens and browns as he fled from his pursuers — and he just wasn’t used to it all. He fell, stood and tripped again. Finally, a tree root took his leg and they were on him. It was then that he gave up. He had surrendered all right to try to preserve his life. He had partaken of unclean meat. He would accept death and, inevitably, damnation. A man must accept the will of God no matter what it might be.

Others were around him now, faces pink and angry. He was unused to seeing, to focusing, and the faces seemed to whirl and smear, a circle of flesh hemming him in. He had to get back to what he knew. Jehan closed his eyes.

‘Is this the king-slayer?’

‘It’s a monk by his clothes, though a rough one.’

‘He’s not a monk; they cut their hair funny.’

‘Well, whatever he is, he’s a Frank. Shall I kill him?’

‘Best.’

‘Hang about, son.’

Jehan opened his eyes again to see a fat Viking with a big blond beard shoving through the crowd of faces.

‘Before you go killing anyone, why not ask who might have a use for him?’

Jehan recognised the voice. It was Ofaeti, the one who had carried him from the church.

‘Can you speak our tongue?’

Jehan tried to remain still but found himself nodding.

‘How did you get here? Are you one of that party that ambushed the king last night?’

‘He couldn’t ambush a tree with a piss. Look at him — he’s as frail as an old woman.’ It was another voice.

Ofaeti crouched beside him. ‘What happened to your confessor? He’s a mess. Did the Raven get him? Hang on, that shield looks like the king’s. And I recognise those arrows.’

‘The king was robbed after he’d been killed. Maybe one of the thieves paid the price,’ said someone else.

‘Maybe the king was felled with arrows and the thieves dropped it here in their flight,’ said another.

‘Those are the Raven’s arrows.’

‘Did he kill the king?’

‘More like whoever stole the king’s stuff.’

‘Perhaps this is the killer.’

‘Are you saying our king could have been killed by an unarmed slave like this?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Well don’t open your mouth if you can’t speak sense.’

‘Watch who you’re talking to.’

The men fell to arguing. Ofaeti ignored the rising hullabaloo and spoke to Jehan.

‘There’s one of our men with his head facing the wrong way down there. I guess you’d have noticed if someone had done that in front of you.’

Two of the Norsemen picked Jehan up and dragged him back to where the bodies of Abram and Saerda lay.

‘Are these the god’s bones?’ said one, poking at the bloody remains of the monk with his foot.

‘Last time I noticed the Raven was mutilating monks. That’s a mutilated monk. Raven’s arrows are in the king’s shield down there. Leaving aside how that got here, that makes the man down there that confessor, I reckon,’ said Ofaeti.

‘Are we in the god bones trade now, Ofaeti?’

‘Well after two nights making the lady who we’d been sent to kidnap fetch us drinks, and then the man who was going to pay us for her being killed, I’d say we should move out of the noblewoman abduction line of work and into something else, wouldn’t you? We can’t be any worse at it.’

‘I can’t believe we had her there and didn’t know.’

‘I’m going to pretend it never happened. I thought she was too good-looking for a slave.’ Ofaeti shook his head and looked at Jehan again. ‘You, Frank, we’ve got your saint’s bones. If you want them back, you’ll have to pay for them.’

Jehan hadn’t thought of that. Abram would need a proper Christian burial. He couldn’t allow him to be taken by wild animals.

‘We will pay,’ he said.

‘What did I tell you. Speaks Norse like a Haithabu whore — that is to say, well enough for what we want him for. Frank, you are going to help me sell his bones.’

‘To Saint-Germain?’

‘No chance. You’d like that, I bet. We’re going east, son.’

Men were streaming past the confessor into the trees.

‘You don’t know me?’

‘No, should I?’

‘I’m the confessor. I’m the one you took from the church.’

‘Of course you are. You’re blind, you’re crippled and you’ve had half your face eaten by ravens. On top of that you were shaved bald on top yesterday and today you’ve got a fine thatch. For someone who’s been tortured to death, I must say, you look pretty well. Now get that mess over there into a sack. Once you have, we’re going on a little journey.’

The confessor touched his head. His tonsure had grown out. It was only a small detail but it left him mildly panicked. It was if part of his identity had been removed. He looked down at his body. It was wasted and thin still and yet it moved. He could walk. God had released him. It was all too much to take in. The implications of his cure were so huge. Jehan breathed in and tried to focus on what he needed to do rather than what had happened to him. If Aelis was with the merchant, she would be on her way to Ladoga by now — he had heard the easterner pressing the case of Prince Helgi.

Jehan knew he had no way to get back to the city, or even to Saint-Germain. Could he rescue Aelis if he followed her? That morning, standing upright, the sunlight through the trees dappling the forest floor and turning it to a shimmering stream, he felt anything was possible. Everything was so beautiful. But it was more than that. He felt bound to the girl, almost compelled to follow her. God, he felt, had picked him out for the task and cured him so he might accomplish it.

And there was one further advantage of travelling east. The sea way would be impossible, thick with Norse pirates, so they would go by land and he would learn what stood between him and the lands of the Rus. It was a chance to gain information about the enemies of God, even to seek out evil and uproot it.

He looked at the fat Viking, the one who seemed to be the leader, if not in name then in the respect the men gave him.

‘I am a monk and I can help you. There is a monastery I know that is in need of some relics and would pay well for them,’ he said.

‘Where’s that?’ said Ofaeti.

‘In Agaune, to the south and east in the Pass of Songs,’ said the confessor. ‘The abbey of Saint-Maurice.’

‘Why so far?’

‘You need to step out from the shadow of war to a land where you will be seen as merchants, not pillagers. If you approach an abbey in this land then you will be cut down. Not all monks are men of God, as you know, and some grew up with a sword rather than a Bible in their hands.’

Ofaeti looked the confessor up and down. ‘A word spell,’ he said. ‘Magic or sense? There’s no way back to our boats, for sure.’ He snorted. ‘Yes, Fastarr? What do you think?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then follow,’ said Jehan.

Saint-Maurice, thought the confessor, was where the Raven had said he was found and lost by God. The Raven had been described by Sigfrid as an intelligencer, so someone had sent him. Jehan had no idea who but he thought the abbey of the black saint was as good a place as any to try to find out.