Fenrir

42

Aelis had to be wary as she headed north. She needed to get a boat downriver to the coast and from there go east. Her only hope was that the wolfman had been speaking the truth. She had to believe he had. He had nearly given his life for her twice, may in fact have given it already. And she sensed no dishonesty in him at all, unlike in the little man who rode beside her.

Of course she was careful. She refused to let Leshii sleep near her at night, leaving him to guard the horses while she found a place to hide. If he couldn’t find her then he couldn’t kill her no matter how many ravens came to warp his mind. A bigger problem would be getting hold of a boat. They needed to buy one outright and travel alone. She could not explain her odd behaviour to others and could not camp with any party of traders or pilgrims she encountered.

As it was, Leshii came up with the solution. He did a deal with a river family to take their boat down to the sea. There was no room for the horses so Leshii sold them at what, he kept repeating, was a scandalously low price. The problem was that there was only one buyer. He came from a day’s travel away and had only a few deniers. It was a question of take it or leave it. The man didn’t want the mule and Leshii was not about to leave the animal for whoever found it. He took it aboard and it settled down well enough after some initial coaxing. A boy and his two uncles followed in another vessel, to bring their boat back when they reached the sea. The men were fishermen not farmers, so there was no substantial spring planting to be done and they were glad to take the payment.

Leshii explained that Aelis was a young monk travelling east and preparing for the life of a hermit so would need to be alone to pray at night. The fishermen were not curious sorts and asked no more questions, though their gaze did linger on the sword at Aelis’s side.

The weather broke as they travelled north, iron-black clouds igniting with halos of sunlight before blowing away to leave a clear and cold blue sky. The meltwater had gone and the river’s flow was slower but still enough to take them on at a good pace.

Aelis sat in the boat huddled under her cloak. The enormous change her life had undergone since leaving Paris had come home to her and she found herself shivering and rocking, not just with the cold.

The river narrowed and broadened, bent and straightened; they passed through small settlements and larger ones where curious villagers stood on the banks to see them pass. Many of the people looked very poor, their clothes tattered and torn, a number with limbs missing or leaning for support on their fellows. The houses too were mean things, flimsy-looking, many of them burned shells. Norsemen had been there and the land was shattered. Why did King Charles buy the Vikings off? she wondered. He should have driven them out.

Leshii was puzzled. ‘They have enough traders on this river. I don’t know why they look at us as if we had the many heads of Triglav.’

‘Who is Triglav?’

‘A horse god of my people. Four heads. His worship has fallen into disuse. Helgi holds the horse in contempt and prefers to fight on foot. He won’t have the animals worshipped in his lands.’

‘What do you know of Helgi?’

‘He’s a Viking, but not from the same place as the lot besieging your brother.’

‘How many did he slaughter to win his crown?’

‘None. His ancestors conquered Ladoga, then we overthrew them and set up our own king, or rather kings. We are a fractious people, lady, many loyalties of tribe and family. We could agree nothing. So we invited the Norsemen back to rule us.’

‘You asked them to make you slaves?’

‘Not slaves, subjects. There are no ancient grudges against the Norsemen. When the Norseman makes a decision he does it on the facts, not to spite one tribe or favour another. It was for the best, and we have prospered under his rule. Helgi attacked the lands to the south and established Novgorod, which is to be the new capital when it’s completed, and Kiev, which suffered badly under the rule of two wild Varangians, Askold and Dir.’

Aelis shook her head. ‘You are not a proud people to invite another race to rule you.’

‘We are too proud. That was the problem. We’d take a thousand indignities from a foreigner before we took one from a neighbour.’

Aelis looked out. The forest of the Arrouaise was tight about them, its big oaks in bud, the river gentle and pleasant.

‘Do you think he can help me?’

Aelis knew what the answer would be — Leshii was never going to say ‘no’. But she wanted some reassurance, even the sort the merchant had to offer — which was not much different to the patter he used to sell his wares.

‘If Chakhlyk thinks so, then I think so. He has laid down his life for you, so I think you can trust him.’

‘He said he was doing this for love. Do you know what he meant?’

‘Love of money, very likely.’ Leshii saw the joke had gone down badly. ‘Who knows, lady? These men are full of riddles. He is a sorcerer, a shapeshifter. His words can have a thousand meanings and none. I do not look too deeply.’

Aelis leaned back in the boat. The mule had gone down onto its haunches. Leshii was steering — the current was strong enough that they didn’t often need to row — and Aelis tried to sleep. It was cold but she was tired. The movement of the boat lulled her. She felt herself sinking and couldn’t tell if she was awake or dreaming.

‘You did it before; you can do it again.’ A voice, a woman’s voice.

She suddenly sat upright, reaching for her sword. She was on the boat still but it was night, the river cloaked in a strange dark in which moonlight turned the water to a shimmering veil of silver, the leaves of the trees to pewter, the sky to a forge-blackened steel. She had known that darkness before. At Loches, when she had walked in the night.

There was someone with her on the boat, but she couldn’t make her head turn to look. Where was Leshii? Nowhere. Where was the mule? Nowhere.

‘You did it before. Do it again.’

‘What did I do before?’

‘What you needed to. What you will do again. Do it.’

It seemed to Aelis that the river was flowing through a very strange place indeed. It was underground, and there were no stars, just the glimmer of strange shining pebbles in the dark; no trees, just great trunks of rock dropping from the ceiling of a huge tunnel.

The boat came to shore by a small black beach. A tunnel stretched away in front of her. She got out and followed it down into the earth. From somewhere far off she could hear a monstrous grinding sound, the like of which she had never heard. It was like a great stone moving over rock. In the streets of Paris she’d once seen a pair of horses harnessed to a cart spooked by a dancing bear. The cart had hit another, smashing a wheel and breaking a horse’s leg. The uninjured animal had panicked and tried to bolt, the cart scraping behind, the lame horse screaming and staggering. This sound was also of something stricken, broken, and brought with it a sensation of deep agony, something wrong in the order of nature. But Aelis felt compelled to seek it out.

She walked down the tunnel, and though it was dark, she could see. A light seemed to shine from within her, and she realised that another of those strange symbols had lit up inside her. This was nothing like the horse symbol: it did not breathe, it did not sweat, and though it shone, it was not with the lustre of a horse’s coat but with an intense flame. It was a much smaller presence than the horse symbol, not at all expansive but dense and bright with a light that seemed to illuminate not only her vision but her mind so that she became aware of the teeming darkness pricked by lights that spread out across the earth. There were so many living things around her shining from the vast night, she felt like a bright cold star in the twinkling field of the heavens.

‘You did it before. Do it again.’

‘What?’

‘Your lover is dead but he will live again. Without you if your courage fails.’

Aelis looked around her. Just the tunnels, just the rock. She couldn’t see where the voice was coming from. Then the tunnel dipped and turned, grew narrow. A gap was to her right, no more than a fissure in the rock. Something glistened and shone on the wall next to it. She put out her hand and touched it. She looked at her fingers. They were wet and shiny. She couldn’t see the red of the blood, the whole cave was bathed in a lead light that turned everything to shades of grey but she sensed red. Aelis went through the crack in the rock, edging herself sideways to get in. She was not a big woman but still it was a breath-crushing push, the fissure so narrow that at points she had to wriggle to get through. But she did get through. She was in a room, a small chamber just high enough to stand in, though after ten paces it began to taper to nothing, the jagged ceiling coming down to a sharp and stony floor like the jaws of a great animal.

It was a scene of carnage. On the floor lay a huge wolf, its eyes vacant, its tongue lolling, its throat cut, a pool of blood about it. It was dying, and the noise it made was a wet rasp that seemed to fill up her mind, leaving her incapable of thinking of anything else. The wolf’s breathing quickened when it saw her and it tried to get up, though it seemed fatally wounded and could not stand. She did not feel afraid and went forward to put her hand on its great head. Its eyes turned to hers and they seemed almost human, full of longing.

Next to it lay three bodies, or the remains of bodies. One was a man with long silver hair, his hand still clasped around the handle of a strange curved sword. She had seen that before. It was the Raven’s sword. The second hardly existed. It was no more than a ripped spinal cord hanging from a skull like a bloody plait. It was female, that was all she could say. The other body she knew. Its face was instantly familiar.

The man wore a dark wolfskin about him, and his muscles were strong and taut, but a gout of flesh had been ripped from his side. She thought of Sindre, who had struggled to rescue her from that thing with the torn face, but this was not Sindre. Though the face was much stronger, more vigorous, not drawn or wasted like that of the monk, still she recognised him. It was Jehan, the confessor. Aelis felt her throat tighten, tears come to her eyes. She heard her own voice speaking: ‘I loved you but the gods did not love us.’

Someone was watching her but she could not see who.

She knelt at the confessor’s side and pulled back the wolfskin from his face. He was dead. She lifted him. His body felt light in her arms. She dragged him through the fissure in the rock, pulling him through until she was back in the larger passageway.

Aelis felt a breeze on her right side and looked to see where it was coming from. An archway of light was there. She walked towards it.

Lady! Lady! Another voice. She recognised it. It was the merchant.

She stepped into the arch and found herself looking out over a broad and beautiful land of mountains and rivers. To her right she saw the ocean, to her left a wide and fertile valley. She was very high up indeed; wisps of cloud hung beneath her. When she looked down, the ground seemed to rush and swim, and she knew that if she stepped forward, she would fall to her death.

‘You did it before; you can do it again.’

Lady, put down the sword. Lady, you will hurt yourself.

‘Do it. For your lover.’

She looked over her shoulder. Behind her was the creature with the defiled and torn face, the woman whose head looked like a gall apple on an oak rather than anything human.

But then she felt a light burning inside her. She felt something manifesting in her mind — a shape, two lines at an angle, like a K but without the vertical line, an arrowhead. It flamed and burned, crackled and shone, and when it shone it threw out a light that illuminated everything before it in a way far beyond sight.

The man in her arms had the confessor’s face, but it was not the confessor.

‘He is not dead,’ she said.

‘He is on the brink. If you go, he will know and he will follow you.’

‘He is not dead. I know who he is and so do you.’

Lady, lady, put it down, for the sake of the lord of the holy lightning. What do you mean to do? Does not your religion forbid it? A Christian must not take his own life. You must not take your own life.

Leshii was gesturing at her with his hands raised as if trying to coax a valuable vase from the hands of a two-year-old. To Aelis he was an insubstantial figure. The reality of the caves seemed stronger.

‘See my lover. Your pretence is undone,’ Aelis said.

She turned and showed the face of the man in her arms to the woman behind her. The creature fell back and clasped the side of the cave, then fell to the floor and screamed, a piercing frightful noise that had within it the tortured cries of foxes in traps that Aelis had heard in the night at Loches, the screams of relatives of thieves hanging on the gallows, the cries of children in the burning buildings of Paris. It was the sound of the collapse of reason and sanity.

She looked down at the face of the man in her arms and now she screamed too. It was the Raven.

Aelis let the sword fall from her hands, and Leshii sprang forward to wipe away the blood where she had been pressing it into her neck beneath her chin.

‘It was the witch. You were enchanted.’

‘Yes.’

‘What is to be done? What is to be done?’ The merchant was talking as much to himself as to her.

Aelis sat back against the prow of the little boat. She was cold beyond measure.

‘Get me to a fire, Leshii.’

‘The night is falling, lady. We cannot risk the birds.’

‘The birds will not come tonight.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘She is scared, Leshii, I felt it. That woman who pursues us, she is terrified. She is acting out of fear.’

The face of the Raven seemed to hover before her. How had she not seen it? His skin was ripped and torn by the beaks of the birds; he was stronger, better fed, healthier than the confessor, but they were like brothers. It was as if they were the same man, his image reflected in some imperfect and distorting mirror.

‘It is wiser to keep moving.’

‘Let me have a fire, Leshii. I am so very cold.’

The merchant nodded and steered the boat into the bank. The mule gave a great sigh of relief and hopped ashore, and the fishermen beached their boat beside them.

‘Problem?’ said one, nodding to the bloody cloth Aelis held beneath her chin. His hair was grey and his face raw with years of wind and sun.

‘No problem,’ said Leshii. ‘The lad is an ascetic.’

‘A what?’

‘A mystic. He seeks pain to put him nearer to God. They have them in every religion; I’m sure they have them in yours — what is it, brother?’

‘We are Christians of the holy Catholic Church,’ said the fisherman.

‘As am I,’ said Leshii. ‘Come on, we’ll have a fire. The lad will join us tonight.’

‘Honoured indeed,’ said the younger fisherman, a man with the slightly surprised look of one of his catches.

They sat together in the night, cooked river trout on the fire and ate it with samphire from the waterside. Aelis was hungry and gobbled it down.

The younger man bit a piece of samphire in two and waved the remaining half towards Leshii and Aelis. ‘Getting near the sea now, as Saint Peter’s plant shows.’

‘We need to go east, brother. Will we pick up a ship there?’

‘Who knows? Tomorrow we’ll see what the Norsemen have left of the land. There’s nothing out towards the coast; all the villagers have come inland. Those bastards were beaten here in the summer but people know they’ll be back. You might find yourself on a boat to the west and north as a slave if you’re not careful. I’m not sure ships go east any more.’

The fisherman’s words stirred something in Aelis’s memory. She felt she had been a prisoner before — taken north on a ship. The memory was so vivid to her. She saw great dark mountains rising out of a cold black sea, felt the bitter north wind, smelled the greasy wool of a sea cloak, heard the creak of the rigging.

Huddling into the fire, she touched her neck. It was sore from where she had pressed in the tip of the sword. She looked at the faces of the fishermen in the firelight. They seemed like spirits of the underworld to her.

At Loches there had been a little chapel. Her uncle had commissioned a man to paint some biblical scenes for it. She had sat and watched as he mixed his pigment and egg and made the faces of the apostles appear on sheets of wood. Every day Aelis watched him, and eventually he asked her if she would like to be the model for a picture of the child saint Agnes of Rome. He had painted her outside in the clear summer light, on a panel he had used before for an unsuccessful attempt at a depiction of Saint Catherine. She’d been fascinated to watch herself appear from the mess of colours he kept in his little pots and to hear the story of how Agnes had refused to marry the prefect’s son, so the prefect had her put to death. Roman law didn’t allow him to kill a virgin, so he had her dragged naked through the streets to a brothel to be raped. But she prayed, and hair grew all over her body to cover her nakedness, and each man who tried to rape her was struck blind. A pyre was made for her, but the wood would not burn, so a soldier stabbed her through the throat.

When the picture was done Aelis had gone with the artist to the kitchen to eat and flirt with him. When they returned, a shower of rain had blown into the clear blue day, washing part of his painting away. Through the face of the child, the eyes of the woman Catherine peered out. This image had come back to her because the same thing was happening to her now. Memory, or something like memory, was becoming so powerful that the world she walked through seemed no more than an impression, a shimmering of sun on water, a shadow on fog.

And then there was that face, not the woman but the man she had held in her arms. She had looked down at him and known him — the Raven, the thing that stalked her. She had once felt close to him. But when? The wolfman had said she had lived before, which was a belief contrary to holy law but one for which Aelis had a distinct sympathy.

A preacher from the east had been put to death at Loches for saying that Sophia of God’s Left Hand was equal in divinity to Christ. She had heard him speak before he was arrested. Only one thing he had said remained in her mind: ‘And the disciples said, “Tell us clearly how they came down from the invisibilities, from the immortal to the world that dies.”’

His execution had enraged many of the servants, who said rightly that worse heresies were spoken at the table of the count. Aelis had not gone to see the hanging — she was too young and never had the stomach for that sort of thing anyway. The servants had said that he had shown no fear and declared that the world, his flesh, was only related to divine reality in the way a painting is related to the thing it represents. He no more feared to lose it than to see a child’s doll broken.

These recollections chilled Aelis. Her mind seemed like a plundered house, its contents smashed and disordered, but at the same time a new clarity was upon her. She could connect things she had never connected before and sense a truth deeper than anything she had ever known. The preacher had been right, she felt it in her heart. The world was a painting and now the pigments were being washed away. But what was underneath? The caves, that figure in her arms and those terrible symbols that fizzed and spat, shone and chimed inside her mind, and most of all the figure of the man with the wolf’s head who watched her in her dreams and whispered words of love in her ear?

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?’