Fenrir

48

By the graves on the headland Jehan prayed: ‘Deliver me, deliver me.’

A voice from the dark: ‘Three ships, Ofaeti. It’s too many!’

‘It’d be a rare death, though, wouldn’t it, Fastarr? They’d sing songs of us, wouldn’t they? Grettir’s people give credit to brave enemies — we’d live eternally in the songs of the skalds.’

‘Are you sure we want to do this?’

‘Sure.’

‘Come on then. We’ll lure them up to the monastery. Get some lights visible up here!’

Jehan couldn’t see. Again, he couldn’t see. A soft blackness had taken his vision. And then the raiders on the beach, the sweet stink of their aggression, the enticement of their excitement and fear cleared his mind like a whiff of Hammonicus salt, and he could see everything. The moon was like a cold sun to him, picking out the men on the broad wet expanse of sand.

His hearing was sharper than it had ever been, bursting on his mind in subtle shades of sound, his ears almost revealing as much as his eyes. He could hear the Vikings next to him breathe and rustle, the quick gulping inhalations of the young boy Astarth, Ofaeti more measured, forcing calm on his body by long slow breaths. He could hear the water slapping on the longships, the suck of the raiders’ feet through the wet sand. He could hear the breath of the invaders, tight and fast. More than just sound, he could sense weakness, strength, doubt and resolve in the whistle of air in a man’s chest.

The dark. Jehan had sought the dark. That howling, the noise from the boat, had set his skin tingling, his muscles seemed to creep on his bones like caterpillars on branches as he slunk tight to the shadows. He spat the meat from his mouth, its dead taste suddenly unpleasant to him. He was hungry, still, but now for something else, for the meat that is warm on the teeth, for the flesh marinated in the seepings and secretions of stress, for the tremble of the body as the soul looks down at the valley of death.

The shadows were strange to him, hardly shadows at all. He could see quite clearly within them but he knew their use on instinct. He clung to them, pressing his body to the walls of the courtyard, slipping down the alley between the scriptorium and the penitence cell. The moonlight caught him and for a second he stopped. He held up his hand. The palm was long and strong, the nails thick and the fingers muscular, like the claws on the gargoyle of a devil on the church at Saint-Denis. He stroked his jaw and clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, moistening his lips. His tongue felt almost too big and was cut and blistered where he had accidentally bitten it when feeding. Jehan breathed in. His lips too felt raw, his skin tight over his bones. The men, the raiders with their fast-beating hearts and miasma of tension that accompanied them, were coming. He spat and spat again, saliva filling his mouth.

Elation filled him and he heard himself giggle, though he could not think why. The shallowness of his laughter struck him.

Smell burst in on him in a million registers. It was as if all his life he had suffered from a heavy cold and had suddenly found himself free of it in a summer meadow. Rot was on the breath of the Vikings — from their teeth, from the meat between their teeth. Their sweat was sour but in a fascinating rainbow of shades. He breathed in the smell of the furs they wore, sensed the stress of the animals’ deaths, smelled the wool of their cloaks, damp with dew, the odour of the farmyard clinging to it. And from down the beach, just detectable in the light breeze, he smelled something else. A woman. Not all of the raiders were men.

‘We’ll make it quick,’ said Ofaeti. ‘Double back around the dunes smartish. Slash the rudders on two of the boats then away.’

‘They’ll leave guards.’

‘Like I say, we’ll have to be quick.’

‘What about the monk?’

‘Leave him to his graveyard feast,’ said Egil. ‘The man is bewitched.’

‘He led us to great gold,’ said Ofaeti.

‘I won’t have a corpse-muncher on my ship,’ said Fastarr.

‘It’s not your ship.’

‘And it won’t be yours if you don’t hurry up.’

‘We should leave him, Ofaeti. You know the Christians are cannibals. They freely admit that as their rite and ritual.’

‘I…’ Ofaeti was going to say he had no time to argue, but the monk had gone. ‘Right, lads, this is it. Death or glory. Maybe death and glory. Death anyway. Are you ready?’

‘Let’s have them,’ said Fastarr.

The Vikings ran out of the back of the monastery and around the dunes to its side, crouching low.

Jehan heard them go. He crawled down the alley, drinking in its rich smells of mould and piss. They were as enticing to him as any posy he had smelled in his life. He came to the scriptorium, where the scrolls and books were made. The door was half open and the tang of the vellum drew him inside. He knew what he needed to do: he needed to read, to anchor his mind to the word of God. The bitterest thing about his blindness had been his inability to read, the necessity of listening to the Bible read by monks who had no feel for the words. He had memorised large sections, said them back to himself in the quiet of his cell, purging the snivelling syllables of Brother Frotlaicus, the leaden delivery of Brother Ragenard from his mind and recalling the words as he thought they should be said.

The roof was damaged, a hole an armspan wide allowing the moonlight in. There had been a fire in there, the previous raiders unable to resist the lure of the inflammable books and scrolls. Scraps of burned vellum were all over the floor, the smell of charred animal skin and damp thick in the room. The Vikings destroyed these works because they did not value them and their enemies did. They had marked their territory, imposed their values. The residue of the sweat of the raiders still clung to the room. He could smell the delight. It had been fun to burn and wreck.

Jehan sat down on the floor and picked up a sheet of vellum.

‘And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their own home — these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgement on the great day.’ He said the words aloud, tried to will himself back into what he had been — the learned man of Saint-Germain, the man God had cursed in the body but lifted up in the soul and intellect. ‘Clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.’

The words meant nothing to him now, but their sounds, the collision of their consonants and the gong notes of their vowels in his ears, linked him to what he had been.

‘I am man,’ he said, ‘in the image of a god.’ No, that was wrong. ‘I am a man, in the image of God.’ He read out more: ‘To the chosen lady and her children, whom I love in the truth — and not I only, but also all who know the truth — because of the truth, which lives in us and will be with us for ever-’

There was a sound in the courtyard. The feeling was on him again. He put the vellum to his mouth and bit, tasting skin and ashes. The hunger would not relent. He lay on the floor of the scriptorium trying to ignore it, trying to sate it, shoving pieces of script into his mouth, tasting ink, goat, the blood tang of the unborn kid used to make the uterine vellum. The hunger grew sharper still. He writhed on the floor, trying to banish it from his mind. He caught glimpses of fragments of script as he stuffed the vellum into his mouth — only a few words but enough to trigger the memory of the whole passage.

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? That is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Jehan shoved more into his mouth. He felt he was little more than a hunger trapped in flesh.

And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.

‘I am a man,’ said Jehan.

There was shouting now: ‘Look in there! Try in there! There is something here for us. The sorceress wouldn’t lie.’

Boots outside the door. The door pushed open. A flood of moonlight rushing to meet the cascade that fell from the hole in the ceiling.

‘Lads, lads, in here.’ A big Viking was in the doorway, a flash of silver at his knees as he turned the haft of his axe around in his hands.

‘In the image of a god,’ said Jehan in Norse.

‘What’s that, matey. Where’s your gold, you cringing coward? Lead us to your gold.’

‘In the image of a god.’

‘In the what? Lads, get in here. I’ve got one of them. Are you a monk, matey? Are you a monk?’

‘I am a wolf,’ said Jehan and leaped at the Viking’s throat.

The kill was quick, the Viking’s neck broken with one twist. Flat against a wall in the shadows, Jehan waited for the next. The corpse lay in the moonlight, its eyes wide, like a drowned man lying beneath a waterfall.

‘There’s someone in there.’

‘Erik went in, didn’t he?’

‘He hasn’t come out.’

‘Don’t be stupid. Hey, Erik, are you all right?’

Men were rushing all over the monastery. They seemed to be looking for something. He crouched, leaning forward on his hands, stretched out his back, turned his head. He felt powerful and strong, a deep energy welling inside him. When he had first been afflicted he had not come to terms with his condition easily and would find himself weeping in frustration on his bed, the smells of the summer outside enticing him to run in the fields, his body a fetter holding his spirit down. The feeling was similar — a desire for movement — but now it was exaltation that he felt inside. He could move. He would move. It was just a matter of biding his time.

‘Erik! Erik!’

A man was in the doorway. He came inside, peering in with little pecking motions of the head, as if he feared the dark would bite him. It did. He was dragged into the room in a breath, dead before he could scream.

More voices: ‘Erik! Oh no, Thengil! Thengil’s in here. He’s down.’

A Viking came in and crouched in the moonlight to look at his friend. ‘By Freyr’s fat cock, look at his neck! Look at his neck!’ He put his hands to the fallen man’s throat. Two more entered complaining about the dark. Their eyes were on the corpse, their movements slow and clumsy.

A new sense seemed to have opened in the confessor. He could tell very precisely where the Vikings were focusing their gaze, understand very clearly that he had not been seen. It wasn’t just the movements of the warriors that seemed slow; their attention seemed to shift sluggishly. One of the men had a seax drawn — a cheaper alternative to a sword, a kind of very big knife. He was scanning the darkness of the room but his gaze seemed to take an age to move from one point to another.

‘Can you hear something?’ said one of the Vikings.

‘What?’

‘Breathing.’

‘He’s dead. His head’s half off.’

‘Not his breathing, you fool. Something else.’

Jehan heard. In the dark his senses were wide and deep. He heard the insects all around him — in the thatch of the remains of the roof, on the walls, in the woods outside. He heard them as never before. It was as if the night seethed with seduction songs and battle cries, tiny couplings for procreation or for slaughter all around him as the moths entwined, as the gall wasp fought the spider, a birthing aphid fell to a beetle and a bat swooped to carry off them both. He felt creation in all its slaughter and sex. Nautre’s song eternal, sung since God breathed life into Eden.

The men stopped talking and seemed to freeze. Jehan struck.

The Viking with the seax went directly back into the wall, his head smashing into the stone in a wet crunch. The man nearest to Jehan was crouching with his back to him. Before the Viking could react, Jehan had grabbed him by the tunic and hair and rammed his head into the face of the man who knelt at his side. Both men were knocked cold. The entire attack had taken three heartbeats.

Jehan listened. No one was coming. The Vikings were creatures of habit and had gone to the church looking for gold. Some had lights now, brands that raced across the opening of the doorway in bright streaks.

Jehan’s mind was almost gone. The confessor was just a distant voice inside him, as if heard through wind, his words just whispers, his thoughts unreachable. He crawled to an unconscious Viking and put his hands about his throat. Jehan crushed his neck and his teeth sank into the man’s skin. Flesh and beard were in his mouth. He swallowed them down. The sniggering inside him became a snuffling sound that panted and slavered and howled in his head. He killed the second Viking as he had the first. The taste of the flesh seemed to fill him with strength. He sat in the moonlight, not caring if he was seen. To him the moonbeams were like showers of silver pennies, like something from the fairy tales that the monks had whispered to each other at Saint-Germain when he was a boy and was willing to listen to such things.

He stood. His body was liquid, the ease of movement intoxicating. He breathed in the scent of the salt and weed of the sea, the wet spring grass, the men who sweated and searched all around him.

Jehan crept out of the scriptorium, his body seeming to flow rather than to crawl. In the alley a Viking was taking a piss. He died with his trousers around his thighs, his neck broken with another quick twist. Jehan looked around, his personality drowned under the sensual tide that swept over him. Everything was more intense — the sounds of the raid, the feel of the cobbles beneath his feet, the black daubs of the thin clouds, the brightness of the moon that raced beneath them, and the taste, above all the taste, of blood in his mouth. He crouched low to the floor. The lattice of shadows was a forest, and he was a wolf hunting within it. Jehan let the corpse drop then doubled back towards the church. He was killing to kill now. The hunger was there but a more insistent sense had taken over — survival.

Voices behind him: ‘There’s someone dead here. One of us. There are defenders here!’

Footsteps running. ‘In this room too. It’s a slaughterhouse.’

The shadow was a blanket to him, cosy and safe. Some men came down the alley. The last was very young, no more than fifteen. Jehan took him at the throat, his sinuous fingers encircling his neck, denying him even a scream to mark his own death. He lowered the body quietly and stepped back into the darkness, sliding along the wall of the alley and out into the courtyard. Torches, men searching. The burning brands cut bright lines in the dark. Jehan felt his heart pounding but not with fear — with excitement, the excitement of the fox as he approaches the hen house. He clung to the wall knowing he was unseen. The blunt senses of the men around him were very clear to him. By a pillar he stood almost next to one Viking while the man cursed and shouted, ‘Show yourselves, you cowards, unmanly you are, like maids cowering in the dark!’

Jehan took him, ripping back his head by the hair and tearing out his throat with his nails. He shoved the man away and the Viking staggered forward into the main square, his hand at his neck. Torches lit up the stricken man. It was as if the Viking had taken the floor at a country dance and his companions were crowding in on him to the cue of the music. The man fell.

‘What? What was it?’

‘A monster. A troll and a wolf of the night!’

‘Fetch Munin. She’ll flush it out. Fetch Munin!’

Jehan watched again from the shadows as the Vikings vainly tried to help their comrade.

A huge man stood up and banged his shield. ‘Let’s find this fen dweller!’ he screamed. And then it was as if they all went mad, as if they were rats and the corpse of their comrade a cat. They rushed from him, each man going in a different direction weapon out and swinging. They hacked into the shadows as if they thought they could kill the dark itself. Men were everywhere, tearing through the darkness, hacking, stabbing, screaming and slashing.

‘Wolf, wolf, we’ll have you, wolf!’

‘Odin is here for you, troll witch. Your end is upon you!’

‘Fen dweller, monster, show yourself.’

When an axe hacked into a shadow, Jehan was gone. When it moved on he was where it had been.

He slipped away from the courtyard and found himself in a tight alley between the church and the monastery wall. He slunk forward, low to the ground.

‘There’s no one here.’ The voice was virtually on top of him. He had come across a group of four raiders. One of them held up a burning torch and was looking directly towards him, twenty paces away.

‘What’s that down there?’

‘It’s a monk.’

The words were the last the Viking ever spoke. Jehan’s movements now seemed beyond his control. Faces loomed at him in the dark, eyes bursting with terror; limbs were on him and then gone, torn or snapped. Things were under his nails — hair, necks, eyes and arms. Jehan was squatting on the chest of a man — he thought it was a man. The Viking’s face had been torn away, his scalp ripped clean off. He resembled a wax figure left to melt in the sun.

Something was coming slowly towards Jehan. It shone in the moonlight, twinkled like some precious rock. Jehan put out his hand and took it, studied it. It was attached to something long. He knew what it was, this thing. His mind fought for the language to describe it. It was a harmer. A harming thing. It was on the tip of his tongue. Something had thrown the harming thing towards him. Something living. He stepped forward and broke the living thing, the creature, that had thrown this object. What was it called?

The name came to his lips: ‘Spear.’ Yes, a spear. He dropped it and stepped over the body of the creature who had hurled it.

Words came into his mind: Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts.

Saliva was in his mouth. The prayer meant something to him. Torches flared in the darkness. What was that prayer? It was grace. He sat down on the floor to eat, fingers and teeth working the meat from the bone. He savoured the many tastes — the iron of the muscle, the sweetness of the liver, the farmyard pungency as he tore open the bowels and inspected their contents.

Voices. The war jabber.

‘Grettir! Grettir, he is here. The prophecy is yours to fulfil. The wolf is here for you.’

The words meant nothing to Jehan as he guzzled at the meat. He had eaten too much of it, so he vomited and ate again.

Vikings were at both ends of the alley, sealing it. Jehan didn’t care. He was lost to his feeding. There were so many of them, thirty each way at least.

‘Grettir!’

The throng at the end of the alley towards the sea parted. A huge man came through, shield and sword in his hand. He was wearing a mail hauberk and a coif covering his neck and head topped by a conical helmet. He was wary, stepping forward with the sword in front of him, prodding at the darkness.

‘Wolf?’ called the man. ‘Wolf?’

There was a stir at the other end. A woman, her flesh hanging in delicious ribbons that smelled of iron and salt.

‘Wolf?’ called the big warrior.

‘Fen dweller. Yes, fen dweller,’ said the woman.

Jehan glanced up from the meat. Something about this woman was different. Her attention was focused into a narrow stream, like an animal prowling around him, sniffing him out, focused on nothing and no one but him. And she was scared. There was an acrid smell of fear about her.

The warrior walked down the alley towards Jehan. ‘I am Odin!’ he shouted.

Then the moon tumbled into the cloud and the alley went even darker, the torchlight weakly pushing at the blackness.

Jehan stood, reeling from the taste of the flesh, from the sensations crowding in him. He had a thin patina of hair on his arms, he noticed. It had an iridescence in the torchlight.

‘I am Odin!’ shouted the warrior again and rushed to close with Jehan, his body filling the alley, his sword like something only half there, catching the light of the moon and then disappearing into darkness as it moved. Jehan looked up and felt his muscles loosen, ready to strike, preparing for the snap into tension that would propel him towards his opponent.

But as the big man charged a scream split the darkness. The woman’s scream seemed more than a sound to Jehan; it was a rush of icy wind, sharp with the bite of hail, a blast strong enough to drain all the power from his limbs. His legs gave way and he sank to his knees. He still had enough strength to ward aside the sword, but the huge Viking crashed into him, sending him sprawling. Jehan struck out, snapping the warrior’s head sideways with a terrible blow, breaking his neck. The corpse of the Viking fell on him, its dead weight pinning him to the ground. The woman screamed again, and all the strength seemed to go from his body, but then he was in a very strange place indeed.

The Vikings were gone and so was the monastery. He stood on a high cliff overlooking a land of fjords and mountains. In front of him was the woman, her face torn and ripped, her eyes ragged holes. It was as if the full moon itself had floated down from the sky and settled on her shoulders in place of her head. She was two things: this being in front of him and something else — something that stood behind itself, a fleeting manifestation of something old and permanent, something around which the rest of the world revolved in all its chaos, tumult and beauty.

Then the Vikings were on him, all of them in a mass. He bit and he kicked and he struggled, but the scream seemed to have weakened him, drained the power of his limbs. He was pinioned and roped, his feet bound and his arms wrenched behind his back, lashed and lashed again. They were kicking him and spitting at him. They tied a rope around him and then another. His arms were crushed to his chest, his neck constricted so it was difficult to breathe. When they saw he was helpless the Vikings really laid into him. Fists, boots, the butts of spears came down on him.

‘Hold.’ The assault stopped. It was the woman’s voice again.

He looked up. In front of him was the pale child. She turned and walked away from him and he knew that he had arrived at where she had been leading him. He was where she wanted him to be.

Suddenly Jehan began to weep. His mouth was full of the foul taste of flesh; his lips and his chin ran with blood. ‘Father forgive me. Father forgive me.’ He lay trembling on the cold stones. ‘I have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedness, and have rebelled, even by departing from thy precepts and from thy judgements.’ Scripture came to his lips, and he remembered the taste of the vellum, his defilement of the holy word, his defilement of the human body.

The woman felt her way forward down the alley to kneel at his side.

‘You have not found your teeth yet, Fenrisulfr. We will meet again when you do.’ He recognised the voice — the woman who had held him and sung to him during his tortures at the hands of the Raven.

‘Find the penitential cell and put him inside it.’

‘Shall we not kill him now?’

Jehan sensed uncertainty coming from the woman. It was as if her thoughts buzzed with frustration like a fly against a cathedral window.

‘No,’ she said. ‘The gods will see their doom played out in the realm of men. His fate is not to die at your spears.’

‘What is it then?’

‘He will kill his brother,’ said Munin, ‘and after that…’ she seemed to search for the right words ‘… the dead god will go to his destiny. This is the eternal way and the end to which our powers are bent.’