Fenrir

54

True to his word, Moselle did not allow Ofaeti and his men inside the warming house. His hospitality extended to letting the Norsemen live, no further. The remaining berserks built a fire outside, and though they went hungry were at least warm and safe. And, more importantly, the treasure they had buried lay undisturbed in the woods.

Moselle had searched the abbey for skulking Vikings but found nothing. Only the door to the penitential cell remained unopened and locked, but, looking through the hatch, the Franks saw nothing but straw and elected not to kick it down.

In the warming house, Aelis was shaking with the violence of the day and with what she had heard on the beach. All that war band had been searching for her, and that thing, the faceless hag, was near. She told Moselle in terms she thought he would understand what she feared. A sorceress was at large, she said, and his men must be alert and, above all, beware of birds. The witch could use them as a vessel for her magic, thought Aelis. She had won a battle against her but she sensed her enemy was far from defeated. She looked into Moselle’s eyes for his reaction to what she told him. It was a risk to even introduce the idea of sorcery, but she needed clarity now; the time for even tiny deceit was over.

‘Have you traded with devils, lady?’

‘No, but devils have tried to trade with me. They beset me and I ask for your protection as a warrior and a knight. You are a champion of Christ, Moselle, a Michael to Lucifer. My life, and the life of my soul, is in your care.’

Moselle took her seriously and set a watch, telling his men to keep their bows near for any ravens that might appear, and made her as comfortable as he could in the warming house, giving her blankets to lie on. A table was turned on its side to screen her from the eyes of the men who slept around her.

As she lay awake the events of the day played out in her mind. At one instant she was rocking as if on the longship, but then she’d start as the awful moment that the ship hit the beach replayed itself, or the thunder of the cavalry charge came back to her. She wished she was with the little merchant again. He would take her to Helgi, her only hope. She trusted the wolfman who had died for her and had believed him when he said Helgi could help her. She pictured Leshii on his mule, imagined the horse symbol moving on the animal’s skin, calling it to her.

There is a moment between waking and sleeping and between sleeping and waking when the mind seems to be in many places at once, when memories mingle with dreams, when what has been and what is yet to be exist side by side, and when the mind slips free of time and personality to wander in strange halls where the familiar and the strange become indistinguishable and ghosts and visions walk hand in hand. Aelis tumbled towards sleep and fell into this place, to the mind’s borderlands, where magic is.

It seemed to her that she woke up. The warming house was empty and the fire was just embers, though the room seemed intolerably hot. She went to the door and opened it, drinking in the cold light of the silver moon above her. Aelis was not alone, she could sense. Her memories seemed to stalk her, and she knew she had walked like this before, entranced in the cool night air of the garden at Loches.

The cloister of the monastery was still. Her eye was drawn to a corner of the cloister and a door that opened the opposite way to all the others. The scriptorium, the warming house she had just emerged from, the kitchen and the chapels all had doors that opened into the cloister — so that they didn’t take up interior space, she supposed. Only one door opened inwards. Why was that door different?

She walked to it. There was an open hatch in the door. She was drawn to it. She moved her hand towards the opening and caught a glimpse of something within. A puff of mist? Her breath was freezing on the air, coming out in white plumes in the moonlight. She shivered. The temperature had dropped and her hand was shaking.

Something inside her seemed to light up, almost in answer to the cold that had come over her. It was one of the symbols, a jagged S, which seemed to shine with the light of the sun, warming her and driving the cold away. Another symbol, like a fierce diamond, lit up in her. She felt the deep earth under her feet, currents passing through the land as they might pass through the sea, lapping around the roots of mountains, falling in torrents into deep, dark voids.

A feeling like a million little needles swept her skin; a smell like ocean rain filled the air. It was as if the symbols inside her had called out and the freezing sensation that had come over her was their answer. A memory arose in her mind. She was in the garden at Loches under a big moon and she had in her hand a rose as big as a baby’s head, its scent heavy and intoxicating. There was a sharp sensation and she realised she had pricked her finger on a thorn. The blood ran down her finger in a great gout and she put it into her mouth. That heavy rose scent was in her nostrils now, sweet and menacing, mingling with the taste of blood and the memory of pain.

She turned and looked across the cloister. In the lattice of shadows stood two figures. The first was a woman in a pale white shift, her face no more than a pitted pumice stone like you might find on the beach. In her hand was a knife, long and thin. She was trembling and worried at the outside of her leg with it, so the shift was torn and stained at the thigh. Around her neck was a thin rope tied in an elaborate knot that made Aelis shiver. The figure next to her was a boy of around twelve years old — from the Danish war band, by the look of him. His eyes were dead and his face marked with blood from two puncture wounds at his cheek. He held the hand of the sorceress and guided her to where Aelis could see her clearly.

‘My men are here. They will take you, witch,’ said Aelis.

Another symbol flashed into Aelis’s mind, two upright lines with an X between them. She felt a different kind of cold, saw a different light. It was a symbol of the new day, revelation, clarity. Aelis knew it was inside the sorceress. It washed like a sunrise over the darkness and then disappeared again, leaving the cloister to the moonlight.

Aelis screamed. All around her were the bodies of Franks, lying at grotesque angles, some with their faces to the floor, some with their eyes to the heavens, arms wide as if pleading with the stars to spare them. The symbols inside her seemed to increase her sensitivities, and the colours that attended the warriors, the night music that seeped from them, was not that of death but of sleep. They were enchanted, she knew, but alive.

‘What are you?’ Aelis heard herself speak.

The woman bowed her head. ‘You,’ she said. ‘I am you.’

‘You make no sense to me, witch.’

‘We are pieces of a broken urn. But the urn can be mended.’

‘You are my enemy.’

‘Yes. I have struck at you. But it was no good. I cannot harm you, and you cannot harm me.’

‘Then why do you tremble?’

‘Because of the certainty of death.’

‘Whose death?’

‘Yours and mine.’

‘I will not die. Not by your hand or the hand of any of your disciples.’

‘No, you will not. But the runes will come together. He will be here on earth again, erasing you, erasing me. This is the truth of it.’ The woman touched the knot at her neck. ‘The dead lord’s necklace, the triple knot that was untied, shall be made anew when he is here again, present in the runes.’

‘When who is here again?’

‘The god of the runes. The god who is the runes. I know what is in you. It is more than just the howling rune.’

Aelis swallowed. The howling rune. That was as good a name for it as any, the rune that stood apart from the eight others, the one that cried out with the lonely voice of a wolf in the hills. Calling to what? To the thing that had seemed to stalk her in her midnight walks at Loches. The wolf.

‘That is why you and your hideous brother pursue me?’

‘It is why I pursue you. My brother would not understand those motivations. He cannot understand the true nature of the runes, what it means that they are in me, the unshakeable destiny they decree.’

Aelis felt a strong sensation come from the woman, not unlike the one she had felt coming from the merchant with the taste of vinegar and pitch. Deceit. The witch had lied to her brother. But about what?

The woman continued: ‘When the runes are united by death the god will be here, the wolf will kill his brother and fight with the corpse lord. My destiny will be complete as I die under the teeth of the wolf.’

Aelis couldn’t make sense of what she said but the symbols inside her were now in tumult. They jabbered and clanged, moaned and shook. Images came to her — the sheen on a horse’s coat, the flow of water over a slick black rock, the spray making rainbows a waterfall, the sun firing the tops of the clouds, the glowing fields of the Indre Valley, the glimmer of light on a scythe’s edge as it reaps the golden wheat, the bright bushels of corn loaded onto a wagon and the great light of joy in the windows of Saint-Etienne, casting blue pools on the flagstones below, where she knelt asking for salvation and grace. The runes gleamed and shone and she knew it was with the light of God. But what had awakened them?

Something was calling to them, winter to their summer. The same light lit them up in towering columns of shining ice, gleamed off frosted leaves thick with thorns, turned a fall of hail to a silver veil, gleamed on the steaming skin of a white wild ox. These visions too were caused by symbols but not those that lived inside Aelis. These, she knew, belonged to the witch. The discomfort Aelis felt told her very clearly that the runes inside her were screaming to join the ones the witch carried.

Somehow, the witch must die.

It was as if Munin caught her thought. She threw the knife towards Aelis. It clattered at her feet and Aelis picked it up. The knife was a wicked gleaming splinter of steel under the moon. The witch said nothing, the vacant pits of her eyes staring into nothing. Aelis walked towards her and went to drive the knife into her belly. But she hesitated. It was as if her arm was no longer hers to command.

The witch spoke: ‘If it was that easy you would have been dead years ago.’

Aelis summoned up her strength, took the knife in both her hands and tried to stab it into the witch’s neck. But she couldn’t do it. She could sense what was stopping her: the runes, the ones the witch carried. They wouldn’t let her act and yet they wanted to be together. Each set of eight runes, it appeared, wanted the other’s host to die and defended its own.

Aelis threw down the knife in frustration.

‘There may yet be a way,’ said the witch.

At a sound Aelis turned. Moselle and Ofaeti were coming into the cloister, Astarth, Egil and Fastarr behind them. Ofaeti and Moselle carried a long rope between them. Instantly Aelis noticed what was odd about them. They were both unarmed. Neither man would ever forget his weapon in this company, she thought. Where was Moselle’s sword? Where was Ofaeti’s axe?

She ran towards them. ‘This woman is my enemy. Strike her down,’ she said.

Neither man spoke; they just stared at the witch.

Aelis shook Moselle, but he didn’t react. She withdrew her hands. The knight, for some reason, was soaking wet.