Fenrir

61

Aelis sat next to Jehan in the long light of evening, her fair hair a halo in the low sun. All the colours of autumn were about them, though Jehan was not cold. He had a Lombard’s thick cloak around his shoulders, a good woollen shirt on his body, fine trousers and good boots. They were not the first people the wild men had attacked, though they were the last.

A smudge of memory was in his mind — faint echoes of distant bells, the chanting of prayers, Brother Guillaume’s incessant coughing during mass, the feeling of restriction, of limbs that wanted to move but couldn’t. Other recollections seemed sharper: bright water, a green riverbank and a girl, her hair long, almost white beneath the sun, laughing and splashing. He had loved her for so long, he knew, missed her for so long. Yet none of it mattered. He was there, beside her, the past and the future swallowed by the ravenous present, the sensual instant, the thrill of her touch, her eyes blue against the scarlet autumn, the forest hanging in a million wet jewels of light.

He touched the stone at his neck and she moved her hand onto his to tell him to leave it where it was. A memory of himself came back to him and he had the strong urge to cast it away as an idolatrous image, but he did not. He felt the wolf he had been like a skin he had not quite shed. When he moved he sometimes seemed impelled by a raging force and he had the urge to run snarling through the trees. The stone, though, would save him. Some sense told him this was his lifeline to sanity, the key that had released him from the slaughterhouse of his thoughts.

They hunted together — Aelis taking one of the bandits’ bows, Jehan using stealth and surprise to kill a deer with a spear. That night they cooked the meat and lay in a clearing under the forest stars.

Jehan had a sense of what he had been — a man who had loved a woman so strongly that he had come back from the dead to find her — but could not put it into words. His connection to Aelis was based on a feeling worse than hunger, closer to the fear of suffocation. She was the air to him, and he could not think that he would ever be apart from her.

They had watched the men look for them throughout the summer — the fat one like a giant, the crowman and the merchant — but they had not allowed themselves to be seen, just moved into the trees. The men had stayed a long time searching the woods but had not found them. The lady walked among them unseen, sitting by their fire, stroking their horses, even eating their food, before coming back to join Jehan. She did not want them to be discovered, so they would not be discovered.

Then one day when the air was cold Aelis had kissed him and taken his hand, leading him through the trees for miles. They came to a house, a low hut with a turf roof. No one was inside, though the remains of a life were there — a table overturned, a chair smashed and a straw bed. Someone had left quickly, and Jehan did not wonder why. The forest was a lawless place and the lives lived there were precarious. Aelis found a bow and made a fire for the hearth; Jehan laid down the pack he was carrying and opened it to find the meat and roots inside. Then they cooked their food and sat on the bed late into the evening, falling asleep in each other’s arms.

In the hut Jehan slept and dreamed of nothing — not God, not the wolf, not the cripple he had been, the man he was nor the woman by his side. He was at peace.

He awoke, feeling the late autumn cold on his skin. She had been up before him and was out collecting mushrooms. He heard her at the door, coming down the low step, putting the basket she had found in the hut down on the table.

He stretched out on the bed and opened his eyes. At first he thought the sunlight had bleached his vision away. But there was no sunlight. He was inside.

‘You are awake?’ It was Aelis’s voice.

Jehan blinked and blinked again.

‘Jehan?’

Jehan swallowed. Then he put his hand to the stone at his neck.

‘I cannot see,’ he said.