Wolfsangel

3

The mother’s name was Saitada and she had been very beautiful, sold as a young child when she was captured from her own people. Then her name had been Badb. As she had grown she had attracted the sexual attention of her owner — a smith. He was a generous man and liked to share her with his friends. At the age of thirteen she had cursed her good looks, taken a hot iron from the forge and applied it to her face.

The smith had been furious. He had tried to beat her but for some reason couldn’t bring himself to do it. He wanted to hold her, to kiss her, tell her he would make things all right, but he knew the girl would never come near him any more except by force. For as long as he’d owned her he had been convinced there was some bond between them — that despite her tears and her protestations, her eventual sullen withdrawal, that she felt something for him, even that he was special to her. There on her face he confronted the damage he had done and, as a coward, could not bear to look at it in his home. So he’d just taken her to market. Though she had been delirious with pain from her wound, she remembered that place, where she had stood alongside goats and pigs in the shit and the stink to be prodded and inspected and sold on.

‘This one,’ said the farmer’s wife, who could have been mistaken for an upright pig in the wrong light. ‘This one I think is very suitable.’

The farmer, whose advancing years had neither increased his discernment nor reduced his lust, had been delighted. If he positioned her right then he would have a rare beauty to enjoy. Then he had looked into that eye and the idea had seemed impossible. He felt bad for having had such lewd thoughts and took pity on the girl.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘she will make a fine maid.’

They had asked her what she was called and she, wishing to leave the sullied little girl with the pretty face behind, had chosen another of her people’s names. Saitada.

The farmer’s wife had picked her for her horrible looks, fearing to lose her husband’s affections to a prettier girl. The wound, she knew, would not put a man off because a man in passion is a beast that no small deformity can deter. It was the bloody eye that seemed to look through you and expose your sins to shame that would keep her husband true. No man, she thought, could have that look upon him and feel his misdeeds would go unpunished.

The farmer’s wife was a healer and had dressed and cared for the girl’s wounds with presses of comfrey and chamomile. Lacking children of her own, she lavished attention on her, combed and plaited her hair, made her a pretty dress and even gave her a bed. Saitada was as happy there as she had ever been, though she swore she would never take another man. And she never did, until she was seventeen.

On the day that she was to go back on that vow a neighbouring farmer had visited to warn that, very unusually, there was a wolf in the area. Three of his sheep had been killed the night before. In such a tight community of small farms wolves were rare, put off by the number of men. Hence the local farmers had little experience of dealing with them.

So Saitada, the farmer and his wife drove their livestock into the pen by the pigsty and waited the night with the dogs and a spear. You have two ways to go with a wolf, unless you are an experienced trapper. One is to light your torches and sing your songs, hoping that the noise will drive him away. The second is to lie in wait to spear him and kill him. Neither will work but both courses of action will provide the comfort of doing something. If you come in force he will slip away and try again tomorrow. If you wait, he can wait longer, until you are tired and sleep takes you. To catch a wolf, you need a trick and a trap, things the farmer did not have.

The farmer was eager for sleep and wanted to get things over with, so he commanded silence from the women. Still, he could not quite keep quiet himself, so impressed was he with the weight of his spear. Men who have never had to fight love a weapon. They love to hold it in their hands, feel its balance and speculate on the damage they might do, were they called to do it. There is a killer in every cowardly man, waiting for the right set of circumstances when the time has been drained of the possibility of reprisals and he feels free to act. The farmer was no different and began, as he sat in the warm night, to feel the importance the spear bestowed upon him and, despite himself, to talk.

‘When I was a boy it was said no one threw a spear better than I.’

The farmer’s wife rolled her eyes because she had heard this story before many times when he was in drink.

‘I thought we were being quiet for this wolf,’ she said.

‘I’m just saying,’ said the farmer, ‘had I been born higher I would have made a mighty warrior. As a boy I had quite the feel for weapons. The earl himself saw me one day and said he wished half his warriors could shoot a bow as well as I. I was quite the-’

Suddenly he was quiet. In the trees by the farm two gigantic eyes seemed to burn, less a wolf than some fiend from hell.

He moved smoothly behind the slave girl. She did not flinch, having endured worse than a wolf had to offer her.

‘That is no ordinary wolf,’ said the farmer’s wife.

‘Sound the alarm,’ said the farmer. ‘Fetch aid, fetch aid!’

‘You fetch aid,’ said his wife; ‘you’re the man.’

‘If I move it might see me,’ hissed the farmer.

‘If I move it might see me,’ hissed his wife.

‘I am needed to till the land. Who will provide for poor Saitada?’ said the farmer.

‘I will go for aid,’ said Saitada.

‘Too late. The wolf is among you,’ said a voice close at their ears.

The three turned but couldn’t for a moment see anyone. Suddenly, so bright and white in the starlit night that they wondered how ever they could have missed him, a young man of around twenty was there. He was strikingly handsome, long-legged and lithe. He seemed to draw the moonlight to him, and beneath it his muscles rippled as if under some silvery sea. For a breath it didn’t seem remarkable that he was almost completely naked. All he had to cover his modesty was a huge and bloody wolfskin draped across his back, a rear paw cheekily positioned by his hand over that part the nuns shun. His hair was bright red and stood up in a shock.

‘Christ’s wounds!’ said the farmer. ‘You nearly made me jump out of my skin.’

‘Well, I did jump out of mine,’ said the man, sliding away the paw that concealed his shame and then whipping it back again.

‘How dare you appear in front of my wife like that!’ said the farmer, who was a pious man when it suited him.

‘The wolf behind you?’ said the strange man.

‘Where?’ said the farmer. ‘Oh Lord, the eyes.’

The farmer turned to run but he had those grim burning eyes in front of him in the wood and the strange and terrible young man behind. He had nowhere to go and, his brain running out of ideas for what to do with his body, he simply flopped to the floor.

‘Not eyes,’ said the man, ‘just torches left by some kind traveller.’

The farmer squinted into the darkness. Now it was obvious: they were just brands.

‘As I thought,’ said the farmer.

‘Fire,’ said the pale man. ‘That is the way to keep the wolf at bay.’ He walked to the wood and returned with the two burning torches. Now he had tied the wolf skin’s back paws around his midsection.

‘I have covered that serpent that tempted Eve,’ he said.

The man held the torches up and looked at the peasants. ‘A farmer, his pretty piggy wife and who is this rare beauty? No wonder you panic, old man, to see such a face.’

‘I wasn’t panicking I was… taking advantage of the terrain, that is why I got down.’

‘It seems this one knows better than you that fire keeps the wolf at bay,’ said the man, holding up his hand to Saitada’s chin and studying the scar on her face.

Saitada did not flinch to hear his words because the scorn of a man meant nothing to her. He gently turned the undamaged side of her face towards him.

‘Such beauty is a terrible thing,’ said the man, ‘for no shield can deflect its dart, and even the most nimble of warriors can no more dodge it than you can, old man.’

‘You are mocking me,’ said Saitada, ‘but I am glad of it if it means you will not lay your hands upon me.’

‘No, lady,’ said the man. ‘You are far more beautiful to me than any woman on earth. You have snatched the spool of destiny from the hands of the fates and woven a skein yourself. ’

‘You speak fine words, sir,’ said the farmer.

‘High praise from such a judge,’ said the traveller with a bow.

‘And now you’re mocking me!’ said the farmer, who like most old men tended to hear only those parts of the conversation that concerned himself. ‘I once threw a spear the length of a laine. And it stuck in the mud properly too.’

‘Don’t worry, ma’am,’ said the man to the farmer’s wife. ‘I shall mock you when I have finished with your husband, but, oh, shall I ever finish with such an example? No, ma’am, you are quite safe, I shall never finish with him.’

‘What of that wolf?’ said the farmer, whose head had become a little disordered since the stranger’s appearance, though he had drunk little.

‘I have slain that night-time caller, that freeman of the forests, that furry sir, oh farmer, my manure mangler, my seedy serf, my shit smith. But he tore my clothes,’ said the man. ‘Will you lend me some of yours so that I might cover the splendour the priests would call our shame?’ He went to pull the wolf skin away but stopped at the last instant.

‘If you have killed the wolf, as I see you have, then I owe you a cloak,’ said the old man. ‘Here in the house I have one that has served me many winters.’

‘I prefer the expensive one you’re wearing,’ said the man. ‘It was woven by the finest hand that ever picked up a distaff.’

‘It was woven by me,’ said Saitada.

‘I know it, lady,’ said the man and bowed deeply.

‘She is not a lady, she is a slave,’ said the farmer.

‘She’s freer than you will ever be,’ said the man. ‘Now get me your cloak before I tear the skin from your back and wrap myself in that instead.’

The stranger’s words seemed to sizzle through the farmer’s mind. He felt as though he was frying in the juice of all his boasts, all his pretensions and weaknesses. He did as he was bid. The pale fellow stretched out his hand to Saitada and it seemed to her that little points of light began to dance around her, tiny silver orbs no bigger than seeds, glinting in a shimmering web. He put on the cloak she had made, drew it around him and began to sing. Half beautiful is she, like the moon And from her shall spring the moon taker Oh the sun it grows dark at the noon And the wolf in his dreams is a waker

This last line seemed to amuse the fellow no end and he burst out in giggles, which Saitada could only share, as if she was a child learning some naughty secret. Her giggling seemed to grow and grow in her until she thought it might never stop.

And then it did stop and the night was silent. Everything had changed and for ever. It seemed to Saitada that she stood in the middle of a glade that was bathed in the silvery light of a flaming moon.

‘See the beauty of the garment you have made,’ said the man.

He was in front of her, but the cloak was not her cloak but a cloak of feathers that might not have been feathers but silvery flames or just points of light. It engulfed him and lifted him so he seemed to hover a stool’s height above the ground. The farmer and his wife were nowhere to be seen.

‘You have never been loved,’ said the traveller.

‘Sir, I have not,’ she said.

‘And you have not known until this moment that you could be loved,’ he said.

‘I have not.’

‘I can only love your kind,’ he said. ‘Who could love the princes and the heroes with their murders and their wars?’

‘I know no princes or heroes, sir.’

‘Bide your time,’ he said. ‘You’ll be sick to your back teeth of them before you’re done.’ He smiled at her. ‘You, my dear, are perfect.’

‘My face is not, sir.’

‘You chose imperfection — what could be more perfect? You saw your imperfection was perfection and therefore remedied it by imposing an imperfection on yourself thereby becoming perfect again. The logic is imperfectly flawless.’

He descended to the earth, and the cloak he had been wearing became a carpet of white feathers that covered the glade, deep as midwinter snow. She lay down upon it and, having only ever known straw before, was overwhelmed by its comfort.

The stranger spoke. ‘To strive to be the best, to excel and have the skalds sing your praises. They’re all at it. What better than to spit at what the gods gave you and spite your fate?’

‘I did it because I would not give them a moment’s more pleasure from me.’

‘They will have no pleasure ever again. Would you know their fate?’

‘If it is a bad one.’

‘I have repaid them,’ said the burning beautiful god, for now Saitada was sure this was not a mortal before her. ‘You should have seen the smith’s face when I spoke to him from the fire and he knocked that smelting pot onto his bollocks. He’s got his cock out of his breeks for a different reason now, I can tell you. Are you grateful?’

‘It is not enough,’ said Saitada.

He stretched out his hand and she saw the smith asleep in his bed. He was drawn and pale but something obscured her vision. It was smoke. The thatch was on fire. The smith woke and tried to move but his wounds wouldn’t allow him to. She saw him panic as the fire took hold.

Saitada smiled as she watched.

‘You are a power, lady, a power,’ said the god. ‘The elves sing your fame and the dwarfs of the earth despair for they know that in all their art they will never make anything to compare to your depthless beauty.’

‘I would know your name, sir,’ said Saitada. She felt something strange sweeping over her, something she had never felt from a man before: love as more than an idea, as something present and intense, like her forgotten mother might have cherished her baby girl.

‘My name?’ said the traveller. ‘Name? Lady, like you my magnificence cannot be contained by just one. First, you must know me better. You must see what I am up against.’

The odour of blood and fire filled the glade. There was a clamour and a hammering like the sound of the smith’s shop increased a thousand-fold, metal on metal, metal on wood. Saitada knew it by instinct — the noise of battle. At the edge of the glade stood a tall grey man with a beard, wearing a wide-brimmed hat. He had a patch over one eye and two huge wolves lay panting at his feet, their teeth as big as knives. The expression on the man’s face was terrible. Saitada had seen it before. It was the look men wore at cock fights or when cheering two dogs to rip into each other, the look the smith’s friends had worn as they’d held her down — a look of delight in violence and lust for more.

‘See Odin, the king of the gods in his hungers,’ said the traveller. ‘See how he would know and consume and control. Father, let go!’

The old man said nothing, just stood there frozen in his expression of malicious joy. The traveller went across and flicked the old man on the nose, but he did not respond.

‘He would eat the world!’ said the traveller. ‘He would know it all, devour every mystery until the whole of creation came at his call. He’s mad, you know. He drank so deeply of the knowledge well but the waters splashed on that burning hunger and boiled all his brains. Yet still he wants to know, ever more, ever more.’

‘I would forget,’ said Saitada.

‘Of course you would. It’s the only sane thing to do. Not knowing is what gives the world its beauty. Who would know why the sun on the dew on a May morning makes the heart sing? That pervert would. Would you have no love, old man Odin, would you snaffle down even a girl’s secret heart’s desires for a gorgeous flame-haired fellow and spew them out on a table in maps and runes? Would you chart the very stir-rings of the heart? Well, lady, I think we should give this greedy knowledge glutton, this filthy wisdom hog, a right royal bite on the bum, don’t you?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Saitada, though she didn’t really understand what he meant. She only knew she wanted to please him.

‘That’s where you and I come in,’ said the traveller. ‘Would you know my imperfections, lady?’

‘I know all I need to know of the imperfections of men,’ she said, ‘though I think you are not a man.’

‘Whatever gave you that idea?’ he said as the fiery moon turned green and points of emerald light began to dance around the glade. The old man disappeared, then one wolf, then another, its body first, then its head apart from the mouth. Finally the tongue snapped back into the teeth and lips and the glade was empty in a blink.

‘I want you,’ she said.

‘Well, that’d be a clue, wouldn’t it? You could never love a man, and yet you love me.’

‘I do,’ she said.

The pale god took her in his arms and kissed her. She felt at one with the moonlight, with the stars in the heavens and, stranger than that, she felt all her fears and dreams consumed by the strange traveller and then fed back to her, sweet as honey on his lips.

She took him to her and held him, and as their bodies joined it seemed that so did their minds. A searing laughter filled her up, somewhere between malice and wild delight. But there was love there too. She felt connected to every living thing on earth, felt the earthworms moving beneath her, the forests teeming, the cold spaces of the stars delicious and beautiful above her. The world felt precious and the gods, who she sensed like a pressure at the back of her head, the gods with their bloodlust and their battles, seemed ridiculous, terrible and contemptible.

She stroked his skin, and it was wet with the blood of the wolf pelt. She found the crimson on the white of his flesh fascinating. Her hand was red with the wolf’s blood. She licked it and the taste of it seemed to fizz through her, as if tiny bubbles went popping all the way down inside her from her mouth to her knees.

The god now had the wolf’s head over his face. He peered through the animal’s bloodied lids with cold eyes. The tongue that slithered from between the dead wolf’s teeth was long and lascivious.

‘What is your name?’ she asked.

‘Names are like clothes, lady. I have many.’

‘And which one do you wear tonight?’

The god smiled. She could see he liked her words. He pulled her to him, pressed his wolf lips to hers and said, ‘My name is Misery, and would you know yet more?’

‘Yes,’ said the girl, breathing in his scent, the scent of something beautiful, strange and burned. ‘I would know more.’

He flicked at her lips with his tongue and whispered, ‘So is yours.’

The next morning the traveller was gone, along with the fine wolf pelt. Around Saitada’s neck, tied in a strip of leather, was a strange stone. It was a token, the night caller had said, of his affection and protection. It didn’t seem to do her much good.

The livestock had been slaughtered. The dogs were dead and Saitada was blamed for lying with a stranger while the wolf devoured the pigs. The farmer’s wife wanted to forgive her, to comb her hair and call her daughter again, but the farmer, brave in the wolfless light of day, wanted revenge.

She was sold with only the clothes she stood up in and the pebble charm the strange fellow had given her to her name. The priests had bought her and told her to make a virtue of her suffering. When they discovered she was pregnant they set to chastise her but found they could not. Something about her, maybe the charm, maybe that eye that seemed to see all their sins, stopped them, and they let her live among them unpunished.

Then Authun had come.

So what stopped Authun’s thoughts of murder on the ship? The stone at her neck was no more than a pebble with the head of a wolf scratched on it. Perhaps he had seen the rough little picture — his family sign — and felt some deep-seated fear that this foreign woman was kin. Or perhaps he just felt sorry for her.

He looked north, up into the white-capped peaks where he would meet Gullveig, witch queen of the mountains, that mind-blown child. She had been no more than ten years old when he’d first faced her the summer before. Authun knew the stories surrounding her. As the old witch queen was dying, she had appeared to Gullveig’s father, a warrior at the court of King Halfdan the Just. She had told him to take his pregnant wife to the Troll Wall to give birth. He knew better than to refuse, surrendered the girl child and gave thanks for the luck the sacrifice would bring the family. Gullveig had been a decade in the dark of the mountain caves, breathing in magic like a fisherman’s children breathe sea salt on the wind.

Authun looked at the mother cradling her twins. No, he couldn’t kill her. He’d give her to the witches, he thought. The chosen boy would survive the journey from the Wall to his wife without feeding. The girl couldn’t even speak Authun’s language, would never know what had happened to her children. What harm could she do waiting on the witches? It wasn’t as if she was going to escape them: no one could even find their way in and out of their caves without a guide. In this way Authun the Pitiless, burner of the five towns, allowed the privilege of life to a deformed slave that he would not allow to his kinsmen, and in so doing sealed his fate.

When they came ashore, the summer valley was pleasant and hummed with fertility but Authun could take no pleasure from the scenery. All his life he was a man of the necessary, someone who did what needed to be done and thought no more about it. He was pitiless but as a means to an end. The fouler the fate of his enemies, the more tribute he could exact from others without having to lift a spear. But, as the woman’s strange eye seemed to watch him wherever he went, he could not rid himself of the image of Varrin’s face as he’d faced death and spoken of his wife. He would, he decided, carry the message to the widow as his first priority after he had given the child to his wife.

There was a river between the coast and the Troll Wall and Authun would have liked to have sailed up it. Single-handed, however, it would be impossible. And anyway the witches had called down enough rocks to make it impassable even with a full crew. So they walked.

The woman went in front of Authun, where he could see her. Her hair hung loose, as the wimple the priests had made her wear was now in the North Sea. In her tatty fifth-hand nun’s habit and the overlong cloak that had once belonged to Hella she looked like a beggar. The king did too, in his salt-stained cloak and sea furs. Authun carried the Moonsword tied on his back, hidden away. The hills, he knew, were full of trolls and bandits, and he didn’t want to go advertising his wealth.

They faced no supernatural opponents on their journey from the sea but on the second day saw three riders approaching in the distance. The girl looked for cover, which Authun thought a very reasonable course of action — for a woman. The king himself simply stood where he was. The men dismounted and approached, which Authun took as a sure signal of violent intent.

When taking on a warrior such as Authun the Wolf the best plan is to stalk him and cut him down in his sleep. Taunting him from afar and then approaching with ‘What have we here?’ is ill-advised. Still Authun, who was in a curiously melancholy mood, would have let the three pass had the first not attempted to shake him by the shoulder. Authun grasped the man’s hand so he couldn’t let go of his intended victim, took a pace back with his left foot to expose the arm and, in one movement, drew the Moonsword from his back and cut the limb in two. Before the bandit could realise what had happened, Authun struck him again, this time hard to the leg. Authun had no intention of killing him; already he was thinking how he might use him. His leg damaged, the man had sought to steady himself but had instinctively put his weight onto the missing hand at Authun’s collar. He fell forward at the king’s feet, bleeding heavily. The remaining two robbers stared in disbelief at the Moonsword. They knew now exactly who they were facing — they had heard so many stories of Authun the Wolf it was almost as if they knew him personally. One thing was clear in their minds. Fighting him was certain death.

They tried to flee, but Authun, even at thirty-five, was too fast for them. The king had noticed as soon as the men appeared that both were wearing costly byrnies. Thus encumbered, they died before they had run twenty paces.

He cleaned his sword on the fallen men’s clothes and returned to Saitada and the bleeding bandit. Working quickly, he took out a length of walrus cord from his pouch and tied off the man’s arm to stop the bleeding. The bandit was unconscious, which suited Authun. Saitada looked at the two bodies and then at the king. He found himself explaining.

‘If I’d let them go they would have come back when we were sleeping, perhaps in numbers,’ he said, though he knew she couldn’t understand. ‘They’re scavengers. They never paid for those horses. See the byrnies? They’re taken from the bodies of brave fools who came to steal the witches’ treasure, treasure that is only there to draw fools on to death. They use them in their magic then they throw them from the rock.’

The rock. In the distance they could see it, already huge three days’ march away. It was their destination: the Troll Wall, as tall as a thousand men standing on each other’s shoulders. It was a monstrous overhanging cliff, like something from a dream, an obstacle which blocks all further progress, something symbolic, with a resonance far beyond its daunting physical mass. He looked up at it. It was impossible, he thought, to imagine climbing it, though he had done so before. It was the only way into the witches’ caves that the sisters were willing to reveal to outsiders. The back of the mountain was even more impassable, swathed in permanent ice and perilous loose boulders, and defended by hill tribes under the witches’ thrall.

So they would have to climb — almost to the top of the Wall and then into it, to the caves. Authun knew, though, that the Wall would not be the greatest impediment to seeing the witch queen. That would be the witches themselves.