She glanced at the two men with her. Would one of them come for her in the night, his eyes wild, his body burning? She couldn’t think too much on that. She had to get away from this thing that was following her, and to quell the odd sensations that afflicted her.
The wolfman, she could sense, was a good man acting for good, his presence complicated and odd, wild yet not hostile. When she looked at him she saw great spaces, valleys, rivers and woods, felt a longing, but a solidity too. He would not let her down, she knew.
‘Come on,’ said Leshii. ‘Let’s at least get away from here. Who knows what’ll happen if these countrymen suddenly decide they want revenge for the death of their kinsman.’
Aelis allowed Leshii to help her up onto her horse, her ribs were agony. The wolfman mounted the other animal and the merchant led the mule out of the village, heading north by the Pole Star. Aelis could not decide what to do. The forces against her seemed overwhelming. She wanted to go to Melun but couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t be making things easier for her enemies by going there — surrounding herself with men who could be enchanted. They made slow progress over wet fields and finally came out into common land and woods. Passing through a clearing, she heard distant screams, sounds of anguish and terror from back the way they had come. She turned to look behind her.
‘Don’t think about it,’ said the wolfman. He drew his horse alongside her. He was not used to riding, she could see, and was lucky Sindre’s horse was a well-trained gelding. He flopped on the animal as a passenger, not a rider. She wondered if it was the effect of his wound or if, like the northerners, he had never been taught to ride properly. ‘We must press on, and quickly,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ said Aelis.
‘The Raven is not easy to kill,’ said Sindre, ‘but he will not know where we have gone and neither will the farmers. If we can make the River Oise then we can take a boat. We must not sleep until then.’
‘He will kill all the farmers?’
‘He will spare some of them for a while to try to gain the information he needs but then he will kill them too. He can’t risk them running to their lord, and a party of warriors searching the countryside for him and whoever is with him.’
‘He seems a match for any warrior.’
‘Perhaps. But what if your kinsmen find us? He means to kill you and doesn’t want anything delaying that. If your people rescue you it will make things difficult for him.’
‘Then I should go to my people.’
‘You will only delay your death. You were with your people when he came for you before. Helgi is your only hope in this.’
‘Why does that thing want to kill me?’
‘Just press on. We have no time to talk.’
‘Why does he want to kill me? I have a right to know.’
The wolfman swallowed and went to put his hand on her hair in a gesture of affection. Then he withdrew it. ‘He is afraid of you. Now let’s be gone.’
‘We go nowhere until you tell me more. Why am I pursued? Why am I harried? How can something like that be afraid of me?’
Sindre looked across at her. He leaned heavily on the pommel of his saddle.
‘Because something else follows you too. It always has and always will.’
‘What follows me?’
‘You dream of a wolf?’
Aelis nodded. ‘How did you know that?’
‘I dream of him too.’
‘Does he say that he loves you?’
The wolfman was silent but Aelis could see the fear in his eyes. He looked very old, she thought, or rather he had an air of great age about him. He had, she thought, travelled a long way to be with her, and not just in distance. When she looked at him she felt the wheel of the seasons turning — rain, sun and rain again. But she sensed something else too. His life was passing. It would not be the arrow that killed him, nor the Raven. His death would come quickly and unforeseen.
When she was a child she had taken her meals in the kitchen at Loches. She was a girl and so was not invited to the high table, but she had not wanted to go. In the great hall there was an iron stand as tall as a man. It held a brazier at the top of it which lit the room on feast days. She had hated it and not known why. It seemed to her like an evil presence simmering by the table, a tall, pendulous thing full of harm. Her cousin Godalbertus was hardly more than a baby, just able to walk. The stand had fallen, caught by a drunken nobleman, and had struck the child and killed him. Count Albertus had had the stand taken outside. Someone had filled the brazier with earth and grown flowers in it. All her youth it had stood in the garden, flowers spilling from its basket, like death in his victory garland. When Aelis looked at Sindre it was as if the stand — or rather the evil feeling the stand seemed to generate — was behind him, ready to fall.
‘What will happen to me?’ she said.
‘You will go to Helgi and you will be saved.’
Aelis sensed the uncertainty in his voice.
‘Will the Raven kill me?’
‘He will try. I cannot tell. No one can tell. It will not profit you to know more until you are with Helgi. I promise you, he will give you a better explanation than I can.’
‘And you do all this for the love of your prince?’
‘Lady?’
‘You said you were acting for love.’
The wolfman looked into her eyes. Aelis had that feeling of great age again, but this time seemed to share it. She went back in her mind to her childhood and then beyond that. She had the sensation of a weight in her arms, of falling and of a terror at her back that she could not shake.
The wolfman winced and grasped his side.
‘We must move quickly. I am in no condition to fight the Raven if he finds us.’
‘If he is scared of me then shouldn’t we wait for him?’
‘The Raven expresses his fear in sword cuts and tortures,’ said Sindre. ‘He does not hide from the monsters of his dreams, he hacks them down.’
‘Can we get on?’ said Leshii. ‘We can find the river. The current is too strong to take a boat, but if we can find a crossing we can cut north and lose our pursuers.’
Aelis looked at Sindre. In her mind she was standing on a ledge in a high cold place. She was holding something in her arms. It was a man. She could not see his face. Was it the wolfman? Someone like him, though she couldn’t tell. She didn’t know what to make of the vision, nor did she know if she saw the past or the future. Perhaps, she thought, she saw something that had never happened, nor never would be. But it told her she was linked to this man in a way that went far deeper than his rescue of her or their present conversation. But when she looked at him, she did not think of love. Another word came into her mind: daudthi. It meant nothing to her — that is, she couldn’t translate it — but it too seemed to come in a rush of images and sensations: a warrior, his white hair gleaming from the dark and then gone like a fish in a pond, cries of anguish, her body aching and bruised, and a smell, a deep animal smell seeping from somewhere at her side, a smell that brought her around again to that word and a knowledge of its meaning. Daudthi. Death. And it was death she saw when she looked at Sindre, not love.
But still, better death for her than against her. The wolfman had tried to protect her and she felt compelled to act on her instinctive trust of him.
She looked up at the Pole Star and then east to the constellation of Cassiopeia. Its flat upright M-shape seemed to her like the symbol in her head, the one that called the horses, and she imagined the stars as a rearing horse pointing her way. There lay her destiny, she was sure, with Helgi and his magic in the lands of the Rus.
‘Take me to the east,’ she said, and squeezed her legs against the horse’s flanks to urge it forward.
PART TWO
Wolf Age
31
Helgi’s Sacrifice
Years before Aelis set off to seek Helgi’s help, the child had been taken to the roof of the river loading tower — the highest structure in Ladoga,
nearly five man heights tall. Logs had to be removed from the roof in order for her to be passed up through a gap.
Her father laid her down there himself.
‘Nearer the apex, khagan.’
The healer chinked like coins in a purse as he spoke, his whole body adorned with charms and trinkets. Prince Helgi glanced at him and moved the girl nearer to the top of the roof.
‘The surest cure is at the apex,’ said the healer. ‘That is where the cooling humours of the sky settle.’
‘They’ll be no cure for her if she rolls off to her death,’ said Helgi.
‘I will sit beside her and make sure she comes to no harm,’ said the healer.
‘Yes,’ said Helgi, ‘you will.’
He touched the girl’s head. She was boiling in her own sweat. He cursed himself. It never did to love your children too much, least of all the girls.
Helgi was a troubled man and the little girl had been one of his comforts. She was bold and funny, even going as far as to ridicule his stern manner. He would have cut a warrior down for that but she just made him laugh, made him forget his tormented sleep and the nightmares that woke him ranting in the darkest hours of the night. In those awful dreams he always found himself back by that well, the vision of his own death, of the trampling hooves, waking him with a shout. When he returned to sleep there was worse. He saw a warrior on an eight-legged horse — Odin was coming to earth and would march at the head of Ingvar’s armies. The god was treacherous, it was well known, but Helgi felt cheated. He had sacrificed so much, given so many slaves, so many cattle, so much gold. But the portents were clear — he was under divine threat.
So he had sent throughout his land for wild women and holy men, for priests and witches, wanting to hear that the prophecy had been wrong. The mystics came pouring in to Ladoga like a market-day crowd, rattling bones, casting runes, sweating and fasting for prophecy. So many came that Helgi earned his nicknames ‘Helgi the Magician’ and ‘Helgi the Prophet’. All the troll-workers told him nothing, just that he would be a great king throughout all the known lands of the earth. He did not believe them and saw that they only sought to please him.
One mountain woman, though, had drawn a shape in the dust of the floor. ‘This is your destiny,’ she had said. The outline was that of a horse.
‘I will be killed by my horse?’ He glanced left and right. The hall was empty, the druzhina sent outside to prevent them hearing anything that might upset them and, through them, the people. ‘Could the horse be a symbol? Might it mean something else? Might it be that a god is the only thing that can kill me? Could it be a sign of great fortune?’
‘Anything can mean anything,’ the wild woman had said and put out her hand for gold.
There had been a sound from beneath a bench at the side of the hall, and he’d turned to see what it was. It was his little girl, Svava, poking her face from the shadows. He’d laughed when he’d seen her.
‘You know I should beat you for sneaking, don’t you, girl?’
The girl had just chuckled and come up to him.
‘Can I have an apple?’
‘This woman isn’t a farmer, she’s a witch. A troll-worker. Shall I get her to eat you?’
‘I might eat her,’ said Svava.
‘My girl,’ he’d said to the wild woman, ‘as bold as any boy and ten times as cheeky.’
But the wild woman had her gold and was heading to the door, plunging Helgi back into his thoughts of what Odin was about to take from him and give to Ingvar.
Helgi had tried to weaken the boy but Ingvar’s faction was strong, the loyalty he commanded from kinsmen in the druzhina not far from Helgi’s own. His uncles were hard and cunning men and watchful for any plot, so that way was not open to Helgi. He would have to let his original scheme stand: conquer the south and leave the boy to make his mistakes. He was at the mercy of the god and there was nothing he could do about it.
And then in January, the traveller had come, fighting through a terrible blizzard, hunched against the cold. The men had thought him a beggar in his rags and wolfskin, but had been shocked to see anyone emerge from that storm.
The guards had let him in to the town out of amazement and pity. He’d gone to one of the fires they kept going behind the gatehouse to warm himself. A man came to tell Helgi because lone travellers on foot were unheard of in that country at that time of year. No one could travel in such weather and live. Helgi told the druzhina to stay where they were in the mead hall. It would be a dark day when the prince of all the east needed a bodyguard to face a frozen and wandering beggar. He’d been bored, to tell the truth, by the men’s boasts and the drinking games where a mistake in the rhythm of a complicated pattern of clapping forced the error-maker to take a swig. Helgi had played the games so many times that he found it impossible to fail at them and sometimes broke his rhythm deliberately just to wet his palate.
So he had gone alone, shielding his face with his cloak as he walked half blind through the storm.
The man had stood by the fire, the snowy wind turning the back of his body white, looking like a thing of ice himself, a statue topped by a shock of red hair. Helgi told the guard he was a poor host and to get the visitor some food, and the traveller had smiled at him. With his smile, the blizzard stopped and the wind died.
Helgi had looked up. It was night, just past dusk, and the sky was a dark and frozen purple, the stars shards of ice, the slim moon an icicle ready to drop. Without the shrieking wind the special silence of the snow fell upon the town and with it a sense of complete stillness. Helgi felt strange. ‘I know you,’ he had said.
‘And I you, my burning prince, whose desires have melted away all the storm.’
‘What do you know of my desires?’
‘The only thing worth knowing about them.’
‘And what is that?’
‘They will never be fulfilled.’
Helgi felt his blood fall to his knees, though he maintained his composure. It occurred to him to strike the man down where he stood for his insolence, but he felt strangely vulnerable. The freakish change in the weather had unsettled him, but there was something else. What? This man, the firelight crawling over his body like so many snakes, had come half naked through weather that could kill a horse under its rider.
‘Then I should make them greater,’ said Helgi. ‘That way, in falling short, I will have enough.’
The man smiled. A grin of ancient hunger like a wolf’s, thought Helgi.
‘You know what will kill you.’
‘My horse. I am glad of it. It means I am immortal for Helgi owns no horses. All he rides, he borrows.’
‘What a fate! To be master of nothing but a borrowed horse, your lands snatched away by the dead god’s hand. Would you see him?’
‘Show him to me.’
The man moved his hand and the snow in the gatehouse square rose from the ground. It swirled and eddied, turned tiny whirlwinds and finally took shape. It was a scene from the sagas. The dread lord Odin, one-eyed and fearsome, his face contorted into a scream, sat on his great eight-legged horse Slepnir, driving his spear down at a terrible wolf that tore and bit at his shield. The sound of the battle grated through the town and Helgi wondered why none of his druzhina came out to see what was happening.
The spear stabbed into the wolf, lodging in its flesh, and the animal gave a terrible keening howl but it didn’t falter in its attack. The rider’s shield shattered, and the wolf’s front paws dug into the horse’s flank, its teeth snapping at the man’s throat, its body tossed around in a crazy spiral as the monstrous horse screamed and bucked to be free of it. But the wolf did not let go.
And then the snow spectres crashed to the earth and the night was quiet again. Helgi walked forward to where they had fought. All that lay on the snow was a twisted rope. Helgi recognised the triple knot of Odin.
He picked it up and took it to the beggar. It seemed the natural thing to do.
‘When he died last time,’ said
the man, ‘this happened.’ From nowhere he produced a long knife and with skilful fingers cut the knot into three pieces.
‘He is in the world, sundered,’ said the man, holding the pieces of the rope out to Helgi. ‘If he ever becomes whole again you and the armies of mankind will have never known such destruction. He will light a fire from the shores of the blue men to Thule, and from the green hills of Albion to the sands of Serkland.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Helgi.
‘He is in the world, as three. If he becomes one again, you and all the kings of the world will run from him like rats from a fire in the corn. Only his favourite will remain. Ingvar will triumph. Ingvar will rule.’
The man’s words seemed to fizzle and sizzle in Helgi’s mind with the sound of a branding iron on an animal’s back.
‘And how does he become one?’
‘How he does anything — by death. Three live with the runes within them. Fragments of the god. Eventually there will be just one, and your destiny will fall upon you and sweep you from the earth.’
‘Who are they? What do I need to do?’
‘Those who drink at Mimir’s well pay a price so to do. Odin gave his eye for wisdom; the bright god Heimdall gave his ear. What did you give?’
‘My peace.’
‘It was not enough. More is required.’
‘What?’
‘A child.’
‘Which child?’
‘The one who sits beside you in your great hall.’
‘For what?’
‘For death.’
Helgi felt a delicious current of anticipation flow through him. Could the god really be asking for Ingvar?
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