‘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.’
49
A Parting
Giuki took three candles into a small chapel, a bare room with an image of Jesus on the cross painted on the wall behind a simple altar. The room was relatively untouched because there was nothing to steal.
The pirate chief stared at Aelis then stepped forward and suddenly thrust out his hand to her tunic, feeling the breast beneath. Aelis pulled back, but he made no attempt to follow her, just stood there shaking his head.
‘ Domina,’ he said. ‘A lady. I have been a long time in a boat, girl, as have all my men. You’re welcome here tonight, indeed.’
Aelis returned his stare and spoke in Roman: ‘I am Aelis of the line of Robert the Strong, betrothed to Helgi, harried by enemies, pursued and alone save for this servant. Congratulations, Giuki, you have won a great prize. If you return me to Helgi unharmed and still a virgin then you are a rich man. Tell him, Leshii.’
‘You overheard me incorrectly, sir. This girl is my servant, no more,’ said Leshii.
Aelis spoke again, but in halting Norse: ‘You misrepresent me, merchant.’
Leshii’s eyes widened. ‘I thought I dreamed it in the courtyard,’ he said. ‘You can speak the language of the Normans.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you concealed it from me.’
Aelis turned to Giuki and spoke in Norse: ‘I am a Frankish noblewoman, betrothed to Helgi the Prophet. Take me to him and win great gold.’
Giuki said nothing for a while, just looked at her in the candlelight. At last he said, ‘Tell me, domina, why are you travelling with your hair cut like a country clot, in a man’s clothes with a sword at your waist? Why do sorcerers drop from the roofs to try to free you? You are Christian. Why do the men of our gods seek to help you?’
‘He is Helgi’s man,’ said Aelis, ‘and came to take me to him. We have been chased from one end of the land to another. My protectors are gone. This is why I wear this disguise. As a woman alone I am helpless. As a warrior, I have a chance.’
‘Are you a warrior?’ said Giuki. ‘I’ve heard of battle maidens but I’ve never seen one.’
‘I killed the king who owned this sword,’ she said. ‘Sigfrid the Dane died at my hand.’
‘That was a mighty king,’ said Giuki, looking very troubled. ‘I should call you a liar. No woman can kill a strong warrior. It is impossible. And yet on the beach you did for Brodir. That is odd, ve
ry odd.’
He stood quietly for a while.
Then he put his hand on the wall on the picture of Christ crucified and spoke to it: ‘Odin,’ he said, ‘god of the hanged, god of kings, god of madness and magic, give me insight. Tell me what to do. You who hung on the tree for nine days and nights, chilled by the moon and pricked by starlight, stabbed by the spear and strangled by the noose, guide me now and I will seek battle at the earliest opportunity. I will kill nine men for you.’
Giuki held his hand against the wall for some time. The candle was burning low by the time he turned.
‘It pleases me to fuck you now and throw you in the water. You’re bad luck, lady. You draw wolves to you. A woman cannot kill a king, not one like Sigfrid. And yet I don’t think you’re lying. How far have you travelled with this little ape for company, unmolested, unrobbed, alive?’
‘From Paris.’
‘Then you must have had mighty protectors. That sorcerer killed five of my men.’
‘He would have killed more but he was wounded when he arrived.’
‘If you encounter the Raven you will lose many more,’ said Leshii.
‘Who?’
‘The Raven. He is a sorcerer of your people. Sigfrid had use for him before he died.’
‘I have heard of him,’ said Giuki. ‘He has a sister, does he not?’
‘He does. She is watching you now, very likely.’
‘How?’
Leshii swallowed.
‘It was she who sent the wolfman. She is in league with Helgi and has placed her protection on this lady. Whoever moves against her, the Raven will move against.’
‘Then we had better stop messing about and chuck her in the sea straight away,’ said Giuki.
‘They serve Odin,’ said Leshii, gesturing towards the Christ figure. ‘Tell me, is he a forgiving god? Do his enemies prosper?’
Giuki tapped his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
‘Whatever you do,’ said Leshii, ‘they will come. But there is one way to save yourselves.’
‘What is it?’
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