Lord of Slaughter c-3

by M. D. Lachlan

‘High prices are paid at the well of fate.’

  ‘Odin gave his eye; what will you give?’

  ‘What will you give to hear the oracle speak?’

  A clatter and a groan from the entrance to the pool and the boy Snake in the Eye came skittering down. The sword was still in him but in his hand he carried Bollason’s head.

  He wriggled down and sat on the shelf beside her.

  ‘Well, here’s a pretty thing,’ he said. ‘Do you not see how the runes come to me? See them in their orbits, eight and eight. Yet eight go missing. Why, they are sitting in the waters. How shall they come to me?’

  On the other side of the pool sat the girl, arms around her knees on a shelf above the water. She was young and pale in the ghost light. Next to her sat an old man — one-eyed, his skin stained dark, a rope tight at his neck, his beard and hair a dirty white straggle. He too stared down into the well, his good eye wide, full of madness, his other just a decayed socket. In his hand he had a spear — a blackened, burned shard of wood, but wicked sharp — and he held it as if in deep concentration, like a fisherman waiting on a bank. At Rouen, in the Rouvray forest, she’d seen a body dug from a bog by peat cutters. The old man reminded her of that. He chilled her to the core.

  The howl again, nearer and louder.

  The man stirred. She had the sense he wasn’t seeing what she saw — he hardly seemed to notice her. His movements were slow, almost torpid, and she remembered how she had felt in her trance on the beacon tower. Was he even there? Or was he some sort of apparition, as the girl seemed to be?

  The girl knows what to do; she will lead the way.

  Loys pulled himself out of the water, his body convulsing with the cold. He went to Beatrice and she opened her arms to him. He held her tight, trying to make his trembling jaw say some words of comfort. Inside her something keened and moaned. That symbol, the one that said ‘wolf trap’.

  That terrible boy, that half-man Snake in the Eye, was talking to her. Her cold-numbed brain hardly registered what he said. Death, death, he was talking about death. He put out his hand to Loys and made a little blowing motion. Loys didn’t pay any attention and the boy looked puzzled.

  The howl came from the top of the stream and Beatrice turned to see the wolf.

  It was Azemar, though he was terribly changed, his eyes flickering green gems in the lamplight, his body twisted and misshaped like an exhumed root, his muscles tight, so tight they seemed to contort him. He held one shoulder high, the other low; his hands were talons, his jaw long, full of teeth as big as boar’s tusks, and his tongue lolled from his head, black with blood.

  Snake in the Eye’s eyes widened with fear.

  ‘I don’t wish to have any conversation with this fellow,’ he said and jumped into the water. The splash seemed to wake Mauger. He stared at his sword as if trying to work out what it was for.

  Azemar — or the thing he’d become — spoke: ‘What is happening to me? I’ve come for you. All these lives I’ve come for you; don’t turn me away now. Aelis, Adisla, Beatrice, don’t turn me away.’

  ‘I do not belong to you, Azemar.’

  ‘Do you not recall the light on the hills? Do you not remember what we vowed on the mountainside? I am yours, returned. I am yours.’

  ‘I remember now,’ said Beatrice. ‘I remember, pain and suffering and a love that died on the teeth of a wolf.’

  ‘I do not want this,’ said Azemar, ‘but I cannot leave you. I am driven by things I cannot control. I have eaten. I have been consumed. A wolf’s eye watches me.’ He seemed tormented by his words and jumped out over the water, to cling to the side of the cavern, his great talons seizing the rock.

  ‘Do not let that thing near me!’ shouted Snake in the Eye. ‘He wants something from me, for sure.’

  The story you told to the pale god.

  Tell it now.

  The girl’s voice was in Beatrice’s head.

  Snake in the Eye answered it. ‘What story?

  Of the god who dies to please the fates.

  ‘I know you, girl.’ Snake in the Eye had terror in his eyes.

  You have always known me.

  Snake in the Eye babbled, seeming to talk to no one: ‘There seem so few to slaughter here. I cannot go near the candle wall while he is in front of me.’ He pointed to Azemar.

  The wolf Fenrir stands here, the god killer, seething and growling in his hungers. Someone else lies at the threshold, as befits her goddess. Her fate is unseen and undecided. Her skein is not yet woven, her death knot untied.

  ‘The Norn Verthani is here, mistress of the present, caller of the wolf, holder of the howling rune, mother. The wolf will kill her. Her destiny is foreseen. The Norn Skuld is here, the future, her fingers weaving in unseen currents, dead and so deathless. The crone Norn is here. Uthr. The past, immortal, for ever. She who rules the domain to which heroes fall. Men call her Memory and they call her Hel. We are three and he is three.’

  ‘Who?’ Snake in the Eye cast his eyes about him, desperate to find the source of the voice.

  He waits unbodied in the waters, eight and eight and eight. Gods and men are drawn by the Norns, each to play his part.

  ‘What of Loys?’ said Beatrice.

  One person can still die.

  ‘He can’t because I can’t see him,’ said Snake in the Eye. ‘Those that can be killed have been killed.’

  He is hiding from fate, as you hid.

  ‘What is his fate?’ said Beatrice.

  To die so you might shake free of your destiny of torment. The skein is woven, the threads of fate entangle him.

  ‘I would die a thousand times before I let him come to harm!’ said Beatrice.

  He must die. The well has revealed it. The future is being spun.

  As the ghost girl spoke again the white-haired warrior suddenly remembered what his sword was for. He came rushing at Loys through the water, but Azemar sprang off the rocks and knocked the sword aside.

  ‘For all that has happened, he is my friend,’ he said, his horrid tongue lolling from his saw-toothed jaws.

  A voice from somewhere, a shrieking rhyme. It was not the voice of the girl. It was stranger, deeper. At first Loys thought it came from the bloody waters of the well but he realised it was the wolfman, his voice changed, different.

  ‘She saw wading there through harsh waters

  Men who foreswore oaths and murders

  And one who covets another’s beloved.

  There the snake sucks

  On the corpses of the fallen

  And the wolf tore men — would you know yet more?’

  Azemar’s great teeth ground at the warrior’s ear, his tongue slavering at his neck.

  ‘I have had my fill of murder,’ said Azemar, his voice like a rain-swollen door on flagstones. ‘I am a holy man and seek only peace. Do not provoke me.’

  Mauger did what he had been trained to do since his earliest years. He struck at the wolf, cutting a huge slice out of its flank. The thing screamed terribly as the curved sword bit into its flesh, but it seized Mauger’s arm, tore it from its socket and threw it, still holding the sword, back up the stream.

  Mauger’s remaining hand sought the wolf’s wound to tear it open, but he was too weak and too slow. The wolf picked him up and smashed him on the rocks. Then he leaped upon him and began tearing at his flesh.

  Loys felt something warm on his fingers. He put up his hand. Blood. Not his own. Beatrice slumped against him. Azemar had knocked Mauger’s sword into her and she had an ugly wound in her side.

  ‘Help her! Help her!’

  Elifr began to speak as if entranced: ‘We have struggled for nothing. Is the wheel turning again? Then the dead god will come and offer his sacrifice and the Norns will be bound to take it.’

  ‘No!’ shouted Loys. ‘No!’

  ‘Again and again will she suffer and die? All tenderness denied her, her life washed away on the blood tide.’ Elifr’s eyes were blank as he cradled the corpse of his mother
under the water, and it was as if the words were not his own.

  ‘I will not let this happen!’ Loys tried to staunch the wound but the blood would not stop.

  Azemar gulped and tore, his face grotesquely distorted, his wolf eyes green in the lamplight.

  Elifr worked his ritual, muttering and whispering as he held the vala down.

  ‘The wolf shall be the bane of Odin

  When the gods to destruction ride.

  The wolf shall be the bane of Odin

  When the gods to destruction ride.’

  Azemar looked up from his feeding, his body like a wax effigy left too long in the sun. His eyes narrowed when he saw the wolfman.

  Elifr gave a great cry and let go of the corpse in his arms. He leaped towards Loys, grabbing at his leg. ‘If you want to save her take off the stone,’ he said. ‘Take off the stone! The waters have shown me. Take off the stone!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To die. The god is coming.’

  Loys’ hands were wet with Beatrice’s blood.

  Azemar rose to his full height. He was huge — a head above even the tallest man, horribly muscled, his head a patchwork of flesh and hair but unmistakably that of a wolf. Still he fed on the body, gripping the torso in one hand, biting at it as if it was a hunk of bread.

  Loys’ mind was numbed by the terror of the wolf-thing, by the sight of Beatrice, wounded and bleeding.

  ‘Take off the stone,’ said Elifr.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Take you across the bridge of light.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because you have no place in the god’s story. You are not divine nor cursed nor monstrous. You are a man and your skein is still unwoven.’

  Beatrice lay dying and he could not imagine his life without her. Loys took off the stone and Elifr dragged him down into the water.

  52

  The Blood-Rooted Tree

  Loys fell, fell through water, fell through air, through darkness pricked with light, through a tree made of light, caught in threads of light.

  Above him the pool stretched up like a shaft, a glimmering disc of silver at its top, the threads that suspended him spinning down from three points.

  ‘I am falling.’

  ‘You are falling.’

  As he’d removed the stone, a tide had swept over him — of water, yes, but of voices and of images, strange emotions of fear, anger, love and hate. New words formed in his mind to describe new ways of feeling. One was like a purr — he could hardly say it, but it reminded him of a cat in the monastery at Rouen that the abbot had joked he was sure sniggered behind his back. Then another feeling like the tight-stomached, dry-throated sensation a warrior has the instant before battle begins. Yet another — a stolid sadness, a resentment, the way an old man resents his body.

  Falling, falling, falling still.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘At the well of fate, where the Norns weave the skeins of men.’

  Next to him was a girl no more than thirteen years old, her flesh pale and her eyes eaten. Bubbles were coming out of his mouth and Loys realised that, in some strange way, they must be underwater. He was falling, but he was falling upwards.

  He had been at the base of a great tree and now he span up through its roots that stretched out like the feet of mountains — massive, more like things of stone than wood.

  Things flashed past him in the dark, faces of light, creatures of light.

  He was tumbling but up, towards the stars that spread above like the lights of a great army. Up through branches and leaves, and everywhere the light, pouring out of him, pouring out of the god who flew beside him.

  A noise was in his ears, a crashing and breaking of branches. A great thump drove all the wind from him. He was on a strange riverbank. The river flowed beside a path and a broken wall.

  ‘What boat is this?’ It was a longship which seemed constructed of thousands of tiny petals, pale as bone.

  At the prow of the ship stood a man, tall with a shock of red hair. Loys was sure he had seen him at the palace. Here he was not dressed for court. His head was smeared in blood and his body wrapped in a cloak of white hawk feathers.

  ‘This is Naglfar,’ said the girl.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A ship.’

  He nodded to the tall man.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘A god. Lord of lies. Enemy of death.’

  ‘How can a liar be an enemy of death? Lies breed death.’

  ‘How can you be mortal unless you lie to yourself? Somehow you all think you will live forever,’ said the god, turning to face Loys.

  ‘Go with us,’ said the girl.

  ‘To where?’

  ‘Death’s kingdom.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘You will see.’

  Loys’ mind felt a wide and beautiful thing, horizon deep and shot with stars. He let the dead girl lead him on board the ship, along a gangplank.

  ‘What is this boat made of?’

  ‘The nails of dead men,’ said the god. ‘And dead men to row.’

  A Viking crew was at the oars, their eyes the eyes of the dead.

  A woman sat leaning against the mast — she was red-haired and beautiful but with a terrible scar across the side of her face, the chamberlain was there too. He sat huddled in the stern of the boat, vacant-eyed, seeming mindblown.

  ‘Is this a ship of the drowned?’ said Loys.

  ‘Are you drowned?’ said the god.

  ‘I am in the waters of the well, I think.’

  ‘What city sits above that well?’

  ‘Constantinople.’

  ‘What goddess rules that city?’

  ‘Hecate.’

  ‘Ruler of what domains?’

  ‘Of gateways and thresholds, of the moon and the night,’ said Loys.

  ‘So you are at the threshold,’ said the god.

  ‘The waters seek death.’

  ‘Men who say so presume more than the gods. The waters seek the offer of death. They do not always accept it.’

  ‘What are these woods? You are the angel Michael,’ said the chamberlain. ‘This is Jordan and I have fallen to the foot of the tree of life that Enoch saw.’

  ‘My name here is not Michael,’ said the god.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I have a name for every mood.’

  ‘What is your mood today?’

  ‘As black as ever was.’

  ‘What is the name that suits it?’

  ‘Loki,’ said the god.

  The moon was bright, but in the distance were dark clouds, flashing with fire from below. The river seemed very strange too — a glittering road of white light.

  ‘I know you,’ said Loys. ‘You are a devil and this is hell.’

  ‘You fell here with me. What does that make you?’

  ‘One of the damned.’

  ‘Justly?’

  ‘I do not know. To be damned is to be justly damned, for it is God who damns.’

  ‘I tell you it was unjustly. What did you do but love a woman, a woman marked for death by a darker spirit than mine?’

  ‘The woman is not here,’ said Loys. ‘That is how I know this is hell. I saw her dying. I…’ He couldn’t control himself and put his hands to his face to shield his tears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Men do not weep.’

  ‘Oh, they do,’ said Loki. ‘They weep and they mewl and they ask for their mothers as the blood bubbles at their throat. Their tears drown all pretence of heroism and they see at the last how sweet it would have been to spend a life at the plough or the nets, and they see the fellows they have killed are men just like them. How petty pride seems with a spear in your belly.’

  The boat was moving. Bollason took an oar, Vandrad another, other Vikings too — the men who had taken him to the Numera.

  ‘The slaughtered sons are coming back to the carrion god, ravenous for his blood. We must cross the bridge of light,�
� said Loki.

  The longship glided down the river under the metal moon.

  ‘I am dead,’ said Loys. ‘Without her I want only death. Oblivion.’

  ‘My word, you don’t ask much, do you? Oblivion — whose lure is deeper than rubies and gold, to be as unmindful as a stone — the gods grant that rich prize to so few who ask.’

  ‘I ask,’ said Loys.

  ‘I know,’ said Loki. ‘Your task here is to seek death. King Death.’

  He could not tell how long they had been sailing. A long time, it seemed. A week? Many years? Under the moonlight his hands were strangely beautiful, delicately wrought. God’s work, he said to himself. God’s work.

  The boat was slowing and approaching the bank. The night was windless, and the trees stood shining in the moonlight, as still as if the smiths of the emperor’s court had made them from silver to stand in the palace courtyard. The longship grounded by the broken wall, Bollason jumping ashore to tie a mooring rope around a stump.

  ‘Alight,’ said the god, ‘for a light, a light from which old grim guts cannot hide.’

  Loys stepped onto the riverbank. The night was cool but not unpleasant, and the woods were fragrant, noisy with insects and the calls of owls.

  In the wall he saw a single little lamp burning, others beside it dead and cold. He went to it. The flame seemed weak. He touched it and saw her — Beatrice in the frosty woods, her horse steaming in the dawn sun, Beatrice naked in the bed next to him, standing by the prow of the merchant ship that had brought them to Constantinople, the blue waters of the Aegean turning her eyes to turquoise. The warmth of the flame was like the warmth of her touch, the sound of the wind in the woods like the sound of her voice and the moon hung above him, like God’s eye, judging his worthiness to call her his wife.

  ‘The dead do not wait,’ said the pale god from the ship. ‘Make the needful action, that necessary gesture.’

  Loys took another lamp from the wall. It was wet so he dried the wick on his tunic and upended it so oil ran onto the wick. Then he lit it off the flame of the single burning lamp. It flared, guttered and finally caught.

  ‘This is my lamp,’ said Loys, standing back from the wall.

  ‘Yet you will not use it to see your way.’

  ‘What will I use it for?’