Wolfsangel

by M. D. Lachlan

  ‘Varrin.’

  ‘Lord, I know I cannot return.’ The old warrior knew his king well and, even facing death, sought to lift the burden from his shoulders.

  Authun lowered his head.

  Varrin said, ‘What shall they say of me, lord?’

  ‘Your friends loved you and your enemies feared you. Of all men on the earth, you were raised the least cowardly. Who could hope for more?’

  ‘Will they sing songs?’

  ‘They already sing songs of you, Varrin. In death they will unlock a word hoard to your memory.’

  Varrin stood and breathed the air like a man waking on a fine morning. He peered out to sea.

  ‘Lord, I see a sea serpent, a beast of venom and fury that could devour the world snake himself. Allow me the glory of testing my spear upon it.’ As death approached, it seemed Varrin was already writing himself into a saga: his language became finer, emulating the songs of the skalds. Authun joined in, to honour his friend.

  ‘You are right, brave Varrin. Fight and win honour. You will need strong armour against such a serpent. On you I bestow this byrnie, this sheltering roof of blows.’

  Authun took his mail coat from its barrel and held it up. Varrin bowed, humbled by the honour, and allowed the king to dress him. When the byrnie was tight about him, the king took out the golden wolf helm, its ruby eyes part of a trove of plunder taken from the Franks of the south. He placed it on his friend’s head and knotted the straps. Then he tied on his rich cloak. Finally he put Varrin’s spear in his hand.

  ‘Tell my wife she was as fine a woman who ever kept a key,’ said Varrin. ‘Though she was given to me, I loved her. May my sons serve you as I have served you. Dispose of my daughters in marriage as if they were your own.’

  By the prow, the woman slept with her boys in her arms.

  ‘You will dine at my right hand in Odin’s hall,’ said Authun.

  ‘We shall be drunk for all time,’ said Varrin.

  Varrin turned to the side of the boat and put one foot on the rail. ‘Now, serpent!’ he said, his voice low with determination. Without a look left or right he dived from the longship, stabbing into the waves as he leaped. In Authun’s splendid byrnie and helmet there was no swimming, and in an instant he was gone. The king swallowed and turned away. Varrin’s death had been necessary; no more to think about it.

  In the prow the woman and the babies stirred, though Authun was surprised to see she hadn’t woken. She had hardly closed her eyes during the voyage but it was as if she felt some comfort and security coming from the land and had finally given in to sleep.

  Authun, in all his wars, had never killed a woman before. They were too valuable as slaves was the reason he gave himself. But there was something else.

  He stood above her watching the two children sharing her sleep at her breast. He had his hand on his knife. Soon he would use it to kill her, he thought, perhaps when they met the witches, perhaps just before he returned to his wife. Whenever, it would be by the knife. The Moonsword had only ever killed warriors and he wouldn’t stain it with the blood of a woman. And yet he felt it wrong to finish her with the same implement he would use to gut a fish. She was a mother and, to him, that deserved some respect. He had seen his wife go through labour five times and had wondered how many of his men would stand such pain.

  There seemed something precious and worth preserving in the bond between the mother and her children, a warmth that seemed to spread from her. Authun the Pitiless felt something stir in his breast that, had he known it, was the first faint flickering intimation of his doom.

  The woman had a charm given to her by the boys’ father, a curious, wandering man in an age when lonely wanderers were rare. Few would dare to walk the land alone, at the prey of hostile villagers, offended lords, bandits, wild men, trolls, elves and wolf men. But the boys’ father had dared. The amulet - just a wolf’s head scratched on a pebble - would offer her protection, he had said, and left. So far it had offered her none at all but she clutched it to her in her sleep. When Authun the Wolf, slayer of the giant Geat, pillager of the east, feared lord of the white wastes, touched his knife and looked down at her he felt pity. It was a new emotion for him but who is to say it was the stranger’s charm? A man has to become tired of slaughter eventually. Only the gods have an endless appetite for that.

  The ship, under no direction, had turned across the waves and made a sudden violent jar. Authun kept his balance but the woman and the babies were shaken and slid against a chest. They awoke in a confusion of screaming, and for an instant the woman stared at Authun with that penetrating bloody eye. The king, who could face down any enemy, turned quickly to steady the boat. Action, as always, kept reflection at bay.

  The woman watched him tie the rudder and work the sail and thought him the second most terrible thing she had ever seen. She recognised him for what he was, a belligerent self-seeker who had taken all the fears he had in him and thrown them at his enemies, a snatcher, a killer and a hero.

  The children’s father had said he was bored by heroes but Authun seemed anything but boring - terrible, murderous, almost divine. As he’d taken her from the church, the arrows flying, the fires blazing and the villagers screaming, he had seemed a point of unnatural calm, a rock in the eddying currents of violence. It was as if, for him, that situation was normal. If she ever met the god of war, she thought, Authun is how he would look.

  The gods, however, had been much closer in her life.

  3 Night Caller

  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 h
er 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.