Fenrir

by MD. Lachlan

  ‘Lord, sails! This is our chance … What are you doing. By Freyr’s holy poke pole, what are you doing? Are you eating that? What are you doing? Egil, Fastarr, the monk’s gone mad! He’s dug up a corpse!’ In the graveyard of the church, Ofaeti, a man who had fought in many battles and seen ten men die on the point of his sword, retched as he watched the monk crouching, spitting and howling above the ruined, rotten body at his feet.

  Jehan tried to swallow the snarl that was inside him but remembered why he had refused to baptise the Vikings. But he would not do it, would not tear the man down. Ofaeti had been good to Jehan, in his way, and the confessor looked inside himself, to God who dwelled within him, to resist his body’s impulse to murder. There were others to kill, righteous enemies.

  He stood and looked over the bay. There was the ship, one of three. The boats under the moon seemed tiny and fragile as they put out their oars and pulled towards the beach. He threw down what he had in his hands, and as he looked towards the ships something seemed to flare in the darkness, a light like a second moon on the water, a symbol that seemed to rattle like hail, to chill like ice. Something was on that ship that meant him no good.

  Jehan remembered the girl, the water, the sunlight, and then the shadow, the shadow of the wolf that blotted it all out, the shadow that he threw himself. He heard no howls; he heard only his own voice, crying out into the night, calling for Aelis, for whoever that girl was he saw in his memory: ‘I am here. Where are you?’

  47 Shadow of the Wolf

  Kylfa sat glowering at Aelis in the light of the fire. There were too many to fit in the warming house so Aelis had opted to spend the night under the covered walkway at the corner of the cloister.

  Leshii was inside, amusing the Vikings with a story. She heard some words in Latin – camel, gonads – and guessed that he was telling his usual tale of how a Saracen had lost his balls to a kick from a camel he was trying to castrate. She heard the nervousness in his voice, though the Vikings seemed not to notice it, and she could tell that he was at the limit of his endurance. He sounded old. He wanted his fire and his mug, his friends about him and his dog at his feet, not the company of strangers. She had watched him in the mornings, getting up from his place in front of the embers of the fire, creaking to his feet, crouching, resting again, stretching a leg, moving up to almost stand, his legs not quite straight and his back bent. Once he had relit the fire and sat in the morning sun, he was fine, able to continue the trip. But he was a man tired of moving, she could see.

  What of herself? That sensitivity she’d had since a girl, the one that allowed her to hear people like music, to sense them as colours and textures, had rarely been used to look inward. She looked at Kylfa brooding in the corner, his axe across his knees. His brother was by him, huge and stupid with upper arms the girth of her thighs. Was she afraid of death? Yes. She heard a voice whispering inside her: It happened before.

  Whose voice was that? A child’s or a woman’s, she couldn’t tell. It was cracked and hoarse, full of suffering.

  Aelis too was tired of moving, tired of the sensation of shadows watching her, of terrors lurking just beyond her everyday senses, of sleep being a kingdom of monsters that sweated and slavered in the dark.

  Tomorrow she would die, she knew. But her maid at Loches had told her that before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes. Hers had not. What had she been? A woman to be married off, a token that a state might offer to another, her beauty just a way of making an advantageous trade, allying a count to a duke or even a king, something to make armies move one way or another. Important then. But she didn’t feel important. She felt like a scrap of cloth blown on the wind.

  Her memories came to her not as stories or even pictures but as colours, sounds and sensations. The green and gold of the summers at Loches, the metalled leaves of moon-dipped trees, the feel of river water and the smell of damp earth, the song of the skylark and the voice of the owl. From her window she had been able to hear the wolves calling to each other in the hills, and their voices had chilled her. A shadow now lay on her, the shadow of a wolf. She saw it, picked out by the swollen moon in front of her on the flagstones of the monastery, there on the eve of her death.

  It happened before. That voice again.

  She stood.

  ‘Hey, you. Don’t think you’re sneaking off. If you want to piss or shit you do it where I can see you.’ It was Kylfa, his axe in his hand. A squall of laughter came from the warming house. Leshii was saying something.

  The shadow of the wolf. She wondered if it was another trick of those terrible things that lived inside her, those symbols that seemed to live off her like magic leeches, like mistletoe on the oak.

  ‘Is this a vision?’

  ‘It’s an axe, my friend, as you’ll find out tomorrow.’

  The shadow moved. It was tracking behind Kylfa.

  She looked up and, without thinking, said a name: ‘Sindre!’

  Something dropped to meet the shadow and Kylfa turned.

  The wolfman brushed him aside and went for Aelis’s throat. Her hands flew up to defend herself, to push him away, but he had her. His fingers crushed her neck. She tried to peel them off but it was no good. Seven heartbeats and she was no longer in the cloister.

  She looked about her. That place again, the cave of blood. The wolf, the presence of her lover, death, death everywhere, her muscles tight on her head, as if the skull beneath was trying to break through to burst grinning from her skin.

  ‘No,’ she said, and the arrowhead rune, which shone like the moon shines when it is small and sharp in the sky, burst into fire.

  She was back in the cloister, gasping on the floor. The wolfman had dropped her. The first thing she saw was a raven, looking down at her from the roof of the covered walkway, its cold glassy eye fixed on her. There was screaming and shouting. Three Vikings were grappling with Sindre, more pouring from the warming house. A big Norseman lay puking on the ground, his great axe, its haft smashed in two, beside him.

  Four Vikings, five, were on Sindre but still he stood. A man’s neck was broken, then the staggering mass fell into a wall, Sindre driving a Norseman’s head into it as he went. Another had his feet swept from under him and sprawled on the stones. Sindre came back towards Aelis, dragging two men behind him. Vikings were everywhere – some laughing, some angry, all drunk. One aimed a kick at Sindre but only succeeded in thumping his foot into the side of one of his kinsmen.

  The arrowhead of light still fizzed and spat inside Aelis. What did it mean? Illumination. Clarity.

  He kept coming. Two steps more and he had one of the Vikings’ knives from his belt. A breath later the man fell. Aelis looked up at the raven on the roof. She felt strange, dizzy, full of light. Four more came at Sindre, but he tore off the one clinging to him and threw the man at them. They all collapsed in a heap. She watched the raven on the roof. It watched her. And then she allowed the light inside her to travel to meet it. It was like learning to ride a horse, that moment when the beginner begins to feel how it should be done, when the stiff legs, back and arms give way to the rhythm of the animal and the rider becomes one with the gallop. It felt so easy.

  Sindre was on her. There was a flutter. The raven had flown away. Aelis was down, Sindre on top of her, but the fury had left him.

  ‘See,’ she said to him. ‘See who you are.’

  And the light that was in her went to him as the Vikings hit him from every side. A lesser fighter than Sindre would have died where he was, but the wolfman needed no second of reflection, no fatal breath to assess where he was and who his enemies were. The trance snapped away from him and he blocked a sword cut at his attacker’s hand, breaking the wrist and sending the sword spinning. He stood, driving the heel of his hand into an axeman’s chin, putting him unconscious to the floor. Then he had Aelis up and was pushing her towards the doorway. The Danes leaped at him with sword and spear but he dodged and ducked, rolled and blocked. Then Aelis was at the the entranc
e to the cloister.

  ‘Open the door!’ he shouted. ‘I was bewitched but I will save you. Go! I am destined to be with you – I cannot die here.’

  Aelis slipped up the bar that held the door closed and stepped out. She didn’t know where to go. The beach was bright with the light of the moon and she could see the men who guarded the ships running across it towards the monastery. The path led down to the ships or away across the marshes. A scruff of trees was just visible on the horizon. She’d have to run across the salt marshes in the dark with a bunch of wild Vikings behind her.

  The light of the strange symbol that lived inside Aelis seemed to shine into every nook of her mind, bringing understanding and clarity. She could not run. She turned and went back into the monastery.

  Sindre was very near the door, at the centre of a group of Vikings, snarling and spitting, tearing spears out of hands, dodging attacks at his back, smashing men to the floor. His eyes turned to her for a heartbeat and Giuki ran him through with his sword.

  He sank to his knees and tried to speak. Aelis read his eyes at the moment of his death. He wanted to say that it was impossible for him to die there, that his fate was woven in with hers, that a greater destiny, a more important death, awaited him. He coughed and lashed out, driving the Vikings back.

  ‘I will meet you again,’ he said to Aelis and fell forward. Then the Vikings were upon him like wolves themselves, spears, axes, swords, kicks and punches cutting his flesh and breaking his bones.

  The wolfman was face down on the flagstones, blood pouring from countless wounds on his body, his head unrecognisable after the cuts and blows it had sustained. She bent to his corpse and put his hand upon it. She spoke but did not know what she said, the words just tumbling from her: ‘It was not you, Sindre. It was not you. You died for me, and I thank you for that, but you have been misled. The rune is calling but not for you.’

  The rune? She had given the symbol inside her a name, one she had no memory of hearing before but that seemed familiar to her.

  She put her hand on the wolfman’s head and stroked it. A tall Viking sank a kick into his body. Anger came over her, hot and sudden. ‘You have killed him,’ she said. ‘Are you looking to kill him again?’

  ‘If I can,’ said the Viking and stamped on the wolfman’s belly.

  Aelis looked at him. ‘You face him one-on-one now he’s dead. You came more slowly to the fight when he had breath in his body.’

  The Viking levelled his spear at her but Giuki tapped it away with his sword. He bent to her side. ‘You’re more interesting than you look, boy. Since when did you speak Norse?’

  ‘I …’ Aelis could make no more words come out. She tried again, but when she spoke it was in Roman. ‘I …’ She looked at Leshii. ‘Tell him I need to speak to him. Alone.’

  ‘Domina, that is not a good idea,’ said Leshii.

  ‘Domina?’ said Giuki. ‘I know only two words in Roman, one is “fuck” and the other who you do it to.’

  Leshii threw up his hands.

  ‘All pretence is gone,’ said Leshii. ‘By your duty as Helgi’s vassal we really do need to speak to you alone.’

  48 The Word of God

  By the graves on the headland Jehan prayed: ‘Deliver me, deliver me.’

  A voice from the dark: ‘Three ships, Ofaeti. It’s too many!’

  ‘It’d be a rare death, though, wouldn’t it, Fastarr? They’d sing songs of us, wouldn’t they? Grettir’s people give credit to brave enemies – we’d live eternally in the songs of the skalds.’

  ‘Are you sure we want to do this?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Come on then. We’ll lure them up to the monastery. Get some lights visible up here!’

  Jehan couldn’t see. Again, he couldn’t see. A soft blackness had taken his vision. And then the raiders on the beach, the sweet stink of their aggression, the enticement of their excitement and fear cleared his mind like a whiff of Hammonicus salt, and he could see everything. The moon was like a cold sun to him, picking out the men on the broad wet expanse of sand.

  His hearing was sharper than it had ever been, bursting on his mind in subtle shades of sound, his ears almost revealing as much as his eyes. He could hear the Vikings next to him breathe and rustle, the quick gulping inhalations of the young boy Astarth, Ofaeti more measured, forcing calm on his body by long slow breaths. He could hear the water slapping on the longships, the suck of the raiders’ feet through the wet sand. He could hear the breath of the invaders, tight and fast. More than just sound, he could sense weakness, strength, doubt and resolve in the whistle of air in a man’s chest.

  The dark. Jehan had sought the dark. That howling, the noise from the boat, had set his skin tingling, his muscles seemed to creep on his bones like caterpillars on branches as he slunk tight to the shadows. He spat the meat from his mouth, its dead taste suddenly unpleasant to him. He was hungry, still, but now for something else, for the meat that is warm on the teeth, for the flesh marinated in the seepings and secretions of stress, for the tremble of the body as the soul looks down at the valley of death.

  The shadows were strange to him, hardly shadows at all. He could see quite clearly within them but he knew their use on instinct. He clung to them, pressing his body to the walls of the courtyard, slipping down the alley between the scriptorium and the penitence cell. The moonlight caught him and for a second he stopped. He held up his hand. The palm was long and strong, the nails thick and the fingers muscular, like the claws on the gargoyle of a devil on the church at Saint-Denis. He stroked his jaw and clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, moistening his lips. His tongue felt almost too big and was cut and blistered where he had accidentally bitten it when feeding. Jehan breathed in. His lips too felt raw, his skin tight over his bones. The men, the raiders with their fast-beating hearts and miasma of tension that accompanied them, were coming. He spat and spat again, saliva filling his mouth.

  Elation filled him and he heard himself giggle, though he could not think why. The shallowness of his laughter struck him.

  Smell burst in on him in a million registers. It was as if all his life he had suffered from a heavy cold and had suddenly found himself free of it in a summer meadow. Rot was on the breath of the Vikings – from their teeth, from the meat between their teeth. Their sweat was sour but in a fascinating rainbow of shades. He breathed in the smell of the furs they wore, sensed the stress of the animals’ deaths, smelled the wool of their cloaks, damp with dew, the odour of the farmyard clinging to it. And from down the beach, just detectable in the light breeze, he smelled something else. A woman. Not all of the raiders were men.

  ‘We’ll make it quick,’ said Ofaeti. ‘Double back around the dunes smartish. Slash the rudders on two of the boats then away.’

  ‘They’ll leave guards.’

  ‘Like I say, we’ll have to be quick.’

  ‘What about the monk?’

  ‘Leave him to his graveyard feast,’ said Egil. ‘The man is bewitched.’

  ‘He led us to great gold,’ said Ofaeti.

  ‘I won’t have a corpse-muncher on my ship,’ said Fastarr.

  ‘It’s not your ship.’

  ‘And it won’t be yours if you don’t hurry up.’

  ‘We should leave him, Ofaeti. You know the Christians are cannibals. They freely admit that as their rite and ritual.’

  ‘I …’ Ofaeti was going to say he had no time to argue, but the monk had gone. ‘Right, lads, this is it. Death or glory. Maybe death and glory. Death anyway. Are you ready?’

  ‘Let’s have them,’ said Fastarr.

  The Vikings ran out of the back of the monastery and around the dunes to its side, crouching low.

  Jehan heard them go. He crawled down the alley, drinking in its rich smells of mould and piss. They were as enticing to him as any posy he had smelled in his life. He came to the scriptorium, where the scrolls and books were made. The door was half open and the tang of the vellum drew him inside. He knew w
hat he needed to do: he needed to read, to anchor his mind to the word of God. The bitterest thing about his blindness had been his inability to read, the necessity of listening to the Bible read by monks who had no feel for the words. He had memorised large sections, said them back to himself in the quiet of his cell, purging the snivelling syllables of Brother Frotlaicus, the leaden delivery of Brother Ragenard from his mind and recalling the words as he thought they should be said.

  The roof was damaged, a hole an armspan wide allowing the moonlight in. There had been a fire in there, the previous raiders unable to resist the lure of the inflammable books and scrolls. Scraps of burned vellum were all over the floor, the smell of charred animal skin and damp thick in the room. The Vikings destroyed these works because they did not value them and their enemies did. They had marked their territory, imposed their values. The residue of the sweat of the raiders still clung to the room. He could smell the delight. It had been fun to burn and wreck.

  Jehan sat down on the floor and picked up a sheet of vellum.

  ‘And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their own home – these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgement on the great day.’ He said the words aloud, tried to will himself back into what he had been – the learned man of Saint-Germain, the man God had cursed in the body but lifted up in the soul and intellect. ‘Clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.’

  The words meant nothing to him now, but their sounds, the collision of their consonants and the gong notes of their vowels in his ears, linked him to what he had been.

  ‘I am man,’ he said, ‘in the image of a god.’ No, that was wrong. ‘I am a man, in the image of God.’ He read out more: ‘To the chosen lady and her children, whom I love in the truth – and not I only, but also all who know the truth – because of the truth, which lives in us and will be with us for ever—’