Fenrir

by MD. Lachlan

  ‘Empty the mead benches of Valhalla were,

  So the dark god sent his wolf to fill them.

  Now the sands run with the blood of the brave

  And the warrior’s hands itch to hold the weapons of revenge.’

  Hugin listened carefully. He had not been raised among the northmen but was steeped in their traditions. He knew the honour that Ofaeti was giving his friends was as deep as that the Franks gave their dead with their prayers and tears, or the Moors with their wailing and lamentations.

  ‘My kinsmen are dead,’ said Ofaeti, ‘and I have no way back to my homeland. I have three ships I can’t sail and treasure I can’t carry. Food and drink to me now are treasure. I have had smoke in my head for days and it will not clear but by cool water.’

  Raven stood. ‘Walk up to the monastery; there will be food and water there.’

  ‘You wear a rich robe, warrior,’ said Leshii. ‘Did any other treasure come with it?’

  ‘It’s already in the ground,’ said Ofaeti, ‘so don’t think to rob me of it.’

  ‘The reverse,’ said Leshii. ‘I was thinking to secure you a good price.’

  ‘I will follow the wolf,’ said Raven.

  ‘I’ll come with you. That wolf has killed three of my friends and I would have the payment of its pelt for that,’ said Ofaeti.

  Hugin nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have a use for you.’

  ‘No one uses me,’ said Ofaeti.

  ‘The gods do, as they use us all,’ said Hugin. ‘There is a destiny in train here, a destiny of blood. It is up to me to stop it.’

  ‘I thought you said destinies couldn’t be avoided,’ said Leshii.

  ‘Not by you,’ said Hugin, ‘but with effort and determination heroes may stand against the gods.’

  ‘So modest,’ said Leshii.

  ‘How will you avoid this destiny?’ said Ofaeti.

  ‘Find her.’

  ‘She was going to Helgi, if that helps,’ said Ofaeti.

  ‘That was her intention when she left me with a wet arse in Francia,’ said Leshii.

  Raven thought for a moment. ‘Then it’s as I thought. Helgi must die,’ he said.

  ‘What good will that do?’

  ‘The god is on earth. This I saw in visions, and I am sure it is true. My sister was a sincere defender of the god and she sought to protect him from his destiny by killing the lady and using me to help her. The wolf follows the lady. The lady goes to Helgi. There, then, is where the skein of fate ends – when the wolf fights the corpse god.’

  ‘You think Helgi is your god?’ said Ofaeti.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What if he is?’

  ‘Then I must try to kill him before the wolf does. I must stop the destiny unfolding.’

  ‘And what good will that do?’

  ‘It will end it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The cycle of blood – the god comes to earth, the wolf comes to earth and kills him.’

  ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘Because the lady draws the wolf on, the lady dies too.’

  ‘I ask again,’ said Leshii, ‘why do you care?’

  ‘Because when the enchantment broke,’ said Hugin, ‘I remembered.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Before. When I swore to protect her.’

  ‘Before when?’ said Leshii. ‘You’ve been trying to kill her all the way from Paris.’

  The Raven ignored him and spoke to Ofaeti: ‘I ask a service of you, fat man, for freeing you from the enchantment of the witch.’

  ‘I do not know it was her enchantment but I do know it ended when you killed her, so I might believe it was so. What is the service?’

  ‘A simple one. Find a woman, raise many good sons and tell the story I am to pass to you. Have them tell it to their sons as long as the world lasts. You will have a noble task.’

  Ofaeti gestured at Leshii. ‘Why can’t you or he have many sons and tell them these stories?’

  ‘He is old, and my fate is to die.’

  ‘How to die?’

  ‘Opposing the wolf, as I have before and will again. It is my destiny.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘My sister, that thing that I took for my sister, showed it to me, but in a guise I could not recognise.’

  ‘She was a wide-seeing woman,’ said Ofaeti, ‘skilled in Seid magic. You know your end, and yet you do not seem happy. A man goes smiling to his fate once he knows it.’

  ‘Because, for all the witch’s lies, there must be a way to break the curse. If not then I will live in the future as I have lived so far – ignorant of myself, beguiled. It may be too late for me in this flesh but not too late as I will be tomorrow. In our future incarnations one of us might recognise what is going on and be able to act to stop it before we are damned to misery and suffering again. We are going to send a message to eternity, fat man, and you are going to carry it.’

  ‘I will come with you to Helgi,’ said Ofaeti. ‘Not to serve your purpose but because I swore an oath to the girl to protect her. She is in danger, so I will follow you, shapeshifter, not for fame, not for gold or for sons. I will follow because the girl asked me for protection and I offered it. The witch who lies dead on this shore enchanted me and made me harm the lady against my word. I need to repay that or it will be a hard welcome for me in the halls of the dead. And my kinsmen must be avenged. We will find this wolf and kill it. I struck it once and it bled well enough. No reason why I can’t strike it again and see it bleed some more.’

  ‘You will not be able to kill it,’ said Hugin, ‘until it has performed its part in the god’s great ritual and sent the All Father to death.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Ofaeti. ‘I have met many men who claimed to be invulnerable, Eric Harm-Hard for one.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ said Leshii.

  The fat man winked. ‘He didn’t live up to his name when he fought me.’

  ‘This is different,’ said Raven.

  Ofaeti just grunted and turned towards the monastery.

  Leshii looked up at the treeline. There was a lot of forest between them and Ladoga, and mountains too – haunts for all sorts of wild men. And what were they chasing? The thing that had loomed from the darkness to take the lady? That was the sort of creature that wise men ran away from, not towards. Still, he wanted to keep the necklace the Raven had given him, the one he now wore concealed beneath his kaftan. How much did he want it, though? Enough to stay with these madmen who set out to spite the gods. Probably not.

  Leshii ran to catch up with Ofaeti. ‘I told you you should have left me on the hill,’ he said. ‘The lady has brought you no luck.’

  Ofaeti smiled, though tears were in his eyes. Leshii guessed he was thinking of his dead kinsmen. ‘Too late for that now,’ he said. ‘The past is a wind at our backs. We cannot unblow it.’

  Ofaeti walked away across the wet sand to the monastery and Leshii began collecting weapons and other valuables from the corpses. There were ten fine swords there at least, which would give him plenty to trade, should he stop at Birka. The necklace was hugely valuable, and there were also the hundred dirhams in the sorcerer’s pack, but Leshii had had his fill of adventure. When they reached the first market town he would say his goodbyes.

  59 The Lamps in the Garden

  Aelis rode into the woods. The runes were all around her like a garland of bright stars. They whispered the wolf’s names to her, one familiar, one strange and one that seemed to shimmer between the two: He is Jehan, he is Fenrisulfr, and he is Vali that is, was and will be.

  She seemed to burst with memories – mushroom-hunting at dawn in the woods at Loches, the hawkmoths among the jasmine rising around her as she passed, the flutter of their wings close at her ear like the fear that dogged her. She had told herself it was fear of nothing at all, but she still went running from the dark of the trees to the sunlight of a clearing. Everything had seemed so intense: the inky stains on the cloth wi
th which she lined her basket, the dark juice on her fingers, the rising sun pulling the mist from the dew-soaked grass, her face warm but her feet wet and cold.

  She had been looking for something beyond mushrooms, she sensed, and was chased by something more than the rays of the sun. There was a menace to the birth of morning, she felt it in her core. She walked as the deer walks, in fear of the wolf.

  Vali.

  The name conjured something from her. She saw herself in a place she had never known, by some strange houses that were low and mean, turf roofs not waist-high, a bright river below her down a small hill. She heard the excited cries of children and looked down to see them bathing in the sunlight. Someone was at her side. When she turned to him his face was familiar but she couldn’t place it. It was as if she had seen it before but only through an imperfect glass, its features distorted and blurred.

  She looked at her hand. It was the same hand she had always known. The runes had reunited but she had not become a god, nor had she died as the witch had predicted. She made herself calm down and saw the runes all around her in two spinning orbits of eight, the howling rune at their centre, twisting and slinking like a crawling wolf. That one seemed more important to her than all the others put together. But something was missing. A third orbit. While that was not in her she was human still.

  She still had not let go of the stone the Raven had given her; in her panic she had hardly noticed it was in her hand. She held it up to examine it, and nearly dropped it. It was just a pebble tied within an elaborate knot on to a thong, but it was etched with the face of a wolf. A phrase came to her: When the gods saw that the wolf was fully bound, they took a fetter and lashed it to a rock called Scream. In her mind she saw a huge wolf, its jaws stretched wide by a cruel sword, tied to an enormous rock by a rope as fine as a ribbon. It thrashed and groaned and howled but could not get free. It was night and a man came to the rock. He was tall and pale with a shock of red hair and he tried to break the fetters. But the fetters would not break. So the man took up a pebble that lay at the bottom of the rock, of the same stone as that to which the wolf was bound. And then, as the day came up, he stole away to inscribe something on it – the head of a wolf.

  The runes were showing her these things. The runes knew.

  She drove the horse on through the trees. Eventually the animal tired and she stopped to let it forage and rest. The spring was lovely, the forest full of flowers, thick with full-leafed sycamore, birch and oak. The sun dappled through the leaves and turned the light to water; the bark of pale trees flashed from the deep green like the skins of silver fish; mustard lichen changed the carcass of a fallen oak to a chest of gold; flowers of yellow and white seemed to dance on the branches as if caught on unseen currents.

  Suddenly the effects of her ordeal by water swept over her. She was aching everywhere, her skin cut from the ropes, sore from the salt water. She was terribly thirsty too. Aelis looked around for water. There was no stream but the woods were damp and it had rained recently. She licked the moisture from leaves and when she found a muddy puddle put her head in and lapped like a dog. She was too exhausted to forage for anything to eat. Spectres of tiredness loomed at her from the trees. She thought she saw movement, heard noises. She was full of fear and remounted, walking the horse on through the forest.

  The greens and the golds blurred and she slumped down on the horse’s mane, jolting back to wakefulness for a moment before falling forward again. For a second she would think there was a threat, the runes would wake in her and all tiredness leave her. Then, as the horse plodded forward, she would feel more secure and start to doze. She drifted awake. The horse had stopped, she noticed. It was cold, though the low sun split the trees in blinding rays.

  ‘It will devour me.’ A voice terrible and guttural. Suddenly she was fully awake. The wolf was in front of her, its great jaws red with the blood of her countrymen.

  She kicked the horse around and sent it leaping away from the creature, but it was no good. The dread wolf had her, springing forward to take her from the horse’s back and drag her to the ground. As she hit the forest floor it was as if all the tiredness she had been holding at bay came back to her and she fainted into unconsciousness.

  When she came to, her horse was nowhere to be seen and the creature was on all fours above her, its great muzzle thrust into her face.

  ‘It will devour me,’ it said again. Its voice was like a fall of hail, like the scrape of the keel of a boat on a beach.

  Aelis could not speak. She looked for the runes. They were nowhere. It was as if they had run from the wolf.

  She tried to back away but it held her by the leg with one great clawed hand.

  ‘I have struggled,’ it said. ‘Do you not know me?’

  ‘You are a monster.’

  ‘I am Jehan, the confessor. I tried to help you, to save you from the thing that pursues you.’

  ‘Then why did you not kill him on the beach?’

  The beast bowed its head. ‘I saw only you. You. I have tried to protect you, but I cannot be near you. The rage I feel will consume me.’

  It stood upright and turned from her as if to walk away then dropped to all fours, snapping and spinning as if tormented by a fly. It crouched and snarled out through bared teeth, ‘Leave me. Walk away because I have a wolf inside me that I cannot quiet.’

  ‘Then why did you come?’

  ‘To see you. To touch you.’

  Aelis looked down at the pebble she held in her hand. The Raven had lengthened the leather thong so it would go around the wolf’s neck. She did not believe it would work but had no other option. She edged towards the writhing wolf. It crouched, seething like a dog beneath a table who fears someone will take its bone. She reached forward to tie the stone around the creature’s neck but it bared its huge yellow teeth. Aelis recoiled. The stink of death was on its breath.

  It spoke in that growling voice that sounded like the crunching of cartilage, of a joint being torn apart. ‘I will not wear it. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.” Show mercy on me now, God. Show mercy on me now!’

  She put out her hand to comfort the great animal but it flinched away, rolled and snapped. Then it came for her with paralysing speed. It threw her to the earth, stood over her keening for a few moments and then bounded off into the trees. It was gone in a few strides. Aelis was alone in the deep forest with the night falling, starving and cold. But suddenly she wasn’t alone, nor was she hungry, and an odd warmth sprang up in her. She saw a sunrise in her mind, filling the forest with a crisp, clear light; she saw the track of the wolf in the darkness bright and clear. A rune had lit up inside her.

  Aelis followed the track through the trees. It was night, she knew, and yet it was not night. The light in her mind made everything as clear as full day but it didn’t quite banish the reality of the dark forest. It was as if she was walking through two forests at the same time, one light and one dark, existing equally in both.

  She walked on and on, the perfumes of the forest all about her – wet earth and grass, the resin that clung to her hands from the tree trunks she touched as she passed. Moths moved in the dark; things burrowed and sighed in the loam and the deeper earth beneath it. As the sky moved from pitch to silver there was birdsong, warmth and spears of light shot through the trees.

  It was just after dawn when she came upon the sleeping wolf. It had wedged itself against a fallen tree and covered itself with earth. Asleep, the creature did not seem to terrify the runes in the same way that it did when awake. Her mind was alive with the crawling and glimmering symbols. Aelis looked down at the pe
ndant. Like the night that she could see as day, like the wolf she had seen as a man, it seemed two things. One was a stone with a wolf’s head on it; the other was a pocket of darkness, as if torn from the night sky, much bigger than the pebble she saw in the real world.

  She knew it for magic and she knew it for a sin, but the runes filled her with exhilaration. She felt stronger than she ever had in her life, though the nightmare land she had fallen into in her dreams as a young girl was coming into being about her, the trees seeming more like carvings than living things, the sky metal, more a roof than a natural creation, the grass sticking up like shards of dark glass. She was not afraid. She felt safe in that place between reality and hallucination with the runes as her guides.

  She peered into the darkness that was the pebble and saw that she could not tell how big it was. It seemed as if it would fit into her hand but it was as wide as the stars. The world was a strange and beautiful place. The wolf seemed an entrancing thing, not frightening at all. It lay in the dusk like another long shadow among the shadows of the ancient trees. She tied the pendant around the wolf’s neck and then lay down to sleep against its side, putting her head onto its flank, feeling safe in its animal warmth.

  The creature did not wake – not that morning, nor that afternoon, nor in the evening when the shadows of the trees stretched towards her and bars of light spread from the setting sun. Night did not wake it, not the buzz of insects by its ears, nor the damp mist that clung to its fur in the dawn. The morning sun was strong but the wolf did not stir.

  Aelis stayed beside it. Her clothes were just rags, but she did not feel cold nor scarcely hungry. The runes kept her warm. She sank into them, searching for them in the dark of her mind, learning how to find them at the little drop where consciousness becomes sleep, and to allow them to emerge to consume her. She was a horse racing under the sun, a sunset stretching fingers of light to the dark hills, a hawthorn bristling with spikes, a hailstorm battering the land, a river feeding and shaping the terrain that fed and shaped it.