Fenrir

by MD. Lachlan

  He knew what he was going to do, knew what he needed. He was weak, his human thoughts locked below ice. Only the hunger of the wolf, the same hunger that kept him from death, was in his mind now.

  He writhed his way forwards until he bumped into something. He could tell it was not part of the structure of the boat, but something softer. He couldn’t make his body roll, so, shivering and shaking, he turned himself round on the floor with his legs. The effort was enormous, and, despite the cold, he was sweating. Now his head was against something that felt like a man’s coat. Groaning, he wriggled his way up the body. An arm. Again, he slithered along the icy deck in increments, his muscles impelling him on and then rebelling into spasms, his joints as solidly locked as the icebound ship. And then, an ungloved hand. The men who had come onto the ship had stripped the oarsmen looking for jewellery. Jehan was next to a half-naked Viking.

  He worked his head around until he had a finger in his mouth. He had too much of it, the whole finger, and couldn’t bite down. Jehan pushed back with his lips until only a fold of flesh was in his teeth. The first bite was agony. He could hardly puncture the flesh. His jaw was like an old gate long surrendered to decay and rust. But move it did, and the taste of blood, rich and deep, was in his mouth with the promise of more. He swallowed. Then he bit again.

  A flash of his old life came to him: the chapel at evening, the smoke of beeswax candles in the air. And then the memory slipped away, flickering into darkness like a hare into the woods. His old life was gone.

  While the monks of Saint-Germain went about their duties between vespers and compline he managed two bites. Between compline and nocturns he ate six. By lauds, as the sun turned the mist to a glowing grey, he had eaten the flesh of the whole hand, his neck freer, his jaw stronger. By prime he had removed most of the flesh of the arm. By terce he had the strength to tear open the belly and eat the lights, the liver and heart. By the time vespers came round again he was sitting up on the boat, the cold freezing the Viking’s blood to his clothes. But the blood in his veins was now warm, the confessor’s thoughts released from their shackles of cold.

  Jehan stood up and put his hand to his neck. The stone was missing. He looked down at what he had done. He felt the wolf inside him almost smirk, content to rest a while before feeding some more. Already his teeth felt too big for his head, his mouth more central to his consciousness than his hands. The change he had known before was rushing upon him now. That feeling was in him – a mixture of dread and glee as the human recognised the animal.

  Why had God put him through this again? He had regained himself only to lose himself. He had been content to die and to face the mercy of God. Now he was condemned to walk again, prey to the vilest lusts.

  He recalled Corinthians: You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons. He looked at the wreckage of the corpse. What was that if not the table of demons? The Lord had shut him out or he had shut himself out. Whatever had happened, there was no heaven after this. So what then? Embrace hell? Never.

  The wolf, he realised, had done more than give him the appetites of a beast; it had reduced him spiritually to the status of an animal. His whole life had been shaped by the idea of future reward, of heaven. That idea had been devoured by the wolf, and now he was chained to the present, his past life destroyed, his future unguessable. The instant was all he had, an endless rush of moments. That and Aelis, with whom the present was enough. She had been taken. Captured? Enslaved or murdered? He would find out. So seek her out. The wolf could find her, it had found her before. The idea was a boulder on the edge of a precipice. He only had to touch it to send it irreversibly forward.

  The smirking hunger rose in him again, the feeling that hoarded bones like a miser hoards gold.

  ‘No!’

  But he was what he was, and there was no way to fight the wolf. Even now the odour of the cold corpses drifted up at him, calling him to abomination. He felt his chin wet with saliva, his teeth begin to grind.

  ‘God,’ he said, looking to the sky. ‘Jesus, the test you set me was too hard.’

  And then he fell upon the corpses to cool his burning appetite.

  The wolf inside him would not let Jehan leave the ship until its hunger was sated. The winter deepened around him, snow was on his back but he felt no cold. No one came to interrupt his feeding. Helgi had forbidden the ship to his people, fearing that he would lose it to firewood if they were allowed near it.

  So Jehan remained, icebound, eating.

  Still, he heard men out on the river, their hammers breaking the ice to fish, the thick scent of oily wool drifting in on the fog, the smell of the fish themselves.

  The transformation was coming fast upon him and he could sense himself growing. He would stretch out his fingers and find that when he folded them again they lay strangely in his palm.

  His tongue was a bloody mess where he kept catching it as he chewed, while his back began to hunch and his shoulders’ movement to feel restricted and cramped.

  The frozen days burst with odours – it was almost as if he could smell the cold. The fires of Ladoga told their stories: – old wood burning, very dry and musty as from deep in a store, first the smell of roasting meat, later only fish.

  The old human stinks drifted in on him – shit and piss, sweat and bad teeth, secretions that seemed to sparkle in his mind telling their own tales of too much drink, of the exertions of work, sex and fever. He ate.

  The corpses smelled wonderful to him, fascinating in their trade-off between the odours of life and the tiny decay the cold would allow them. They smelled so different to live men: the fluids of the stomach and bowels stronger, the sweat weaker, the blood full of the scent of iron.

  He turned the corpses over, noting the redness of the back and buttocks where the blood had settled after death, marvelling at the mortal detail. Then suddenly his moral self would return, and he would run to the stern of the ship, putting his fingers into his mouth, trying to make himself vomit. But eventually that faded, and he felt no more revulsion that he would have chewing on an apple. The change that worried him most was the delight he seemed to take in feeding. He tried to hold back, to retreat from the euphoria, but he could not. He lay on the deck laughing and grinning, stretching his back again and again. It felt so long and so lithe.

  But the confessor was a man of great will. Though he knew he could not fight the wolf, he did his best to cling to himself. Prayers and psalms seemed no use – he was separate from God, a cursed thing that crawled in blood and slime – but he thought of her. He had seen her when he was seven and she had told him, ‘Do not seek me.’ Yet he had looked for her, not with his body but with his will. He had wanted her at his side. Even in his affliction he had called out to her, though he had tried to muffle his inner voice with prayer.

  Now he called to her again: ‘Aelis, please. Come to me. Adisla. In my life before I said I would find you and I am here.’

  The fog meant nothing to him. His sense of smell and his hearing guided him across the land at night when there was no light. In the day, when the light from the sun was no more than a brightening of the fog’s grey, his eyes could pick out shapes – men fishing on the ice, animals moving across the frozen river – though they did not see him. He roamed, looking for her, but she had gone, it seemed. He couldn’t smell her, couldn’t hear her. On the barrows beyond the town walls he sat and watched for her. He called but she didn’t answer. When he saw the stir his cries caused, the men running to the ramparts with torches; when he smelled their fear and heard their hearts beating quicker than their steps, he went back to the ship, back to the bodies and his feeding and his growing until the remains of the Vikings were all gone.

  He awoke one morning when the air was the colour of cloudy steel and spoke.

  ‘I am hungry,’ he said.

  He first took a fisherman at his hole in the ice. The next day he took a guard from the ramp
arts of the town, leaping up to drag him down to his death on the frozen river.

  Then he was hunted, men moving through the fog with torches and dogs. The words on their lips were harsh and he knew they were meant for him: ‘troll-witch, fen dweller, monster, wolf’.

  He went deep into the fog and waited until they retreated. The boat was now closed to him, just a place where men waited, a brazier on the ice, spears and axes at their sides.

  He watched them in silence, trying to make himself leave, trying to resist the urge to see them as prey.

  But then, when the hint of a thaw was on the breeze, people came with a mule. His memory sparked and he saw himself in a river, pulling a fat man from the black waters, remembered Saint-Maurice, the blood, that terrible sorcerer watching him. He remembered the merchant who had fretted and sweated in the forest where the Viking Saerda had pushed him down the path to abomination. He crept closer and could make them out quite clearly – the fat Viking, the little merchant with his mule and the Raven, the one who had killed the witch. He knew them, but not as he had known them before – by vision and voice – but by scent. But he would not go to them. His animal drives were stronger than his human thoughts. He tried to understand what he was feeling. A phrase came to him: I am full of food and do not need to exert myself.

  He watched as the travellers greeted the men on the boat. Then a guard left along the frozen river with the merchant following on his plodding mule.

  72 Unexpected Welcome

  The fog did not lift and it seemed that winter would go on for ever. Helgi sat in his hall, Aelis silent and brooding nearby on a bench. Since he had put the stone on her she had hardly spoken a word. However, the girl’s inability to remove the pendant told him he had been right to do so. She was one of them that Loki had mentioned, for sure. The fragments of the god. Helgi felt he had for the moment neutralised her.

  Aelis looked at him with anger in her eyes. He knew she wanted to know what had happened to the monk. She had even tried to return to the ice herself, but he’d had his guards stop her. Her persistent questioning almost made him wish he had rescued the monk too. He couldn’t understand her attachment to the cripple. She seemed convinced he was enchanted, which made Helgi nervous. Eventually, Helgi felt he had to come up with a story and told her he had sent the monk to a mountain witch for a cure.

  ‘You cannot explain this to me as you would to a child whose dog has died,’ she had said.

  ‘I am a king,’ said Helgi, ‘and I owe you no explanation. You should thank me. You asked me to free you from the magic, and I did. We are all safer now.’ She’d just looked at him with her even stare, shaken her head and said nothing.

  The townsfolk were used to her now and the hall was thronged with the everyday crowd, a small market in operation, inside to shelter from the cold.

  ‘Lord.’

  It was one of the druzhina, the cold clinging to him as he entered the hall.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The merchant has returned. Leshii is back.’

  Helgi stood. ‘And the wolfman too? Myrkyrulf?’

  ‘I don’t know, khagan.’

  ‘Don’t know?’

  ‘It’s difficult to say. He has a companion, but he’s a sorcerer and I never look too closely at those. They can bewitch you with their eyes. They have warnings for you, khagan.’

  ‘What warnings?’

  ‘They would not say.’ The merchant had decided to leave all that to the Raven to explain.

  Helgi glanced at Aelis. He knew that her power was contained and felt secure as long as the winter lasted, but also knew the runes would aim to reunite, that the other fragments of the god might come searching. He now had a more secure home for her. Despite the fog, work on it had continued, and it was finished.

  She was looking at him. Helgi had used the Norse word ulfhethinn – wolfman – and had mentioned the name, Myrkyrulf.

  ‘Sindre is dead,’ she said. Her Norse was faltering and unclear since he had put the stone on her.

  ‘What?’

  She said it again in Roman. A spice seller – who had found little appetite for his wares since the fog descended – translated for the king: ‘The wolfman you sent for me died in the north of my country.’

  ‘And the merchant I sent with him?’

  The spice seller translated: ‘Without the wolfman’s protection perhaps he lived, but I cannot see how.’

  ‘You are sure this is the wolfman?’ said Helgi to the guard.

  ‘I’m sure it’s the merchant, sir. He’s thinner than he was but I’m sure it’s him. The wolfman, no. I remember the fellow and he was a head above me. This man is the same size.’

  ‘And yet he claims to be the same sorcerer who came here?’

  ‘He said to tell the khagan that Sindre was here with the merchant and they had urgent business with him. They have a Viking with them – fat and tall. A great warrior, I should say.’

  Helgi looked at the girl. Could this be the one that was prophesied? The half-god, looking to be complete? Odin, god of the hanged, of the spear, of magic and poetry, come to kill him and steal his crown.

  ‘The merchant is outside?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Take the lady to the gate by the back door of this hall. Do not let him see you. Leave her there and come back.’

  Aelis was led out. She wanted to protest, but with the stone about her neck she was torpid and dull-witted; her limbs were heavy and her head ached.

  ‘Bring the merchant in.’

  Leshii hobbled into the great hall feeling as if he might be sick. His leg was very painful despite the Raven’s artful splints and herbs, and it was beginning to swell and blacken. It had been shattered, and had it not been for the Raven’s medicines Leshii would have been unable to stand. The Raven had offered to remove the leg but Leshii had refused. He knew his time was up and saw no reason to spend what he had left in any more pain than he needed to.

  Still, he could not quite bring himself to leave his swords and used the bundle in which they were tied as a sort of cumbersome crutch as he came before the king.

  The murderous thing stalking the fog meant that no stranger would be allowed in to town. Leshii, however, had known the guards and been led to the king to bargain for his companion’s entrance while they waited on the ice. He was not hopeful.

  Only the certainty of his death had given him the courage to enter the town. He still had to find the lady for the Raven and Ofaeti if he could but he was glad he would not have to sell her. He would be protecting her, saving her from the teeth of the wolf. And if the Raven fulfilled his threat to kill Helgi? So what? Leshii knew he did not have long and Helgi, he felt sure, would punish him for returning empty-handed.

  But he would die at home, after a life on the trail. No foreign sands would cover his bones; he would lie in no perilous forest or high mountain pass. He would die within a few paces of the market where he had traded for thirty years, within an apple-pip spit of the land upon which he had hoped to build his comfortable house and fuck his dancing girls.

  Helgi was seated on his big chair, the one he used on market days to judge the people’s disputes.

  ‘Dread khagan,’ said Leshii, attempting a bow.

  ‘You have the girl?’

  ‘No, lord.’

  ‘Then you are a bold fellow, returning here. What is your purpose?’

  ‘I seek news of her. She should be here by now – I sent her ahead.’

  Helgi’s face was a mask. ‘You do not fear the wrath of your lord?’

  ‘I do, khagan, but I am old and I tried very hard to bring her here. We were separated to the north of Francia and I have not seen her since. I was with her on a boat but was washed overboard in a high sea. Thankfully a whale delivered me to the shore and I was saved, but the lady was gone.’

  Leshii did not want to admit he had been thrown off the ship by the Vikings because that would have made him look weak. Neither did he want to start mentioning werew
olves as he knew there were those in the town who might think he had brought the fog monster with him.

  ‘A whale?’

  ‘Yes, lord.’

  Helgi nodded. ‘I have heard it said they will sometimes save a drowning man.’

  ‘And so it proved for me, lord. But I set the lady on a ship with paid guards. I am surprised she is not here by now.’

  ‘Did you not fear for a lady on a ship full of strangers?’

  ‘She is a powerful sorcerer, lord. Men move against her and die like mayflies. She appears from the shimmering air; kings fall dead before her, and evil powers cannot touch her.’

  Helgi nodded. ‘These are the signs I expected. It was your doing that she came by boat to Aldeigjuborg?’

  ‘Yes, khagan.’

  ‘And the wolfman?’

  ‘Dead in north Francia.’

  Helgi turned to a druzhina. ‘Bring the merchant a bench – can’t you see he’s wounded. And a cup of hot wine.’

  Leshii had to resist the temptation to rub his ears. He couldn’t quite believe what he had just heard.

  The bench was provided and Leshii gulped the wine down. Then he knocked back another cup.

  ‘A third,’ said Helgi, and the merchant’s cup was refreshed again. The prince was staring at Leshii like a money changer who suspects a coin to be false but can see no proof that it actually is.

  ‘But who are the two who travel with you?’

  Leshii thought he should stress the fine qualities of Ofaeti and Hugin in order that Helgi might find them some service if their mission to find Aelis failed. ‘They helped me on my journey here. One is a mighty warrior of the north, a prince in his own realm. He is the most formidable warrior I have ever seen – next to yourself, khagan.’

  ‘Bring him in and let’s test that claim,’ said one of the druzhina. Helgi waved his hand to silence him.

  ‘On a ship here he was unarmed and yet went unflinching into a battle with five men and emerged the victor. He throws a spear well enough to pin a fly to the wall and is a mighty and formidable poet. His name is Ofaeti but he has many others that speak flatteringly of his battle prowess.’