Valkyrie's Song

by M. D. Lachlan

  They lit a candle and both sat close in its tallow stink, holding their hands around it. Ithamar’s hands were raw where he had beaten the man.

  ‘I had to do that. I had no choice. These are hard times and we must look after ourselves.’

  ‘He cut you. He brought it on himself,’ said Tola.

  Did she mean it? It didn’t matter if she did. The cold land, full of enemies, meant only the most basic things could be seen to. The man had died not because of his hostility but because it would have been too difficult, too cold, to solve the problem he presented.

  The dark filled the hut so Ithamar lit the fire and drove it out.

  He took off his coat, shirt and trousers and set them to dry.

  ‘You should dry your clothes,’ he said.

  She removed the cloaks and set them down but only turned her back to the fire to dry her dress.

  ‘The shift will not dry beneath that,’ said Ithamar. ‘You should remove the dress.’

  ‘You are neither my husband nor my father, sir, so I decline to be naked before you.’

  ‘I am not so wild as to fall upon the first pair of tits I see.’

  ‘I’ll keep my dress on.’

  When her back was quite hot, she turned again to the fire. She could not enjoy it, however much it warmed away the ice of the day. The fire of the hearth was the same fire that had burned her home, the fire that cooked the same as the fire that killed.

  Something was out there, among the valleys. Not the murderous Normans, nor the frightened farmers. This was a dark and heavy presence, an ending of things. It crept through the ice black night towards her.

  Ithamar was restless. She knew what was on his mind and needed no insight to say what it was.

  ‘Will you lie with me?’ he said.

  ‘No.’ There was no lust in him, just the wolf call of fear. That was surprising.

  ‘I have saved you.’

  ‘I will not lie with you. My family is dead. The man who should be my husband is dead. I am hunted in my own land, frozen and dirty. I will not lie with you, man of fear.’

  ‘If you use that knife on me,’ he said, ‘you will die here. You rely on me. So you stab me and I die and you die. You stab me and I do not die, you die.’ Still he didn’t come close but his eyes owned her.

  ‘You have troubled yourself greatly to find me. I do not think you will kill me. And if you get me back to whoever wants me, I will tell them of anything that happens between us, good or bad. If it is bad then I will demand I am revenged before I consent to anything they might ask.’

  ‘You are a troublesome girl.’

  ‘I will be no trouble to you, if you are no trouble to me.’

  After that he was quiet.

  She watched the firelight and tried to stay awake to keep her mind on the land about her. But that flesh-hungry thing, slinking through the hills, made her mind retreat to the hearth. They let the fire burn out and slept at its side.

  Before dawn she awoke and shook Ithamar to rouse him.

  ‘There are Normans near here,’ she said. ‘We need to go.’

  Outside, the day was bitter but they had no choice but to take to the hills, dodging columns of riders.

  A snow storm came in and they spent a day locked to the side of a small overhang. The wildman knew how to keep a fire going from the sparsest of materials – digging a pit and then angling a hole into its side, the wind feeding the smoke. They would have died without it. She did let him near her then – she had to, for warmth, but the cold had frozen the lust out of him.

  When the wind dropped it was time to move. Ithamar knew the way, reading the bends and folds of the land before pointing and saying ‘there’.

  She ate snow in the pink dawn. The whole country was white now, save for the scars of the fires the Normans had raised. What were they burning? Surely there weren’t farms enough to feed their appetite for slaughter.

  At first they came down the mountain and then they came to a huge hill, white shading to purple under the labouring sun.

  ‘Now we climb again,’ said Ithamar.

  She was glad of the effort, it warmed her, but they were terribly exposed to the wind as they went up. It lay on her back like a troll from a story; cold-skinned, life-sapping, as if it were feeding on her, turning her slowly to stone.

  The riders passed them by halfway through the second morning, two hundred paces below. There were ten of them and they had seen Tola and Ithamar. They didn’t chase nor even threaten the pair but they stopped. They were in a steep ravine, a pale cliff like the dirty tooth of a giant between them. The horsemen talked, pointing, and she could see they were debating what to do. She felt no animosity from them, merely a workmanlike attitude. It would be a chore to climb the hill.

  ‘We should run,’ said Ithamar. His breath was heavy.

  ‘There’s no running,’ said Tola. ‘Our fate is spun. It ends here or it doesn’t.’

  The Normans looked up and then one held up his hand. For an instant she couldn’t work out what he was doing. Then she realised. He was waving to them, as a hunter might wave to a deer he sees on the hillside, knowing it is too far away for his dogs to catch. She put up her hand without thinking and waved back. The sinuous, wolfy rune inside her writhed and with it a feeling, not a thought, that they were bound in a pact as old as the earth; hunter and hunted, acting out roles set by the Fates at the beginning of time. She disgusted herself. These men were killers. She had no bond with them, gave them no respect and, should she get the chance, would extend them no mercy.

  She knew why he waved – he expected her to die. She wouldn’t die.

  They came upon the cave after two days’ walk. Her feet were swollen in blisters from the wet and the cold, and she had no feeling in her hands or arms. The wildman was useful to her as they travelled but his fear never relented, never dropped. It was like a veil and she could see nothing of him beyond it. It covered the land of his mind like a snowfall.

  They climbed higher than she had even been before. The wind was a vindictive spirit, never leaving them, never tiring, becoming ever angrier that it couldn’t blow them down. She could not stop shaking. The man beside her was a mute, all his concentration taken up by just keeping moving forward, not becoming another stone among stones.

  At times she thought she would die. She fell twice but he made her go on. To stop moving for a moment was to stop moving forever. In the frozen agony, she thought she saw death stalking behind her, loping along, his soft wolf tread slow but relentless.

  A sentry saw them coming from a long way off and the men were out in force to greet her by the time they arrived, armed with pitchforks and clubs – not a sword among them.

  These, she could see, were masterless men – their manners rough and their faces lean and sharp. They looked the sort who hunted the woods and roads, waiting for people to rob.

  ‘Ithamar!’ The voice was only just audible on the iron wind. Men came running down the stony slope towards them – a ragged band of five or six, while the others remained where they were, watchful.

  The biggest of them spoke – a tough, dense-limbed, stooping little man who seemed to have been physically squashed down by his troubles. She felt fear from him too, but not as complete as that from Ithamar. There was a vinegary taste beneath it, one of ashes and resentment, greed too. Was he going to fight the Normans? His presence felt like a marsh in the woods – indifferent to whether it drowned a conqueror or one of the vanquished.

  ‘This is the girl?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The little man looked at her like a farmer might look at a horse at market, as if scanning her for signs of any imperfection.

  ‘We all get a slice of this.’ A man spoke in an accent she didn’t recognise. A foreigner?

  ‘Them of us who puts the work in, southerner of Bradford,’ said the little m
an. ‘Get her inside, Ithamar. We can’t stay here.’

  They ran back along a scree slope – running to fight the cold, not for fear of being seen; no Norman was going to hunt the high passes in that weather.

  The cave was more like a well, a round blackness on the white hillside that smoked like the mouth of a dragon. They dropped into it, scrambling down on their backsides until they reached a flat floor. From there they ducked under a low overhang into the cave itself.

  The fire was like a rebirth, offering comfort beyond anything she had ever known. It was as if the warmth of the cave melted away the control and the concentration that two days in the open had frozen into her and her whole body convulsed and twitched as she sat down, finally out of the driving snow.

  If she had expected food, she was to be disappointed. There was none. There was no greeting for her, nor any kind word. Seven people were already in the cave – one man, four women and two small children of no more than six or seven years old. All sat staring lean-cheeked and moon-eyed at her. No one spoke for a long time while Tola lay out by the fire, her clothes steaming on her. Feeling was returning to her right hand but her left was numb, the skin blistered. All her limbs ached and then the ache became painful and she had to retreat to the back of the cave.

  ‘That’s it, girl, don’t warm up too quick, you’ll crack, so it’s said,’ said the stooped little man.

  After a while the pain subsided and she began to feel cold again – but a tame cold this time, not the cold of the hills, that ice wind that cancels all personality, reduces you to just someone who, for that moment, is not dead.

  There was no conversation in there, no wise woman for her to meet. Two of the women, at least, were foreigners – come over with the northern Vikings, maybe. There was an echo of other places about them, the smell of odd food, the tongue held in a strange way to curl out the odd, buttery sound of their language; a feeling of unbelonging. They had likely come over with Hardrada and been marooned when his ships went home. One had a black eye like a rotten apple. Slaves, probably. It was notoriously dangerous to beat Norse wives as they were adept at beating back.

  Cedric from the top farm had married a northerner, Drifa, whose father had come with Canute. He beat her one day and she set about him with a spade while he was asleep. When he complained to her father that his wife would not cede to discipline, her father told him he wasn’t beating her properly. ‘What is properly?’ Cedric had asked. Her brothers had dragged him outside the house and given him a good demonstration of what ‘properly’ meant.

  The memory made her forget the present and laugh for an instant. Then she remembered – Cedric would likely be dead now, Drifa too, maybe even her father and all his beefy, bold sons. All those silly stories, all the misery, boredom, delight and love of their lives existing only in a friend’s mind.

  Ithamar and the stooped man were talking by the fire. She went to it and sat down. All the eyes in the cave followed her but no one said anything.

  ‘Tomorrow we move,’ said the stooped man. ‘We’ll head east with dawn and take the first shelter we can get, be it after an hour or, God forbid, near dusk. The going will be slow but careful and steady is better than quick into the arms of the invader.’

  He glanced at Tola and she felt his irritation in prickles on her back. He did not like her listening to him – not because what he had to say was secret but because it implied she might have some opinion on it. She was mere goods to him. She ignored his disdain.

  ‘Are men massing in the east?’

  He didn’t give her the courtesy of a reply.

  ‘We must go east,’ was all she got from Ithamar.

  The men she was with could not hope to fight the Normans. There were six of them – young and healthy enough but badly armed, half starved. They had no more than clubs and farm tools for weapons, though the stooped man had a long knife. A single Norman horseman might account for the lot of them.

  Tola thought it best not to make further enquiries before she was sure of what was happening. The attitudes of the men in the cave told her nothing. Some scarcely registered she was there. There was the familiar hot and restless sensation of lust coming from two of them but from the rest, very little. Tola wondered if Ithamar had told them why he had brought her here.

  One of the men came towards her but the stooped man turned to him.

  ‘Not her. She’s our way out of this mess. Choose one of the others.’

  The man snorted. Then he pointed at one of the women who was caring for the children.

  ‘You,’ he said.

  She didn’t argue but followed him to the back of the cave. Her mind was as cold as the wind on the mountain – she had cut herself off from everything that was happening. So that woman was a slave too, though she looked like a freewoman, by her dress.

  ‘Don’t look so appalled,’ said the stooped man. ‘She sold herself and her children as slaves for us to save them. It’s a fair bargain for the effort we’ve been through.’

  Tola glanced at Ithamar but he avoided her eyes. She was under no illusions now. She was a captive.

  10 Call of the Wolf

  Three horsemen returned to the village. They’d left one of the houses unburned so as to draw the villagers back for shelter. After three days they came back upon it in a wide circle, dropping in down the frozen stream that fell from the scar.

  Freydis, the heat of Arabia long gone from her bones, saw them coming. She was trapped in that country. When Harold had shattered the Viking army at Stamford Bridge, Freydis had tried to get back to the ships but the English king’s army had cut off her escape. She’d seen the smoke of the burning boats in the distance and turned back inland, taking to the forest. It was no difficulty to her to survive the autumn there. This was an abundant land and the trees were full of berries and nuts, birds and squirrels if she could catch them.

  Of course, the Englishmen scoured the country looking for the scattered invaders but she hid her sword, her spear and her armour, and lay watching the farms as best she could. When she could be sure she had found a family of northerners – it wasn’t difficult, many Danes and some others had stayed since the time of Canute – she went to them and offered herself as a slave, saying she had been brought over as such with the Vikings. When the farmer saw how she could dig, mend and cook, he took her on and so she was saved, until the Normans came.

  The farmer had stayed to defend his land but the women ran to the woods. She’d had to leave them when a party of twenty riders found them by the bridge at Weasel Gill. There was no saving anyone and she had only just got away herself. She couldn’t give herself up to a farmer again – there was no one to give herself to. So she had gone back and found her sword and armour.

  Winter alone wouldn’t have driven her out – she had fire and shelter – but she heard a call. At first she thought it was a wolf but its voice was in her mind, not her head. The rune that lived inside her seemed to shiver. That alone made Freydis want to know more. The rune was a burden to her now, its presence stronger and stronger. At the battle of Stamford Bridge she had felt swallowed by it, consumed. Her hand was faster, her aim surer than it had ever been, but the battle rune had not calmed itself when she had won her distance and fled.

  Nights were full of strange visions – a spear flying against a storm-black sky, a field of the slain where she walked among the dead and dying with a bloody sword, killing some and leaving others. In the daytime she ached for vengeance on the English who had fallen upon her. She could not understand that. Men might fill up with resentments and anger, men could not stand to be beaten. She saw it as simply part of the business of war – someone had to win; someone had to lose. Any warrior who did not accept that and expected always to be the victor had to be a fool. But the rune, the blood-wanting rune, filled her with thoughts of shattering the enemy, using his head to adorn the prow of her ships, taking his gold and his lands
for the pleasure of taking them, not the pleasure of having them.

  The wolf ’s voice had quietened the rune. It was coming from the north. She went north, to this village.

  The cold numbed her mind and clouded her thinking. Only when she had warmed herself for a day in the house did it occur to her why it might have been left.

  There was even straw there, which she’d slept in, to make it more inviting in the cold. She hadn’t lit a fire, she wasn’t that stupid, but she saw straight away her mistake as she heard the blowing of an approaching horse. Her footsteps were in the snow outside. Had the wind blown them away? She couldn’t be sure. Now she wanted the rune to express itself and she looked for it inside her mind. It shone, a silver spear, and she imagined herself grasping it.

  She put her armour, her shield and her sword in the straw, lay the spear against the wall by the door, and waited in the cold darkness. The horses drew up and she heard the Normans’ voices. The rune hummed and sang like a spear striking wood. She sat in the cold darkness, flattening down her skirt like a wife waiting for her husband.

  She heard the Normans talking outside. They were arguing with each other, or rather one was upbraiding another. She guessed they wouldn’t come in by the door.

  She was wrong. The door was booted through and at first it seemed that one of their tear-drop shields stood on its own in the doorway. The warrior crouched behind it, anticipating a spear or an arrow. Confronted by silence he peeked over the top like a child playing a game. He smiled when he saw her.

  In two bounds he was inside the room, wheeling to see if anyone was behind the door. He saw the spear and laughed, threw it to the floor. Then he turned his attention to her, as the two others came in behind him. The spear rune hovered before her in the dark, pointing at his throat. The man spoke and one of the others curled up his face as if tasting rancid butter. The other held up his hand in a gesture of refusal. She saw what he was saying. ‘Not for me. I have standards.’