Valkyrie's Song

by M. D. Lachlan

  What could she offer the well? Her guilt and her shame. Her peace of mind. The girl’s life was nothing to her but the vow felt sacred. She shivered as she realised what that meant. She had emulated the gods. Odin himself was called the treacherous backbiter. Was his magic bound to him by chains of guilt? The howl came cold down the passageway. No time to think about that.

  She put her arms underneath Tola’s armpits and pulled them both into the water. It was so warm – like a bath in the great palace of Constantinople – and for an instant she forgot herself. She had been cold so long. What a temptation just to sink into the waters and be warm until death took her. No. That was the well. She had come to the right place. The well of Uthr beneath Constantinople was a place of all possibilities. Now she could feel the cold flow leaving the pool at her feet, dragging her down. The water was not deep – on tiptoe she could keep her mouth above it. She held Tola’s head up so she could breathe. And then silence. They were two women in an underground spring. She had thought the well like an animal. Now it held its breath.

  She heard a short cry from the top of the passage. Then that howl; all the terror of the burning land made sound. Oh God, she had left Dýri in the dark. The dark was nothing to the wolf. She needed to call on the runes properly, not just to summon them as shadows to light her way or heat her. She needed to do something she had never done before, to allow the runes to flower properly in her mind. She had always known they could run wild, cling like ivy around her thoughts, consume her. The wolf nearly upon her, it was worth the risk. She let go of her thoughts and called them forth.

  Kenaz, the beacon rune, blazed, shining into her, lighting all those parts of her she had hidden, an arrowhead, sparking stories and pictures in its wake. She saw herself as a little girl, taken by her brother from the slums of Constantinople to the city itself, saw her servant initiating her in the mysteries of the goddess Hecate that her dead mother had held dear, felt her brother’s love that he had cultivated for its own sake but also so that he might betray it when his mind needed the shock to his sanity to access his deeper magics. She saw how the runes had entered her, growing within her at the well to which he had carried her and where he had died.

  She saw the rune Algiz, spreading its antler arms wide. It would be her shield but she saw it spinning and turning, whispering threats. Odin, the dark god, was present in her in part. Odin would be whole again. She would be consumed. No. She reached forward as if to grab the rune, to turn it back to its defensive posture, to shape her own destiny.

  Now the horse rune stamped and sweated, its chestnut sheen filling her mind. It would carry her away, change her. No. It meant a partnership. Was it telling her to drown Tola now? She pulled the girl up by her long scarf. Should she tie the knot that would kill her, cement the betrayal that would offer insight? Again the howl and now, from within Styliane, she heard the rune answering in kind, a lonely voice calling to its kin, the wolf.

  The final rune whispered its name. Othala. A vision of a chest of gold. It meant reward, inheritance, the receipt of dues. This had always been the furthest rune from her mind, the one whose use she could never fathom.

  Duty. It wanted her to leave the girl who carried the howling rune, to honour her promise. Yes, that was the price the well sought for insight. Defy the rune, go to war with the magic inside her, and live forever in a state of inner turmoil. But live forever. She pulled Tola backwards and looped the final knot.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s you or me.’

  She forced Tola down into the water. The girl’s eyes opened wide, staring up at Styliane and then Styliane saw it – the girl’s rune, the low wolf slinking shape crawling across her face, the shadow of the wolf that stretched out to meet the real thing. It was a trap, but for who?

  For the wolf. For anyone. She saw the rune writhe and turn, stretch up towards her.

  ‘No!’ said Styliane, but the rune had twined its way through the eye of the Othala rune, winding around it like a cat winds around a post but ensnaring it, pulling it in. The receipt of dues. Time to pay, Styliane.

  ‘No!’ Styliane spoke again but the wolf rune had seized the Othala rune and would not let it go.

  Styliane coughed, choked. Tola’s hands, she realised, were around her throat.

  Something else was in the water too. She saw a face close by her, its nose a squashed bit of clay.

  ‘Freydis!’

  ‘Lady, I am here to save you,’ said the warrior.

  23 The Wolf Rune

  Tola felt the rune inside her coil out to grab at the bright symbols all around. The constriction at her neck was terrible. She scrunched up her eyes, afraid they might pop out if she did not, but still she saw the shapes floating in the darkness, whispering their names. Fire, Protection, Horse and Gift. The shadow rune inside her snapped and guzzled at the one that shone like the gold of a dragon’s lair in a story, ripping it from its orbit and throwing it aside.

  Then she was in front of a mighty white tree that stretched to the stars and she saw the runes hanging like shining fruit upon its branches. She reached up and snapped off the burning rune, the one that was shaped like the head of an arrow. It fluttered like a bird in her hands and she let it go. Then she snapped off the horse rune, feeling its great beating heart as she took it down. It wanted to be free to gallop. She let it go. Finally she took off the shield rune and saw it wasn’t a shield but a stag that snorted, tossed its head and looked at her with liquid eyes. Then it was gone, turning into the darkness as if into a forest.

  She wanted to be sick but she couldn’t. Something was at her throat. She felt a heavy blow against the side of her head and fell back. Warmth swept over her and she knew she was in water. It was very important to her to remove the pressure at her neck but she had something in her hands. Her head pounded and water filled her mouth and nose, it was important to hold on to the thing in her hands for just a few moments longer. It was a living thing.

  Her head broke the water, or she thought it did. No light now, nor any air, but a scream filled up the chamber. It was coming from the thing in her hands. She burst to breathe out as much as to breathe in. She let go of the thing in her hands and fell back into the water. She didn’t know up from down, water from air. Inside her she felt the shadow rune howl, calling out, trembling and shaking. Another voice answered it, a keening that turned her bones to powder.

  The well swirled around her, a whirlpool of images and sounds. She saw a barren island, a grey sky, green turf. There was something below the turf. Treasure? The rune she had taken from Styliane glinted and shone. Not treasure, an inheritance.

  In her vision she dug with her nails, tearing away the grass and soil, scraping down and down. She didn’t know what she was digging for but she felt it was the most important thing on earth to find what was buried there. Mounds of earth behind her. Still she dug until a knuckle of wood became visible. She kept on digging, scraping down around the wood, exposing more and more until she saw it for what it was – the figurehead of a ship, a carved raven, inscribed with runes. She counted them out. Twenty-four. The sky had turned black, the sun on the horizon lighting it up like iron in a forge. The runes caught the red light, shimmering as if inscribed in gold.

  Someone was buried there. Her grandfather had talked of kings who went to the afterlife in burning boats, or who were buried in them – sometimes along with their servants to aid them on their journey to the lands of the gods.

  She stepped back from the grave, horrified. The soil on her hands was wet with blood.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘In the boiling, bubbling, blubbing spring from which all cold things flow.’

  ‘I am on an island.’

  ‘You are on a grave.’

  She looked down and she saw what she had taken for the prow of a ship was the head of a great black raven. It crowed and strained, as if trying to lift itself from the soil, bu
t it couldn’t. Blood dripped from the bird’s beak.

  Tola wanted to help the animal and ran forward to try to dig it out but the great bird pecked at her, cawing, its eyes full of anguish. It would not allow itself to be freed but its terrible voice would not be quiet. She would do anything to silence it. She picked up handfuls of earth and flung them back into the hollow she had dug, then she kicked and pushed the piled earth back on top of the bird, willing it to be mute. She felt the ground tremble.

  ‘Where is this?’

  ‘This is the graveyard of the gods, where their old bones lie.’

  Whose voice was it? A woman’s. The voice of the well?

  She kept pushing the earth back on to the screaming bird.

  ‘Let me free,’ she said. ‘Let me free.’

  In an instant she was the bird, looking up in agony as great clods of earth came down upon its head. She felt a blow and the light went out as if carried by a giant who had stumbled and dropped it, a flicker and then nothing.

  Hands were on her and she fought them by instinct. She saw a light, the flash of a knife. Then the pressure at her neck relented, grit and gravel scraped against her knees. Someone was dragging her up and out. She tried to kick and fight but all she could hear was the rasp of her own breath, harsh as a blacksmith’s blast bag.

  ‘Who is this? Who is this?’

  ‘The runes will not go to the murderer. They fly to the lover.’

  The question would not come to her lips, though the rune inside her shook and sobbed. She felt its loneliness, its desire deep as thirst.

  A confusion of limbs thrashing in the water. Someone had her, tugging her up the tunnel with incredible speed and force. Her back tore against the soil, her hands ripped on the walls.

  Her clothes were pulled off her. She resisted on reflex. Her mind would not yet come back to the horrors of the everyday world with its mundane killings and rapes – she was still consumed by the shivering, beseeching rune inside her that whined and implored like a dog at a gate.

  She was pulled up to sitting, a tunic put over her head and her arms lifted roughly – like a mother helping a reluctant child to dress. Hose were pulled over her legs, a big fur coat put around her.

  ‘You’re all right,’ she heard a voice say in Norse. ‘You’re all right.’

  ‘Who is this?’ Another voice, younger. A man too.

  ‘Someone who can help me. Now we need to get her away.’

  She was lifted to her feet, plunged through the nightblack and moonsilver of the ruined church. From outside, noises, footsteps, but bringing with them the resonance of calamities – of dear Aeva, dead in childbirth, her baby too, the echo of her husband’s cries; the time when the ox in the top field had backed Bryni against a wall and broke his leg. They’d heard his cries as far as the next valley, it was said. The leg had turned bad and left his wife a widow.

  Tola snapped to consciousness.

  ‘We are discovered,’ she said.

  She was shoved on again, to the side of the church, into one of the side chapels. It was utterly dark in there but the man who held her moved unerringly, driving her on.

  ‘Will they find us?’ It was the younger man’s voice.

  ‘Shhhh!’

  She heard the church doors open and a prowling, thorough presence enter the church.

  It was the man she had sensed on the dale, the one with the tricks for flushing out the villagers.

  She heard a barked order in the Norman language. She didn’t need to understand the words to know what the man had called for.

  The image of a burning torch appeared in her mind. He had sent for light.

  24 A Wolf Cage

  The man guarding the entrance to the tunnel died quickly, mundanely, his neck snapped back then torn, the delicate flesh peeling beneath Loys’s fingers, the vertebrae severing as easily as the cooked bones of a fish.

  Before that moment and after it, under the power of the wolfstone, Loys would think of the horror of it all. The blood, yes, the salt beef smell of it, the chicken leg crunch of the spine, the little breath the man gave as he died – as if trying to say something profound or moving, not accepting fate had denied him the time even for that. All those horrors, yes, he would think of and the littler, quieter horror that niggled at the corners of his sleep like a draught at the fireside: the horror of knowing he no longer found such things horrific.

  Before that moment, and after, he would think of the words of Saint Paul in his Epistle to Timothy: ‘Even though I was once a blasphemer and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief.’ And he would wonder if grace could be extended to the man who had gone the other way, who had slipped from knowledge and faith to the level of a brute.

  At the moment he tore Dýri’s mortal soul from its flesh, he did not think at all and there was no horror. A man opposed him. A man fell. By the time Loys jumped into the passage beneath the crypt, Dýri was just the taste of blood on his lips – a nectar that set his body tingling and burned away the human fog that sat on his senses.

  He could see nothing but that was unimportant. Water was ahead, he could smell it, people too. Behind him he heard Freydis and Gylfa arguing.

  The passage was low – he could feel it touching his head even though he crouched. Even if he hadn’t have touched it, he would have known it was low. It smelled low, the air had a squeezed, musty tang to it. She was down there, he heard the rune mewling and calling for him, hooking him on.

  He was forced to crawl. The soil was damp and pungent. This was bone-rich earth, rotting treasures all around. He had a strong urge to dig at the wall but he did not follow it.

  He knew that he needed to put the wolf stone back on like a six-cup-drunk knows he needs to stop drinking. He felt no urge to do so. For an instant he sat, puzzled, forgetting his purpose, wondering why he was not in the crypt guzzling the wet feast he had prepared.

  Things were shirking from him in the darkness ahead, as if fear was a bow wave that preceded him. The runes. He could not tear them, he could not kill them. Why did they fear him? That human thought was a lodestar to him, leading him from the darkness of his wolf mind.

  ‘The point is not to want to do it; the point is to do it.’ The voice in his head was not his own. Whose? His tutor at Rouen? The man had a name, had been important to him, though he could recall neither his name nor his importance now.

  Something ahead of him was in distress. His lips were wet with drool, his body tense with a greedy excitement that rose like an echo of the thrashing panic before him in the dark. The howling, creeping, calling rune he knew in his dreams was there, but something else too. Their scent told him all he needed to know. Two women, stinking of sweat and fear, fear so lovely that his teeth itched. You don’t have to want to do it, you just have to do it. Want is the fire and the hearth. Do is the cold night full of painful duty.

  His fingers made shapes at his neck, a weight fell on his chest. He had tied the stone about him and it was as if he had stepped through a door, out of the light into darkness. He could see nothing now, nor smell it. The air was not tight nor the earth full of sweet decay. Anxiety gripped him – but not fear, for the long years had eroded any terror of death he might ever have had. He needed to find his killer, to protect her.

  He blundered down the passageway, his head hitting the ceiling, his elbows catching the walls.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ A woman’s voice called. The voice spoke in Greek. ‘I must. I …’

  The sentence was not finished. A great cry with a close echo sounded. Splashing and slapping, a scream and a shout. He scrambled on, the floor dropped away and he fell heavily into the water. He plunged blindly towards the noise, the screams and the splashing, the keening and sobbing – or where he thought it was. The cavern was small and the voices loud and echoing. He stretched out his hands but found nothing bu
t a wall.

  ‘They’re going. Where are they? They’re going.’

  Styliane, her voice right beside him. Someone hit him, he grabbed at an arm, then a torso. Frantic hands clawed at him and he shoved and pushed to defend himself. He needed to find the girl, his killer. He was certain she was here but with the wolfstone at his neck he couldn’t tell where. But to face Styliane with the wolf free in the forest of his mind was to risk killing her, freeing her runes, moving the god closer to resurrection and he could not do that. If Odin came again then the story might restart, telling its tale of misery and death for aeons to come.

  He must even be careful how he struggled against her. If she lost consciousness here or fell then she might die.

  ‘Lady. I’m here. I will free you from this hateful woman. Where are you?’

  Styliane screamed and fell from his grasp. He leapt after her, grabbing into the blackness. Someone else was there, bigger than the tiny Styliane. He had her and then he lost her. She was gone. There was nothing for it. He took off the stone.

  It was light and all around him were runes, shimmering in the air like the moon on water. The pool was no longer water but a cascade of stars. The runes shrieked and shook as the wolf woke in him, flying away. The stone on the thong in his hand was a hole, a sphere of darkness.