The girl lit up in the starlight, all shiny wet. The liquids on her skin interested him greatly – water of stone, water of salt, water of iron that was called blood and lovely to lap at. She could not see him but she had something at her neck.
His mind was sand, but the sand of mould like a blacksmith uses, she the metal burning within. They were expressions of each other; non-existent, useless alone. He had been in such waters before with another woman who he wished was alive in his place.
He took out his knife and cut the cord at her neck, her weight collapsing into his arms, her breath a wet rattle. A hundred years before he remembered a woman in the water. The shoulders were different, bigger this time, the arms not slender like a princess’s – these thick from years of toil, piglet-lifting, cow-shoving, pail-swinging arms; shoulders to lift a yoke to the ox. Still her, though. The girl who had died to save him, reborn as the fates had cursed her.
He did not remember her at the table, saw only glimpses of her in their bed. He remembered her there, though, at the world well beneath Constantinople, at the well, the flower of knowledge that seeded the world.
‘Don’t die. Beatrice. Don’t die!’
‘See my blood in the water. It is a ribbon of light that has pulled you back from the realm of the gods,’ she said.
The memory of her voice was such a ribbon to him now, pulling the man from the jaws of the mind-wolf. I am Loys, of Normandy, formerly the Quaestor of the Chamberlain of the Byzantine empire; formerly husband to Beatrice, Lady of Normandy; scholar and father, a man of pen and parchment.
He pulled her to the ledge. The girl was silent. Another presence shoving by him. The woman – not blind, but not seeing him, only looking to the water. His wolf mind had a sense not known to humans – the ability to detect attention. He knew without thinking if someone had seen him or if they had not. Freydis, splashing into the water, had a gaze focused like sun through glass. He followed the scent of the Varangian’s blood above back down the tunnel.
‘Sir, help me, I think they are coming for us. There are voices here.’
It was Gylfa, his voice a harsh whisper. His fear sizzled and snapped like bacon frying. Loys wanted to eat it up, to feel the secreted oils of terror, greasy on his teeth.
‘I’m going to lift this woman. Pull her up,’ he said.
‘We will die, sir. We should run.’
A thought snapped through his mind. You should run. It would be good to hear your heart pumping, the uncertain stutter of fleeing feet on the icy cobbles, to catch you and watch your entrails steaming in the cold, starred night.
‘Gylfa. This is death’s kingdom. You dwell in his hall. Trying to avoid your fate will only speed it along. Pull up the woman.’
Loys lifted the girl above his head. She was light and he was wolf-strong. Gylfa reached down and pulled her up by her tunic as Loys pushed. Loys climbed the rope.
The light was very dim but now he saw his breath was freezing, hazing the air. The girl would die if he didn’t get her dry. She was sucking in breaths in great sobs. No point asking her to be quiet, her gasps and retches were the sounds of her fighting death. He stripped the Viking. No time for this. No time, Gylfa was saying.
‘Hide behind a tomb. If they come down here, strike at their backs.’
‘What if there are many?’
‘Then there are many and your death is a glorious one. I will tell the tale.’
‘Will you live?’
He didn’t answer. The Varangian’s clothes were ludicrously too big for the girl but they were dry. She tried to fight him momentarily, mistaking his purpose, but he soothed her, spoke to her in Norman and in Norse. ‘I am your friend. Vinr. Vinr.’
Voices and footsteps far away, near the door, he guessed. His mouth flooded with saliva and animosity shook his flesh on the bones. No. He couldn’t fight a whole camp of them and what if the girl died? He picked up his curved sword, tied it back on. A shout from the darkness in Norman.
‘Who’s there?’
The girl coughed and heaved.
‘Shut up!’ Gylfa grasped her big wool coat.
‘Who’s there?’
‘Can’t a man get his end away without starting an inquisition?’ Loys shouted up in Norman.
‘You’ve got a woman in there? Give us a go when you’re finished. Robert just killed our last one and this weather’s frozen my cock solid.’
‘This one’s mine. Find your own.’
‘Now don’t be selfish, son.’
The girl mastered herself, was silent. Her eyes were full of fear. Loys supported her under the arm and lifted her to the deep shadows on the side of the crypt. Gylfa came scuttling behind.
There were three of the Normans, their steps heavy, clinking with mail as if someone were manhandling sacks of coin along the cathedral aisle.
‘Where are you?’
Gylfa’s breath seemed very loud to Loys, the boy’s efforts to suppress it rendering it a stuttering sob. Kill him. No, too noisy. Offer him to the Normans, throw him out there, the role of the weakest is to die for the pack. No.
‘What’s your name? Come on, son, this isn’t funny, there have been all sorts of night trolls skulking about tonight.’
Loys could just about see them. The light from the hole in the roof only touched their heads, so that they floated through the mirk as if disembodied.
‘We’re not going until we’ve found you. That woman could have important information about those rebel bastards who were here earlier on.’
‘And it’s our responsibility to fuck it out of her.’
A tight cackle. One of the men, at least, found that funny.
‘Get a brand lit.’
Fumbling and a curse. Flint on steel, the sparks monstrously big in the deep dark. Then the kindling glow and the fluttering light licked at the shadows.
‘I see who you are.’ She spoke Norse with a heavy accent and her voice was close at his ear. He put his hand to her mouth to silence her and he wondered what it would be like to snap her neck like a hock of lamb.
She took his hand away. ‘Over here,’ she said loudly.
The torch swiped lines across the blackness, the men shouted. ‘Where are you?’
‘Bitch!’ said Gylfa and from the wave of hate that came from him, Loys knew the boy would have killed her if she had not been under his protection.
The girl stood. ‘Here!’ Her voice was hoarse.
They had her now and advanced, nearly invisible behind the blinding light of the torch.
‘What’s going on here, chief, sharing her with your servants?’
‘She looks remarkably unfucked to me.’
The girl spoke again in her native tongue, spitting out the words as if they were gall in her mouth.
A soldier stepped forward, shoved her. She hit him, smack, right on the nose. He raised his hand and Loys could not say what happened then. Afterwards, Gylfa would tell him the Normans had died quickly.
Loys knew nothing until he found himself on top of the headless corpse of one of the soldiers, his hands red with meat, his voice shouting jumbles of sentences, chewed up sounds, wolf-torn words.
‘I kill and meat this everyone purpose of death this! Teeth kill come the more men, here come and die us. Wolf I, eye of wolf! Stone, stone. Turn the wolf to stone!’
His mind was slow with blood but his thoughts had a terrible momentum, like a great door swinging shut over the light. Blood was in his mouth and he wanted more. He bit and tore, stopping to examine the way a last strand of a sinew clung to the bone, long white and taut.
‘Oh, Lord, save my soul!’ Not meat, not a sizzling liquor to savour but human blood, human flesh and bone. Gylfa had placed the stone about his neck, crept up and tied it on.
Gylfa?
The boy crossed himself, uttering oaths to Christ, to Thor, to
the elves of the land and the saints of the church.
‘Thank you.’ The red mess beneath him had nearly claimed him. He’d had enough human flesh to fire the appetites of the wolf. The desire to replace the stone might have left him. Still he felt as though he clung to the edge of a crumbling cliff, only the stone holding him. He could not remove it again, not for a while. It might take a week, maybe a month, for the wolf to be quiet enough inside him for him to risk that.
A torch guttered on the floor. Voices outside, many voices.
‘Where’s the girl?’ said Loys.
‘She’s gone.’
Loys got to his feet. The church door banged open. It seemed as if some fire spirit stood in the doorway, so numerous were the torches.
‘The rebels are about, lads,’ said Loys. ‘Look what they’ve done. Let’s find them before they flee!’
‘My God, look at him. You’re covered in blood, man.’
‘They were here. My servant and I beat them away. Ten of them.’ That was weak. His mind was disordered and seemed to slosh in his head like a cloth in a pail of water. That was weak, Loys, it would not do. It did not do.
‘I saw no ten men.’
‘Hang on,’ said a voice. ‘I know you. It’s the coward of the North. Loys, with your airs and graces. The lord wants your bollocks on a plate. What have you done here?’
Loys touched the stone. He could not take it off but he could not get away if he did not.
‘Take him. Take them both!’
The Normans advanced and Loys knew he was lost.
25 The Corpse Shore
Moon-bright and star-light, a dark hill against a dark sky. Styliane walked on a sparkling black beach by a sparkling black sea.
‘Where am I?’
All along the limit of the tide she saw slick shapes lapped by the little waves. At first she took them for seals, but they were not seals. She knew what they were. What? She could not say, but she knew. It would come to her when her thoughts settled.
‘I am far from the sun,’ she said. An old chill gripped the beach and there was ice at her feet. For a moment she feared the Northern bears she’d heard the Varangians talk about. One of the guards in the Great Palace at Constantinople wore a white fur about him, the head of the bear sitting on top of his own. It was enormous and the man said it had cost him two friends and his arm to get it.
The sand crunched beneath her feet. She walked up the beach. No. This couldn’t be. The land of the dead?
Would the goddess be here to meet her? Hecate. She listened for dogs, the goddess’s companions. There were none.
The beach rose for a little while before giving way to glass-black grass with big, sharp blades rising above the ankle. Beyond the grass, trees. Not the lonely cedars of the east nor the tanglewood of England. These stood straight as temple pillars, black lines in the dim distance. She had not known there could be so many shades of darkness. Behind the trees rose a mountain and she could not see its top. Though the night was clear it was far away.
‘I was somewhere else.’ Her voice was flat in the still air. The ocean sucked at the beach but there was no other sound – not the night chirp of insects nor the call of owls.
‘She drowned me.’ It was almost as if she expected someone to answer, to come forward and say ‘No. You are not dead. This is a garden beneath the earth kept by monks according to ancient magical wisdom. There is nothing to fear here. See, the stair is clear behind you. Go back to the light if you wish.’ No one said that.
Styliane saw what she took for a small hill between her and the trees. Having no other aim, she walked towards it, wondering if she could make a survey of the land from on top of it and work out her options. The grass was wet and the dew on it caught the moonlight, shining back to the sky as if it were a field of stars.
The hill was not a hill. It was a hall, white as bone. She approached and saw that it seemed covered in tiny bristles. Coming even closer, she saw it was woven from the spines of snakes, their bleached skulls left with their jaws wide, as if they might live again and snap at any intruder.
For the first time she was afraid. She looked for her runes. They were not there.
She had been before to the realm of the gods but this was not what she remembered. She thought of the wolf, groaning on the black rock where the gods had tied him. Was he here? Had he laid waste to the land like this? If this was death she had been right to fight it. The hall filled her with dread but, if this was the land of the dead, could she die again?
She looked for a door but could see none. She walked around the hall and walked around it again. On the third time she came around, a woman was sitting on a low stool by a doorway, another similar stool next to her. Now the smoke vent breathed smoke and there was light within the hut. The woman had a small knife in her hands and she used it to cut turnips into a dish. But, though the turnips fell and the woman’s hands were quick, no slices could be seen in the bowl. Styliane saw that one hand was young and pale but the other was eaten by rot, but she could not say which hand seemed the living and which the dead. The woman’s face was beautiful and decayed too, so that in one instant it seemed Styliane was looking into the face of a young woman, in the next at a corpse that had lain a long time.
‘Lady Hecate.’
The lady said nothing, just gestured to the stool beside her. Her face shifted in the flat light. This had to be Hecate, Selene, lady of the moon, virgin, mother, crone.
‘I have killed the black lamb for you. I have walked on bare hillsides beneath the cold moon. At the meeting of the ways I sacrificed to you and called your blessed name,’ said Styliane.
The lady cut another turnip, the fleshy slices falling into the bowl and disappearing.
‘Gods have many names,’ she said.
‘What is yours?’
The lady shrugged and cast her hand out wide to the land, as if to say, ‘This’.
‘That is not the question you came to the well to ask.’
The lady’s voice was dry as city dust.
‘You are death.’
The woman laughed. ‘Not he. Sit.’
‘Where is this place?’
‘Nastrond. The corpse shore. Those dead by water find their way here.’
‘So I am dead.’
The woman shrugged. ‘You are a magician. Though you have lost your magic, I think.’
‘Is it here? Are the runes here?’
‘No. But I can show you where they were.’
‘How will that help me?’
‘I am not a helper, lady,’
The woman got up and walked and Styliane followed her. The moon waned in the sky, dropping to the horizon before rising again, filling to a bloated face and thinning to the blade of a boning knife. Men were in the woods, dead men, lying half buried by root and earth. Their flesh showed the stain and rot of death but their eyes followed her as she walked.
It was never day and they had walked a long way before they came to marshy ground. The women waded on through it, ankle-deep, thigh-deep and eventually the water reached Styliane’s middle. The water was dark and full of loam, and the straight dark trees rose above her from where the ground was high enough to hold them.
‘This is the well.’
‘It is a well.’
‘What is it?’
‘Each well is every other well, or an expression of it. This one feeds the rivers of the land of the dead.’
‘And what is here?’
‘The god that died and would live again.’
‘If he lives, I die.’
‘You no longer bear the runes. You will die anyway. I will welcome you to these lands.’
‘What does he want?’
‘Look into the waters.’
She looked down. A dark shape was in the water. It was a man, his body tanned black by the
bog, his hair white, stretching out from him like the roots of some light-starved plant. Even dead, an expression of unimaginable ferocity gripped his face.
‘What does he want?’ The question seemed more important than anything in the world.
‘He wants me to let him go’
‘He is dead?’
‘Yes, or he would scarcely be here.’
‘So how can he be freed if he is dead?’
‘Gods die and are reborn. His magic is working, even still. Perhaps it is why you are here.’
‘He wants my life for his?’
‘A life. Death for life. There is no other coin in this place. You must give something you hate to lose. That is what sacrifice means.’
Styliane reached down into the dark water, her fingers searching for the corpse. She felt the leathery skin, the sinewy arm. He was cold and his body was hard as bog oak. She pulled at him and pulled again. The body came up to the surface. She had thought revelation would come in a rush as the runes had come, shrieking and chiming, sending her mind plunging towards madness. It did not. She was a woman in a cold wood, in water, holding the leathered body of an old man with one eye, and she knew the truth as surely as something she had always known. Perhaps it wasn’t even a revelation. To have her runes back the god would have to live again on earth, to be killed by the wolf again. Then, as the god’s soul shattered under the teeth of the wolf, the runes would fly. Some away, some to her, as they had before. The god had something for her. His dead eye, she saw, had a stone in it, the colour of blood, the size of an eye. She plucked it out and held it up to the moonlight. It sparkled ruby red. Within it curled thorns and a sensation of prickles shot up her arm, through her mind. A gift from the god. A rune. Not inside her, not to be used as easily as she might speak a word but a rune, nevertheless, trapped in a gem.
‘I will call you from the waters,’ she said to the God.
She needed to do what she had fought against for years. To call the rune bearers and to have them die. Twenty-four must be brought to the god, taken to Hel to revive him, brought back to the realm of the living for the wolf to kill. She could not hold all those runes or she would die herself. She had let them go from her, floating away like desert dirt in a cooling spring.
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