Valkyrie's Song

by M. D. Lachlan

  Only her ankle slowed them. At first they tried beating her to make her move quicker but, when that proved of no use, they had to put her on a horse. It was almost worse than walking, the jolting, bumping trot, her hands tied, trying to keep herself on the high saddle.

  The men had not yet bothered her, though they talked often of raping her. She didn’t need to speak Norman to know what they were talking about. Their eyes lingered on her, they made gestures with their tongues and grabbed at their crotches. But this was only a ritual, to convince themselves that everything was normal, that the old certainties of domination – of the sword and of the cock – still held. They were afraid and would not touch her. She sensed an old fear in them, of the pooling dark of the woods, of moors and wild places, of things glimpsed between dreaming and waking.

  They thought she was a witch, just as Styliane had thought she was, and Loys. The mad thought came that it was all for her – the burning, the murders, the destruction of everything she had valued. Perhaps God was doing it to spite her for not finding a way to damp down the magic inside her; the sensitivity that, with a moment’s concentration, could feel the fear of a child in the next valley, the useless love of its father called to defend it against such numbers.

  Cursed of God. She didn’t understand the words of the Norman jabbing his finger at her but she understood the sentiment as clearly as if she had been raised in his alien land over the sea.

  They took her down through the dales, the way she had come. Her shoes were falling to bits, her feet swollen with cold and wet, the rope was scraping the skin of her hands raw, the sweat clammed her clothes to her skin.

  The day was clear and bright, a good work day her mother would have called it – chilly but sunny, cooling to the labouring woman, cold to the idle.

  The Normans were a band of five and afraid. There was movement in the hills, lines of men seen at a distance, watching them for a while before disappearing into the landscape. Her people, mustering resistance.

  Maybe one of the lords of the north had finally come down to face the invader. Morcar? Was he dead? She’d heard it said.

  She felt other forces, the giddying, ecstatic hum of the runes. Where? Somewhere up on the hill, watching her.

  At camp at night she thought she saw the runes dancing in the heather fire, or sliding through the darkness. Styliane? She would not go back to be sacrificed.

  She tried to alert the Normans. They doubted her, though, and one slapped her. They thought she was trying to get them caught.

  The fog returned the next day, though it was less heavy. The Normans set off early but by mid-morning were arguing with each other. They had taken the wrong path, it seemed, and tried to retrace their steps. In the distance there were noises, chiming, a sound like a breath but not a breath, something that made her think of the sea she had never seen – a wide, grey thing, flat like a pond but many times bigger.

  A big Norman pulled her off her horse and held up a knife. He was saying something but she didn’t know what. ‘Stop’ maybe. He wanted her to stop.

  ‘These things aren’t from me,’ she said.

  From a long way away she heard a coil of sound unravelling – a howl in the hills. The Normans heard it too. This was not the sound she had heard in her mind but something real. The horses shivered. A slight man came to his bigger friend’s side, put his hand onto his dagger arm.

  ‘Leave it,’ he seemed to say.

  They shoved her back up onto her horse and went on. Another argument broke out. Two men pointed back down the valley, three of them up. The fog was thickening now.

  Something went running past them, a dark body briefly visible, then lost to the fog. A soldier hacked after it with his sword but hit only the vapours of the air.

  The howl came again, from behind. The Normans crossed themselves and took to their horses. Tola too crossed herself and a soldier shook his head in disbelief at her piety.

  They spurred on, up a steep slope.

  The mist shifted and swirled about them. She could see shapes in it now, shadows and things more substantial than shadows. Something loomed from the fog in the distance, upright, like a man. A Norman dismounted and fitted an arrow to his bow. It took him three shots to hit it. The arrow clattered against it.

  ‘A stone,’ said Tola.

  ‘Eh?’

  The bowman advanced through the fog, his bow drawn. Then he laughed and shouted back to the others. They advanced and she saw that it was the remains of a gate.

  Another shape in the mist. A voice and the Normans gave shouts and waved. Horses appeared through the murk. More Normans – many more, twenty, thirty, more behind.

  They rode forward to greet them with cries of exultation.

  A great rich Norman rode up to her. He wore a broad, victor’s smile and when he spoke he spoke slowly.

  ‘This is hill,’ he said. ‘I have magic in here.’ He beat his breast. ‘At the water. Ice entered me. You make it work.’

  She sensed his discomfort, the shiver within him he tried to hide from his men.

  ‘We must go to Blackbed Scar,’ she said.

  42 A Leader of Men

  Gylfa had run, the great boots slapping on his shins as he did. Behind him the sounds of a fight. They’d grabbed the girl, he thought, and were screaming at her, probably for the deaths Loys had caused. Their brothers.

  Out of the presence of the wolf the runes returned, but he feared to look at them. He stumbled and fell. The fog was tight about him and he couldn’t be sure that, if he ran too hard, he might not fall from a cliff or blunder into some sinking bog.

  He lay still for a long time, his ears straining for sounds of movement, movement towards him in particular. That hound was still baying but he heard the hooves of the horses receding. They’d given up on him but he was not yet sure enough to stand.

  He respected the god’s warning against using the runes but, like a messenger charged with delivering an interesting parcel, couldn’t help prodding and feeling at them with his mind. They sickened him. In the well they had chimed and rustled. Here they brayed, frustrated, like a horse left too long in its stable; grated like a swollen gate on rough stone, breathed fever-bed breaths. Their restlessness made his flesh crawl and he longed to be anywhere but that hillside.

  He vomited, whether from the foul flesh he’d eaten, the magic inside him, from fear or relief, he didn’t know. What now? Which way safety? He waited a day, the aching light of the dawn rune keeping him warm, keeping him ill. After two days he heard something at the entrance of the cave, a great crash like the fall of rock and he saw Loys scampering away. He thought to call after him but there was something in the way the lord now moved, low, very quickly but with an uneven lope, that chilled Gylfa. He was afraid of everyone, everything, and he cursed his fear. But plenty of brave men had died. He was still alive.

  He risked getting up onto his knees. He could see no one around. Mist clung to the hill but down in the valley he saw no riders. He made his way down to the slope above the cave.

  Night was falling and he doubted the Normans or Loys would return. The wind was rising, and with it a little hail, countless little spears blowing in from the North. He felt cold and, if he thought of the day rune to warm himself, nausea rose up within him.

  He dropped down to the mouth of the cave. A big rock had been rolled away at the entrance. That puzzled him and he sat a long time thinking about it. Eventually, he went within. In the dim light he could see bodies, new bodies. A chance for loot, perhaps? He’d need what he could to bargain his way out of this desolation – to go where, he couldn’t think.

  He moved in. Here was the body of a man. He wore nothing but the wolf pelt still tied around him but, at his chest, the stone! How odd. He examined the man carefully. He was not Loys, for sure. Gylfa untied the thong that held the stone and lifted it up. A wolf ’s head, crudely etched. He ti
ed it around his neck, pressed it to his skin as he had seen Loys do. Immediately the runes were quiet inside him, the dissonant, sick-making whirl of their orbit over.

  So that was the secret of the stone. It damped down magic. Would it damp the curse that had been set inside him? It seemed so.

  He felt much better but now he also felt cold. He took the wolf pelt and tied it around his head. He would stay in the cave – there was even a flint and steel with enough dry heather to make a decent fire.

  The bodies bothered him. To put them outside was to invite attention but to stay with them was to go mad. The fatty taste of the cooked limbs was still on his lips, its smell like a floating headache in the cave. They had to go.

  He dragged them outside and hid them as best he could. He couldn’t look at the children or the mother. The other dead didn’t bother him so much.

  He sat weeping for a while in the cave. By taking on the runes, by eating the flesh, he felt he had crossed a threshold but now he wanted to go back through it, to be what he had been before the madness at the well and the abomination in that cave. He had heard that men got used to slaughter and butchery but he knew he would not. He was a gentle man at heart, who wanted to be left with his goats and his sheep. By Odin’s arsehole, he could hardly even bear to kill them.

  The night was as cosy as any he’d had so far – there were blankets, a little lousy, and there was warmth from a fire and the pelt of the wolf. He laughed to think of himself so rich, in his stolen finery. He could go back now, to Norway, claim great deeds, be loved. The curved sword was on the floor of the cave. He took it out and studied the blade. He had never seen anything so fine nor handled anything so sharp. He ran his finger gently across the blade and he knew it would only take the slightest sideways movement to cut him.

  ‘The needful weapon.’ Hmmm. What did that mean?

  The thought of the god at the well was like a weight in his head; his right eye felt heavy and sore, like he had slept too long in a draught. The God had tricked him, but what had he expected from Loki, the lie smith? He couldn’t believe the god really meant him harm. He would be dead if he did. He dozed and was drowning in the well, waking to grip at the floor of the cave, as if he might float away if he did not.

  Often he imagined he heard voices outside and pressed himself down into the shadows at the cave’s rear. He let the fire die, choosing to be cold rather than discovered.

  The morning dawned with a wet mizzle, fine rain like a shimmering net at the cave’s mouth. He went out to see what might be there. Nothing. No one. So what now? He would need to eat but he could not go back to the bodies. He had sickened himself.

  He knew he was taking a risk in the cave but life had become one long enormous risk. It was a case of deciding where to take the risk, in a cave or the hills. He came to the conclusion that the only thing in his control was the temperature, so he stayed in the cave.

  Nightmares bothered him, but less than his dreams. Gylfa had never thought of the future with anything but dread before. His happiest time had been as a young child, before his uselessness with spear and shield had become apparent, before the embarrassment of races with his cousins, before the whale had landed and he had been sick at its butchery. Life was a hill, he had concluded, and he was slipping ever down it, his only hope to hold on to the latest position of misery before sliding to the worse one below.

  Now, though, the runes – however sick they made him, however frightening they were – offered him the chance to climb back up a little. He had met the gods, met a great hero who could best ten men on his own. They were adventures worthy of a saga. He should do something, he was sure. Heroes did things, killed dragons, confronted their enemies, rescued their friends.

  Here, though, there was no clear course of action. Everything was an enemy. He wondered if the heroes of the sagas ever found themselves in such a position, becalmed in dangerous waters, no idea how to proceed.

  ‘Carry the runes,’ he’d been told. Where to? And why? To become a god. Gylfa imagined himself, one-eyed like Odin, sitting at a fire in the company of warriors spinning tales of his battle prowess. Yes, in such company he would be a god.

  His third day in the cave, he heard voices outside. One word in English.

  ‘Butchers.’

  He lay still. A sudden rush and five men came rolling in through the cave’s low entrance, axes and knives drawn.

  Another word in English.

  ‘Nothing.’ Then: ‘Hey!’

  They had seen him so there was nothing to do but stand.

  Five men – English, two freemen and their slaves by their clothes, though the difference between master and servant had been eroded by filth, weather and wear.

  ‘You are the wolf sorcerer?’

  Gylfa trembled. He could not make himself speak. It was as if a glamour was upon him and movement or reply was impossible. It was fear and he did not know how to fight it.

  One of the men sank to his knees.

  ‘We’ve been sent to find you. Lord Morcar is waiting. Do you have the sorceress? Will she help us?’

  Gylfa unpeeled his tongue from the roof of his mouth.

  ‘The Normans have her. We were surprised here.’

  ‘You are not a man of Yorkshire.’

  ‘I speak to the Danish gods of our fathers and they through me,’said Gylfa.

  ‘You could not defend her?’

  ‘They had horses and ran. You see the slaughter they caused and how I repaid them.’

  All the men now dropped to one knee.

  ‘You are a mighty man, strong and full of knowledge. Can we find the Normans? We have a great force mustering in the north under Morcar. We could yet take them if we reach them before York. They can’t have gone far in the weather.’

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘To make our meeting with you, we would have travelled across Hell itself. This is Cedric, he is a man of this vale and has been finding his way around in this weather since he was a boy. He is also a rare tracker. Let us find them and confront them.’

  ‘There were many of them.’

  ‘There are many of us. We have a host of almost a hundred men outside. This is our country, our weather. They’ll not leave these hills. It’s good to be beside you, Ithamar, battle bold!’ Cedric strode forward to embrace Gylfa.

  Destiny. Yes, destiny. ‘Have you a horse for me?’ said Gylfa. ‘I am no great rider’.

  ‘We have a horse. Just hold on and he will follow the others. With our swords and your magic, we’ll send these invaders back south whence they crawled.’

  43 Love and Death

  ‘Where is he now?’ Styliane, on the horse, shivered under her layers of clothes.

  ‘Ahead.’

  ‘What is that? Are they soldiers, can you see?’

  They were on a good-sized hill above the mist and the day was blue and beautiful, the sparse snow speckling the green of the hills like cold flowers. The sun was sharp and strong and, with no wind, the effort of climbing and descending made Freydis hot.

  ‘They are stones, lady. They have them in this country, I have seen them before.’

  ‘What are they for?’

  ‘No one knows. The English say they are magic. Are you cold?’

  ‘Very.’

  Freydis offered the lady her cloak. She took it without a word of thanks and Freydis was glad of it. The lady was recovering her former strength. It was natural for a high lady to put her own comfort before that of a servant, natural and right. Around them the tops of hills jutted from the mist like islands in a milky sea.

  Freydis could feel the wolf on the hillside. They climbed but the wolf so weighted the world that the slope felt as if it was going down.

  Freydis lead the horse on. They said very little, not just for the fear of being overheard. Freydis felt there was no more to say, that th
is moment, warm in a cold country, serving the lady she loved alone, all to herself, was the fulfilment of her dreams.

  ‘Are you afraid, Freydis?’

  Freydis shrugged and pursed her lips. She wanted to say that she was afraid for the lady, not so much physically, though there was clearly a threat to her in such ruination as was around them, but more that she would not be in her proper place as one of life’s rulers. Styliane was born to command, born to master the runes. Without them she couldn’t follow that calling. Styliane sought to command everything, even death. As was natural, as was right.

  Freydis was called brave by many men but she knew that particular strength came from a shortcoming, not a virtue. She lacked imagination. Cowards might envisage a thousand ways to die. She kept her eyes and ears open and did not think of what might and might not happen. You could never truly prepare for battle, only accept it was coming and hope to see the enemy before they saw you. The armies of Constantinople spent a long time training ‘what ifs’. It did them no good, because the enemy always did something you didn’t expect, fighting harder or less than you had thought, being greater or smaller in number, better or worse deployed.

  ‘I am not afraid. Were you afraid when you had this magic inside you?’

  ‘Only of the magic.’

  She still felt the runes but it was as if the wolf was a powerful wind, the runes merely ribbons she had attached to her hair, blowing away from where it came. She didn’t mind; it made them easier to keep quiet.

  For days they had followed the high hills, shadowing horsemen below them in the valley. She could not see them but she could hear them, the conversations of the men, the blowing of the horses. At night she sometimes smelled their fires. They had to be Norman – no Englishman would be so brazen. She held Styliane close, loving her, protecting her. Could she die for her? Ever since she had known her, she would have said ‘yes’ in a heartbeat. But, reunited by fate, it was the parting, not the dying, she would fear.