Valkyrie's Song

by M. D. Lachlan

  ‘I wonder how we are bound to these men,’ said Styliane.

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

  ‘The story is moving somewhere.’

  ‘You think we are nearing the end of the tale?’

  ‘I don’t know. When I had the runes I understood. You might understand now. It is in fragments. We may be going on to the end or we may be returning to the beginning. Perhaps the Norns are shuffling the pieces of the story until it fits their scheme.’

  ‘Might I not write my own part?’

  ‘That is what I have to believe. It’s what I have believed since I started this. The grip of fate is broken. This is a new age. Perhaps it is as the Christians say, each man’s salvation lies in his own hands.’

  A woman’s voice cried out from the mist below. ‘I’m here!’

  Soldiers shouted and cursed at her.

  ‘That is Tola,’ said Styliane. ‘She senses us.’

  ‘Does she not know we are her enemy?’

  ‘If I have two enemies it doesn’t mean they must be friends,’ said Styliane. ‘She seeks to set one against the other and see if she can profit by seeing them destroy each other for her.’

  ‘I can’t fight that many men.’

  ‘You just need to kill the girl.’

  ‘What will that do?’

  ‘Deny the wolf the death he seeks.’

  Freydis held her hand. ‘If I die …’

  ‘Don’t say such a thing, my love.’ The lady had never said those words before. ‘My love.’

  Freydis wiped a tear from Styliane’s cheek. ‘I’ll go tonight,’ she said.

  44 The Scar

  ‘Here?’ The big Norman was alongside her, pointing with the stump of his finger. If he felt the pain, he did not show it. She sensed his men’s love for him, their fear too. He seemed a giant to her, thanks to his size, but his presence was greater still. She imagined the scraggy raven that beat its way over the snow saw only him, that the creatures sleeping in their burrows woke as he passed, that the wind rose for him and the snow fell. She sensed too the magic within him, the rune he carried like a spear of ice in his side.

  He was the future made flesh, violent, huge, foreboding, bleeding.

  ‘This is the hill,’ she said. ‘This is where magic is done. I killed three of your men here.’

  ‘Not my men,’ said Giroie.

  ‘You were in this part of the country.’

  ‘I’d say so. Same to me.’

  By that, she thought he meant that he couldn’t tell one place where he’d burned and murdered from another. ‘I’d say it must be easy enough to know where you’ve been,’ said Tola but he didn’t understand.

  The Normans argued among themselves. There were so many of them to feed and they’d been out for much longer than they’d expected so they had only light provisions. There was nothing to scavenge, not a grain, not a hen, not a dog. They’d burned it all weeks before, stripped the land bare.

  The men were annoyed at being taken out for so long without food, though icy streams and snow gave them enough water. A delegation of three came to Giroie but he struck one of them and insisted, ‘On, on.’

  When the men had gone away he grinned at her. ‘Did too good a job here,’ he said. ‘Where? Up?’

  ‘Up.’

  ‘Cold up there,’ said Giroie. ‘But we see wide.’

  The column made its way up the side of the hill, breaking free of the mist on the top.

  Giroie had been wrong, they could not see the land. It was as if they sat already in heaven, she thought, the cloud below, the pale blue sky above, the moon’s ancient face staring down at them. God had given it a face to remind men that He was always watching, her mother had said.

  The riders settled down to make a fire. She didn’t want to sit at it, it felt wrong to share the comfort of these men and she knew it would be dangerous. It might be difficult for Giroie to keep her safe from his men.

  A wolf howled far off. She intuitively knew what it was saying: This land is mine. Keep away. She wondered if even it had found anything to eat.

  The night was freezing and mist gave way to icy rain. There was nothing to stop her running, other than the certainty of a freezing death. The men sheltered under their shields but she was left out in the open, shivering, trying to edge nearer to the struggling fire.

  All creation seemed split into red and black, the fire a cradle of light in a deep darkness.

  At the edge of the camp she thought she saw something move but it was too late. A sharp pain in her arm, she cried out and the camp was chaos, men running and shouting everywhere. An arrow had caught her a glancing blow.

  ‘What?’ A Norman grasped her but a second arrow struck him on the boot and he gave a wail like a fox caught in a trap. He fell.

  Giroie went thrashing into the darkness with his sword, other men following him, cursing and raging.

  Tola lay still, flat to the floor. Her whole arm was gong numb; it felt as if the bone was an arrow, humming in a struck post.

  A scream from the dark. ‘Get him!’

  A sound like someone hitting a tree with an axe. Raw panic, a jangle of panic that sparked sensations within her – the smell of something that should not be burning – hair, perhaps – the lurch in the stomach felt in the moment you heard a friend had died.

  More thumping and shouting and Giroie burst from the dark, dragging a body into the firelight. Or not a body. The person was suddenly on his feet and kicking Giroie as hard as he could.

  Light and hail, stamping and snorting. Runes! Bursting from the night, shrieking in wide orbits around the stones.

  ‘Witch!’ said Giroie and punched his captive hard in the face. The figure’s head snapped back and it hit the ground, all breath coming out with the sound of great bellows. The runes vanished like the sun behind a cloud.

  ‘More bastards? Any more?’ screamed Giroie at her in his awful English. As if in answer, a horn sounded down in the valley.

  ‘Not ours! Trapped us, witch?’ said Giroie.

  ‘English,’ said a soldier.

  ‘And bold enough to make themselves known.’ He was still talking to her, his face twisted like a walnut in fury.

  ‘This arrow …’ Tola tried to speak but she was faint.

  ‘I saw those things in the darkness,’ said Giroie. ‘What are they?’

  ‘Runes,’ said Tola. She felt bile come into her mouth. The shock of being hit by the arrow had worn off and now her arm felt as though she was being shot again every time she moved.

  ‘Like our fathers had,’ said Giroie. ‘These stories. As a child. Told.’

  ‘They are of the devil, I think,’ said Tola.

  The big Norman grinned. ‘No. My father old ways kept. All old country keeps them. What must be done? Possess.’ Then he spoke in Norse:

  ‘Know that I hung on a windy tree

  nine long nights,

  wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,

  myself to myself,

  on that tree of which no man knows

  from where its roots run.

  No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn,

  downwards I peered;

  I took up the runes, screaming I took them,

  then I fell back from there.’

  He prodded Tola and she thought she might faint.

  ‘How shall I have them?’

  She sensed his greed, like an undertow, endlessly pulling. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How shall I have them?’ he said it again, in Norse.

  Freydis, bound, held by two men, opened her eyes. ‘The god is in the water,’ she said. ‘Go to the water.’

  45 A Spell

  Styliane waited until Freydis had gone. Her sacrifice to the dark god. She wept for a long time. Death for
Freydis, but more than death. An eternity in the cold waters of Hel, in place of the god in the mire. Odin must be reborn and die at the wolf’s teeth. Styliane would embrace the fate she had fought to avoid.

  She fingered the knot she had tied in the cord of her robe in the waters of the well, put her finger inside the loop it made. She took the black blood gem she had found at the well’s bottom, the gem she had taken from the god’s eye, and held it in the crook of her ring finger.

  The horse stamped and blew, its ears twitching. Other horses on the wind, perhaps. A distant horn sounded. Yes. Or if not that, something was unsettling it.

  She thought of her days as a sorceress of the goddess Hecate, who had revealed herself to be Odin, who had revealed himself to be Christ and every other god that split into three, sacrificing himself for wisdom. Three rune bearers, three ways to die, a knot of three.

  She pulled the knot tight on her finger and gasped as it tightened. She pulled it again, struggling to keep her finger on the stone. She looked at the knife for a long time before she summoned the courage. Without the bitter drink that had opened her mind to the realm of the gods in Constantinople, without asphyxiation or drowning, there was only faith to help her – a memory of magic.

  She tried to summon a trance, remembering the knife she had used to cut herself when she had paid the blood price to have the truth of the wolf revealed to her.

  Hel wanted blood. How much blood? That of a hundred men? It should do.

  They were coming. The runes were trying to unite. Well they would, but she needed to guarantee the presence of the wolf when they did. Styliane gave one last tug on the cord, pain shooting from her hand all the way down her arm to her teeth.

  She could hardly grip the bloodstone, so she put her hand on the ground, allowing it to nestle in her palm, against the finger of her seal ring. It was a tangling, tricky rune within it that would trap and trick.

  She wanted to say the old words of her spell to Hecate, goddess of the meeting of ways, of death and the journey to death, but she couldn’t be sure the goddess was even still alive. Was Odin an aspect of her? Was Christ an aspect of her? Or was she an aspect of them? So instead she said the words to the story:

  ‘I slew death at the World Well under the world city. Now I must raise him to kill him again. I pay the old price of agony. I pay what Odin paid at Mimir, what Christ paid on the cross, what the priestesses of Hecate pay freezing in their midnight streams. Hecate. Hecate. She who helped Demeter bring her daughter Persephone from the underworld, who lights the dark of death’s night, whose friend is the dog and who guards at the gateway. Open the gateway to the lands of death. Open them.’

  The sound of horses drew nearer. Up on the hill the Normans were shouting, the urgent voices of men preparing for battle.

  ‘A weft of skulls am I weaving. The warp is sinew and bone, stretched on a loom of pain.’

  She cut deeply into her ring finger, the dark stone shining in an island of blood. She coughed and sighed with the pain. It had been a long time since she had worked such magic.

  ‘All the rune bearers to die,’ she heard herself say. ‘This is death’s land, he is coming, he has prepared the way with fire and blood and this will be his domain.’ She waggled the knife to prise open the knuckle, retching as she did so. The stone drank in the blood. It was dawn and it caught the blue light and made it red. She cut again and the finger was severed, the knot falling loose, the stone cupped in her bloody palm.

  No. The light of the stone took on a shape, a sharp, angular D. She recognised it immediately. It was the Thorn rune. Its light shone from the stone into her, prickling her skin, a delicious caress, half-pain half-pleasure. She felt the tendrils curling around her heart, the thorns tightening her chest and cutting off her breath.

  ‘I do not want this.’ Forget that mortal weakness. Forget the girl who was born in a slum outside Constantinople. Remember the priestess, the sorceress, the fearless fragment of a god.

  The rune’s other meanings flashed through her mind. She felt a step-mother’s spite for an unfavoured child; a jealousy as between sisters, one pretty, the other with a rich husband who let his eyes wander. A word in Norse rang out in her mind. Slatrvif. Slaughter wife. The rune sang out other names too. Evil doer. Witch and plague upon good people.

  A raven fell like a black leaf from the tree and picked up her finger.

  ‘I have paid the price,’ she said. ‘The spell is done.’

  The bird flew up and away, its baggy, black flight taking it up towards the hill. For the first time Styliane became aware of the pain in her hand. She held her cloak to the wound to staunch the flow of blood.

  She watched the bird’s sagging flight as it headed into the mist. She had given something because it felt right, cast a spell but a spell without an aim. Sometimes the reason for the magic was hidden from the caster. She knew that, had seen it happen with her brother in Constantinople.

  She remembered Arrudiya, the slave who had taught her the rites and magic of Hecate.

  ‘Magic is not written, it is not a recipe but a puzzle.’

  She had done what was important – one sacrifice to ensure another.

  She held her bloody hand and wondered if she had given enough and, if she had, what she had given it for.

  From the distance she saw perhaps one hundred riders coming in under the stormcloud sun from the east, bearing weapons, bearing death, bearing blood.

  46 Choosers of the Slain

  Eight dead girls watched her from the edge of the moor. Freydis swallowed as the runes blinked back into her vision, swimming like the frogspawn that floats in the pond of the eye when you look up to a blue sky.

  She feared to use the runes here. She felt the fascination they drew from the peat-stained women who stood in a circle on top of the hill. Each woman carried a cruel, fireblack spear and seemed hardly substantial. Fog spectres. Rain shadows.

  The runelight poured from Freydis unbidden and she saw Tola with new eyes. A sinuous, stretching wolf, long and lithe, seemed to curl about her like a snake. Was it a wolf? Or was it a sign, something rendered by a scratch in the light? This was important, this was real, more real than the men who wrestled her to the damp grass, sat on her hands, bound and dragged her.

  The skies seemed wider now, lightning purple, dark clouds blooming like blood in water. The hollow light was the light of dusk but unshifting, undying. Here on this hill the sun was always setting, never set.

  A boot in her guts. A man shouted at her. She guessed he was asking if she was alone or had companions with her. It was what she would have done. Her body felt like a coat of wood. She was inside it, aware of the blows but indifferent to them.

  Styliane was still down in the valley, hidden in a scraggy copse. She needed to succeed here for her. Yet the presence of the women of the moor set her thoughts jangling. The runes wanted her attention, wanted to present themselves before these women but she felt them tugging on her sanity. She saw herself at the head of an army of spectres, a rotten-skinned horde that had dug itself from tomb and grave to follow her. She could have that if she spoke to the runes.

  She made a lunge towards Tola but the men held her back. She hardly saw them, they were like something from a dream, forces that held her back, only impressing more strongly her will to go forward. Punches and kicks crunched into her and the runes lit more brightly. She had a strange idea – that the runes were a wine and she the grapes. They were trying to beat them from her.

  ‘All ravens here, ready for the feast.’

  ‘All ravens here.’

  The air was heavy with the sound of beating wings. Shadows flickered across her sight, but only two ravens fluttered down behind the biggest Norman.

  The dead sisters intoned:

  ‘How is it, ye ravens – whence are ye come now

  with beaks all gory, at break of morning?

>   Carrion-reek ye carry, and your claws are bloody.’

  One of the ravens had something shiny in its claws. She dreaded it, whatever it was, glinting evil in the storm-blue sun.

  “No!’ shouted Freydis but the women continued to chant. The bird fluttered past, its beak red, its claws red. It dropped something to the ground in front of her. It was a finger and on it was Styliane’s seal ring.

  ‘Choosers of the dead.’

  ‘Choosers of the slain.’

  ‘We never-welcome women.’

  ‘We shunned spear sisters.’

  ‘I choose the slain, in Odin’s name.’

  ‘I choose the slain in Odin’s name.’

  ‘The god is in the water.’

  ‘King Death is in the water.’

  ‘He has what you want.’

  ‘I want only the lady!’shouted Freydis.

  ‘He has what you want.’

  ‘Go to the water.’

  ‘Take the runes to the water.’

  ‘Give me back Styliane!’

  ‘She will stand beside us.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Some must stand beside us.’

  ‘I will! I will do it!’

  ‘Death is in the water.’

  ‘Go to the water where the god lies.’

  ‘Take me to the water where the god lies!’said Freydis.

  ‘Where is the magic? You before,’ said Giroie in his broken English.

  ‘Along the scar,’ said Tola.

  ‘No. This is a trick,’ said Giroie. ‘You escape or kill us.’

  Freydis summoned the Kenaz rune, let its light burst above Giroie’s head.

  ‘I bear the magic, I bear the runes,’ she said. ‘My lady is gone and I would join her in death. The runes are yours. I am a servant, a low woman. I should never have had them. They should go to you, a lord.’

  Giroie nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Follow the Englishwoman. Let’s get this done.’