Fenrir

47

Kylfa sat glowering at Aelis in the light of the fire. There were too many to fit in the warming house so Aelis had opted to spend the night under the covered walkway at the corner of the cloister.

Leshii was inside, amusing the Vikings with a story. She heard some words in Latin — camel, gonads — and guessed that he was telling his usual tale of how a Saracen had lost his balls to a kick from a camel he was trying to castrate. She heard the nervousness in his voice, though the Vikings seemed not to notice it, and she could tell that he was at the limit of his endurance. He sounded old. He wanted his fire and his mug, his friends about him and his dog at his feet, not the company of strangers. She had watched him in the mornings, getting up from his place in front of the embers of the fire, creaking to his feet, crouching, resting again, stretching a leg, moving up to almost stand, his legs not quite straight and his back bent. Once he had relit the fire and sat in the morning sun, he was fine, able to continue the trip. But he was a man tired of moving, she could see.

What of herself? That sensitivity she’d had since a girl, the one that allowed her to hear people like music, to sense them as colours and textures, had rarely been used to look inward. She looked at Kylfa brooding in the corner, his axe across his knees. His brother was by him, huge and stupid with upper arms the girth of her thighs. Was she afraid of death? Yes. She heard a voice whispering inside her: It happened before.

Whose voice was that? A child’s or a woman’s, she couldn’t tell. It was cracked and hoarse, full of suffering.

Aelis too was tired of moving, tired of the sensation of shadows watching her, of terrors lurking just beyond her everyday senses, of sleep being a kingdom of monsters that sweated and slavered in the dark.

Tomorrow she would die, she knew. But her maid at Loches had told her that before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes. Hers had not. What had she been? A woman to be married off, a token that a state might offer to another, her beauty just a way of making an advantageous trade, allying a count to a duke or even a king, something to make armies move one way or another. Important then. But she didn’t feel important. She felt like a scrap of cloth blown on the wind.

Her memories came to her not as stories or even pictures but as colours, sounds and sensations. The green and gold of the summers at Loches, the metalled leaves of moon-dipped trees, the feel of river water and the smell of damp earth, the song of the skylark and the voice of the owl. From her window she had been able to hear the wolves calling to each other in the hills, and their voices had chilled her. A shadow now lay on her, the shadow of a wolf. She saw it, picked out by the swollen moon in front of her on the flagstones of the monastery, there on the eve of her death.

It happened before. That voice again.

She stood.

‘Hey, you. Don’t think you’re sneaking off. If you want to piss or shit you do it where I can see you.’ It was Kylfa, his axe in his hand. A squall of laughter came from the warming house. Leshii was saying something.

The shadow of the wolf. She wondered if it was another trick of those terrible things that lived inside her, those symbols that seemed to live off her like magic leeches, like mistletoe on the oak.

‘Is this a vision?’

‘It’s an axe, my friend, as you’ll find out tomorrow.’

The shadow moved. It was tracking behind Kylfa.

She looked up and, without thinking, said a name: ‘Sindre!’

Something dropped to meet the shadow and Kylfa turned.

The wolfman brushed him aside and went for Aelis’s throat. Her hands flew up to defend herself, to push him away, but he had her. His fingers crushed her neck. She tried to peel them off but it was no good. Seven heartbeats and she was no longer in the cloister.

She looked about her. That place again, the cave of blood. The wolf, the presence of her lover, death, death everywhere, her muscles tight on her head, as if the skull beneath was trying to break through to burst grinning from her skin.

‘No,’ she said, and the arrowhead rune, which shone like the moon shines when it is small and sharp in the sky, burst into fire.

She was back in the cloister, gasping on the floor. The wolfman had dropped her. The first thing she saw was a raven, looking down at her from the roof of the covered walkway, its cold glassy eye fixed on her. There was screaming and shouting. Three Vikings were grappling with Sindre, more pouring from the warming house. A big Norseman lay puking on the ground, his great axe, its haft smashed in two, beside him.

Four Vikings, five, were on Sindre but still he stood. A man’s neck was broken, then the staggering mass fell into a wall, Sindre driving a Norseman’s head into it as he went. Another had his feet swept from under him and sprawled on the stones. Sindre came back towards Aelis, dragging two men behind him. Vikings were everywhere — some laughing, some angry, all drunk. One aimed a kick at Sindre but only succeeded in thumping his foot into the side of one of his kinsmen.

The arrowhead of light still fizzed and spat inside Aelis. What did it mean? Illumination. Clarity.

He kept coming. Two steps more and he had one of the Vikings’ knives from his belt. A breath later the man fell. Aelis looked up at the raven on the roof. She felt strange, dizzy, full of light. Four more came at Sindre, but he tore off the one clinging to him and threw the man at them. They all collapsed in a heap. She watched the raven on the roof. It watched her. And then she allowed the light inside her to travel to meet it. It was like learning to ride a horse, that moment when the beginner begins to feel how it should be done, when the stiff legs, back and arms give way to the rhythm of the animal and the rider becomes one with the gallop. It felt so easy.

Sindre was on her. There was a flutter. The raven had flown away. Aelis was down, Sindre on top of her, but the fury had left him.

‘See,’ she said to him. ‘See who you are.’

And the light that was in her went to him as the Vikings hit him from every side. A lesser fighter than Sindre would have died where he was, but the wolfman needed no second of reflection, no fatal breath to assess where he was and who his enemies were. The trance snapped away from him and he blocked a sword cut at his attacker’s hand, breaking the wrist and sending the sword spinning. He stood, driving the heel of his hand into an axeman’s chin, putting him unconscious to the floor. Then he had Aelis up and was pushing her towards the doorway. The Danes leaped at him with sword and spear but he dodged and ducked, rolled and blocked. Then Aelis was at the the entrance to the cloister.

‘Open the door!’ he shouted. ‘I was bewitched but I will save you. Go! I am destined to be with you — I cannot die here.’

Aelis slipped up the bar that held the door closed and stepped out. She didn’t know where to go. The beach was bright with the light of the moon and she could see the men who guarded the ships running across it towards the monastery. The path led down to the ships or away across the marshes. A scruff of trees was just visible on the horizon. She’d have to run across the salt marshes in the dark with a bunch of wild Vikings behind her.

The light of the strange symbol that lived inside Aelis seemed to shine into every nook of her mind, bringing understanding and clarity. She could not run. She turned and went back into the monastery.

Sindre was very near the door, at the centre of a group of Vikings, snarling and spitting, tearing spears out of hands, dodging attacks at his back, smashing men to the floor. His eyes turned to her for a heartbeat and Giuki ran him through with his sword.

He sank to his knees and tried to speak. Aelis read his eyes at the moment of his death. He wanted to say that it was impossible for him to die there, that his fate was woven in with hers, that a greater destiny, a more important death, awaited him. He coughed and lashed out, driving the Vikings back.

‘I will meet you again,’ he said to Aelis and fell forward. Then the Vikings were upon him like wolves themselves, spears, axes, swords, kicks and punches cutting his flesh and breaking his bones.

The wolfman was face down on the flagstones, blood pouring from countless wounds on his body, his head unrecognisable after the cuts and blows it had sustained. She bent to his corpse and put his hand upon it. She spoke but did not know what she said, the words just tumbling from her: ‘It was not you, Sindre. It was not you. You died for me, and I thank you for that, but you have been misled. The rune is calling but not for you.’

The rune? She had given the symbol inside her a name, one she had no memory of hearing before but that seemed familiar to her.

She put her hand on the wolfman’s head and stroked it. A tall Viking sank a kick into his body. Anger came over her, hot and sudden. ‘You have killed him,’ she said. ‘Are you looking to kill him again?’

‘If I can,’ said the Viking and stamped on the wolfman’s belly.

Aelis looked at him. ‘You face him one-on-one now he’s dead. You came more slowly to the fight when he had breath in his body.’

The Viking levelled his spear at her but Giuki tapped it away with his sword. He bent to her side. ‘You’re more interesting than you look, boy. Since when did you speak Norse?’

‘I…’ Aelis could make no more words come out. She tried again, but when she spoke it was in Roman. ‘I…’ She looked at Leshii. ‘Tell him I need to speak to him. Alone.’

‘ Domina, that is not a good idea,’ said Leshii.

‘ Domina? ’ said Giuki. ‘I know only two words in Roman, one is “fuck” and the other who you do it to.’

Leshii threw up his hands.

‘All pretence is gone,’ said Leshii. ‘By your duty as Helgi’s vassal we really do need to speak to you alone.’