Fenrir

53

There were large advantages to travelling with the Raven. The first was that the man had a fire steel and flint, so it was possible to get warm and to cook. The second was that he was an experienced trapper and fisherman, so they actually had something to cook. The third, of course, was protection from bandits.

The wolfman had been able to sense most ambushes miles ahead and the Raven was no different. The similarity between the two ended there, though. Chakhlyk would put up his hand, motion for silence and then turn off the main track and find a way around the bandits to avoid confrontation. Hugin employed a more direct approach. They were three days into the forest when he put up his hand and motioned for Leshii to stay where he was. Then he dismounted and passed him the reins of his horse.

It was noon when he left and an hour before dusk when he returned and mounted again. They followed the trail down. Six men lay in the bushes. One still had a piece of bread in his hand and was sitting upright, a black-plumed arrow through his eye. Two others had fallen directly back off the log they had been sitting on. Only the legs of one were visible but the other had a big wound at the neck. The others had clearly had time to get their weapons — two staves and a spear. It had done them no good. They lay butchered on the trail.

‘Are there others?’ said Leshii.

‘No.’

‘How do you know?’

Hugin gestured to one of the corpses, the one with only his legs visible. Leshii steered his mule over and looked down. The man had been mutilated, great gouges taken from his face, his eyes sucking pits of scarlet.

Leshii glanced at Hugin. ‘I guess he gave you his assurance.’

The Raven said nothing, just pressed on.

Leshii, of course, had asked to see the silver dihrams, and the Raven had shown them to him one evening as they camped. To Leshii silver had a beauty that was deeper than gold’s. He let the money run through his fingers, listened to the satisfying rain of coins that had come to end his drought, felt the delicious tickle as they fell back into the bag like bright little fishes into water.

What, thought Leshii, was to stop him cutting the Raven’s throat in his sleep and taking everything he had? He looked at the man, the torn ruin of his face, the slim sword that lay at his side, the cruel bow he carried on his back. He thought of the desperation with which the wolfman — Chakhlyk, the man who had slaughtered five men before they got him to the ground — had fought him on the riverbank.

‘You’re laughing, merchant, why?’

‘Occasionally,’ said Leshii, ‘I amuse myself with my own stupidity.’

They sat for a while in silence while Leshii munched on a duck the Raven had caught in a dead fall trap. The fire they’d used to roast it was a risk as it could attract attention, but Leshii thought it was worth it to feel warm and dry for once.

‘You haven’t asked for a story,’ said Leshii. Merchants, with their travels, were noted as story-tellers, and people commonly pressed them for tales of faraway lands.

The Raven said nothing.

‘Then tell me one,’ said Leshii. ‘Come on. I am always telling my tales. I bore myself with them.’

The Raven picked at the wing of the duck he had in his fingers. ‘I have no talent for them,’ he said.

‘You need no talent. Just tell me about yourself. How did you come to be such a mighty man?’

The Raven threw the remains of the wing into the fire. It was almost as if the merchant had read his mind. He was thinking of the mountains, of how he had stolen away from the monastery and his home in the valley to go with his sister and the strange woman with the burned face to the heights where no one ever went.

The paths were steep, the boulder fields draining. They climbed small cliffs, trudged over swampy ground, crossed perilous slopes where they were just a slip from falling into nothing, moved on across snow fields, up and up into the mists. It was dawn when they came to the cave, the light frogspawn grey. They approached it along a perilous path by a great waterfall. She had fed them there, bread, salt beef and strange pale mushrooms, almost translucent, that reminded him of the pale skin of the abbot as he’d lain on his bed, the dead god’s necklace at his throat.

He had looked out at the land beneath him. No one ever climbed the mountains — the danger of falling and the presence of the hill spirits would have put them off even if there had been any good pasture up there. Looking out he had a sense of the vastness of creation and his tiny place within it. His valley home had been all he knew, but here he could see the great lake that stretched like a sea to the north; he could look down on the massive chain of mountains that stretched west, see hints of other places, other valleys. And there was the forest, the vast forest.

‘Here,’ said the woman, ‘the gods will talk to you.’

‘I cannot understand. You say our words wrongly.’

The woman spoke slowly: ‘The gods are here.’

‘I am scared,’ said his sister. She’d used his name. What was it? Louis. Every second boy in the valley was called that. She usually called him Wolf, for his hunting skill and for his black hair.

‘You will have your brother to cling to,’ said the woman. ‘Now go inside the cave. You will come to no harm. This is the first step on your path to service.’

‘To serve what?’ he’d said. He’d been the bold one in those days.

‘You will see,’ said the woman. ‘He will speak to you. The darkness is a soil. You are seeds within it.’

They were just children and they’d trusted her so they’d entered the cave. And then she had piled up the stones, to seal them in. The woman had said they would cling to each other and they did, terrified by the darkness and the cold, by noises from the earth, which seemed to groan and wail about them, to creak like a house in a storm, and by the flashes and glimmers that danced at the corners of their eyes but which gave them no light to see by. They sobbed, desperate for food, desperate for water, licking the rocks for moisture, weeping but without tears.

It had been quiet for a long time when his sister broke the silence.

‘Wolf.’

‘Yes.’ His voice was hoarse.

‘Who is in here with us?’

‘We are alone.’

‘No. There is someone else in here. Feel.’

She took his hand and put it out, but he felt only a rock, smooth and cold.

‘It is nothing.’

‘It is a corpse. Can’t you feel the rope at his neck? Touch his cold eyes. Here. Can’t you feel? There is a dead thing in here with us.’

‘There is only stone and darkness, Ysabella.’

He heard his sister swallow, felt her hand trembling in his.

‘He is here.’

‘Who is here?’

‘The dead god. The lord of the hanged.’

‘There is nothing.’

‘He’s singing. Listen.’ She chanted a strange off-key melody.

‘Three times deceived, I was,

Those treacherous knots,

One thing inside another,

Inside another held tight.

Unseen,

Unheard,

The dead god’s necklace

Closes to open the way to magic.’

He heard her scrabbling in the dark, her hands pulling at something. Only when he heard her begin to choke did he know what it was. The rope. He reached for her in desperation, hands tearing at the three knots at her neck, trying to loosen or untie them, but his fingers were raw and numbed by the cold. He tore and he ripped and he screamed and still she kept on choking. He felt around him with desperate hands, trying to find a stone sharp enough to cut the rope, but it was useless. Tug and tear as he might, there was no way to get it off her.

Desperation, starvation and tiredness overwhelmed his mind. He coughed and retched with the thirst in his throat. And then she stood before him bathed in the light of strange symbols that shone and spoke. He heard their voices, sounds like the wind over water, thunder and rain, the rattle of hail against the roof of a house — he heard the growing of the plants and the decay of the autumn, felt summer sun and winter ice.

Ysabella stretched up her arms to the symbols. She took one, picking it like a fruit from a branch. It disappeared within her, its light undimmed. Other runes — he had seen the wise woman carve them for the spell that had cured the fever, the spell that he had completed by providing the final ingredient of the abbot’s death — were glowing and writhing on her skin. Her face was inconstant, one moment bathed in a golden light, ecstatic, the next blue and bloated, the ligature tight around her neck, her tongue protruding, her eyes bulging, like a gargoyle leering at him as if through a mist.

She reached her hand to him and he took it. She guided his hand to the rope, to the knots. As he touched them, he saw the truth. There was only her for him. They had been together before and they would be together again. They were two threads entwined in eternity, their fates linked in lifetimes past and in lives to come. Music sounded in the cave. He and she danced to it, had always danced, would always dance to it — their flesh and bone expressions of the eternal melody.

‘I am here for you,’ he told her, ‘always.’

‘Something comes to part us.’

‘The rope is so tight on your neck. Let me loosen it.’

‘It is my strength and I must return to it. We have a fierce enemy.’

She opened her hand and on it writhed another strange symbol but not quite like the others. It was a jagged black line with a slash through it, as if someone had carved it but then thought better of it and crossed it out. It was a half-thing, he thought, not one shape or another. The strangeness of that thought struck him and he couldn’t shake it from his head. A sound came from it, a note of agony and distress.

He heard himself speak: ‘That is the rune that will draw the killer to us.’

The symbol seemed to leap from her hand across his face, blinding him but sending him falling through the darkness. He saw bright lights streaming past him, heard voices calling for him. Then he was somewhere else, by a river in a summer night, the metal light of the moon turning the leaves on the trees to pewter.

Someone was walking towards him. It was a woman, or rather a girl, young and blonde, her face indistinct. She was looking for him, he knew. Hunting him? Not quite. Something followed her. The killer. His head felt as though it would burst. His thoughts were smashed to shards, but he knew that this woman was terribly significant to him and would be his undoing. Something was stalking her, and when it found her… what? Harm. He felt it as real as the thirst, as real as the starvation and cold.

The moon above him was growing, its light swamping all vision. He fell to the ground, gasping, fighting to see in the harshness of its light. And then he realised it wasn’t the moon and there was no garden. He was in the cave, face down on the floor, too weak to stand.

He felt cold air and wind, saw the woman with the burned face. In her hand was a short knife. She went to his sister and cut the rope. Then she put her hand on his head to comfort him.

‘The road to safety is a hard one,’ she said, ‘and you have taken just a step.’

He heard himself ask a question, his throat dry and rough. It was a question that had never even occurred to him before. ‘Who am I?’

‘You are his servant,’ she said, ‘a raven flying on the wind.’

‘I wish we had some wine.’ Leshii was looking at the Raven over the fire. ‘Perhaps then you’d relax a little and I’d get a tale.’

Hugin looked into the fire. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘and perhaps not.’

Leshii smiled and stretched out his hands. He was warm and the night was dry at least. ‘Do you think it’s safe to dry my clothes?’ he said.

The Raven remained silent, which Leshii took for a yes. He was sure of one thing: none of the Norse animal priests seemed to let their religion improve their manners.

He drove some sticks into the ground, took off his trousers and shoes, and arranged them on top of the sticks. Then he unwound his turban and laid it out on the dry grass by the fire. Finally he took off his scarf and set that out to dry too, sitting in front of the fire in only his long shirt.

He was relaxed, or as relaxed as he’d been since he set off on this journey among wild men and sword-wielding women. He began to doze.

A thump to his shoulder woke him. He came back to himself to see the Raven’s ravaged face staring directly into his.

‘What?’ said Leshii. Hugin’s long fingers were at his throat.

‘Not for you,’ said Hugin, and lifted the wolfman’s cord and pebble over Leshii’s head.