Fenrir

65

Jehan’s heart felt like a cooling rock, his once strong body was now a useless weight as Aelis had pushed his baggage of limbs up onto the horse. The world was fading. His sight had gone, and now the night sounds, once so sharp and clear, seemed muted, far off. Smell, a sense that had been stronger than vision to him, seemed stifled and blunt. The flavours he had known — the laden breezes of the forest, the teeming airs of the meadows, the tarry stink of far-off oceans, the million rots of bog and fen — were gone. In their place was the thin palette of human perceptions.

Aelis had called the horse — a big brindled mare. The animal had come trotting out of the woods to wait beside her while she helped him up.

The two travelled north to the coast and then turned east. Aelis easily found the way through the vast forest, guided by a rune that shone like a beacon. The other horses she had taken from the Raven and his companions followed them at the beginning of their journey. Then she raised her hand to dismiss them and they turned into the deep woods.

Jehan was finding the going very hard physically, almost impossible. His body chafed with the movement of the horse, his joints ached and his muscles trembled. His mind came back to him and he often wept with the memory of the things he had done, the people he had killed.

Aelis was beside him. ‘Do you want me to take off the stone for a moment?’

‘I cannot give in to murder.’

She nodded. The girl she had been was just like a movement of the light inside her, a rainbow that appeared in a fleeting alignment of sun and cloud and then was gone, as the runes took her mind once more.

When she did return to herself she longed for him — his voice, his touch but the confessor’s voice was weakening, his limbs no more use than dead branches to a tree.

Aelis knew they could not go on much further. She sensed people in the woods, watching from the darkness, and she reached out to them to send them away, to push them shuddering into madness or to blind their eyes to their presence. She sensed the Northmen on the coast before she saw them — a beaten and bedraggled band seeking shelter in an inlet, hiding from the Franks, who would kill them in a second. They had wounded with them and men who smelled of rot and decay. She watched their camp. They were too scared to even light a fire, their ship on its side providing scant shelter from the sheets of fine mizzle.

She told the horse to go. Then she took the confessor in her arms and walked down through the gorse to the little beach, calling a rune into her mind as she did so, the one that whispered of ocean depths, secrets and shadows. There on the sand she laid him down and ate with the northerners at their fire. None noticed her or the confessor because she did not choose to let them notice them.

When it came time to set sail, she climbed onto the boat with the confessor and sat at a vacant oar — there were many. The boat got under way in a good breeze and headed east. Aelis watched the land rolling by, the men around her. She asked one for some food. He gave it to her, his eyes blank, and she knew he did not know they were there.

She went to the man at the steering oar. He was a tall chieftain with a dirty yellow beard.

‘Where are we headed, brother?’

‘To Skania and home.’

‘Try your luck at Ladoga,’ she said. ‘There are riches there.’

‘Aldeigjuborg? You are a wise fellow, easterner,’ said the chieftain. ‘I’ll head there. Svan has been before and will tell us the way.’

Aelis looked down the ship. She saw the crew as themselves and as their magical selves, little candles in that wall in the garden. She went to each flame, warming her hands on it, sensing it, controlling it. The crew would go where she wanted.

It grew cold as she went east and ice began to appear on the shore and on the sea. The confessor shook and trembled at her feet, and she longed to remove that stone from around his neck, to see him stand again. But she would not. She just found a sea blanket for him and saw to it that he was clean and as warm as anyone could be on an open boat.

The sea narrowed to a channel and eventually to a river, where the men threw buckets over the side to draw in the fresh water. Here the way was tight, a ship’s width of water remaining in the ice, and the crew regularly climbed out to smash their way through with axes and clubs. They came to a broad big lake, where the men caught and cooked fish. From there they headed into another river, wide at first and then clogged with ice. A haze was on the water, then a mist that reduced visibility to a few boat lengths. After a time the murk was impenetrable. The ship’s prow was invisible from where Aelis sat at the stern. She could only see the crew nearest to her, gazing around her, their hands at the oars.

She kept them rowing, sending her will to them, keeping them working to speed her to Helgi, taking the rudder to guide the longship through the fog, lit by the rune of illumination, the one that glowed with the colour of the sharpest moons. They rowed on, the ice becoming thicker, but she always found a course.

Night came and she saw the confessor was freezing, so Aelis lay down beside him, hugging him to lend him her warmth. The crew stopped rowing. Lost in her concern for the confessor, she forgot the men at the oars. Enchanted, they just sat with the ice thick about them, their furs in the chests they sat on. No rower needs too much clothing, even in the coldest weather — a jerkin is enough — but in the frigid air of winter in the lands of the Rus, once the oars are still it is necessary to put on whatever insulation you have as quickly as you can. Aelis held the confessor to her. The runes would not warm him, but she kept him well covered and held him tight. The Vikings sat unmoving on the boat as the mist thickened and the frost formed on the sails and the rigging. The confessor’s breath mingled with hers, clouding the air about their faces. She shivered and adjusted her furs.

Aelis lost track of time in the cold, concentrating only on the human warmth of the confessor and the uncommon love she felt towards him. She looked at her fingers. They were blue and she couldn’t feel them. Her body was dying, but the symbols inside her were bright. Sometimes she was calm, accepting of her fate and certain that she would live on in the runes, but then a dread would take her, and a glimpse of her true self would come back to her — terrified to die, terrified not of oblivion but of loneliness. She had travelled so far to meet Jehan, she could not begin that journey again. She thought of the wolfman, of his promise: Helgi will help you. She sensed this was true. The king would help her, would keep her from her fate, from the runes reaching out to their sisters and annihilating her.

‘Helgi,’ she said to herself, ‘we are here. Come and help us.’

A light was approaching across the ice. She needed to find out where she was, to find her way to the magician king.

‘Row towards the light,’ she told the men at the oars.

But the boat didn’t move. It was locked in the ice. And the oarsmen couldn’t row anyway because they were dead of the cold.