Lord of Slaughter

17

Bollason sat by the sea’s edge, watching the dark horizon. Behind him stretched the tents of his army, their pennants of ravens and wolves snapping in the breeze. The light was like nothing he had ever seen, the black ocean shining, the sky iron and the air silver-blue.

The dogs of the camp seemed restless, barking and grumbling at the falling sleet. Two gulls tumbled and brawled over the ocean, crying and screaming as if one said it was day and the other night. Nearby a child howled and would not be comforted.

‘Could this be it, Vala?’

‘Don’t call me that.’

The woman beside him was not young but she was very beautiful in the weak blue light.

‘It’s true. I know no one wiser than you.’

‘I have no art, Bolli. Your mother had the runes in her heart, not me.’

‘And yet you saw.’

‘With borrowed eyes. Yes, I saw.’

‘This could be the end time, happening here.’

‘I don’t know, Bolli.’

When she turned to him, she revealed an ugly scar covering most of the right side of her face. It was a burn; no knife or sword destroyed flesh like that.

‘If the god dies here, then what?’

She waved her hand, a gesture between exasperation and dismissal. ‘What always happens. Death, agony, rebirth. Always.’

‘Elifr has tried to stop it.’

‘Elifr is a man. He acts first and thinks later,’ she said.

‘He is seeking to protect you.’

‘I cannot be protected,’ she said. ‘Elifr has a place in the schemes of the gods, and though he moves to frustrate them, he will only bring destruction on himself and those he seeks to keep from harm.’

‘I could protect you, if you’d let me.’

‘I am not the one who needs protection. This is where Odin earned wisdom. This is where he went mad. If he returns here then the city will fall.’

‘Suits me,’ said Bollason. ‘There’ll be riches for us all then.’

‘It must stop, Bolli. I cannot go on.’

‘Go on with what?’

‘Losing my sons for ever. Putting them away, hiding them to keep them from the mad god’s gaze.’

‘Your sons are dead, Vala.’

The woman looked out to sea.

‘I have lived too long,’ she said. ‘The gods think they bless me but I carry a heavy curse.’

‘They do bless you. You are the same today as when I first remember you.’

‘In my appearance, perhaps,’ she said, ‘but I’m tired. I need to do this.’

‘You’re sure the well is where you say?’

‘We saw as much.’

‘Then let me bribe us into this prison and do your work.’

She shook her head. ‘The ritual is long and could bring notice. We need to take control of that place Bolli.’

‘You talk of ritual but you say you have no art.’

‘I have art enough for what I need to do.’ She wouldn’t tell him what would be required of her because he would try to stop her, as the wolfman was trying to stop her. Death — the god’s old price.

Bollason leaned forward and looked up to the black skies. ‘Your answer will be there?’

‘It is as your mother showed me. We are near to the end, Bolli. It will just take a little courage.’

‘If that is all it took then I could ask any of my men to do it. I would do it.’

‘But you cannot.’

‘No.’

‘Only me.’

‘Could my mother have done this?’

‘That was a lore-wise woman. But no. This was not her destiny. It is mine, so she told me when…’

The woman’s voice faltered.

‘She died, Vala. I have been a warrior these fifteen years. I am not so tender as you think.’

She smiled and touched his shoulder. ‘I knew you when you were at your mother’s breast. Your heart is not as hard as you want people to believe.’

‘It is hard enough.’

‘But you follow me out of tenderness.’

‘Yes. And by my mother’s command.’

‘And if your mother had not commanded it?’

‘I would still follow you, Saitada.’ He sat quiet for a while and then: ‘How will you know you are at the place? If we can take command of the prison and you go down into the earth, how will you recognise the well when you see it?’

‘I will know, I’m sure.’

Bollason said under his breath, ‘Mimir’s Well. Odin gave his eye for lore in those waters.’

‘And the fates sit there spinning the fates of men.’

‘That well is called Urtharbrunnr.’

‘They are the same. And different. One magic well has many manifestations, just as the gods themselves take many bodies in the form of men.’

‘So Odin gave his eye. What will you give?’

‘More than that. I am a woman, not a god; the waters will want more from me.’

‘Will you survive?’ he said.

‘My destiny is here. The destiny of the gods is here. I have my part to play.’

‘In death?’

‘Consider the sky, Bolli. Odin’s magic is unfolding. He will come here to die on the teeth of the wolf so the fates may spare him in the realm of the gods. He must not be allowed to do that. He must die in the realm of the gods. The mad reign of Odin must end. It’s as your mother saw.’

‘And it’s the girl we will find at the palace who must die?’

‘If it was that simple Elifr could have killed her. I don’t know what needs to happen to her. We need to bring her to the waters.’

She watched the dark sea and recalled the rhyme that had been born in her mind when the old vala had died. She said the rhyme. She didn’t want to burden Bollason with it but she needed to speak her fears to someone. And besides, he had a right to know what was happening.

‘In the east did the old one sit

She bred the bad brood of Fenrir

One of these, in a wolf’s fell guise,

Will soon steal the sun from the sky

Now he feeds full on dead men’s flesh

And the sky is reddened with gore

Dark grows the sun and in summer

Come weather woe, would you know more?’

‘So said my mother,’ said Bollason. ‘Is the prophecy coming true?’

‘Fimbulwinter,’ said the woman, ‘when the summer departs and great harm comes to men. This is the sign the death of the gods approaches. This is the sign Ragnarok is here. Look — snow in summer, unexplained deaths on the battlefield.’

‘So Odin is riding to meet his fate at the teeth of the wolf?’

‘Yes. In this world. So he might live in his own. We will suffer; the world will suffer, but he will live.’

‘If the god is on his way to death then what can stop him?’

Saitada glanced at Bollason and he was a little boy again, caught acting foolishly. No one could tame him when he was a child, not with beating, not with shouting, not with denying him dinner or sending him to bed. Saitada, though, could silence him with just a look, leave him creeping in shame from the scene of his naughtiness.

He had that feeling now, stupid, desperate to please her but despairing of how it might be done. He’d loved her since he was a child, first as an aunt, later with all the ardour he should have held for women of his age. He hadn’t wanted them. He had travelled the world, become a great war leader, killed many men in battle, forged his destiny with sword and spear. But when he returned home and looked into her eyes he felt unmanned and unworthy of her. Her spirit was greater than his, and in front of her he was only ever a child.

Saitada threw a pebble down towards the ocean. She remembered the raw dawn, the standing stones stark against a sky of slate. The prophetess had gone seeking an explanation for Saitada’s tormented dreams that had come upon her when her husband died.

Saitada had watched him go, wasting to nothing in his bed, he who had sailed the world and brought the gold he had won with axe and shield back to their hearth. The disease took him, her sons too.

The night the third boy died Saitada had wept by his bed until not sleep but a sensation of falling had come to her. She heard names shouted through the darkness, strange but with an echo of familiarity: Vali, Feileg, Jehan, Aelis and her own. Visions sparked in her mind — a leering smith, naked from the waist down, the hot iron with which she had spited her beauty and ruined her face so he would look on her with pleasure no more. She saw a white-haired warrior, his sword a talon of fire; she saw a demented child; and she saw the god, the one who had come to her three times now. The bright, beautiful, burning god who came to her as a wolf, or who stepped from the corpse of a princess, his skin pale in the moonlight, or who had found her adrift at sea and rescued her in a boat made of dead men’s nails and lain with her on a silver beach under the morning star.

Three times he had given her sons that she had tried to hide from the notice of the All Father. Twice she had failed. This time she would protect them — her boys, the twins, the ones she kept secret from her husband and kin, the ones she had hidden in the hills and over the sea.

She’d hoped to make a life away from the notice and schemes of the gods, had gone back to the land of the white-haired king, raised a family and tried to forget. But he wouldn’t let her rest — him, her lover, the father of the twins.

After that night when she had buried her last son by the farmer she had never slept well again. Always in her sleep strange voices spoke half-remembered names. In her dreams she went to a cave, a low and dark place where something was pinioned and tied, something that seethed and shook, something that longed to be free. An ancient torment was awaking inside her.

Bolli’s mother, the vala, the prophetess, had said she might help free her from her nightmares. They’d gone to the standing stones, where the iron clouds cast a grey veil of rain upon the hills to perform the ritual.

Saitada had helped the old woman, lit the fire and sprinkled on the herbs, kept her awake through nine days and nights on that storm-blown hill. The visions came and they had killed her.

As the sorceress died Saitada had seen too — the magic well, the font of all knowledge, a comet rising above it in the east. She told Bollason his men would win fortune in Kiev and sailed with them there, where they had sold their services to the prince. She spent ten years in the hills, while Bollason fought his wars. With her goats, her staff and her cloak she was happy in her solitude.

She sat by the streams and in the mouths of caves, her mind floating on the vast emptiness of the evening. She watched shooting stars like swift fish in the vast purple ocean of the night, watched the low sun of dusk ignite the storm clouds, turning them to lumbering dragons with bellies of fire, and saw the dawn make its diamonds from the snows. In the winter she took to a cabin and, in solitude and privation, looked for answers. The east, always the east drew her eyes. She had no fire herbs, she had no training or guide to help her. She proceeded by instinct, starving and thirsting the visions from herself, sitting in the cold, wakeful for days until the truth came to her. She needed to know how to find the well, to take her wisdom to the next stage.

The wolfman found her in the eighth year, sent, he said, by dreams. He had seen her in a high place, overlooking the land. She was important to the gods, important to him too. She’d asked him if he was a god and he said he was not, just a man who had dreamed her. She told him she had dreamed him too, every day since she had given him up to the family in the hills. She had dreamed him because she was his mother.

She held him and called him son but wept because in her visions she sensed what the gods intended for him.

In her dreams she was always in that cave, where the thing she could not see shivered and groaned in its bonds. She had a role to play. Was she waiting for something? For someone? With the wolfman at her side no revelation would come.

They shared their rituals, their starvations and thirsts. And then she had seen more than she had ever seen when alone: the city of the moon and star and, under the moon and star, the well, its silver waters glimmering beneath the star-bright sky.

The words had come to her and never left her since.

In Mimir’s well I gave my eye for lore

And on the storm-blown tree

I hung for nights full nine

Wounded by the spear, offered I was

To Odin, myself to myself

I took up the runes

Shrieking I took them

And from there did I fall back.

She knew what she saw — the well that sat beneath the world tree and whose waters impart all wisdom to those who pay the price to drink from them — the well that is every magical well in every world, where the fates sit, where Odin gave his eye for lore. The wolfman perhaps saw even more. He ran from her vowing to save her, though she begged him not to go.

‘You will only damn yourself,’ she said.

But he was gone and she was in the wilderness, weeping for his loss. In her misery she remembered — years before, lifetimes before, how her son, in the form of a wolf, had hungered for a woman and how that woman had led him to kill the hanged god. Saitada had performed her role in a ritual set out by a god to draw his killer to him.

She had welcomed the wolf then. Not now. She thought she had revenged herself on the god for taking her children. No. She had done his bidding without knowing it — killed him on earth so he might live on in his heaven.

As Elifr had gone from her, her despair had deepened, opening doors to knowledge in her mind. She had seen the howling rune, the slinking and crawling rune, the rune of the wolf, of the trap and the storm. That was the fetter that held down the wolf god, prevented him from rising and slaying the old deceiver Odin. It lived within a woman, always within a woman. She had seen her before when she lived before. Saitada wept to know how her sons had been drawn on by love. That couldn’t be allowed to happen again. The rune would have to be dug out of the woman who carried it. By death? Very likely. But only the waters could tell her, so the woman who bore the rune inside her would have to be brought to the well.

She had gone into Kiev and Bollason had welcomed her.

‘At the moon and the star is our fortune,’ she had said.

A day later the Prince of Kiev had offered the Varangians to the Emperor of Byzantium and she was on her way down the Dneiper with six thousand men. They would take possession of the Numera when they had worked out the lie of the land. There would be a battle, and it was fitting men should spill blood to oppose the will of the gods, a sacrifice and a statement of will.

‘I do not pretend to understand this,’ said Bollason.

‘There is no understanding it,’ said Saitada, ‘there is only the water. Down there in the earth, where Odin went. We find the girl and we take her there.’

‘How will you recognise her?’

‘I have seen her before.’

‘And what of Elifr?’

‘He must be opposed. I know what is required of me in there, and he will also oppose me. He means me to live.’

‘Don’t you mean to live?’

‘I hope to live. But above all I mean to play my part. That is all I am required to do.’

‘If we find the wolfman, I will kill him. It will strengthen your purpose. You cannot go forward to fight with gods while you have ties to bind you in this realm.’

She shook her head. ‘If anyone is to kill him, it is me.’

‘Why?’

‘You asked what I could give more than my eye. I can give him.’

‘Can you do it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t shirk from your purpose through too soft a heart.’

‘I won’t. But everything must be done according to what I find in the well. There is one clear way forward and around it — thorns and briars.’

‘I would kill him.’

Her face became stern. ‘From boyish jealousy that he has more of my affections than you do. He is my son; you cannot think I would love you more. When I told you there was fortune in the east, you took on the enterprise like a man. See it through as one.’

‘My courage is fine. For myself I will face a thousand enemies. But for you, as you face this magic, I am a coward. I fear for you and I confess I am fond enough of you.’

Saitada smiled.

‘Stem what tender feelings you have. They are a snare to you. I cannot be loved, Bolli. The dead god’s shadow is on me. Don’t let it fall on you too.’

‘My mother gave her life for you. I am ready to do the same.’

‘Then give it well. Do not throw it away through too soft a heart.’

The man laughed. ‘You would have made a fine wife. You are a warrior, Saitada, though your sword is your tongue and your spear your beauty.’

‘I am old, Bolli.’

‘And finer than a girl. You are beautiful.’

‘I am death to you, and any man who gives himself to me.’

‘It’s fifteen years since I first killed a man in battle, and I have sent many to the All Father’s halls in that time. Odin is impatient for my company at the mead bench, I feel it. Warriors know when their time is upon them. So did my father. One day soon I must die — I can’t be lucky for ever. I will give up my life for you. It is no great thing.’

The woman swallowed and stood.

‘It is,’ she said, ‘but I think it leads to peace.’

‘You would find peace with me. I have treasures many and gold enough to please any woman. Marry me, Saitada, for I will place an otter’s ransom at your feet.’

Saitada smiled at Bollason’s attempt to use fine language. She thought of the myth in which the god Loki kills an otter who is not an otter but a man in that form. The man’s father captures Loki and makes him swear to pay weregild for his son’s death. Loki steals a ring from a dwarf, but the dwarf curses the ring and it brings only misery to the mortals when Loki passes it on.

‘I am the otter’s ransom, Bolli. I am the cursed gift. The fates have wed me to the gods not men.’

‘Then divorce them. It can be done with a word.’

‘No word I know how to speak.’ She reached to touch his hair. ‘Who knows, I may find it in the well.’

‘When will you go to the water?’

‘When can you get me in?’

‘My men are ready. I have deals to do first, but I think in two or three days we should take this place.’

‘Deals?’

‘With the emperor. I have sent messengers. His troops are not up to the job — they’re losing control. Even now people are fleeing. We’re working on him to let us replace his bodyguard. Then the city is ours.’

‘The Greek guard will resist.’

Bollason tapped his sword. ‘I said I was ready to die for you.’

‘Just get me in to the building that sits in the shadow of the dome. Your death is not required. We need to hold that place until the time is right.’

‘When will the time be right?’

‘When I have summoned the courage.’

‘Then it will not be long, Vala.’

The woman smiled at him. ‘No, it will not be long.’