Valkyrie's Song Read online

  VALKYRIE’S

  SONG

  M.D. Lachlan

  GOLLANCZ

  LONDON

  To dead friends.

  Too many, too soon.

  ‘In his anger at the English barons, William commanded that all crops and herds, chattels and foods should be burned to ashes, so that the whole of the North be stripped of all means of survival. So terrible a famine fell upon the people, that more than 100,000 young and old starved to death. My writings have often praised William, but for this act I can only condemn him.’

  ORDERIC VITALIS

  ‘I have persecuted its native inhabitants beyond all reason. Whether gentle or simple, I have cruelly oppressed them; many I unjustly inherited; Innumerable multitudes, especially in the county of York, perished through me by famine or the sword.’

  WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR

  1 The Harrying of the North

  It was winter, and the land bloomed with murder. From the shoulder of the frost-stained fell she could see the burning had reached the near villages. Four fingers of smoke clawed at the pale blue sky. The brittle evening was hazy and in her mouth was the taste of other fires, now spent. On another night she might have mistaken the distant screams for the cries of gulls, blown inland from a sea she had never seen.

  She had asked about the sea but her grandfather, who had come over from Denmark with Canute and had been a great traveller, said it was a dirty big grey thing that killed people; a serpent that cast its coils around the world, and best avoided by those who had any sense. The Norman invaders, the killers down in the valley, came from over the sea, but it was a different sea to the one her northern ancestors had travelled.

  The Normans worked with a terrible industry. From dawn she’d seen them moving in, raising plumes of smoke from the villages like black banners in their wake. Tola had to run if she wanted to live. She had no choice.

  She was cold to the bone but she could feel the killers’ effort even at that distance. She imagined herself among those columns of men; her arm warmed by the toil of slaughter, her body glad of the heat of the animal beneath her and the fire of destruction about her. For an instant she felt herself inside the thoughts of a Norman soldier, one real or imagined so sharp he may as well have been real. He felt not entirely warlike but a fussy, particular man. He would see that Old Nothgyth’s apple tree was felled and split to the root, her pigs slaughtered and their blood turned into the hard soil, lest it freeze on the earth and the people creep back to suck at it in their starvation. The axes blunted easily on frozen wood and frozen soil and it was an effort keeping them sharp.

  He would see the fields salted from the bulging carts that followed the column, the well fouled with pitch and the corpses of Nothgyth’s sons. He knew the salting was only a gesture but it was worth doing – the rebels needed to believe that their land had been laid waste for a thousand years. When the house was fired and everything she owned along with it, he would lead his men away, turning back at the gallop after a short while to catch her digging at the grain she had buried. He knew all the tricks. Only then would he leave her, standing close by her burning home taking the last warmth she would ever know before she died. He had to hurry away. The scene would be repeated one more time before the end of the day. It had been played out nineteen times already. Sometimes he would leave a survivor to spread the fear for a while before the cold took them. Sometimes he would not. There was no reason in who lived and who died. It was a matter of feel, he’d tell his men.

  She heard an echo of words in the man’s mind. If they had been spoken to her face she would not have understood them but in the cavern of her head they took on meaning. She saw a stern-faced man, bald at the front of his head, strong-armed, pot-bellied. ‘No one alive from York to Durham.’ That was the whole world.

  She came back to herself and gazed out over the wide land. White everywhere, like the little woollen blanket the travelling fool had put over the coins at the summer fair. When he’d removed it the coins were gone. The world was changing, hiding itself to emerge anew. When it did, there would be no place for her.

  How many soldiers? She didn’t know her numbers but she had never seen such a host – not even at the market day at Blackdale. More people than she had ever seen, more than she could ever have imagined seeing. They had come upon the dale at an easy pace, walking their steaming horses through the wide snows. One column from the north, another from the south and a third from the sea. It was not a net, nor even an encirclement. The attackers were indifferent to whether their prey stayed and died or fled to the hills. Death by fire or death by cold; death either way.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, though no question had been asked. The man who stood beside her was to have been her husband. Hals. He had not been a rich man, though he had a little land and kept a few sheep. She was a poor woman, pretty enough to marry better, her mother said. A man with five or six hides might have considered her. She hadn’t wanted a man with five or six hides. Hals would do. Tola, so sensitive she could put herself into the mind of a Norman across a valley, knew Hals was a good man and she understood him.

  She shivered deeply. ‘We can’t stay on the hill all night,’ she said.

  Hals hugged her and she sensed the question in him. ‘What can we do?’ He was of the Danish line too, his father coming over with Canute to farm, so Hals would more naturally trust a woman’s opinion than an Englishman of older heritage might.

  ‘Wait and see if they move through. Then go down. To whatever’s left.’

  She saw that he feared they would come back.

  ‘They’ll go everywhere,’ she said. ‘It’s a hunt to them. What man doesn’t love to hunt?’

  He gestured behind him. Nine standing stones circled the hilltop. The local people called them the nine ladies. They were said to protect the valley. They offered scant help now.

  When she was girl, wandering up on the fell on a sunny morning, they had spoken to her. The weather up there could not be trusted, and in the afternoon a grey mist had come down so quickly it was as if the day had closed its eyes. She had found herself among the standing stones then. They’d given her a start at first, as she’d thought they were people standing watching her in the mist. She’d realised they were just stones with her next breath. She’d wandered among them, trying to get her bearings. The last stone slewed at an angle, pointing along Blackbed Scar and out to the boggy top. There was a quick route down from there and she knew it well. The mist was cold on her nose and lips, the shawl tight about her as she stepped along the broad arc of the Scar and out onto the sodden earth of the top.

  The going was harder than she’d thought. There had been little rain but the bog had held its water. She was soaked within twenty paces, about to turn around, when she’d seen him under the surface. The hanged god, his skin blackened from its long soaking, the frayed noose at his neck, one eye ruined and eaten, the other half-open, looking at her. She looked across the Scar and saw the nine standing stones, no longer stones but eight fierce women, staring across the valley, spears in their hands and shields at their side. Where was the ninth?

  She saw a vision of a great battle in the north – Danes camped around a river surprised by an onrushing horde of Englishmen screaming over the brow of a hill, a scrambled defence, no armour, no helms, as the English king led his men against them.

  And then, from a strange country of chalky soil, the other men came; those she now knew to be Normans with their teardrop shields, their shaved heads. The English king rode south to meet them, his weary warriors at his side, and from every shire and every village men ran to meet him to join and refresh his army, though they might have walked or not bothered a
t all.

  Even Tola knew that the Norman king was done for. She sensed his feeling for his ships; it was a familiar one that she felt largely from the young – one of need and resentment. The king could not go far from the ships. If he was beaten he needed a way home. He had ravaged the land, so he needed to resupply. This man, with the pot belly and the strong arm, was walking a ledge above a crag. He felt vulnerable, arrogant, belligerent and exhilarated. He had come too late in the year. He feared winter, feared being king of only the wasteland he had created, his army coughing, rotting and dying beneath its tents. There was a lurch in the pit of her stomach, a vision of two ravens flying against a stormcloud sunset. The English king would not listen to counsel. His mind sank into the blood mire. He would give the Norman king his battle. She knew that the man in the peaty water was a god and he had entered the mind of the English king to drive him on to death and to a place in stories to last a thousand years.

  She fell into the mire and through the god’s mind to a burning city where gigantic beings, half shadow, fought in the ruins. One shadow was a wolf, another the noose god, battling forever under a cold sun. Then the god had turned his eye towards her and she had seen bright shining things, symbols that expressed everything – how a baby grows to be an adult and a calf to become a cow; how the sea pushes against the land and the land pushes back. More light than she had ever known was all around her. After that it was dark.

  Her brother had found her, half dead in the water, and carried her down to the farm.

  Her brother. Where was he in this burning land? He had gone with a party of men to face the Normans, to ambush them as they rode through the woods. It had given her the pause she needed to run to the fell. He was dead now. She could feel the hounds dragging him down, their weight more awful than their teeth; hear the swift and certain stride of the Norman soldier coming through the woods towards him, the punch of the dagger into his ribs.

  She used the cold against her emotions, locking them in under ice, under the will to survive.

  ‘The ladies never offered me help,’ she said to Hals.

  He hugged her tighter, his arms shaking with the cold. The last rays of the sun warmed them from the rim of the hills. They’d have to move again soon and keep moving throughout the night if they weren’t to freeze where they stood.

  Hals had ice in his beard. There was no wind yet, no rain. Even without them she knew they couldn’t spend the night still in the open.

  Hals’ eyes were full of tears. He was a strong man and she had never seen him cry. She knew he wanted her to ask the ladies.

  ‘It is against God’s law. The priest told us that.’

  He drew his knife.

  ‘That too is against God’s law.’

  ‘Orm at Ing End took that way out,’ Hals said.

  He was trembling, with fear and cold, with misery.

  ‘His father was a northern man. He should have fought.’ She pulled her cloak around her. ‘You couldn’t kill me, Hals.’

  He offered her the knife. ‘You do it,’ he said. ‘You are stronger than me. Kill me and then yourself.’

  She turned her eyes away. Out over the valley, a silver half-moon lit the smoke, the dying light rendering the land grey but for the red sun in the west. Away by Alfred’s house a flame sprang up. The Normans were burning again. Surely soon they would stop, if only to secure shelter for themselves.

  A flash from down in the valley – someone holding up a bright sword that caught the light of the burning house. A cry, bounding towards them from far away. Had the warriors seen them?

  ‘Do you remember the rhymes Nana used to tell? About the end of the world?

  Surt fares from the south with the scourge of branches,

  The sun of the battle-gods shone from his sword.

  The crags are sundered, the giant-women sink,

  The dead throng Hel-way, and heaven is cloven.’

  She crossed herself. ‘This is the end of the world. Christ must come,’ she said.

  ‘So where is he?’said Hals.

  A group of six riders broke away from the burning farm towards the hill, small as mice in the distance. Tola looked at Hals’ knife, so sharp, so clean. It had caught the sun, she was sure, and given them away.

  They couldn’t run. The Normans were burning on the south of the dale too. They might make the woods but it was a scant hope. There was no other option.

  ‘I’ll go to the gods,’ she said.

  Tola walked along the ridge of the Scar to the stones. She knew in her gut the key to what she sought. Pain. Denial.

  ‘Keep moving, Hals,’ said Tola. ‘Either run down or stay with me but keep moving. You’ll die if you don’t.’

  It didn’t take someone of Tola’s sensitivities to see the question on Hals’ face. ‘And you?’

  ‘Death had his chance with me before here. He won’t harm me now.’

  She took off her shawl and laid it down, took off her skirt and her tunic, and stood among the stones in only her underhose and her shirt.

  Hals paced the line of stones back and forth, his breath steaming about him. They’d made their decision, he wasn’t about to go back on it now.

  Later, Tola would know there was a point of transition in invoking the gods where you went from willing them to appear to willing them to stay away. Colder than she had ever been, human and vulnerable, she stood – warm flesh among the frozen stones. She knew who she sought. The people still had their stories and their faith. They called to Jesus on a Sunday and, if Jesus did not come, they left their offerings and their carvings for the elves and the gods. There was a charm and she spoke it for want of knowing really what to do.

  ‘Ladies of the Dale, watchers by night and day

  Hear me singing your furious song.’

  There was nothing that had not been there before, only the shouts of the Norman soldiers in the dale, the pacing of Hals along the line of stones.

  ‘Hear me singing your furious song.’

  She said it again and again and its meaning started to slip. Furious song. Furious singer. The old words for that phrase came to her. Woden. Odin, as Hal’s family called him. Death in his hood, death in his noose, in the waters of the mire, his nails black, his skin leather. Hals kept pacing the line. She felt his anxiety as if it was her own, a lurch in her belly, a need to shit. The feeling faded, her body grew colder.

  How long had she been there? Always. She was a stone, watching the valley. Her sisters were beside her, looking down, their dark wings stretching to the sky.

  She heard a name she recognised. Waelcyrian – Valkyries, as her father would have called them.

  ‘Choosers of the slain. Dark ones, overseeing the land.’

  She had a sensation of flight, of great wings beating at the sky; wings or shadows, she could not tell. She heard the call of ravens, felt the rush of cold air.

  Hals shook her. He was trying to tell her the enemy was coming.

  The half-moon was big and bright but there was now a low fog on the hill. She was above it, looking down, the heads of the riders emerging as if they swam through a lake. She saw the bodies of the horses moving through the fog like dark fish through a silty sea, the spears of the riders before them.

  ‘What is to be given?’ One of the strange women spoke, her voice rattling like earth onto a coffin.

  ‘I have nothing to give!’

  ‘Then you must want nothing.’

  ‘Help me vanquish those I hate.’

  ‘The price is high.’

  ‘I will pay it.’

  She was on the ground and in the air at the same time. A rider gave a cry and said something in his strange speech. He’d seen them. He turned towards her, his sword free.

  He said something else and she heard delight in his voice. He was pleased to find a young woman.

  Moonshad
ows were on the fog and the shadows were the wings of gigantic birds, or something like birds. A dark shape swept past her and she threw up a hand to protect her face. The rider slid down from his horse in an easy movement. His hand was at her throat but it was as if she was watching herself in a dream.

  He tore away her tunic and pushed her backwards.

  A woman’s face loomed from the mist, a death mask, her skin like pitch, golden hair falling in a braid to a noose at the neck. On her arm was a shield, in her hand a fireblack spear and at her back were wings like those of a gigantic raven but made of moonlight and shadows. She screamed one word – ‘Odin!’ – and Tola knew that name meant death.

  The spear was a shadow, thrusting forward to take the Norman at the throat. The man fell backwards onto the frosty ground and the woman followed him, drawing a sharp black knife. She seized the man’s hair and, in a swipe, beheaded him. She passed up the head to Tola and it seemed to the girl a marvellous gift, like a flower. Still she was above the fray in most of her mind, looking down, cradling the severed head to her breast.

  Figures condensed from the fog and then were gone, only to reform again – women, some flying on great black wings, others descending on horses of fog and shadow.

  The Normans thrashed with their swords in the murk, like beaters trying to drive ducks into the paths of slings and arrows. She saw one man lifted straight from his saddle, flying up into the swirling air. The voices of the Normans were urgent, those of the horses panicked and shrill. A horseman cried out as his horse stuttered backwards and reared, falling. Another slashed about him as if the air itself was his enemy. He too fell, though she did not see what had struck him.

  Wings were everywhere about her, like the beating of a mighty storm on a door. Horses screeched, men cursed and the women who swooped around her screamed their war cries.

  ‘Woden, Odin, Grimnir.’ The names sounded inside her like the wind bawling in the hills and she knew their meaning. ‘Fury, Madness. Death.’