Valkyrie's Song Read online

  On the ground a woman held up her spear and cried out in exultation as her horse gorged itself on the body of a fallen Norman.

  Tola cried out for Hals but she could not see him. Only two Normans were left now. One had seen her and his horse charged the arc of the hillside. She had come back to herself and was no longer in the air but in front of those stamping hooves, a frightened and defenceless woman, the fog about her waist. Then the rider was dead, two arrows protruding from his back. From along the ridge she saw a man, no more than a shape in the mist. He wore a bearskin on his head as some of her father’s people had done in war, hoping to take on the characteristics of the animal.

  The horse careened on, dragging the rider by the stirrup. It caught her a glancing blow. She spun around, falling back hard on the cold earth. The bear man ran towards her. Above him the dreadful women moved in the fog like embers caught in a swirl of smoke.

  Then they rose up above the fog, wings beating, horses breathing a frantic rhythm, looking down on her and the bear as if readying for a charge.

  From across the valley came a howl, a long tether of sound that tugged her head around to face it. In the howl was the sound of terrible grief, of mothers screaming as they were torn from their children, of fathers watching their families butchered, of old women by the burning ruins of their home.

  ‘The wolf is in the hills,’ a dead sister spoke. ‘Gift for gift. Your enemies are dead.’

  The women, with their peat-black faces, their nooses, their horses, their wings and their spears were submerged by the mist and Hals’ arms were around her but his body was limp, a red wound on his breast. Tola held him and wept at the price she had paid for the sisters’ help.

  2 The Slaughter Beast

  He had run when his daughter by his mistress had died. She was fifty years old, a high lady of the Byzantine court who had lived a good life and shown him the pleasure of sitting in an olive grove under the sun, watching his grandsons wrestle, answering his granddaughter’s million questions about the world. Little dark Theodora was the one who had been most curious that her grandfather looked younger than her mother. She had visited him at his small hill farm weekly – often she was the only human he saw from one month to the next. He had told her, in the end.

  ‘I’m immortal, I think. Or rather, I don’t get older.’

  ‘Could you die if you were run over by a cart?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Best look out for carts, then.’

  He’d watched her grow from a child. His daughter died and he had seen the grey hair among the black of Theodora’s curls and realised he could not stay any longer.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Theodora had asked him, by her mother’s grave.

  ‘I feel as though I am death,’ he said.

  ‘There are many men who spend days with potions and ancient books trying to gain what you have got. Never to die.’

  ‘I think I can die.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I feel mortal. I feel …’ He looked for the word. ‘Vulnerable.’

  ‘You think too much of the future,’ said Theodora.

  ‘It seems vast. And it seems empty. What shall I do, Theodora?’

  He squeezed her hand and put it to his lips. She smelled as she had used to smell as a child, of the bitter oil rubbed into her hair to counter attacks of the lice. She had been putting it on her own children, no doubt.

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You have robbed death and he will have his compensation from you.’

  ‘Weregild.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My father was a northerner. A Varangian of Norway. If a man kills another he must pay money to his family. Perhaps death wants gold for life.’

  ‘If it was only gold you could pay it. Will you not see my children? They might bring joy back to you.’

  ‘I will not see them.’

  ‘Then you have made your decision to leave the world,’ said Theodora.

  He remembered Beatrice – mother to Célene. She had never stood for sentimentality either.

  Most of the time, Beatrice was a fleeting presence in his mind. She wouldn’t sit still to be looked at. Only when he told Theodora about her, how he had met her when they were both Normans – she a lord’s daughter, he a monk brought in to tend her in a fever – did she live again in his mind.

  Beatrice had pretended to be ill for weeks in order that he could keep visiting her. What had they talked about? He’d forgotten. He remembered only her voice, its timbre and tone. Not what she said and the shifting light in the little cell where she lay, the chaperone dozing by the scented fire. For this. For this. Anything.

  ‘I would have liked to have known her.’

  ‘And she you.’

  He’d never told Theodora how he had fought the old mad gods of his fathers by the World Well in the catacombs beneath Constantinople where the Norns sit spinning the destiny of all men, or how Beatrice had given her life in bargain for his. It was a deal he had never wanted her to make. He’d never said, either, how he’d travelled through the catacombs of his mind to free the great wolf that the gods had bound and how it had set upon the gods. Had they died? He didn’t know but the wolf had put its eye on him, mingled its soul with his, and from that moment Loys had never aged, never changed.

  He could feel the wolf inside him, watching him. He had chained it down and subdued it. Around his neck he wore a stone – part of the magic rock called Scream to which the wolf had been fettered. If he took the stone off then the world crackled and spat with sounds in registers he had never heard as a human. Smells no human had ever smelled burst upon him – meat-deep, berry-rich, smells that did not evoke memories like the bitter oil on Theodora’s fingers but that were of the now, only themselves, and opened the gate in the garden of his mind to wild places, to hunger as deep as love. He knew then that without the stone the wolf would claim him and he would be no more than an animal. It was time to let the claim be made.

  Suicide, by his Christian code, was unthinkable. By the law of the old gods he had seen at the well, it was the path of a coward and thus contemptible. But to live as a wolf, to anchor oneself to the present as an animal is anchored, would be possible and, as an animal, he might die. To seek danger was the noble path of the Christian saint and of the pagan warrior.

  He kissed Theodora for the last time and then he ran from the south and Constantinople, up through the forests of the Dneiper, past the Ever-Violent Rapids that promised death, through the bandit lands that promised death, waiting for winter with its promise of death.

  He had lived because he wouldn’t let him die – the god, the pale traveller, the one who called himself Loki. Loys didn’t know if the god existed or was just the product of a brain fever. The Pechenegs of the Dneiper had captured Loys by the Laughing Rapids but they had been afraid of him, even as they stripped him and tied him, ready to throw him down into the raging waters as a sacrifice. They were an intuitive people. Had they sensed he was marked by the gods?

  They’d taken the stone he wore on a thong at his neck – the little triangular pebble with its wolfshead etching. Even as they cut it free he felt the world change subtly. The men who tied and bound him, haggled over his few clothes, his fine sword and his good shoes, were no longer quite people. They weren’t even enemies or threats. He was curious about their movements in the way a cat is curious about the movements of a spider. The Pechenegs were scared of him – the three who tied him would not even show their faces but wore their blank-eyed war masks whose impassive silver features were terrifying to him. After they cut away the stone, the rooms of his mind’s mansion fell in and he saw the world only in broad categories. Living and dead. Food and not food. Enemy and bird.

  ‘We kill you, devil’ said a warrior, in corroded Greek.

  Loys he
ard the fear in his voice. How did they know what he was?

  ‘Yes,’ said Loys.

  Loys tumbled into the waters, felt their mighty weight shoving him down, saw the green of the riverbank, the black of the rocks in that jumbling, breathless churn.

  He did not die. Instead peace came down on him and the waters stilled. He looked up from them at a smooth black rock, slick under the moonlight. On the rock sat an extraordinary figure – an impossibly tall man with a shock of red hair. He was naked, save for a white feather cloak, and his face was torn and bloody, his teeth visible through his cheek.

  ‘See what you did?’ He gestured to his face.

  ‘I did nothing but try to protect those I loved.’

  ‘That’s every murderer’s excuse,’ said the man. No, not a man. A god. Loys could remember his name, if only he could clear his head. He had met him before.

  ‘I committed no murder.’

  ‘You are murder, Fenrisulfr.’

  ‘Don’t call me that.’

  ‘You are the wolf, the wolf who killed King Death at the twilight of the gods. But now the king is gone. And you want him back, don’t you, Fenrisulfr? You want him to live again.’

  ‘He is not gone. I see death all around.’

  ‘Funny that,’ said the god.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Loki – that was the god’s name. He was a liar, Loys remembered, but not a malevolent one. He had helped him.

  ‘You need to die. A new age is being born but it cannot come to be until the fates have their final sacrifice.’

  ‘What sacrifice?’

  ‘You. You were supposed to die after you killed Odin but you cheated destiny.’

  ‘Then kill me.’

  ‘I would if I could, but I can’t.’

  ‘Who can?’

  ‘You are death. You can.’

  ‘Then let me die here.’

  ‘Not so easy. You can die here but you will be reborn. I was thinking of something more permanent. Your total and abiding extinction. Forever. Then the world can heal. Look down into the waters.’

  Loys did and it seemed to him that he was both sitting on the rock under the cold metal moon and in the water at the same time, his vision flashing between the dark and the light.

  ‘The dark is appealing, isn’t it? Less confusing. Less demanding.’

  ‘Will you let me die here?’

  ‘I can’t let you die anywhere. You’re the killer, Fenrisulfr, you need to work out how to die for yourself. I wouldn’t have thought it was too difficult.’

  ‘How do I die?’

  ‘I don’t know. Follow your nose.’

  The god gestured to the bank and the waters raged again. Loys splashed, gulped, thrashed for air. In the tumult and the panic he felt his humanity wash away like dirt in a flood. He was an animal, fighting for survival. His arms had come free of the bonds and he reached out, his hand catching on stone, steadying him against the flow. The night bristled with sensations – he heard the scratching of insects in the leaf mould, the soft wings of the bats who hunted them in the dark, the muffled flight of the owls that hunted the bats.

  He smelled decay and death in its rich glory – the browning leaves, the body of a fox, the autumn growth of mushroom and spore. It was as if his life before had been lived under the influence of some deadening drug and now he saw the world as it truly was. He’d felt this way before, when the wolf had looked at him when he had freed it to face the old gods. He was strong and he was certain. He pulled himself from the waters. The rapids’ roar was like a dim echo of the roar he felt inside himself.

  Two of the Pechenegs saw him and one fitted an arrow to his squat little bow, sending it unseen through the night. Loys didn’t have to think, he just ducked and the arrow snicked through the air above his head. He ran forward, bounding from rock to rock. Two more bowmen fitted arrows, other warriors found swords and axes but it was too late. He was gone, into the dark of the trees.

  He heard the Pechenegs arguing, their voices full of panic. Clearly some wanted to chase him, some to hold their position, keep watch and wait for the dawn. He was itching to kill but he crouched low and listened.

  The Pechenegs’ breaths sawed at the dark. They were terrified. He could smell the sweat of fear and, though they could not see him, he could see their panicked movements. Every quick turn of the head, every stiff, uncertain step forward spoke a single word to him: ‘Prey’. A man, silhouetted against the camp fire, struggled to tie on his metal facemask, his fingers unwilling to obey the commands of his fearful mind.

  Reason lay before Loys like a book on a table that he could pick up or ignore. His more insistent instincts were like fresh baked bread to a starving man. He could not put them from his mind.

  The Pecheneg secured his facemask and Loys killed him, tearing past to strike him to the floor and disappear into the woods again. Uproar in the Pecheneg camp, warriors firing arrows blind into the dark. Already they were aiming in the wrong direction.

  Loys circled the camp, loping around, looking for a weakness in the circle, attention directed the wrong way, imaginary noises causing a man to point and jabber. He struck again. There were twenty men but none of them saw him coming. He leapt upon one, breaking his neck from the rear. A sword fell towards him but he stepped under the blow, driving his head into the man’s midriff, sending him sprawling.

  All the men were around him now, spears and swords pointed, axes poised. Their fear smelled as strong as a Constantinople sewer. Their little dances back and forth as they summoned the courage to strike and then lost it again were oddly fascinating.

  ‘You should go. I will be a bane to you,’ he said, but his voice was not his own. His words were crunched, minced and chewed from his mouth. His tongue felt heavy, made of wood.

  A warrior in a blank-faced mask spoke. ‘Dora Lukelos.’ Wolf skin.

  The words triggered something inside Loys. He threw back his head and howled. The sound was a ribbon stretching out through time, something connecting him to everything he had been, to two brothers who had fought and died for the gods’ protection, to a wild man of the woods, to a prince leading a war band, to a scholar coming frightened to the greatest city on earth. All the Pechenegs ran. The bodies were at his feet, sizzling in their succulent aromas. He was still human. He would not give in to hunger but his resolve could not last long. He bent to look for his wolfstone. Nowhere. The fleeing Pechenegs must still have it.

  He set off after them through the trees.

  3 Child of Blood

  In the north, where emerald seams the night skies and dawn rises with the colour of cooling steel, Célene waited. She kept her fire on the cold island rock, offering amber flames to the silver moon, her white spear leaking the ruby blood of fish, whales and seals, turning pearly blubber to the jasper light of the candles that she made.

  Her mind was wide and full of colour, green sea, grey sky patching with white; the sun tracking out her days, the moon her months, the cold and heat her years. In the long days of summer she was warm but autumn chilled her and winter froze her blood to ice. When the berries grew and the leaves fell she fattened like a bear, eating and eating, fish and whale fat, nuts when she could get them. When the snow fell there was no thought beyond survival – she burrowed into the earth of the cave, fur-wrapped, nurturing the fire, managing the stored fuel, offering prayers for the return of the sun.

  She prayed to Jesus as she had been brought up to do but it was not Jesus who drew her to the island, nor Jesus she felt beneath the earth. A thumb’s depth down, the ground was cold, even at midsummer. The god was down there, buried, his magic corpse sucking all heat from the land. The life on the island was abundant, though, the trees rich in fruit, and she believed it to be because their roots fed on the body of a god.

  The dream lands were hers to wander and in them she chose to
walk with her Aunt Hawis in the stories she had told her as a girl in Normandy. Sometimes she stole rings from sleeping dragons, at others she was Hawis herself, the floor seeming to fall away beneath her feet as Loys – who had run away with her sister – walked in with his little girl in the merchant’s house at Beauvais. The ladies had been on pilgrimage south to the cathedral at Paris and the duke – a man closer to his horse than to God – had not come with them.

  Hawis had thought she would die when she’d seen Loys, she really had. Célene asked about her father but Hawis said he was like two people. The one who had stolen away with the duke’s daughter had been kind and funny, a little chubby from the monk’s good life. The man who returned was spare and lean, serious, with eyes that seemed like – Hawis had thought for years how to describe them and, one day, hit on it – eyes like those of an animal, peering out from beneath his brow as if from some set or den.

  ‘You can have no place here,’ Aunt Alice had said.

  ‘No,’ said Loys. ‘But she might. I am walking a hard road; it’s no place for a child.’

  Aunt Alice had at first said it was impossible to take her, that the duke would not have her. He would beat them all for even entertaining the idea. Hawis had stretched out her arms and the child came running to her. Alice really had cried then. ‘Just like her mother,’ she’d said.

  Loys said that they should keep Célene with them on their tour of the country. He would talk to the duke.

  ‘Then I will not see you again,’ said Alice.

  ‘No,’ said Loys. ‘You won’t.’

  The news came from Rouen a week later. The duke was dead. His horse had been spooked while hunting and he’d been found with his neck broken in a stream. Hawis had to regard that as fortune. She had hated the duke and was glad he was gone. The idea that Loys had killed him was impossible. A scholar could not take on a man at arms like Duke Richard and live.