Valkyrie's Song Read online

  That was the story Célene had been told. That was the story she knew, all she knew of herself. She’d been shipwrecked on the island at fifteen years old, going east as a bride to a Swedish king. She had not wanted to go and sometimes felt she had called the storm herself, emptied a void in her heart into which the storm had poured.

  It had felt right to be on the island. She learned to survive, her mind widening and the magic that lay sleeping inside her growing.

  Men came to the island. At first she did not know if they were dreams or if they were real. They came after she had been on the rock a long time, dragging their ship up the beach to repair it. A plague was among them and she was not sure if she was the plague. They couldn’t see her, though they complained that the island was full of sounds, that the air was weak and the breathing hard. They all died, in a goggle-eyed fever, all twenty of them – boys and old men, warriors and three women. The dog kept her company for a while and she fed it sea bird and fish but it too eventually grew grey at the muzzle and died.

  She kept the human corpses fresh, burying them in the cold earth beneath the warm topsoil, seeds that sprouted ghosts. In life the men had not seen her. In death, they sat by her fire, sang their songs and told their tales, and watched her as she slept. Busla was a goodwife escaping poor soil and famine. She had come from the north seeking the fertile south, in one of three ships that rowed out with the morning sun at their backs.

  A storm had separated them and cracked their mast and they had lost their way.

  ‘Is this Hel?’ she asked Célene. ‘Is this the kingdom of those who do not die in battle? Are you the goddess?’

  ‘I am not a goddess.’

  ‘You speak to the dead.’

  ‘I came here as a living woman. I am a living woman.’

  ‘Half your face is burned. That is what they say of Hel.’

  ‘I slept too long by the fire,’ said Célene. The pain did not bother her any more. It had ceased a long time ago.

  ‘I would leave this lonely place,’ said the woman. ‘Can you be content here, no man to warm your bed, no children to brighten your days?’

  ‘I cannot think of being anywhere else. How might it be done? I am near to the god here, comfortable on his bones.’

  ‘Then bring the god with you, raise him from death. You are the gatekeeper of death, I think. You can let him go.’

  Célene thought for a long time about how the god might be freed. She dug at the earth with her fingers, looking for his bones; she ate worms and crawling things, trying to taste his blood on which they might have fed; she part-buried herself as best she could, digging down with a dead man’s axe and piling the soil back over her, lying vacant-eyed, staring at the stars.

  She felt a rune within her and she sang its long song. The rune was Ansuz, Odin’s rune, and the god’s magic and madness hummed within it like a struck gong. The other runes might come, she thought, but a great spell would need to be woven. It would take the endurance of years.

  ‘Why am I here?’

  The rune answered. ‘To tell the story again. To pay the price to the Norns. You are the angel at Christ’s tomb, rolling away the stone. You are his servant. Valkyrie. Sister Death.’

  Ghost-accompanied, star-chilled and moon-minded, she sang a story, the one the god told, of two lovers sacrificed to the grim ladies of fate who sit at the World Well, sacrificed in eternal time, again and again, so the god might live. The song spun out over the gull-tormented sea to Constantinople and to England, to Norway and Normandy, where those with the ears to hear might hear it and begin to dance to its tune.

  4 The Wildman

  Tola held Hals’ body in her arms, swallowing down the pain. The horse had caught her only a glancing blow but all the wind had gone from her and her ribs were agony.

  ‘Get up, my love, get up!’

  In death he no longer brought to her mind a sensation of a summer breeze, of the still air beneath an oak, heat in the nostrils, of cool stream water on the hand or the buzz of sunlit meadows. He was like the stones now, like the grass; things without a signature, things that were entirely and only themselves. She had killed him, she was sure, struck a bargain for her own life and sacrificed his.

  She saw the wildman coming through the mist, the long bow in his hand, the bear’s head staring blankly forward. He knelt above her and she thought he would kill her. She was so cold she was almost glad.

  She had no weapon, nor any way of fighting him.

  He put one of the Normans’ cloaks about her and spoke not in Norman but in Norse.

  She understood a good deal of the language, picked up from her father.

  ‘Horse,’ he said. ‘You must be warm.’

  ‘Man. My man,’ she said in the same language.

  ‘Dead,’ he said. ‘In battle. Valkyrie took him. Waelcyrge. Good. He’s with the gods now.’

  ‘Not with the gods,’ she said. ‘He must be buried and blessed.’

  The wildman pointed to the mire.

  ‘A door,’ he said. ‘To the gods. Let me.’

  ‘The god in there is not the god of Christ.’

  ‘In there, the mire, the gods,’ said the wildman.

  Tola thought it fitting to send Hals that way. His family were of the north, still left out bread for the elves and called Freya to make the fields bountiful, as they called on Christ to heal them and protect them. He could go that way.

  ‘Yes.’

  The wildman carried the body to the edge of the mire. He was just visible through the mist as he laid the body down. She tried to stand to follow him but her ribs were broken, she was sure, and it was agony to move.

  He held up his hand and she held up hers in reply. He made the sign of the cross over Hals, said, ‘Go to the warrior’s halls,’ and rolled Hals’ body into the water.

  He returned in a short while.

  ‘Go now,’ he said.

  Any certainty she ever had about her life left her. She thought of the first men and women of the dale, of their children growing to become parents, their children too, of how the Danes had come – fighting at first but quickly settling, the rhythm of life and death unaltered. All that had gone. Death had made his camp here and there would be no more life, no babies with their rose-petal breath, no harvest, nothing.

  That moment was a mire to her, sucking at her feet, holding her down. She wondered how she would ever move on from it. Surely all the doings of the world must stop now? Surely no new dawn could rise now? She turned to the man.

  ‘You are death.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not me. Death comes. Not death.’

  ‘Why am I alive?’ She was recovering from her trance and the cold was hitting her so her jaw chattered as she spoke.

  She didn’t understand every word of his reply but she understood enough of it.

  ‘The women of the hill. Valkyrie. Waelcyrge. The Dead Sisters.’

  Tola crossed herself. Hals was dead. Her brothers were dead. Everyone she knew from the farmsteads and villages was dead or about to die. Only she remained. She knew very well none of this was her fault but, looking at the standing stones and the odd northerner with his heavy, dark presence, she couldn’t but help feel that it was.

  ‘I will die here soon,’ she said, struggling to find the Norse words.

  ‘Yes. You must live. I need you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Vengeance. Their blood for our blood.’

  ‘I cannot fight.’

  ‘Valkyrie, Waelcyrge. You help. You are a volva.’ He stabbed a finger towards her. ‘Witch.’

  She tried to see if she could trust him, staring into his eyes, listening to the echoes of his thoughts that sounded in his breathing, shaped the way he held his face. She found nothing, just raw fear inside him.

  ‘I’ll find a horse,’ he said.

&n
bsp; She was convulsing with the cold now, despite the cloak. The wildman too was shivering. He went to the body of a fallen warrior and took his cloak, wrapping himself in it. He went on through the mist and came back with another, putting that on top of the one he had already given her.

  ‘We go,’ he said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Not here.’

  ‘Fire,’ said Tola.

  ‘Fire. Yes. And vengeance.’

  She looked down to where she guessed the valley was, under the mist. ‘Back?’

  He didn’t seem to understand what she meant. ‘Down,’ he said.

  ‘I have the courage to die.’

  ‘Then die well, not cold. Die for the land.’

  Her mind widened, spreading out across the frozen hilltop, down through the mist to the burning farms. The valley was full of men seething with violent intent. She felt all their bubbling animosities, their complaints and dissatisfaction with their leaders. Not another farm to burn. I am tired and need to rest by the fire. Why must we campaign in winter? These people are poor, there’s little profit in it. We should be allowed to take slaves. The Bastard owes us that.

  She hated them more than if they had been enthusiastic butchers.

  ‘Magic has a price,’ she said.

  ‘What have you to pay?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then what can the fates charge you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Have your revenge. First, live. Warmth is the first step.’

  Her feet were numb, her body shaking, she had scarcely any feeling in her hands.

  The future had appeared in the shape of this man who had come bringing death and kindness. He was a Norseman, so perhaps he was used to surviving. After the great battle, where Harold threw the Danes back into the sea, the Norsemen who hadn’t regained their ships or been slaughtered roamed the land in bands. They were lucky to survive. The people bore them a great deal of ill will, no matter that half the English were only two or three generations out of the longships themselves.

  He supported her and led her across the broad plateau. She saw the severed head of a Norman warrior at her feet as she walked on, heard the fretting of a riderless horse somewhere in the mist. The wildman quickly found it and helped her to mount. She cried out as her body pressed against the horse’s but she managed to make the saddle.

  She hugged at the horse’s mane for its warmth but then had to sit up as the man led it on. Every step seemed to break her ribs anew.

  As they descended the hill, they came out of the mist, which sat like a hat on the summit. The fires were still burning all across the dale. It was as if the autumn bonfires they lit to mark the end of summer had blazed again, but so many more. The old tradition said that the sun would not return if the fires were not lit. Now it was as if the people of the dale feared the sun would never, ever return and had burned everything they could in a bid to entice it back. There would be no more sun here or, if it shone, no one would be there to see it.

  ‘This is the end of the world,’ she said. A word came into her mind from a story her grandfather had told. ‘Ragnarok.’ The twilight of the gods.

  ‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘Maybe always now.’

  Her brother, Hals, Nan Johanna. All the people of the dale. Bone fires, she’d heard the autumn fires called, though no one was ever so stupid to burn something as valuable as a bone that could be made into a soup or fashioned into a blade. There would be bones in these fires, though. Human and animal – dogs, cats, the cattle the Normans had no use for. The emotions that drifted up from the valley were overwhelming. Exultation, fear, anger, sadness, delight and despair. Her head felt as if it had a great stone resting within it. She looked out on the burning night of frost, of stars and flame.

  ‘I will fashion your bones into blades,’ she said. ‘They will pay for all this.’ She searched for a word. ‘Beauty,’ she said in her own language. The word surprised her. She saw no beauty in destruction.

  ‘Fire,’ said the man. ‘Then their blood for our blood’.

  5 Cursed By God

  ‘What if she recovers?’

  ‘She will not recover.’ Lady Styliane was irritated by the Viking’s questioning. Travelling by camel was not her first choice but here, in the great red desert of the Rub al Khalid, there was no other way. The heat was intolerable and she sweated heavily beneath her desert robes. Her guardsmen, northerners, had it worse. They were big, pale men who flushed like lobsters and were tormented by the scarcity of water.

  During the day, of course, it had been impossible to move and they had sweltered beneath their tents. Now it was dusk, the sun an angry red eye glaring out over the land, firing the dunes but leaving the plains beyond a metal blue. It was as if the sun was a hammer and the land the anvil on which it fell. They were the metal beaten upon it. The camp prepared to move, glad the wind that had nailed them to the spot for four days had died. The Arabs folded the tents away in no time, the Varangians eyeing the camels nervously.

  The captive had not stirred. She was a young woman of around sixteen, blank-eyed, dry-browed and sweatless in her bonds.

  Myskia, the big Varangian, bent over her as they prepared to go. He had been the worst in the sandstorm, moaning and crying out to whichever gods would listen to him, which were none.

  ‘You did this to her?’

  ‘She did it to herself.’ It wasn’t Styliane who answered but Freydis – a nimble, neat little warrior who, on close inspection, revealed herself to be a woman. She was of average size for a Roman of Constantinople but small for her own people, the Varangians. She was Styliane’s personal bodyguard – her company more pleasing than that of the men. She had been in the lady’s service a long time and Styliane had come to depend on her.

  Freydis was baked brown by the sun, her thin blond hair poking from under her headscarf. Her nose had been punched to a clay splodge and a scar disfigured her right cheek.

  Styliane had spent long nights with her in the gardens of the great palace, the moon shimmering above them as the streets released the heat of the day.

  They had shared a lot, though Styliane kept her affection for the warrior secret. It would not do to be seen to dote so on a servant.

  Freydis had told Styliane her story. The Varangians had met Freydis when they had taken her longboat in the northern seas. Of course, they had tried to rape her ‘as a matter of principle, believe me we didn’t want to,’ Myskia had joked, but she killed one of their number – boldly, by taking the sword of one of her fallen comrades. They had been impressed and made a gift of her attacker’s weapons and armour to her. She, a pragmatist, had asked to join them and, since she could fight as well as a man, they let her. In Styliane’s experience the northerners were almost unique in judging people chiefly by their actions, rather than their sex. A woman could prove herself manly or a man womanly.

  Did Freydis stand in Styliane’s life for a man in other ways? Sometimes. Even in the longest life it is difficult to remain indifferent to everyone you meet. And besides, love has its uses. Her brother had taught her that.

  ‘And the girl’s rune?’ Myskia sounded worried.

  ‘Still inside her. She had only one,’ said Styliane.

  ‘Pray that Odin, master of magic, keeps it there,’ said Myskia, crossing himself.

  ‘Odin is dead.’ She had watched him die all those years ago when her mind had cascaded down through the stars to where the gods dwell and she had watched as he was torn by the wolf.

  ‘I’m a Christian anyway,’ said Myskia. ‘But he isn’t so dead that you’re sure he’ll stay that way, is he, ma’am?’

  ‘Don’t talk that way to the seer,’ said Freydis.

  Myskia shot her a glance. If she had been a man he would have had to answer her rebuke with a challenge but he let it go.

  Styliane sensed Myskia’s soul, a
hot, tormented thing. He was nervous and ashamed of his nerves, covering them up with the bravado of talking to a famous seer disrespectfully. She made allowances. The heat bothered him terribly, mottling his skin and kindling his temper. It was necessary to travel with such men. He was a prodigious killer, the best of the Varangians, battle bold and quick to anger. One blessing of the extreme heat was that the Varangians were too exhausted to fight with each other or with anyone else. She kept him close to her, for such men were like sharp knives, best handled carefully.

  Styliane kept her gaze on him, unwavering, but she said nothing. He crossed himself again, bowed and said ‘Odin protect us. Jesus too. And you, ma’am.’ He tapped his sword as if reassuring himself it hadn’t melted and lifted the young woman up to put her across a camel’s back. So much cargo.

  Styliane would turn north for Baghdad as soon as she had killed the girl. She longed to sit in the shade of the flower garden at the palace of the Caliph, to sip sweet sharbat chilled with ice from the northern mountains. The drinking glasses were made according to the secret formula of the Kitab al-Durra al-Maknuna. It was true what they said – the glass hid its colour from the sun, leaving the liquid within seemingly suspended in space. Nothing hid its colour from the sun in the desert, its fierce gaze brightening any colour to a dazzle.

  They mounted, she helped up by one of her Varangians. The Arabs would not go near a foreign lady, fearing offence to the giant northerners. Then the Varangians themselves mounted – spurning the help of the Arabs. None of the tribesman laughed at their efforts to climb aboard, though a boy had to turn his face away. No one wanted to antagonise these odd blond warriors with their long axes and big swords.

  The procession moved on through the channels among the vast dunes, some as big as mountains. The Varangians sat unsteadily on the camels, swaying as if drunk, comically dignified.

  The sun fell behind the dunes and the red land turned blue. You could not say it was dark; the stars themselves were a desert, nearly as numerous as sand grains, the sweating moon looking down, its face wavering in the heat haze. Was the moon as bare as this land? Did moonmen suffer in such heat?