Valkyrie's Song Read online

  The unconscious girl moaned on the back of the saddle. It wouldn’t be long before she was beyond all pain. She had come to Styliane, as Styliane knew she would come, looking to kill her. Styliane was preparing to leave for Baghdad anyway; talk of her unageing appearance had grown too much again. The last time she had gone to Baghdad as her own granddaughter. She would do so again, sixty years after she had left.

  She took with her ten selected Varangians, oath-bound to keep her secret of immortality: that within her dwelled a fragment of a god’s mind, four magical symbols that expressed and controlled the fundamental nature of the world – runes. It was tempting to allow one to grow in her thoughts. The symbols were of the northern land and all brought a chill. One moaned like the wind in the hills, one stamped and blew like a bull, still another came with the silence of ice caves, the dead air of crevasses in glaciers she had never seen. A fourth boomed and swelled like the ocean, a dirty green, cold sea – not the bright water of the Bosphorus or the Sea of Mamara. It filled her mouth with the taste of salt and made her shiver however hot the day.

  She would not call them yet. She had needed to summon all four to defeat the girl on the camel and she still felt unhinged by the experience. The runes flared compassion inside her, making her regret the death of the girl, though Styliane knew the girl needed to die so she might live. She spat. To put a foreigner’s life before her own. That was a rare madness. She was an aristocrat of Constantinople, born to rule. Her life was more valuable than other people’s. The order of men on earth reflected the divine will.

  They tramped all night through the heat.

  ‘We will be met?’ said Freydis. Her eyes met Styliane’s and the lady took comfort from the warrior’s concern for her.

  ‘Yes. They are awaiting us eagerly,’ said Styliane.

  She felt the well before she saw it, as if her daily thoughts were just robes she put on and the presence of the well a wind that nagged at them. It was out here. Mimir’s well, where the god Odin had traded his eye for insight. She did not fear it. She had been to the World Well where the Norns sat spinning the fates of men, the well that was all wells. Mimir’s well was present there too, as all the wells of wisdom were, but she would not risk a second visit. She had emerged from the earth there once and had no certainty of being able to again. She knew it was foolish to talk of a magic well ‘being’ anywhere in the realm of men. They were vast things that existed in the realm of the gods. Mimir’s well appeared in the desert, it might appear in the snow fields or forests too. This manifestation was the nearest she could find to Baghdad.

  ‘There are three roads that meet there, Shaddad?’ Her Arabic was perfect. She’d spent a long time in Baghdad sixty years before, would spend as long again when the business here was done.

  ‘Yes, lady, as I told you before.’ The little man looked like a Constantinople street deceiver, over-keen to do a deal. Styliane cursed herself for betraying her nervousness.

  She tapped three times on her thigh, a blessing from her goddess, Hecate – lady of the dead, lady of the crossroads, lady of the moon. Of this burnt ash moon? In the days before the Norse god had entered her mind she had been a sorceress. The goddess had always come as a shimmering, cool presence, like the moon on water. Was Hecate here? Was she anywhere? Or were the gods all one – Hecate with her three faces and mastery of magic, goddess of death; Odin, king of enchanters, god of death, Christ, who cast out the demons and came back from the dead, king of death.

  ‘They will be there?’

  ‘Yes. I have said. Praise to God.’

  This man did not mean that. He was not an Islamist, though he pretended to be so. He followed an earlier faith – a worshipper of the star called Sirius. Was everything linked? Hecate was attended by dogs, as Styliane was now attended by worshippers of the dog star. She recalled her Homer:

  Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky

  On summer nights, star of stars;

  Orion’s Dog they call it, brightest

  Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat

  And fevers to suffering humanity.

  Very apt. Her guide was a member of the tribe of . . A¯d, cursed by God, so the Arabs said. Only a man like this would make such a deal. Two nights of such travel and her Varangians were sweating.

  Myskia came to her side.

  ‘I wish this was not necessary, Volva.’ He gave her the old Norse title of ‘seer’.

  ‘The Varangian guard owes its exalted position in the emperor’s service to me, to the sacrifices I have made, to the runes I carry. It is necessary if you wish that to continue.’

  ‘If Odin could return …’

  ‘The god chose death. How else can a god die? Would you presume to resurrect him? Honour the god’s will, Varangian.’

  ‘Yes, Volva.’

  She could feel the well strongly now, a current that drew in all her thoughts. She found it hard to think of anything else. The travellers rounded the purple bulk of a vast dune. There under dark, flat-topped mountains was the oasis, a begrudging smear of water among the rocks and the sand. Ten tents were pitched next to it, goats running free – no need to tether animals that had too much sense to leave the water.

  Styliane felt her mind shift, like liquid in a tipped glass. She could see the water for what it was but, at the same time, it spun with stars, the moon at its centre. The wells were a gateway between worlds for those who could see it. Was Odin dead? Of course he was. She had seen him, torn by the wolf. He could not be there waiting for her and, if he was, she was part of him because of the runes within her. She remembered the noose at his neck: the suicidal god, endlessly dying in his incarnations on earth. He would not hesitate to kill her. No, he was dead, though death for gods was not like death for others.

  ‘Lady.’ It was Freydis. The camel had knelt; she was offering to help her down.

  She took her bodyguard’s hand and dismounted.

  The tribesmen were already running ahead to the camp, greeting its guards.

  Shaddad bowed. ‘We have a tent with our women if you would rest after your journey.’

  ‘No,’ said Styliane. ‘We’ll do it now. I will rest the day after and leave the next night.’

  ‘It is customary for us to speak to our brothers for longer than that.’

  ‘It is customary for me to leave when I have worked the magic of the gods.’ She pointed up to Sirius, bright eye of the dog constellation. ‘It will still be looking down on you when you return. We do a serious thing here, Shaddad, and the sooner it is a memory to us all the better.’

  The little man nodded. Was he afraid? She couldn’t tell any more, the runes pulling at her thoughts, turning them always towards the well.

  ‘I will fetch the child.’

  ‘Don’t. I must prepare.’

  ‘When then?’

  ‘At my signal. I need to go to the water. Can you make sure your people allow it?’

  ‘They will allow it.’

  Styliane went to the water as if dragged. This was the place. A muddy puddle, really, no more; the moonlight thick with insects. But she saw it as it really was, a chasm deep with stars.

  ‘What will happen?’ said Freydis.

  ‘The girl will be offered to the waters and her rune torn from her. The baby of the . . A¯d will receive it. You carry her in. It is a girl child and the Arabs will not suffer to let a man touch her.’

  Her attacker – the girl – had come to her in her chambers at the palace, bribing her passage in by way of the kitchens, no doubt. The assassin had thought to surprise her but Styliane had heard her coming, or rather, heard the moaning of the rune she bore inside her. The rune had granted the girl insight and she knew that by killing Styliane she could become a god, or take a step on her way to that destiny. There were twenty-four runes in all creation. When all the runes inhabited one body, Odin came to earth. Or
rather, Odin was the twenty-four in one body; he came to being. Once, his birth in the realm of men had been inevitable. Now, not so. She had seen him die under the teeth of the wolf. Was he dead everywhere? And if he was, would he stay dead? If she strove to keep him in the grave then perhaps he would remain there.

  Styliane put her hand into the water and kept it there. She could feel the connections to the other mystical wells, from the cold currents of Hvergelmir in the ice lands to Urðarbrunnr, the well of wyrd, into which she had fallen beneath Constantinople. She felt too the icy currents of the first rivers that flowed from those wells, the cold sparks that fired life onto the earth. They were threads connecting her to the three grim women who sat spinning the fates of all men at the centre of creation.

  There was so much magic in that well for those who were prepared to pay the price of denial and pain to take it. She was not one of them. She had given as much as she was willing to give two lifetimes before.

  Once she would have invoked ritual, called on the names of the three-faced goddess of darkness and the dead, called her Cthonia and Bellona of the Battles; drunk bitter potions. Now none of that was necessary. Rather she just stopped suppressing the runes, let them grow inside her mind with their hollow light of grey skies, their animal stink, their sighing and their chiming.

  It was hard here to keep them where they needed to be. The well was a vortex, sucking at them, and her hands stretched out as if she could pull the symbols back from its brink. They were hers and she would not let them go but she felt the well’s need for sacrifice, for blood.

  She sat for a long time deciding what to do. The tribesmen could not move her from the midday sun, so they built a shelter over her as she sat watching the waters. Should the child be immersed? What felt right? Magic was such a thing of instinct not something that could be learned in books like men said, not true magic like this. She asked the goddess Hecate for help, a prayer born of instinct, and for a time fancied she could hear the howling of dogs. She felt as though she walked on the rocks of great rapids and could be swept into foaming waters in a moment’s loss of concentration.

  She expected to see him, the dead god, sitting by the water’s edge; his bog-black body lean and lithe, the madness burning in his one good eye. Nothing. Her mind fell through the sand to dry graves where she lay among the bones of the dead, where her mouth filled with dust and her thoughts too. She needed to cling to the question: what to do? The rune in the unconscious girl could not be allowed to unite with hers. She had four runes. Five would edge her nearer to twenty-four – the number that meant she would cease to be Styliane and become Odin.

  ‘Djinn?’

  Shaddad was speaking. She could not reply. She thought that perhaps she was in the water, drowning, looking up at him through a shimmering veil of liquid.

  ‘You must drink. You have not drunk for a day. You will die here like that.’

  Three women came to the edge of the water and sat down. Were they tribeswomen? Perhaps. She found it hard to focus on them. They had distaffs in their hands and began to spin, a weft of stars that fell tangling through the pool. She picked up one of the threads and she saw that it was wound around something down in the spangled darkness. She tugged on the thread, feeling it snag. She kept pulling and pulling. The effort was immense; she was dragging an enormous weight up from the bottom of the pool. She could see a massive black body snared in the bonds of stars. She knew who it was – the wolf – but she kept pulling.

  Its head reared above the water, its great jaws dripping, its dead eyes on her. The runes around her shrieked and clamoured. She felt the connection between herself and it, knew that she had been shown their destinies were linked. It was looking for something, its nose twitched at the air, its tongue flicked as if trying to take taste from it.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ said Styliane.

  ‘Death,’ said the wolf.

  Styliane saw a vision – a foreign land under flame, warships pouring in across a grey sea towards a cold shore, men sweating in their armour, unsure of the reception they would receive. And then a girl standing amid destruction in a white land.

  ‘Who?’ said Styliane. She had not expected this. She had hoped the well would show her the way to take the rune from the girl and plant it inside the infant.

  ‘Death,’ said the wolf. ‘My death.’

  ‘Do not seek her,’ said Styliane. ‘If you die, the Norns’ broken story is over. The time of magic will be gone. I will die too.’

  She knew the man that the wolf had been was godly and she tried to appeal to his better feelings. But the wolf was heedless. It plunged into the water, the starry ropes snagging around Styliane’s hands, snagging her as she desperately tried to unravel them. They were pulling her under, pulling her down to death.

  The runes were screaming around her in ever widening orbits, fleeing her. It was time.

  ‘Now!’ she said.

  Freydis splashed forward through the water. She had the baby with her in her arms. Two Varangians dragged the unconscious girl between them.

  ‘Drown her?’

  ‘Drown her.’

  They plunged the girl’s head into the water and held it. Her rune expressed itself in her – a spear flying across a blue sky. The wind was like a fist, knocking Styliane down. Still she strove to untangle herself from the coils of stars. It was all right. The rune would not come near her when her own runes fled for fear of the wolf.

  The baby screamed. Freydis collapsed to her knees in the water and then fell backwards, the baby on top of her. The young woman was dead, the runes returned and Styliane shook free of the coils. Styliane lost consciousness, as if the ink of the sky had leaked into her mind.

  When she awoke, the tribe was gone. Only her guards and their camels remained.

  ‘Success?’ said Styliane.

  ‘Success.’ said Myskia.

  ‘Where is Freydis?’

  ‘Gone,’ said Myska. ‘She went with the . . A¯d.’

  ‘Why?’

  Myska shrugged. ‘No point asking. She’s gone. A pity. She was a strong warrior.’

  Styliane cast down her eyes. It would not do to be seen to cry over the loss of a servant. What had Freydis seen at the well?

  6 For Love

  Freydis could only travel so far with the tribe. They did not understand a woman alone. The tribesmen would not tolerate her for long. She had to spend time with the women, at the back of the column, and could only speak to Shaddad through his wives. Freydis was not Styliane. She had no riches or magical gifts for which custom might be ignored for a moment. She ate only what the men left. It was enough and she did not feel hungry.

  In the water of the well, as she’d held the little girl, something very odd had happened to her. She heard chiming and rain, a cool breeze sprang up. The rune hung in the air, whispering its name in a rush like the passing of an arrow – Tiwaz, the spear, bright as a star. It seemed vastly attractive to Freydis and she lifted her hand to take it, forgetting that she was supposed to hold up the baby for it to enter.

  The rune flew through her mind like a raid, screaming and howling. In an instant she relived all the battles she’d been in since she had left her home in Hordaland. She smelled the burning of the monastery, felt the crunch of the beach pebbles underfoot, the rushing, flashing sensations of the fight, everything fast and slow simultaneously. Her hand ached as if weary from the sword, her body buzzed as if slammed and battered by the frenzied defenders. The rune was all these things and it was a longship too, a spear through the surf cutting out around the bay, heavy with treasure.

  The rune took root inside her and she felt its shining tendrils coiling around her heart, singing and chiming and spear-rattling, shield-bashing. It came with cries of torment, of exultation, of elation at battles won and dejection at battles lost. She knew what had happened – the Volva had explained the true natur
e of magic to her.

  Styliane had lived a long time and had no one to confide in. In Freydis, silent and thoughtful, raised in the traditions of the old gods but believing in Christ, she found someone she could speak to. Freydis was her closest servant and never doubted her mistress’s magical gifts nor the truth of what she said. Odin was dead and must never live again to threaten the Christ god. If he did, Styliane would die and the people would fall to his worship, bringing destruction, evil and, eventually, damnation to the world.

  But now, a fragment of the god inside her, she did not know what to think. She knew only that the girl who had come carrying the rune to kill Styliane had been a great danger to her mistress and was now dead. Since she had no desire to be either of those things herself, she had fled with the tribe. The Varangians had not been sad to see her go. Styliane would pay them as a unit when she returned to Baghdad. With Freydis gone, there was one less warrior taking a share of the pot.

  In the shade of the evening’s camp, when it was cool enough to cook and to talk, she sipped a little water and looked out over the blue desert. She let the rune come to the forefront of her mind. It was not a restful presence at all but brimmed with a fitful aggression. Men were like that on the eve of battle. Freydis had never known such a feeling. She had taken up the sword because the men of her farms were always at sea, raiding. This left their women vulnerable to opportunistic raids by other Vikings. It was natural and necessary for women to know the use of arms and she had proven the best of her kinswomen at it – fast and accurate and, above all, dauntless. It frightened Freydis to face an armed man – it would frighten anyone who wasn’t mad or drugged – but her fear never stiffened her arm, nor slowed her swing. Rather it strengthened her. She had killed three men in her life before she had joined the Varangians – one on her own farm, backed by her dogs. Then she had killed her brother when he had returned from his raid with a poison wound. He had told her to do it and she had, holding a blanket over his face to smother him. The third was the man who tried to rape her when her longship was attacked. Freydis had no future on the hard stony ground of her farm, unsupported by her brother’s raiding, the sheep thin and sickly. She was headed to Ireland with a family of her neighbours. They’d hit trouble near Orkney when a boatload of violent men on their way east had attacked them. She’d thought her life was over then and it freed her of all restraint. The man who attacked her had laughed when she picked up her friend’s sword. She cut his head half off with it and he didn’t find it so funny.