Wolfsangel c-1 Page 5

  Authun felt pleased he had drawn first blood but was also alarmed that he had been wounded. But then the king who struck the blow felt something in his side. An identical wound to the one he had inflicted had appeared. The king could not stop, could not back down, he was incapable of even having such an idea. So he struck again and hit again and both kings took a wound to the forearm. Then one to the ear, then the hand. Who hit and who received the blows became unclear, but Authun kept fighting because that was the only option for someone raised to believe the sword was the answer to everything.

  One thing was plain to Saitada, though: if the fight went on she was about to lose her children’s guardian.

  Clinging to the boys — she wouldn’t leave them — she sprang out into the rain to interpose herself between the warriors.

  ‘No!’ she shouted. ‘Enough!’ But her words, incomprehensible to the kings, were lost in the rain, and suddenly it was as if a giant hand had lifted her from the ground and she was shooting up through the sodden air, up the cliff, up and up and up. Then she heard a strange childish voice speak to her.

  ‘Die,’ it said.

  She was falling, squeezing her babies to her. Then it was light and quiet and the same voice spoke again.

  ‘Forgive me, Lord Loki,’ it said.

  ‘Sister, we all make mistakes. Forget the error, and forget me too,’ said Saitada, though it wasn’t her voice. It was the voice of the strange traveller, the boys’ father. And then she was on the ground below the rock, and Authun, bloodstained and panting, was standing over her. It was dawn and the sun warmed her face.

  ‘They have sent a boy to guide us,’ said the king. ‘See to the children and then we’ll get going.’ Strangely, she understood him, though he was still speaking his own language.

  A pale child of about eight was in front of them, laden with protective charms, arm rings, amulets and talismans.

  ‘Follow,’ he said.

  And they set off, on the arduous journey across the Troll Wall and up to the witches’ realm.

  5

  The Loss of Sons

  The cliff was perilous and it was becoming clear to Authun that they would not reach the top. The woman had finally yielded her children and they were strapped wriggling and squalling to the king, the mother checking their bindings with irritating regularity.

  Authun still shivered to look at her but he could not yet cast her aside. He shivered still more when he thought of the ordeal that faced him in meeting the witch queen.

  ‘Do you know where you are going, child?’ he asked the boy.

  The boy just kept on climbing.

  It had been a still day at the bottom, but here, an inexorable ten days up, along winding paths, down others, braving terrible scrambles and awful jumps, the wind almost flattened the climbers to the rock. Authun had thought the slave girl would never make it. There was a path, not that you would see it from the bottom, but it was so narrow in places that even Authun, who had stared down death so many times without blinking, felt a tightness in his stomach as he trusted his life to a root or a fingerhold. He did not look down.

  They slept tied on to the cliff with ropes and pegs the boy had with him, and surrounded by charms. The child seemed not to sleep but spent the night chanting a strange song to a broken tune in a language Authun did not understand. The only thing that troubled the king’s dreams was the anticipation of what was to come.

  And then the overhang became serious. Impassable. How had he reached the witches before? Authun couldn’t remember. He remembered only the prophecy, the witch queen’s presence and the dark.

  Inside the clouds, visibility down to a few paces, the path finally gave out. The child guide seemed to have missed the entrance to the caves. Authun felt the fear drying his mouth. He was weak, the girl was weaker. They wouldn’t survive the climb down, even if the boy agreed to guide them. The boy clambered back around Authun, back around Saitada and then, just visible in the clinging mist, he beckoned them. There in the rock was a gap, no more than a crack. It was only a shoulder’s width and scarcely as tall as a man. Authun would not be able to pass through it with the children, and even without them would have to turn sideways and wriggle his way in. He peered into the blackness and smelled the deep earth. He could see nothing at all but he had to go on. He untied the infants and gave them to their mother. Then he slid inside after the boy. There was only the weak light from outside to see by. He could see an arm’s length, maybe a little more, in front of his face but after that nothing. The mother passed her wailing children in. She was committed to Authun now, whether she liked it or not, and had no other option than to follow.

  Authun tied the infants to him and watched the girl climb through. He had come to admire her and had certainly known men with less resolve. She needed no coaxing, morale building or bullying. She just followed.

  The child guide stood very close to them and unwound a long cord from his waist. He passed it to the king, and gestured for him to tie it to himself and allow Saitada to take it too. She did. Then they went down into the dark.

  Thoughts came and went in the blackness, as Authun fought to keep his footing and protect the children. The entrance on the Wall, he thought, must be how the witches admitted their few guests. It was too impractical as an everyday access. How did they eat? How did they come forth to visit in the night, to sit at the end of a stunned farmer’s bed and barter magic for children? There must be other ways in and out, thought Authun, unless they could fly — as was the rumour.

  In the dark he became acutely aware of his breathing, of that of the children and the woman behind him, and of his footfalls, heavy and uncertain. He lost purchase on time. At one point he heard water and felt the boy take his hand and thrust it into a stream. He drank and helped Saitada do the same.

  They rested a while and he passed the babies to the girl to be fed. He was aware of how young and fragile they felt as he gave them over. How had the girl endured this journey so soon after giving birth? He admired her. Then the descent continued, sightless. His hands scraped on rock; he stumbled; he felt the boy push him back as they slowed to clamber over a rock fall or squeeze through a bone-crushing passageway. Authun felt terribly vulnerable and hated it. The dark was an enemy he couldn’t fight; there a child could maroon him and he would be doomed. On they went, down and down, first cold then hot. They rested again, and then again. Had they been inside a day? Authun thought so. Down, down, down through galleries blind and cold, crawling into tiny fissures that scraped his face and arms as he wriggled through them. Standing room could have been just out of reach to his left or right and he wouldn’t have known. And still down, the children’s wails echoing through vast chambers or deadened by long coffins of rock.

  How long now? Two days? Perhaps. Breathing became difficult; balance had to be fought for. The air itself seemed weak and lifeless. And then Authun felt the rope go slack to his front and heard childish footsteps going away. He pulled the taught end towards him and held Saitada to him with a tenderness that had never come as naturally before. He heard his own voice shaking.

  ‘We will overcome. Do not let go of the rope.’ He felt to see that she had tied it to her wrist. She had. ‘Sleep,’ he said. He didn’t expect her to understand but she did — not just his words but his feelings of concern and tenderness. She sat down. What else was there to do? Moisture clung to Authun’s skin; he was sweating and then he was shivering. He felt around where he was sitting, aware that he could be a step away from a terrible drop. He pulled the girl to him, presenting her children to her. The terrible danger of their situation made them seem even more precious to him. The girl fed the babies and Authun struggled with the fixings of his scabbard, releasing the cords. When the mother passed the children back he tied their feet to his belt, stowing his sword under the boots he used for a pillow. For the first time in his life he valued something more than his weapon in a time of danger.

  It seemed to Authun that sleep came — but what is waking
and what is sleeping in such darkness? The body has its rhythms of hunger and excretion, but when hunger is constant and water scarce these cease to mark time. The woman’s milk failed and the children’s wailing became constant. Then, after a while, it ceased.

  ‘Who?’

  A voice was close in the dark, the word like a note on a flute.

  ‘Lady?’

  ‘Who?’ Again, like the hoot of an owl, its breath near to him, foul and hot.

  Authun imagined some giant bird next to him in the dark, picking him over in its claws.

  ‘I am Authun, king of the Horda. I bring tribute of gold and slaves to the palace of the witch queen.’

  ‘Who?’

  Authun felt something climb over him. It was a human form, frail and light but still the king had to restrain himself from reaching for the sword. No. Whatever it was, they were at its mercy.

  ‘Who?’

  Authun breathed in. Would the Valkyries find him down here, he wondered, to take him to Valhalla to feast for ever? Or would it be just that damp dark, always. He reached to his side. Then he realised the cords on his belt were loose and the children were gone.

  A guttering flame burned the king’s eyes and he moved to shield them. In a glimpse he saw, leaning over Saitada and the babies, a tiny old woman in a white shift. Above her, in a flicker of gold, almost like a flame herself in that light, stood the witch queen, that grim child, pale and beautiful, crowned in an impossible tangle of golden cables, rubies, emeralds, diamonds and sapphires, like a dragon’s hoard in miniature.

  At her throat was a rich necklace whose jewels burned with a light familiar to Authun. It was the light he’d seen as he sacked the five towns, the light of the burning village from which he’d taken the child, the light of destruction. Then it was gone, and he could see nothing.

  A baby was thrust into Authun’s hands. Then some sort of object. It was a small leather bottle, half full with liquid, he could feel. No one spoke, though he understood what it was — medicine to give his wife, to complete the deception.

  ‘The mother will come with me?’ said the king.

  ‘Who?’ The older woman’s idiot hoot again.

  Authun must have been dreaming because all around him tiny lights came on and went out, the faces of the strange sisters appearing for an instant and then vanishing again. Wherever they were, it seemed, was wreathed in gold — arms and armour, cups and plates, fine arm rings and gilded chests of coins. The king used the light to locate his sword. His hand closed on it and he had to will the tension from his fingers. If he was going to fight he would need to be relaxed: too tight a grip would rob him of speed.

  ‘The mother?’

  ‘Who?’

  Authun was finding his ordeal almost unbearable. He longed for the real light, for the feel of the breeze and the taste of rain. And then it was dark again and he didn’t know for how long.

  He awoke by the bank of a river. The Moonsword was gone but the baby was at his side. He was terribly thirsty and plunged his head into the water and drank like a dog. Then he turned to the child. It was filthy but looked well enough. It was crying, at least, which Authun took for a sign of health. He looked at the Troll Wall, far in the distance, still immense. He washed the child and thought of all the sorrow that had surrounded it up until that point, the deaths and the deception that had brought them to where they were. Even the death of the bandits played on his mind. There were his kinsmen left on the river beach; Varrin, weighed down by the byrnie, swallowed by the sea; that poor girl with her hideous face — what had become of her? At the very best she had lost one of her babies. At the worst? Still alive and alone in that awful dark for as long as it took for thirst to kill her. On any other day of his life Authun would have regarded these things as simply the way of fate, unpleasant briars he’d had to pick through to get to the clear path ahead. But though he didn’t know her name, he thought of Saitada and, alone by the water, Authun the Pitiless wept.

  Then he wrapped the child in his cloak and headed for the cabin, five days away at a comfortable pace, where his wife lay supposedly pregnant. He looked at the baby. It needed a wet nurse and wouldn’t last that long. He would need to do the journey in much less than that. Never mind. After the stagnant air of the cave it would be good to feel the exhaustion of movement. By the water’s edge on his way he saw hoof prints, maybe two riders. He only had his knife, but if he could kill a horseman then he could be at the cabin in perhaps a couple of days, maybe less if he could get a second horse. More deaths would be needed before he reached his homeland.

  6

  Wolfsangel

  Had Authun been of a more reflective nature, he might have wondered why the witches had been so generous as to grant him the son he longed for. He would have suspected unasked-for generosity in any rival king and expected it as a right from a visiting ambassador, but the witches belonged to another realm entirely. They were in the sphere of the supernatural, the unguessable, similar to providence or fate, and he didn’t question their gift any more than he would have a whale beaching on his shores, or a good wind for his longships on a raid.

  It would have surprised him to learn that the witches were acting from something as mundane as fear.

  Though the women of the Troll Wall were considered monsters by the people and kings from whom they took their tribute, they were really not so very different to the terrified farmers, jarls and thralls who left their gifts of food, drink and children on the mountainside.

  The fisherman who had lost his boy, for instance, thought of the witches as monsters. He couldn’t say if he had been waking or dreaming that midnight when the air in his house had seemed as tight and cold as a compress on his skin and the thing he had glimpsed from the side of his eye vanished when he turned to look at it properly. The lad had woken in the morning and said the women had called to him, so the fisherman had taken him to the mountain. There was no other way, he knew. The consequences of refusal would be visited on all his people, not just his own family.

  The man had watched trembling as his son walked away and was swallowed by the fog. He couldn’t have imagined that the witches felt anything at all, least of all fear. But the women were afraid.

  What is prophecy? It is a wide thing of many forms. We don’t call a person who anticipates a cat will knock over a cup and moves to catch it a prophet. We don’t maintain that the ability to look at the clouds and say it will rain makes you a seer. Even in the summer we know the cold of winter will come, but no one claims magic powers for that. These predictions are part of our everyday experience of the future, not a veiled and mysterious thing but something that connects directly to the present.

  In the crags and caves of the Troll Wall, behind that door in the face of the cliff that you would not see, could not see, if you were not invited there, the witch queen’s powers of prophecy were not unrelated to those possessed by us all. The boundaries between the present and the future are not as strong as we imagine, and the witch queen had sweated, frozen, starved and hallucinated until hers were not strong at all.

  Prophecies were not something external to her, something she made or said; they were part of her consciousness, the way she saw the world. They were like a language she spoke. And for a year before the queen had sent Authun on his mission, that language had hissed softly of a threat. It did not arrive wholly formed one day, but rather started like a suspicion or even a rumour — a whisper beneath the rush of the cave streams or a cold that crept too far into the earth and left her shivering even in the wolf chamber, where the breath of a fettered god heated the rock so it was painful to touch.

  The feeling grew in her as she sat in the dark, and it grew in the other sisters. As the witches eroded the distinction between today and tomorrow, they blurred the lines between me, you, she and it. Their experiences were like possessions that could be lent, borrowed or shared.

  Minor magics were used to clarify the sense of foreboding. The sisters lit a whale-blubber candle and asked
it for a vision. They could have asked anything to direct them but they chose the candle because it had once been a living thing and so its connections to the outside world were more solid than those of the rocks of the caves. First the candle revealed its past, as it would to anyone, the fish stink filling the cave. The sisters, though, could sense more. They breathed in the stress that had seeped into the fat with the whale’s beaching, its discovery by hunters and its killing. The candle burned on, and they began to see that, for the prophecy, the quality of its light was the important thing.

  Then a sister, because it felt right, reached forward and snuffed out the flame. The light disappeared but the thought of the light, its residue, filled the witches’ minds. Underneath the sickly yellow of the flame, they thought, was a darker colour, a bright slate, the colour of the sky before a storm. The link was followed, and rainwater was brought down in a cup from the top of the Wall, and it was noticed that the water felt heavier than normal water, or rather it held a sentiment, a wish. The water, thought the sisters, still wanted to fall, to be rain again. The smell of it too was sharp, like ozone. The link to the coming storm seemed stronger.

  A witch went to the top of the Wall to observe the birds. They had moved from the north face of the mountain and come around to the south. In the valley, she could sense, other animals were moving to shelter. The gulls had come inland and insects were burrowing into the earth. Why were these things happening? Because the witches were looking. The animals didn’t move to offer auguries to the ordinary people of the mountains.