Lord of Slaughter (Claw Trilogy 3) Read online

  She needed to walk, to get out of that freezing little room and stretch her legs a while.

  Pregnancy was gruelling. How long had it been? Six months? Seven? Her body seemed full and heavy as if she’d taken an enormous drink of water. She was beginning to waddle when she walked.

  Beatrice lay on the bed, hoping Loys would come home early and they could go to see the markets. She had a great desire to eat figs, which she took in itself for evidence of her condition. She should have asked him to get her some.

  She had told him her dreams had receded since she had come to Constantinople. In fact they had grown worse. She was always wandering that riverbank where the trees stood like things of pale stone, where the moon silvered the water, where something blundered and snuffled in the woods that stretched away from the bank. The thing in the trees seemed closer now. It sought her. To do what? Harm her. Yes, harm her, but without intention, like the smashing power of the sea, like the tree that falls to crush and kill, as destructive and inhuman as the wind. She did not forget the fear of her dreams when she woke, it was always there, like the bell that tolled the hours.

  Only Loys made her feel better. When she woke from her nightmares to find him at her side, she wrapped her arm around him and felt safer in his human warmth.

  She got off the bed and returned to the window. Down the hill, stretched the houses of the lighthouse quarter, falling in a ramshackle tumble to the edge of the bright blue waters of the Golden Horn and the lighthouse gate – the only sea gate where they admitted unlicensed foreigners. Sitting at this window was her sole entertainment, though it was good entertainment. The city streets fascinated her, the people so varied and so many – the Moors with their skin like ink, the easterners in their desert wraps, the many colours of the bureaucrats’ robes, who seemed to be everywhere. She watched the squabbles of the market traders, the little children sneaking in to steal fruit or a loaf, the world travellers disembarking among the press of frauds and thieves.

  Over the water the blue hills rose up towards the big white church of St Dimitri. A faint haze smudged the horizon and she wondered if that was usual in the city at that time of year.

  She did miss the court, her family and the familiar faces of Rouen. She longed to hear how her little sisters Emma and Hawis were getting on. The memory of them running in the woods playing hoodman’s blind made her laugh but brought a tear to her eye too. Her maids said ladies shouldn’t play such rough games, but they were Franks, employed by her father to teach his girls nice manners. Little Hawis had told her maid that she was a Viking’s daughter and, as such, needed to toughen up because northern women were not like the fainting Frankish ladies. When their husbands beat them they didn’t weep and whine but picked up a stick and thrashed them back.

  ‘That is not a natural way to behave,’ said the maid Barza.

  ‘Neither is pissing in your husband’s soup, but that’s what my auntie Freydis did when my uncle beat her,’ said Hawis.

  Beatrice wondered if she would ever see her sisters again. If the child inside her was a boy, then perhaps. She bowed her head. And if it wasn’t a boy? Then she’d just have to try again and again until one appeared. Maybe she should even buy a child in a market and present him to her father as his heir. The more she thought about the idea the better it seemed.

  And what of her mother? Now tears came down her face in great gouts. There had to be a way back. But not while she dreamed those dreams. She had run away with Loys for love, true, but that that wasn’t her only reason – she wasn’t so stupid.

  Plenty of noble ladies had their loves and managed to keep them close despite the husbands their families had chosen. Minstrels, tutors, advisers, merchants even, all had a legitimate claim to regularly attend on a lady. An old, sleepy or bribable chaperone made everything possible, particularly if you had a warlike husband who was always away fighting.

  No, she knew why she had fled. The dreams. Something sought her and at Rouen it found her. She needed to move, to hide. She loved Loys dearly but she would have found him a place in her life in Rouen had she been able.

  She remembered that morning – the frosty predawn when she had crept out of the hall to saddle her horse and slip off to meet Loys. She had looked for him in the woods but then had noticed something strange – the dawn was not coming and the moon was still high. It was the middle of the night. Why had her father’s guards not at least questioned her? Had she woken no one, not even a dog, as she left?

  It was cold, very cold. She turned her horse for home but around her the hoar frost seemed to glow, her horse’s breath clouding the air under the sickle moon. The woods felt full of eyes and she dearly wished to be home. She spurred the horse, but the animal wouldn’t budge.

  A noise behind her in the trees.

  ‘Loys?’

  ‘Loys is not here but the night is cold. Won’t you share my fire?’

  An extraordinary man stood twenty paces from her. He was tall and his hair rose in a red shock. Stranger, he was scandalously underdressed, just the skin of a wolf tied around his midriff to cover his shame, a long feather cloak on his back. A fire burned further away in the woods. How had she not seen that?

  Beatrice kicked the horse again but it didn’t move, standing as if entranced.

  ‘Come, lady, the ice is cold and my fire is warm. Though you, I think, have a chill in you no flame can dispel.’

  ‘It’s not seemly for me to be here with a man on my own. Go away from me, sir. My father does not like to hear of vagabonds on his lands, let alone ones who approach his daughter so boldly.’

  ‘You are a beauty. The god always wants beauty and lives that are painful to lose. He could go to the starving, to the sick and the imprisoned and take them – and take them he does – but it is the lovely life he wants the most, the life like yours. Dismount.’

  Beatrice did so, though she didn’t want to, as if her body was not her own to command.

  ‘Who do you speak of?’

  ‘Why, who else? Old man death himself. Lord Slaughter. King Kill. The back-stabbing, front-stabbing, anywhere-you-like-and-plenty-of-places-you-don’t-stabbing murder god. Odin, one-eyed corpse lord, corrosive and malignant in his schemes and his stratagems. But of course you know all this, you’ve met him before.’

  ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about. It sounds like idolatry.’

  ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘They call us idol worshippers, while they are on their knees before their painted saints. And what do the saints ever bring them? Misery and death at every turn.’ He clicked his fingers and pointed at her. ‘Ask what I bring you.’

  ‘What do you bring me?’

  ‘Why, me,’ said the man. He bowed and walked forward to take Beatrice’s hand. ‘And, lady, there is no richer gift.’

  Beatrice felt very odd indeed. Was this another fever? She had seen this fellow in her fevers before, she was sure, but this seemed so real.

  She walked with him through the wood towards the little fire. Beside it he spread his feather cloak and lay down. Beatrice did not think it odd that it surrounded the fire in thick down for twenty paces about. It looked so warm and wonderful. She dearly wanted to test the comfort of the feathers. She lay down too, next to the man, all fear of him gone. The feathers were truly very comfortable, more comfortable than any bed she had ever lain on. Beatrice gazed into the man’s eyes and thought they were the green eyes of a wolf. She wanted to confide in him.

  ‘I have dreams.’

  ‘So do I,’ he said, ‘and sometimes it’s easy to fall in love with a dream. I did once.’

  ‘Am I a dream?’ She didn’t know quite what she said.

  ‘The very idea! You, lady, are reality. You are to where the dreams of gods fall with a thump.’

  ‘I go to a place by a river and there is a wall full of candles. I cannot touch them.’

  ‘Are you the only one there?’

  ‘There are others.’

  ‘What others?’

  ‘
A boy who seems lost and a thing in the darkness. I cannot see it but I know it is there.’

  ‘It is a wolf and it hunts you.’

  ‘Why is the wolf hunting me?’

  ‘To love you and to kill you.’

  ‘Why would he kill someone he loved?’

  ‘Well I don’t think he means to. It’s just that he always associates with such disreputable types.’

  Beatrice breathed in the aroma of the man’s skin – like incense and smoke, like the freshness of rain, like iron in the hand.

  ‘Why does he follow me?’

  ‘For what you have inside you. The thing that howls and calls. The wolf trap rune. You are a mighty bait, lady, irresistible to a creature of such palate.’ Something seemed to stir within her and she saw a shape, a long thin line with a sharp slash through it. She heard a howl in her mind and a shiver went through her flesh. The shape was calling to the wolf, however odd that seemed.

  ‘What can I do to escape him?’

  ‘I have told you enough. For that, lady, I require something more from you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You have been too long a maiden.’

  The threat was clear but Beatrice did not feel scared. The man’s statement felt curiously reasonable.

  ‘Can you truly tell me how I can escape him?’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘How do I know you are telling the truth?’

  ‘I am a god.’

  ‘There is but one god.’

  ‘So forcefully stated,’ he said, ‘and so obviously untrue.’

  The air danced with points of light, like the silver shimmers that appear in the eyes on rising too quickly, but unfading. Snowflakes fell, as big as saucers, and yet she was warm.

  ‘Tell me and I will give you what you want.’

  ‘Give me what I want and I will tell you,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me a little, so I may know if you are trying to deceive me.’

  ‘Give me a little, so I may know if you are trying to deceive me.’

  He undid the brooch that held the neck of her tunic together and dropped it onto the feathers. Then slid his hand inside the robe’s neck onto her breast. Her body tingled, her skin tightened, a delicious chill like going out into the frost after too long in a stuffy room.

  ‘If he insists on following you,’ he said, ‘take him to the place he would least like to go.’

  He kissed her and she inhaled his scent. It seemed so complex – like a bright stream, like wet grass and like earth, like the sea on a sunny day, but under it all the odour of burning. The moon was a sharp crescent, the morning star sparkling like a jewel next to it.

  ‘Where is that place?’

  ‘You will know it. Now I will know you.’

  He lifted up her skirts and did what he had asked to do and it seemed to Beatrice that, in her pleasure and her abandon, the world opened to her, gave up its secrets. She felt the lives of everything around her, of the trees with their questing roots, of the swallows never still, of all creation in its tumult and uproar, its wild delight. And when it was done she slept. The sun and the shouts woke her.

  ‘Beatrice! Beatrice!

  The winter sun was bright. The man, with the feather cloak had gone, taking the night with him. Loys bent over her, his bundle of firewood at his side.

  ‘What happened to me?’

  ‘You fell from your horse! Are you all right?’

  ‘I think so.’ She hugged him, and he kissed and comforted her.

  So it had been a dream, a vision brought on by a faint. But it didn’t feel like a dream.

  In the blue evenings of the weeks that followed, walking the earthen ramparts of her father’s fortress, she heard the voice of a wolf in the hills and something inside her trembled. She understood what the wolf was saying, or rather caught the message in its voice. It was lonely and calling for its friends. But when she dreamed, the same voice called for her and she found herself standing in her father’s hall at midnight, wandering outside to look at the hills.

  Something was coming for her and the idea had assumed an unreasonable importance in her mind. In sleep she went back to the river where she had been in her fever, back to the wall where little lamps burned and where something crawled and crept towards her in her bed. But someone else waited unseen, someone who wanted to help her. When she woke she’d seen Loys and felt that with him the dream demons could not harm her.

  The instinct to leave Rouen had been just that – an instinct. ‘You will know,’ the strange man had said. She did know. The thing that sought to harm her was there and she had to run from it.

  A disturbance in the street, men’s voices, Greeks. She craned from the window to see what it was, but couldn’t. Boots tramped on her stairs – a man’s footfall. It wasn’t Loys. This fellow jingled like a shook purse. She recognised the sound. A hauberk of mail. A warrior was outside her door.

  She went to the back room to hide, not knowing what to do. The door was bolted but any man who wanted to have it down could do so in a second. She had only the little knife she used to cut her thread. She took it up as a voice, thick and foreign, spoke loudly in Greek.

  ‘Open. Lady Beatrice, we know you and your station. Open the door and we will do you no harm.’

  Beatrice crossed herself. She came back into the main room and ran to the window. The street was too far to jump.

  ‘No man enters here without a chaperone!’

  Too late. A heavy blow, the door smashed in and she stood facing the soldiers.

  7 The Road to the Dark

  The wolfman trembled before the walls of Constantinople. They were vast, stretching from the water up the hill as far as he could see, almost too bright to look at in the morning sun, burning like he imagined the walls of the city of the gods would burn. Could Asgard be so vast?

  The army had disembarked at a port ten miles down the coast so it could march into the city and receive the accolades of its people. The Varangians – Vikings and their kin from the Russian steppes – led the column. The wolfman was behind, with the emperor’s Greek guard, who marched leaderless and subdued. He had watched their great men hang.

  It had been a weak and yellow dawn, the sun trapped beneath deep cloud, burning like a poor candle seen through the vellum of a window. The light had come up but the rain had not relented. They hanged them on a plum tree, one after the other. Everything was wet through and the hanging ropes were swollen and would not slip, so they’d tied the ropes as tight as they could, thrown them over a branch and pulled, leaving the men to dance and throttle. None of the victims said a word and none of their men made any protest. It was, said the soldiers, the Roman way.

  Their job was to guard the emperor, and someone had got through. There was no excuse. Many among the Hetaeriean ranks thought Basileios was being lenient. Other emperors might have ordered the regiment decimated – every tenth man killed.

  Now the army had outrun the bad weather and the day was bright under a sharp sun. The wolfman, though, scented something on the horizon. Smoke. A sooty rain had fallen on the battle and the wolfman tasted it here, even under the heat of the Greek autumn sun.

  The front of the column burst into clamour as the army passed through the shanty town that spilled from the city walls like litter from the back of a house. Already hostile eyes were on him; a crowd jeered and a couple of bystanders threw mud and stones. The guards barked at them to stop and, dazzled by the exotic sight of the emperor and his new northern army, they forgot the wolfman as they poured forward to acclaim the victors.

  The army arrived at the city gates. The wolfman looked to the head of the procession, where the emperor rode his white horse. On the journey home the emperor had put on plain soldier’s clothes but now he wore a sparkling crown and a great collar flashing with emeralds and rubies.

  The emperor addressed the Varangians. The wolfman couldn’t understand what he said. He knew only a handful of words in Greek and he’d used all of them when he’d aske
d the emperor to kill him. The boy who had been in the tent translated into Norse. The Vikings would be guests outside the city walls for a while. When proper accommodation had been arranged for them they would enter. In the meantime, their every need would be met and all services provided. The northerners grumbled and moaned – some saying they had been tricked – but then a big Viking dressed all in red spoke.

  He said the emperor honoured his promises and the Vikings would be well rewarded. As a gesture of goodwill, the Varangians would be paid within a week for the work they had done for Vladimir even though they had fought for Constantinople for less than a month. And tents would be delivered to them.

  This assuaged their anger and the men pulled off the road and down the slope towards the sea, dragging their baggage with them, women, children, dogs and flocks of goats and sheep all trailing alongside. The Norsemen travelled light, used to sleeping on their ships, stretching the sail across as a canopy. Few had tents. Much of their treasure was in their ships, under guard down the coast, and so there were few carts or horses to move – just their personal possessions and weapons, their families and their livestock.

  The Hetaereia advanced to the gate and the wolfman found himself near the front of the army behind the standard bearers, one carrying an image of St Helena, the other the sickle and star banner of Constantinople.

  Past him came two riders, one in blue and one in green. They went up to the gates and hammered on them with gold-tipped staves.

  ‘Open in the name of the emperor!’

  ‘There is only one emperor, that is Basileios, born in the purple, king of all the world! The gates open for none but he!’ It wasn’t one man who spoke but hundreds, it seemed to the wolfman.