Valkyrie's Song Read online

  ‘What is York like?’ asked Ithamar, one night when no one could sleep for the cold. They were in a tiny hill cave, just big enough for them to squeeze into, and the ground had been too hard to dig a pit fire, so the one they had gobbled all their wood too quickly.

  ‘It’s big,’ said Ceoluulf. ‘Bigger than anything you’ve seen in your life.’

  ‘And what are its people like?’ said Ithamar.

  ‘Rich ones, those that I’ve met,’ said Ceoluulf. ‘They say the markets have all the world’s wonders in them. A hippogriff of the east was sold there within living memory.’

  ‘You’ve never been there,’ said Tola.

  Ceoluulf snorted. ‘And why should I? There are men there who would cheerfully cut off my head and everyone would know me for a stranger. I meet its people when I rob them.’

  The cloud cleared and a bright moon came up so they set off before dawn, hungry and cold but glad of the warmth that movement would bring.

  As the yellow sun forged the sky into a cold blue blade, they crested a hill and looked out over a broad plain.

  Ithamar’s mouth dropped open and he said:

  ‘Woden spoke:

  “Vigrid is the plain where in fight shall meet

  Surt of fire and the gods;

  A hundred miles each way does it measure,

  And so are its boundaries set”.’

  ‘The end of the world,’ said Ceoluulf.

  Tola stared. The whole vast plain was studded with fires. In the valleys of her home the Normans had burned the farms but they had been isolated houses, set well apart. The plain in front of her was flecked with little villages and some not so little. All were on fire. All. In the far distance burned the biggest of them all – a vast plume of fire stretching up into the sky as if the land had given up on the sun to warm it and stretched up arms of fire to show it how it was done. York was burning.

  The soldiers swarmed the plain, horses at the trot.

  ‘I heard they had left it alone,’ said Ceoluulf.

  ‘They’ve just gone north first,’ said Ithamar, ‘and come round behind it.’

  ‘Why? Their lords would be pleased by this land, it’s so fertile,’ said one of the men.

  ‘When a farmer catches a fox on his lands he doesn’t train it as a guard dog,’ said Ithamar. ‘He cuts off its head and mounts it on his gate for all to see.’

  ‘This is a sermon on disobedience,’ said one of the men.

  ‘And the Normans are harsh priests. It is a sermon of fire.’

  ‘Where, then?’ said Ceoluulf.

  ‘To meet our benefactor,’ said Ithamar. ‘It changes nothing.’ He jabbed a finger towards a great forest of trees to the west of the town. ‘Wheldrake Wood. That is where she will be waiting.’

  Tola was almost deaf to what he said. ‘Do you think the people had warning?’ she asked. Screaming was in her head, panic and despair, she felt love sundered and smashed under pounding hooves, fire and destruction reigning as kings of the land and more. Down there on the plain something as old as death stirred. Her skin prickled as if pierced by thorns. She saw a shape like a battered cross floating above the woods, felt a desire like the downward pull of a mountainside drawing her towards it, saw fire flashing from it.

  There were other shapes there too. She couldn’t see them but she could sense them. They were calling to her in voices that chimed and breathed, that whispered and roared.

  The shape inside her, the absence, stirred, slinking to the forefront of her thoughts. It was a low wolf crawling forwards from the night of her mind. It threw back its head and howled, so loud that the voices of the symbols by the woods were drowned. Its voice was all the shrieking notes of terror that emerged from the valley, moulded like clay, made one thing.

  From behind her, way in the distance, she heard another voice, answering the one in her. This too was the call of a wolf but, instead of terror or agony, its voice brought nothing at all, no resonance or recollection. She could not read it. It was an end, a negation, a night that did not need a day to define it. Death? She thought so.

  She tore her mind free of the valley’s agonies and tried to send it towards the howling in the north to gain a better sense of it. She could not. She dare not. It was as if she stood on the ledge of a great precipice and any step would be her end.

  She looked out over the burning plain, towards the woods. The symbol there spoke no threat to her but it frightened her too. She had never seen anything like it, not even in her dreams. People represented themselves in different ways in her mind: as a bird on the wing, a swampy field, or even a moon over the meadows. These images were expressions of their mood or their habitual dispositions. The symbol in the wood was attached to no person, was not a picture or a representation of something but a thing in itself. It was strange and frightening yet it was more appealing than facing whatever it was that was howling into her head from the north.

  ‘What shall we do?’ said Ceoluulf. ‘We can’t go down there.’

  ‘Ask the girl,’ said Ithamar. ‘She is a seer. That’s why they want her.’

  ‘What then, girl, what? I don’t believe in seers but any idea’s better than none.’

  When she spoke, Tola didn’t really know what she said. It was the odd thing inside us, the winding, slinking shape that seemed to speak for her. ’Fear what follows us, not what is ahead.’

  Ceoluulf crossed himself.

  ‘Could we make it to the woods?’ said Ithamar.

  ‘I don’t know. With luck, maybe. Not in the day. We’ll need to wait for night.’

  Tola crossed herself. ‘There can be no waiting,’ she said. ‘We must press ahead.’

  ‘Then we’re dead,’ said Ceoluulf. ‘How many Normans do you think are down there?’

  ‘We can make the woods,’ said Tola. ‘I will guide you.’

  The men talked among themselves and were of the opinion that to go back was to die, of cold or starvation. To stay was to die.

  ‘To go on is to die too,’ said a bandit.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ceoluulf. He nodded towards the burning plain. ‘But it might be that we die warm.’

  13 The Opposite of Magic

  ‘You’re a northerner?’ said Loys.

  ‘Yes,’ said the boy.

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘I came with Hardrada’s army and when the English king threw us down I had nowhere to go. Our ships were burned and those that weren’t had run for home.’

  ‘So how did you finish up here?’

  ‘By luck. I was captured by the people of these farms but many of them are of my country, or their fathers were. An old man spoke up for me, a warrior of my land who had come with Canute.’

  Loys scented the air. He had a strange sense. The horizon towards the south seemed heavy. He would go there to seek the girl. The boy was a problem now. He wanted to travel as he’d travelled in the Dneiper Woods, the stone at his neck at night, in his pouch by day. The wolf inside him was not a domestic thing like a horse, to be let out or stabled as he chose. Always there was the chance that he would not be able to tie the stone back on, nor want to. He knew very well the smirking, self-satisfied feeling that came over him when the wolf stirred. It had taken a vision called by the sorceress Styliane to replace it last time. He would have to put it back on at the first hint of elation, to stop the spark before it became a fire to engulf his mind. But, as a human, the cold would dull his senses and put both him and the boy in danger.

  The boy watched Loys as he decided on a path. ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I have to find someone.’

  ‘A loved one?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘They’ll be dead if they’re around here. This is a place for hate, not love’

  Loys shrugged. ‘We’re not dead,’ he said.

&nbs
p; ‘You’re a Norman. They won’t kill you.’

  ‘They will. I expect Robert Giroie would like nothing better now.’

  ‘He was the chief of the band you were with?’

  ‘Yes.’ Loys turned to his chosen path. ‘We head south.’

  The boy was terribly slow, even in his boots and cloak. He shuffled like an old man but he didn’t complain about the cold and tried to remain in good humour. He sang a song as they went about warriors who walked ten days through a country of white bears to their ships and whose names were known ever after, and Loys could not be bothered to tell him to be quiet. If the Normans were close enough to hear them, they were close enough to see them among the winding valleys.

  They took a wrong turn – a path heading south veering suddenly and seemingly permanently east so they had to turn back. Loys looked at the snowy hills. He could go over them but he could not take the boy – he would die up there. He tried to distract him from the cold by asking him about his home.

  The boy’s name was Gylfa and he was the son of a great pirating family who went Viking from spring to autumn every year. He’d gone with them.

  ‘Though I confess I am not much of a fighter,’ he said.

  Loys thought that extraordinary. There were as many Viking cowards as in any other race of men but no northerner ever admitted to that fault. Gylfa must have been despised among his men, though Loys admired him for admitting it. So many men boasted of their bravery but were too cowardly to admit any trifling imperfection.

  ‘So what are your talents?’

  ‘I can smith,’ said the boy. ‘I think that saved me with the people here. They welcomed my skill with iron. To bend it if not to swing it.’

  How much had he changed that he found this admission startling? He himself had been a monk, no fighter at all, and had valued learning far above skill at arms. Swordsmanship did not hold up the dome of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, nor plan its aqueducts or build its bridges. The man he had been a century before spoke: ‘I am no swordsman myself.’

  ‘You killed the sentry very easily.’

  Loys laughed. ‘You learn a few tricks when you’ve been around as long as I have.’

  ‘Some trick.’

  ‘I am better with a pen.’

  ‘I don’t know what a pen is.’

  Loys shrugged. He had abandoned his books after Beatrice died. That alone should have told him he had had enough of the world.

  ‘I’m so cold with this wind at our backs,’ said Gylfa.

  ‘Walk in front of me,’ said Loys. ‘I will shelter you.’

  They came to a wood on the first night and dug a hole with their knives, built a platform of branches within it and put a roof of branches over it.

  ‘Tie this about my neck,’ said Loys, his smashed hand still making it hard for him to knot the cord for the stone.

  The boy tied the stone around Loys’s throat. ‘What is this?’

  ‘A ward against bad luck.’

  ‘Then take it back to the man who sold it to you, for I’d say it is faulty. Much as I enjoy your company.’ They lit a fire using Loys’s flint and tinder. They might be seen but better that than dead of the cold.

  ‘So you are Norman,’ said Gylfa.

  ‘Yes. Though I spent a long time in the east.’

  ‘Was there plunder?’

  ‘I didn’t go for plunder.’

  ‘For trade, then. Though where is the merchant who hasn’t paid in steel rather than gold when the odds favoured him?’

  ‘I was a scholar.’

  The boy looked nonplussed. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I was a man of learning. I read books.’

  ‘And books brought you gold?’

  Loys smiled. ‘No. They brought me the company of great men, which was poison to me.’

  ‘The favour of great men brings only joy,’ said Gylfa.

  Loys watched the flames. He had lived too long to argue. Once he had loved passionate debate but now he watched the sinking of the sun and the rising of the moon; saw the shooting green of spring and the falling gold of autumn as an animal sees them, without curiosity.

  The fire was smoky but it was near dusk. Perhaps it would not be seen. Loys dozed for a while, frozen on the back, a little too hot on the front, but glad of the sleep after the day’s efforts.

  ‘What will you do?’ said Gylfa.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Is there a world now? Is there a place for me?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Will you go east again? Will you take me with you?’

  ‘I am no sort of mentor, Gylfa. I am going on to find death. I saved you from an immediate danger. Perhaps we will go to somewhere you will be safe. I cannot promise that. I have my own destiny to follow, or rather to spin myself.’

  ‘So why did you save me?’

  ‘So I would not see the horror of your death.’

  ‘And that was all? Not for your honour or your soul?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why save me only to abandon me to death?’

  ‘I do not wish to kill you. I do not wish to see you die. But die you will, so I prefer to get you to a place where you will do that out of my sight.’

  Gylfa looked puzzled. ‘Then bid me walk into the woods alone.’

  ‘That would be to kill you. You may travel with me as far as I go and if you reach safety I’ll wish you well.’

  ‘Yet you say I will die?’

  ‘You are a man. You must die. Now or later. Time is an ocean and you and I are specks upon it. What difference does it make if a speck sinks on the first wave or the third? It is still sunk.’

  Gylfa pointed to Loys’s strange curved sword. ‘Then take out that and end your life,’ he said. ‘Today is no different to tomorrow, tomorrow to twenty years hence. If you believe what you say, sink now like a speck on the tide.’

  Loys pushed his foot towards the fire, so close it might burn his boots.

  ‘If it were that easy, I would.’

  ‘How could it be easier? You cut your throat and in ten breaths you are dead.’

  Loys kept quiet. He knew what he had seen at the World Well. Endless lives, endless rebirths. A tale played out down the centuries that had now ended but whose echoes were left sounding on through time – its players scrabbling in the chaos of existence, no meaning, no story, just the agony of glimpses of each other, of knowing connection and love only to see it swept away by death and the years.

  ‘You’re a hypocrite, then,’ said Gylfa. ‘You say you don’t value your life but you do. Why are you so cowardly as to fear to see a man die?’

  Gylfa’s face drained as he clearly feared he had said too much. Loys wondered about his frankness. Call Varangian warriors hypocrites, even jokingly, and you were likely to encounter the honesty of an axe or sword.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Gylfa.

  ‘You want my advice,’ said Loys, ‘I’d offer yourself to the Normans as a slave. Theirs is the future.’

  ‘You are Norman,’ said Gylfa.

  ‘I am, or once was, a Norman. Now I am just an old man seeking death,’ said Loys. ‘I will have no part in the future of this country, no lands and no cattle. Go to the south if you can. Offer yourself there. It’s warmer and the fields are bountiful. You can live out your days in peace.’

  There was movement through the trees. A rider. No point in putting out the fire now, they would have been seen. Three, four, five riders. A party of Giroie’s men – there was a big dappled horse Loys recognised.

  Gylfa grabbed Loys’s arm. ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘Take off this stone,’ said Loys, tapping the pebble at his neck. He felt terror grip him but mastered it. He knew well it was a useless emotion, the vestige of a man he had been. He might die but he would
live again. And even if he was to die forever, his beating heart, his sweat and his dry mouth would not save him from that fate.

  ‘That will not save you!’ Gylfa’s eyes were wide with panic.

  ‘Do as I say or we will die!’ But the boy was gone, running away through the trees. The riders hallooed, wheeling their horses, each man a dragon in the steam of his horse’s breath. Loys took out his knife, left-handed, and cut away the thong. The stone dropped to the ground and all his senses fired. His heart rate calmed and his mouth moistened and then became wet. He felt the shift in his perception from human to wolf, from prey to predator.

  There was no point trying to use his sword with his hand so broken. The Normans had no lances, just swords, and he was thankful for that.

  The horses came trotting in.

  ‘We’re to bring you back alive, foreigner.’

  Loys bent and picked up the wolfstone, slipped it into the top of his boot, away from his skin.

  ‘Still fiddling with your pagan icon?’

  The horse and the man crackled with a deep aroma like the crisping of bacon. He smelled the sweat, the shit and piss of man and beast. Already the animals were nervous of him, a steel tang to their smell, lathering even in the cold.

  Loys had his knife in his good hand and loosened his fingers on the handle. He would need to be quick.

  ‘Kill him, Filocé, and we’ll be back in a hot farmhouse within a couple of hours.’

  ‘Giroie wants him brought back in one piece.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He wants to bring him before the king. I think he wants this man’s lands after he dies.’

  ‘I have no land,’ said Loys.

  ‘He has no land, Filocé. We should kill him.’ The rider pointed his sword at Loys.

  ‘He has land. No one who talks so fine and knows so much is landless. See his sword, see his fine clothes. He has land and a few days in the company of King William’s inquisitors will reveal where it is.’