‘It is not enough,’ said Saitada.
He stretched out his hand and she saw the smith asleep in his bed. He was drawn and pale but something obscured her vision. It was smoke. The thatch was on fire. The smith woke and tried to move but his wounds wouldn’t allow him to. She saw him panic as the fire took hold.
Saitada smiled as she watched.
‘You are a power, lady, a power,’ said the god. ‘The elves sing your fame and the dwarfs of the earth despair for they know that in all their art they will never make anything to compare to your depthless beauty.’
‘I would know your name, sir,’ said Saitada. She felt something strange sweeping over her, something she had never felt from a man before: love as more than an idea, as something present and intense, like her forgotten mother might have cherished her baby girl.
‘My name?’ said the traveller. ‘Name? Lady, like you my magnificence cannot be contained by just one. First, you must know me better. You must see what I am up against.’
The odour of blood and fire filled the glade. There was a clamour and a hammering like the sound of the smith’s shop increased a thousand-fold, metal on metal, metal on wood. Saitada knew it by instinct — the noise of battle. At the edge of the glade stood a tall grey man with a beard, wearing a wide-brimmed hat. He had a patch over one eye and two huge wolves lay panting at his feet, their teeth as big as knives. The expression on the man’s face was terrible. Saitada had seen it before. It was the look men wore at cock fights or when cheering two dogs to rip into each other, the look the smith’s friends had worn as they’d held her down — a look of delight in violence and lust for more.
‘See Odin, the king of the gods in his hungers,’ said the traveller. ‘See how he would know and consume and control. Father, let go!’
The old man said nothing, just stood there frozen in his expression of malicious joy. The traveller went across and flicked the old man on the nose, but he did not respond.
‘He would eat the world!’ said the traveller. ‘He would know it all, devour every mystery until the whole of creation came at his call. He’s mad, you know. He drank so deeply of the knowledge well but the waters splashed on that burning hunger and boiled all his brains. Yet still he wants to know, ever more, ever more.’
‘I would forget,’ said Saitada.
‘Of course you would. It’s the only sane thing to do. Not knowing is what gives the world its beauty. Who would know why the sun on the dew on a May morning makes the heart sing? That pervert would. Would you have no love, old man Odin, would you snaffle down even a girl’s secret heart’s desires for a gorgeous flame-haired fellow and spew them out on a table in maps and runes? Would you chart the very stir-rings of the heart? Well, lady, I think we should give this greedy knowledge glutton, this filthy wisdom hog, a right royal bite on the bum, don’t you?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Saitada, though she didn’t really understand what he meant. She only knew she wanted to please him.
‘That’s where you and I come in,’ said the traveller. ‘Would you know my imperfections, lady?’
‘I know all I need to know of the imperfections of men,’ she said, ‘though I think you are not a man.’
‘Whatever gave you that idea?’ he said as the fiery moon turned green and points of emerald light began to dance around the glade. The old man disappeared, then one wolf, then another, its body first, then its head apart from the mouth. Finally the tongue snapped back into the teeth and lips and the glade was empty in a blink.
‘I want you,’ she said.
‘Well, that’d be a clue, wouldn’t it? You could never love a man, and yet you love me.’
‘I do,’ she said.
The pale god took her in his arms and kissed her. She felt at one with the moonlight, with the stars in the heavens and, stranger than that, she felt all her fears and dreams consumed by the strange traveller and then fed back to her, sweet as honey on his lips.
She took him to her and held him, and as their bodies joined it seemed that so did their minds. A searing laughter filled her up, somewhere between malice and wild delight. But there was love there too. She felt connected to every living thing on earth, felt the earthworms moving beneath her, the forests teeming, the cold spaces of the stars delicious and beautiful above her. The world felt precious and the gods, who she sensed like a pressure at the back of her head, the gods with their bloodlust and their battles, seemed ridiculous, terrible and contemptible.
She stroked his skin, and it was wet with the blood of the wolf pelt. She found the crimson on the white of his flesh fascinating. Her hand was red with the wolf’s blood. She licked it and the taste of it seemed to fizz through her, as if tiny bubbles went popping all the way down inside her from her mouth to her knees.
The god now had the wolf’s head over his face. He peered through the animal’s bloodied lids with cold eyes. The tongue that slithered from between the dead wolf’s teeth was long and lascivious.
‘What is your name?’ she asked.
‘Names are like clothes, lady. I have many.’
‘And which one do you wear tonight?’
The god smiled. She could see he liked her words. He pulled her to him, pressed his wolf lips to hers and said, ‘My name is Misery, and would you know yet more?’
‘Yes,’ said the girl, breathing in his scent, the scent of something beautiful, strange and burned. ‘I would know more.’
He flicked at her lips with his tongue and whispered, ‘So is yours.’
The next morning the traveller was gone, along with the fine wolf pelt. Around Saitada’s neck, tied in a strip of leather, was a strange stone. It was a token, the night caller had said, of his affection and protection. It didn’t seem to do her much good.
The livestock had been slaughtered. The dogs were dead and Saitada was blamed for lying with a stranger while the wolf devoured the pigs. The farmer’s wife wanted to forgive her, to comb her hair and call her daughter again, but the farmer, brave in the wolfless light of day, wanted revenge.
She was sold with only the clothes she stood up in and the pebble charm the strange fellow had given her to her name. The priests had bought her and told her to make a virtue of her suffering. When they discovered she was pregnant they set to chastise her but found they could not. Something about her, maybe the charm, maybe that eye that seemed to see all their sins, stopped them, and they let her live among them unpunished.
Then Authun had come.
So what stopped Authun’s thoughts of murder on the ship? The stone at her neck was no more than a pebble with the head of a wolf scratched on it. Perhaps he had seen the rough little picture — his family sign — and felt some deep-seated fear that this foreign woman was kin. Or perhaps he just felt sorry for her.
He looked north, up into the white-capped peaks where he would meet Gullveig, witch queen of the mountains, that mind-blown child. She had been no more than ten years old when he’d first faced her the summer before. Authun knew the stories surrounding her. As the old witch queen was dying, she had appeared to Gullveig’s father, a warrior at the court of King Halfdan the Just. She had told him to take his pregnant wife to the Troll Wall to give birth. He knew better than to refuse, surrendered the girl child and gave thanks for the luck the sacrifice would bring the family. Gullveig had been a decade in the dark of the mountain caves, breathing in magic like a fisherman’s children breathe sea salt on the wind.
Authun looked at the mother cradling her twins. No, he couldn’t kill her. He’d give her to the witches, he thought. The chosen boy would survive the journey from the Wall to his wife without feeding. The girl couldn’t even speak Authun’s language, would never know what had happened to her children. What harm could she do waiting on the witches? It wasn’t as if she was going to escape them: no one could even find their way in and out of their caves without a guide. In this way Authun the Pitiless, burner of the five towns, allowed the privilege of life to a deformed slave that he would not allow to his kinsmen, and in so doing sealed his fate.
When they came ashore, the summer valley was pleasant and hummed with fertility but Authun could take no pleasure from the scenery. All his life he was a man of the necessary, someone who did what needed to be done and thought no more about it. He was pitiless but as a means to an end. The fouler the fate of his enemies, the more tribute he could exact from others without having to lift a spear. But, as the woman’s strange eye seemed to watch him wherever he went, he could not rid himself of the image of Varrin’s face as he’d faced death and spoken of his wife. He would, he decided, carry the message to the widow as his first priority after he had given the child to his wife.
There was a river between the coast and the Troll Wall and Authun would have liked to have sailed up it.
