they shared no language. She would just have to suffer it. He heard a voice through the rain. Where had the rain come from? He tasted it on his lips — more iron, like the way the hand smells after handling a sword, like blood. Mother in the pen, Mother in the pen.
It was a child’s voice, high and piping but clearly audible.
Authun didn’t want to look but knew that he must. If it was the witch queen then she would have to see him. He pulled the semi-conscious bandit to him, ready to throw him to the witch.
Down along the rock face he could see a young woman bent over as she tried to shield herself from the driving rain. She had something in her arms. It was a baby. Authun turned to Saitada. She was holding both her children close to her.
The woman staggered out from the cliff face with the baby and laid it on the ground. She took off its swaddling clothes and exposed it naked to the elements. Then she ran off into the night.
Authun stayed where he was. The witches had all sorts of tricks and he wasn’t about to fall for one so easily.
He watched as the child died. After a short while it stopped moving and then seemed to disappear. So this was magic. Authun kept his hand on his sword.
And then the rain stopped and it seemed that it was a lovely summer evening. The same woman who had left the baby appeared but this time dressed in farm girl’s finery, as if she was going to a dance. A man, also in his country best, walked past her, kissed her hand and seemed to tell her not to be late. Authun recognised the story. It was a fairy tale about an unmarried woman who had exposed her child to die rather than face the hardship of raising it. How did the story end? He couldn’t remember.
The woman smiled and sat on a stool that had appeared from somewhere. She was combing her hair. She finished and got up. Authun recalled that the story told she had gone to check on the pigs before leaving for the dance. She looked into a trough and from within it took something cold and blue. It was a baby, and Authun knew it was dead. The woman held the dead child up and looked at it as it began to move, kicking out its legs as if attempting a jig. And then the rhyme began, a rhyme that seemed to come from inside his head. Mother in the pen, Mother in the pen, Primp and preen to charm the men Take my swaddling clothes and dance in them.
As the rhyme split its way through his mind all he could see was Varrin’s face, bloated, white and drowned. What had he done? What had he done? The rain came down again, straight and hard in the windless evening.
Suddenly it was night, pitch black, and the young woman, her face pale with madness, clasping the dead child to her, was at Authun’s side. Even the king screamed, though he didn’t forget to push the wounded bandit towards the witch. It was as if the man’s body was swallowed by the night. The king knew that he wasn’t facing the witch queen. She would have recognised him. It was a patrolling witch mistaking him for another plunderer, or worse it was one of the truly terrible sisters, her mind simmering with magic, some half-demon who leaked delusions and madness to those around her and who could kill them without even noticing they were there.
‘Gullveig, Gullveig!’ shouted Authun at the top of his voice. ‘Help us, lady!’
The Moonsword was out, and he looked around for whatever would come next. The light was so inconstant, one instant flat dark, the next the pale washed-out murk of a rain-soaked dusk. He wanted to find Saitada, to throw her to the witch, but she was not there.
‘Authun the Wolf,’ said a child’s voice in his head, ‘mightiest warrior in Midgard, is there no one who can defeat you in arms?’
‘Gullveig! Gullveig!’ Authun screamed, trying to make the witch queen hear him. He must not reply, he knew. He must not accept the delusion, enter into it and become consumed by it. I know one who can lay you low, I know one who can prick you so. If you defeat this one I know Then, King Wolf, I will let you go.
No mortal had ever challenged him and lived. He did what he had sworn not to: he answered the voice. ‘Bring forth your champion!’
Behind the veil of rain there was a shimmering and the shape of a man took form. It seemed to Authun that the witch had underestimated him. His opponent was a man of near forty with long white hair and a straggly beard. He looked careworn and beaten by his years but there was something in his hand that shone with a cold fire. It was a sword, curved, slim and wicked. Even in the dullness of the rain it gleamed. Authun recognised it at the same time he recognised his opponent. It was the Moonsword. His opponent was himself.
As the realisation hit him something very strange happened. He saw himself with his back to the rock and he saw himself advancing towards the rock. He seemed to be both warriors at the same time, looking out through both men’s eyes. He could see a white figure with a woman and two babies at his back but at the same time he could see the same white figure advancing from the rock and hear the cry of the boys behind him. Authun did not know which warrior he was and in some way he was both.
More reflective men might have wondered what to do, but Authun, both Authuns, had been brought up to value swift action. The kings closed with each other and began to fight. It was a hopeless struggle, each man guessing the other’s moves, each anticipating blows and ducking beneath them or stepping away so their swords sliced through thin air. All things being equal they could have fought like that for ever. But all things are not equal. What we do and how we react is not the same when we are facing up a slope as when we are facing down. Authun might instinctively know his opposing self might offer three feints and then a strike to the legs, but he couldn’t know by how much the ground had raised one of his attacker’s legs higher than the other, where the disposition of his weight lay — largely on one foot, largely on the other or spread. He could not guess when the rain would blind his eyes or when it would clear from his opponent’s. Also, what you do facing a rock, looking only at blackness, is different to what you do facing a man with a moving background of trees. We are not the same people facing north as we are facing south: humans are a inconstant and contingent race. So the king did strike himself, a glancing blow to his flank.
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
