‘She doesn’t speak your language,’ said Leshii, ‘but nothing is beyond negotiation. Work with us to return her to her city and she will see you’re rewarded.’
He guessed what Saerda had done — watched from afar until the trouble was over and then approached them when there was less chance of others taking his prize.
‘I know the reward the Franks would give me,’ said Saerda. ‘Rollo is my king now. He doesn’t want the people to kneel and call him a god. He’s content just to see them kneel. He’ll pay a good price for this girl and then he’ll either marry or ransom her. She can come back with me.’
‘Tell him if he takes a step closer I’ll kill him,’ said Aelis.
‘The lady invites you to sit a while with us and talk things through,’ said Leshii.
‘Yes, it looks like it,’ said Saerda, ‘very much indeed. Do you want to fight, lady, is that what you want?’
He moved towards her across the glade. Aelis thrust forward the sword but her arm was straight and stiff, her body taut, like she was reaching with a pole for clothes drying high on a hedge. Saerda moved more fluidly. He put his sword up to hers and tapped it a couple of times. His arm was a whip, fast and accurate. Twice she thought he would shake the sword from her hand just with the force of his blow against it.
He withdrew slightly and she instinctively poked the sword after him. He had been waiting for that, Leshii could see. Saerda caught her blade with his in an enveloping motion. He whirled it round and round in four quick circles before a sudden jerk of his arm sent it singing into the trees. He feinted a blow at her head, and Aelis took the bait, raising her shield to her face. There were two smart smacks on the shield but Saerda’s sword had gone nowhere near it; he’d driven it straight down through the toe of Aelis’s boot. Late and clumsily, Aelis brought the shield to the grass between them. Saerda’s mouth fell open like a gargoyle’s as he saw the two black-feathered arrows protruding from it. He turned to look behind him, and Aelis hammered into him, sending him sprawling. A noise, no more than twenty paces away, a war cry, thought Leshii, a strangled croak of aggression.
‘No!’ Aelis’s eyes were wide with terror. She retreated a couple of steps, dropped the shield and then turned and fled through the trees, Sigfrid’s big boot still pinned to the floor by Saerda’s sword.
Saerda got to his feet and retrieved his weapon but went no further. Just visible through the shadows, twenty paces away, Leshii could see a terrible, lean, naked figure drawing a bow. It was the Raven. How could he aim in the dark? Leshii thought of the shield, stuck with arrows. It had been rare luck that Aelis had moved it in front of her face at the right moment. Leshii picked up a heavy stick and hurled it. He hit the bowman square on the arm, causing him to loose an arrow into the dirt.
‘Oh dear,’ said Leshii to himself as Hugin turned and lowered the bow. The merchant ran. Leshii couldn’t see where he was going — the moon through the trees robbed the forest floor of all perspective, every shadow containing the possibility of an ankle-breaking depression, a root or stone. He fell and fell again. Then he rose and tripped once more. He was flat exhausted and could not run any further.
He sat up. The grim figure was coming towards him through the bars of moonlight, his cruel sword drawn. In a frozen instant of terror, Leshii saw his opponent, the thin limbs, the muscles wound onto his bones like creepers around a tree, the face eaten by the self-inflicted torture of the birds to who knew what purpose, that cold weapon, death made steel, which seemed to shimmer and flash in the moonlight.
The Raven was still twenty paces from him when Leshii fainted to the ground.
20
Aelis ran too, flat out and blind with terror through the wood. There was a thump, a blinding light and she was down. Witless with fear, she had blundered into a tree.
She could hear the monster behind her, his pace quick and light. She knew that to hide was suicide. Raven had sunk two arrows into her shield from thirty paces, through the deep darkness of the trees. He would find her, she knew. There was his call again — horrible, almost mocking.
She ran on, as quickly as before. She couldn’t afford caution, though she stumbled and tripped on roots, sudden dips and unseen rises. She crashed into a thicket of ferns, sensing the river’s cold before she saw its glitter, the moonlight turning the water to a road of sparkling ice. But it was no road you could walk on. The cry was near her now; she had no choice, and she leaped in.
In her haste she had forgotten the mail coat. It was heavy but not so heavy that she couldn’t keep her head above water. Her brother and his men held races across the Seine in full war gear in times of peace, and she told herself she was of the same stock, though her limbs were tiring quickly.
Aelis hadn’t expected the current to be so strong. It swept her downstream, and she had to pump her arms to keep her mouth above water. The cold was a serpent, crushing the breath from her body and dragging her down. She kicked for the opposite bank but she was exhausted and couldn’t fight the pull of the freezing river. The black mass of a fallen tree loomed in front of her and she snatched at a branch. No good. Her numb hands couldn’t grasp it. The water took her and spun her, but then the little breath she had in her body was driven from her. Her leg had caught on something submerged. She gulped in an icy mouthful and was certain she was going down. She cried out and beat her hands against the current’s pull.
Her foot was stuck fast but she managed another breath. As she did, her hand touched something rough, cold and hard. It was a tree trunk, beneath the water. She hugged it, turning her back to the stream, clinging on. She was pressed against the trunk of the tree, frozen but breathing.
She looked around. The tree emerged from the water and went under again, but it was attached to the bank. If she could free her foot she could pull herself to the shore. She tugged at her foot. It had become wedged at the ankle between a branch and the trunk. Every time she tried to free it, the bitter cold water threatened to shove her forward and down. There was nothing for it, though, she had to try. Aelis crossed her feet and used her left leg to hook back on her right. The ankle came free, the water tried to tear her from the trunk but she was ready and clung on. She felt her way along the tree to the shore.
The ravaged face of the sorcerer looked down at her from behind a drawn bow. Aelis looked up at him and realised that all hope was lost. She shook and shivered on the trunk.
‘Go on then.’
The Raven put down the bow and crouched at the side of the river. His eyes were just blank spaces; his face under the moonlight was a moon itself, pitted, torn and unreadable.
She went to climb onto the bank; she had to get out of that icy water no matter what. Hugin moved his head to one side and looked down at her. Then he drew a long thin knife from his belt. He wasn’t going to let her get out.
She knew she was going to die. How long would it take?
Longer than she had expected. It got lighter, and lighter still. She didn’t die, though she shivered and her hands were blue. She knew it was impossible to get across the river, impossible to get past the Raven. How much time passed? The spring hours, the divisions of twelve between sun and dusk, seemed as long as those of high summer. How many had gone by since she entered the river? One? Two? Still he sat there, a great carrion bird, watching her like a crow watches a dying sheep. The sharp moon hung in a sky of duck-egg blue and the sun through the trees turned the air to crystal. It was day, she realised.
Her vision faded, the moon dancing and wheeling, blurring and finally fading from sight. A sharp crescent of light split the darkness and at first she thought it was the moon again. But it was not. It seemed she was standing inside a cave, and the crescent of light was its mouth. She walked to the mouth and saw that the cave was set in the wall of a dizzying cliff. The air seemed to rush beneath her; wisps of clouds hung like mountain spirits at her feet. She held something heavy in her arms — a man. He was dead and he had died for her. She looked behind her. Somewhere inside the cave was someone else she had loved, she could sense it.
A thumping, rhythmic song came into her head.
‘Then fares Odin to fight with the wolf…’
She had never heard it before, but she knew its meaning was bound up with her life. The cold sent pins and needles through her body, but it wasn’t just a physical sensation; something seemed to fizz and spit in her mind.
