‘Good, good. I should think our sacrifice should have ensured a fine prediction. The witch should be happy with what I gave her.’
He would remember that place for the rest of his life, the darkness of the hut, the closeness of the fire and the cloying smoke of the herbs the priestess had thrown onto it, foul things that burned with the smell of pitch. He never knew whether he had only dreamed that they had brought the corpses in to sit beside him in the tiny room.
The priestess had said only that Svarog was a complicated god, lord of the bright air and of the sun but also guardian of the sun in the underworld when it disappeared at night. Svarog knew the dark places of the earth and the realms of the dark gods, and it was to that side of his nature that the rite of prophecy appealed.
She had cast her herbs into the fire, murmured her rituals and uncovered the oracle, a carved tree of wood, a face daubed on it in a childish way.
His mind lost focus and wandered. When he came back to himself, his limbs were stiff and he felt far too hot. The dead men were around him, their ripe berry heads dark and swollen in the light of the witch’s baking fire. The place was an oven, and Helgi wanted to get up and leave, but it was up to him to bless his kingship by emerging with a favourable prophecy.
He had had no idea that the ritual would be so arduous. He had thought he would go in, receive good words from the priestess and come out again. Not so. He was to prophesy; he was to be the gate through which the magic would pass, so said the witch. And for that he needed to suffer.
More logs were put on the fire, more herbs, and he tried to tell her he had endured enough, that kings were to be obeyed not tortured, but the herb smoke seemed to rob him of speech. Were the corpses there? It seemed so one moment, not the next. Helgi was a warrior, a man of cold certainties. It bothered him greatly that these dead men were neither quite there nor quite absent. They seemed to blame him for something, their eyes bulging and bloody. And, strangely, he seemed to care. He seemed sorry, although he had no idea why. He had paid for them: their lives were his. No man could say he had done wrong by killing them.
The daubed face looked at him, its expression seemed full of smirking knowledge. The oracle knew things, Helgi could tell. The oracle had inside information, he was a sly one, a secret titterer behind the backs of great kings, he was no woolly headed man that oracle, he was a smart fellow indeed. What was happening to Helgi’s thoughts? He chewed at nothing, he stretched the muscles of his face and stuck out his tongue; his nose streamed with snot; he longed for water but could not move.
The priestess was alongside him, a woman in a wolfskin snuffling and scratching near his side. No, not a woman. A wolf.
‘Where am I?’
‘At the well.’
He looked around. The room was gone, the dead men too. Instead he stood on a wide plain of black ash under a bright steel sky. The plain was utterly featureless apart from a protrusion that seemed like something grown from the same stuff as the ground, like the stump of a tree but rootless, black and hollow.
He walked up to it and looked in. A sheen of silver water was inside it, coming right to the brim of what he realised was indeed a well.
Helgi looked to his side. Two figures were there. One was a terrible old man, his face contorted into the drooling fascination men show when watching dog fights or duels. Around his neck was a strange noose tied in a complicated knot, and he stood frozen, his hands out wide. He carried something in one of them, something that dripped blood to the floor. It was an eye, his own. Helgi realised the man had torn it from his head. He stood by the well as if offering it to the heavens.
On the ground was another figure, headless. Next to it lay the crude head of the oracle, looking up at Helgi from the black floor.
‘This is the well.’ Helgi couldn’t tell who was speaking.
‘Whose well?’
‘Of Mimir, the first man.’
Helgi knew the legend. This was the well of wisdom where Odin had given his eye for lore. Helgi plunged his hands into the water and drank deeply. Now he was no longer on a barren plain — a gigantic tree stretched up above him, a black ash tree spreading its branches across all of the sky. Snakes slithered and spat at its base, all around his feet, around the well, around the body on the ground, around the feet of the strange old man who had ravaged his eye.
Helgi saw visions. A rearing horse with eight legs was stamping him down, all his lands were burning and Ingvar was at the head of his army, taking his glory, stealing his plunder. He was being buried alive, a thick stream of earth dropping into his mouth, stopping his nostrils, denying him breath. He was in a pit, a pit that was being filled up, a grave in the Christian manner, sealed in and weighed down by soil.
He heard a voice in his ears: ‘Odin is coming and will tear you from your throne. Ingvar will be king. You will be killed by the creature of hoof and mane, and Ingvar will take your glory.’
‘I shall kill him.’
‘You will never kill him. The god is coming, and his manifestation is your death. Bar his way.’
Helgi choked on the soil, his vision gone, his breath denied.
And then he was in the light and the air of the market square, under a cool and smoky evening sky, his people around him, his druzhina offering him wet cloths, drink and food.
‘A premonition, khagan?’
Helgi swallowed, spat and forced his voice to speak. ‘Great fortune,’ he said, ‘great fortune.’
‘This,’ shouted a druzhina to the crowd, ‘is the blessing of the gods, a prophecy sent to honour the birth of the khagan ’s child!’
25
It was not the wind that awoke Jehan, nor the clear blue cold of the spring day. It was the voices of the Norsemen. He heard them shouting, one phrase heard many times: ‘King-slayer, king-slayer, we will find you!’
He had an intense pain in his eyes, a searing ache. He put his hands up to his face and blinked. The agony of his torn eyelid was gone. This was another sort of pain. He blinked again and again.
He had a sensation of light, swimming brown and green and gold. There was a broad vertical line in front of him. What was it? A tree, a big oak. Jehan coughed and tasted blood. He turned to his left. There was a flash of bright gold. The river.
He breathed out, leaned back on his hands and realised it wasn’t a dream. He could move. He could see.
He got up and staggered against a tree, unused for so long to standing. At his feet was the body of Saerda, his head twisted almost to face the opposite way nature intended. Jehan sank to his knees in prayer.
‘Dear Lord God almighty and father everlasting, who hast safely brought me to the beginning of this day, by thy holy power, grant that this day I fall into no sin but that by thy restraining care my thoughts be set to keep thy holy laws and do thy holy will.’
Jehan had never cried, not as long as he had lived, but he cried then. God had granted him release from the bondage of his body, and Jehan had used it immediately to kill. The commandment was clear: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ But the Viking had been a devil, an enemy of Christ.
Jehan put his hands to his head. He felt in such confusion. What was happening to him?
‘A Frank!’
Three men were dashing towards him, two with spears, one with an axe. He wanted to wait for them, wanted to accept the punishment of God’s will, but he couldn’t. His legs began to move, haltingly at first but with increasing fluidity. He was running, for the first time since he was very young, he was running.
The sensations were nearly overwhelming — the feel of the forest floor digging into his tender and uncalloused bare feet, the dazzle of the light through the trees, the rush of greens and browns as he fled from his
