‘Lady?’
‘You said you were acting for love.’
The wolfman looked into her eyes. Aelis had that feeling of great age again, but this time seemed to share it. She went back in her mind to her childhood and then beyond that. She had the sensation of a weight in her arms, of falling and of a terror at her back that she could not shake.
The wolfman winced and grasped his side.
‘We must move quickly. I am in no condition to fight the Raven if he finds us.’
‘If he is scared of me then shouldn’t we wait for him?’
‘The Raven expresses his fear in sword cuts and tortures,’ said Sindre. ‘He does not hide from the monsters of his dreams, he hacks them down.’
‘Can we get on?’ said Leshii. ‘We can find the river. The current is too strong to take a boat, but if we can find a crossing we can cut north and lose our pursuers.’
Aelis looked at Sindre. In her mind she was standing on a ledge in a high cold place. She was holding something in her arms. It was a man. She could not see his face. Was it the wolfman? Someone like him, though she couldn’t tell. She didn’t know what to make of the vision, nor did she know if she saw the past or the future. Perhaps, she thought, she saw something that had never happened, nor never would be. But it told her she was linked to this man in a way that went far deeper than his rescue of her or their present conversation. But when she looked at him, she did not think of love. Another word came into her mind: daudthi. It meant nothing to her — that is, she couldn’t translate it — but it too seemed to come in a rush of images and sensations: a warrior, his white hair gleaming from the dark and then gone like a fish in a pond, cries of anguish, her body aching and bruised, and a smell, a deep animal smell seeping from somewhere at her side, a smell that brought her around again to that word and a knowledge of its meaning. Daudthi. Death. And it was death she saw when she looked at Sindre, not love.
But still, better death for her than against her. The wolfman had tried to protect her and she felt compelled to act on her instinctive trust of him.
She looked up at the Pole Star and then east to the constellation of Cassiopeia. Its flat upright M-shape seemed to her like the symbol in her head, the one that called the horses, and she imagined the stars as a rearing horse pointing her way. There lay her destiny, she was sure, with Helgi and his magic in the lands of the Rus.
‘Take me to the east,’ she said, and squeezed her legs against the horse’s flanks to urge it forward.
PART TWO
31
Years before Aelis set off to seek Helgi’s help, the child had been taken to the roof of the river loading tower — the highest structure in Ladoga, nearly five man heights tall. Logs had to be removed from the roof in order for her to be passed up through a gap.
Her father laid her down there himself.
‘Nearer the apex, khagan.’
The healer chinked like coins in a purse as he spoke, his whole body adorned with charms and trinkets. Prince Helgi glanced at him and moved the girl nearer to the top of the roof.
‘The surest cure is at the apex,’ said the healer. ‘That is where the cooling humours of the sky settle.’
‘They’ll be no cure for her if she rolls off to her death,’ said Helgi.
‘I will sit beside her and make sure she comes to no harm,’ said the healer.
‘Yes,’ said Helgi, ‘you will.’
He touched the girl’s head. She was boiling in her own sweat. He cursed himself. It never did to love your children too much, least of all the girls.
Helgi was a troubled man and the little girl had been one of his comforts. She was bold and funny, even going as far as to ridicule his stern manner. He would have cut a warrior down for that but she just made him laugh, made him forget his tormented sleep and the nightmares that woke him ranting in the darkest hours of the night. In those awful dreams he always found himself back by that well, the vision of his own death, of the trampling hooves, waking him with a shout. When he returned to sleep there was worse. He saw a warrior on an eight-legged horse — Odin was coming to earth and would march at the head of Ingvar’s armies. The god was treacherous, it was well known, but Helgi felt cheated. He had sacrificed so much, given so many slaves, so many cattle, so much gold. But the portents were clear — he was under divine threat.
So he had sent throughout his land for wild women and holy men, for priests and witches, wanting to hear that the prophecy had been wrong. The mystics came pouring in to Ladoga like a market-day crowd, rattling bones, casting runes, sweating and fasting for prophecy. So many came that Helgi earned his nicknames ‘Helgi the Magician’ and ‘Helgi the Prophet’. All the troll-workers told him nothing, just that he would be a great king throughout all the known lands of the earth. He did not believe them and saw that they only sought to please him.
One mountain woman, though, had drawn a shape in the dust of the floor. ‘This is your destiny,’ she had said. The outline was that of a horse.
‘I will be killed by my horse?’ He glanced left and right. The hall was empty, the druzhina sent outside to prevent them hearing anything that might upset them and, through them, the people. ‘Could the horse be a symbol? Might it mean something else? Might it be that a god is the only thing that can kill me? Could it be a sign of great fortune?’
‘Anything can mean anything,’ the wild woman had said and put out her hand for gold.
There had been a sound from beneath a bench at the side of the hall, and he’d turned to see what it was. It was his little girl, Svava, poking her face from the shadows. He’d laughed when he’d seen her.
‘You know I should beat you for sneaking, don’t you, girl?’
The girl had just chuckled and come up to him.
‘Can I have an apple?’
‘This woman isn’t a farmer, she’s a witch. A troll-worker. Shall I get her to eat you?’
‘I might eat her,’ said Svava.
‘My girl,’ he’d said to the wild woman, ‘as bold as any boy and ten times as cheeky.’
But the wild woman had her gold and was heading to the door, plunging Helgi back into his thoughts of what Odin was about to take from him and give to Ingvar.
Helgi had tried to weaken the boy but Ingvar’s faction was strong, the loyalty he commanded from kinsmen in the druzhina not far from Helgi’s own. His uncles were hard and cunning men and watchful for any plot, so that way was not open to Helgi. He would have to let his original scheme stand: conquer the south and leave the boy to make his mistakes. He was at the mercy of the god and there was nothing he could do about it.
And then in January, the traveller had come, fighting through a terrible blizzard, hunched against the cold. The men had thought him a beggar in his rags and wolfskin, but had been shocked to see anyone emerge from that storm.
The guards had let him in to the town out of amazement and pity. He’d gone to one of the fires they kept going behind the gatehouse to warm himself. A man came to tell Helgi because lone travellers on foot were unheard of in that country at that time of year. No one could travel in such weather and live. Helgi told the druzhina to stay where they were in the mead hall. It would be a dark day when the prince of all the east needed a bodyguard to face a frozen and wandering beggar. He’d been bored, to tell the truth, by the men’s boasts and the drinking games where a mistake in the rhythm of a complicated pattern of clapping forced the error-maker to take a
