Had he killed too many, been too keen in his wars, given too many slaves to the gods? What were they asking for now?
‘My darling,’ he said, ‘I did not think he would ask for you. I did not think the god would take you.’
The girl moved her right hand from where it rested on her left hip, up across her body, a back-handed gesture almost of dismissal.
All around him strange symbols sang and hummed in the air. Runes. He counted them. There were eight. He was in his bed and wet with sweat. He could not get up. It was as if he was oppressed by a vast weight, and his chest could not rise.
Something was crawling across his skin like a snake — a rune, a single upright stave with two others sloping away from it. It creaked and groaned like a rope on a ship, like a rope taut with a dead man’s weight. He knew its name. Ansuz. He lifted his hand to touch it where it writhed on his face. He saw gallows, black lines on a hill against an angry dusk. Phrases of poetry went screaming through his head like hurled spears. He saw a rider hurtling across a plain, a girl in a garden under a metal moon, a well and, next to it, the headless corpse of a man. Mimir’s well, the well of prophecy. He knew that this was no ordinary dream; this was a communication from the gods.
The rhymes rattled through his mind like pebbles down a staircase, the runes singing around him, calling out to him to embrace them.
Know how to cut them, know how to read them,
Know how to stain them, know how to prove them,
Know how to call them, know how to score them,
Know how to send them, know how to send them.
He looked at the rune, the gallows rune, creaking and twisting on his skin and within his thoughts. The rune was wrapped around him, constricting him, crushing the breath from his body. He felt a tightness at his throat, all his weight, all his consciousness, suspended from his neck. He knew whose rune that was. Odin, Odin the treacherous, Odin the ruination, lord of the burned earth.
‘This is the meaningful letter,’ said Svava, ‘though it is not what it seems. This is the deceiver’s rune. Your rune, for you deceived me.’
‘Svava, I did not know.’
He was reaching out for his girl but he could not touch her. He could not sit up no matter how hard he tried.
‘I have your prophecy, father, the one the god promised you.’
‘Svava, Svava!’
The pale child looked down at him. ‘If three become one, then the ravener will come,’ she said. ‘Find her and give her the protection of the dark.’
Svava turned back to the darkness and sleep pulled Helgi down.
34
As Jehan headed east, the rain was unceasing, turning the fields to mires and the trade tracks to swamps. The Seine was in flood, the current too strong to row against for long, even if the Vikings could have scouted out a decent boat. The stars were invisible under the cloud by night, so when they came to forks in the river they either guessed the way or waited for day and took direction from the sun. Jehan knew that the Vikings might be seen as raiders and told Fastarr to hide his splendid shield with its hammer motif and on the plainer shields chalked the sign of the cross. The berserkers agreed to this but would not cut their cloaks in the Frankish fashion. Ofaeti said he’d rather die of a spear than a frozen arse.
The Transversale to Lyon was a good old Roman road but fraught with danger. When they met travellers he told them the Norsemen were Christian converts, protecting him on a pilgrimage to Rome. The eleven proved their worth. Bandits lurked on the road, and about forty of them barred the way near Auxerre, too scared to attack but testing the northerners mettle. They found the mettle in good order and scattered when Ofaeti screamed for his men to charge. There were easier targets than a troop of well-armed and battle-bold northerners, and the thieves disappeared as quickly as they had come. But it was all Jehan could do to talk one group of merchants — a hundred or so strong — from attacking the Norsemen, so when they got to the Saone, which flowed in the right direction, they took the broad river south.
Huddled on a stolen river barge — hardly more than a glorified raft — wrapped in their cloaks and travelling by night when the moon allowed, the Norsemen were less conspicuous than they had been on the open highway. The abbeys they passed were poor and mean-looking and the Vikings took Jehan’s word that there were no great bargains to be made there. They didn’t even make use of the pilgrim hostelries the abbeys kept for travellers both religious and secular; they were too wary of the reception they might get. The human remains they carried with them were kept in a sack which was towed on an improvised raft of branches because of the smell. Jehan had to admire the Vikings’ woodworking skills. The little raft took them next to no time to make and even he — who had spent most of his life inside a monastery — could see it was better built than the one they had stolen from the riverbank.
The Vikings fed him nothing, but he wasn’t at all hungry. He drank from the river and felt he needed nothing more to sustain him. This was just part of God’s blessing, the same one that had cured him of his affliction, he was sure. The words of Romans 14: 17 came to him: For why the realm of God is not meat and drink but rightwiseness and joy in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit did really seem to be filling him. Sometimes the rain was so heavy it was almost painful, but he was not cold and he put back his head to drink it in, enjoy its taste and delight in the looseness and power of his limbs.
He had, he was sure, been blessed. The trials he had undergone, the tortures at the hands of the Raven and Saerda, had been a gateway of agony through which God had stepped. He had eaten of unclean meat, true, but even that did not seem so bad now. The taste of the blood haunted him but he did not find it unpleasant. That in itself, he thought, was a message from God telling him not to blame himself for what had been forced upon him and not to question what had happened to him. He had been freed from the bonds of his infirmity for a purpose. Every instinct he had told him to pray, to know God’s mind.
When Jehan prayed it was not as the weavers, butchers, candlemakers and reeves of Paris prayed — requests for help, a word of thanks, something like a silent conversation. Jehan had spent years with God as his main companion, a presence by his side in the dark of his cell, the guiding principle of his every thought. Prayer was indivisible from his life. In some ways his life was a prayer, every action, every mouthful of food enabling him to serve God. So he sat in the dark and the chill on the raft as the Vikings steered it on under the black sky, sinking down into himself, surrendering will, surrendering personality, to God.
‘Let me know your purpose, Lord.’ The movement of the raft lulled him, the cold seemed to leave him. He fell through a thicket of his own thoughts, jolting awake as he relived the shock of the moment when he realised strength and freedom had returned to his limbs. Infirmity and constraint had been so familiar to him that the sensation of free movement was very disconcerting.
As he prayed, the feeling of Saerda’s head in his hands came back to him, the quick snap with which he had broken the Viking’s neck repeating itself over and over in his mind. He remembered something else from that moment: a presence — yes, a presence, and not one he had ever felt before. There was a sort of signature note to the way it felt. He was tempted to say that it was evil, but it wasn’t quite that. No, this presence that watched him unseen did not have a moral nature at all. He tried to think of a word to sum up what he thought of it, ‘hungry’ seemed to fit best.
The movement of the raft seemed indistinguishable from the movement of his mind towards God. The words of Psalm 51 came into his head. He knew it well, the Miserere, and the memory of his brother monks singing its verses rose in his mind, a chant as rhythmic and restful as the lapping of water against a riverbank. The beauty of the Latin carried him away, though three lines came to him in plain Roman.
Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.
