Jehan couldn’t reply. His head was spinning. The odour of that stuff was in his nostrils again. The rage was growing inside him. He fought to hold on to it, to remember his purpose of finding out why this thing sought out the Lady Aelis, to understand it so he might defeat it.
‘I went to her side and I knew that she was dying. My mother had called in a woman from the hills, one who kept to the older faith, who had burned her face for her art. She told me that this place, this valley, is a special place. The church was built on a spring sacred to the old god — the dead god, the god of the hanged, the keeper of the screaming runes. The Romans said there was a temple of their god Mercury here when they arrived. I know him by a different name: Odin. Others call him Wotan, Wodanaz, Godan, Christ.’
‘Christ has nothing to do with idols, only in that he casts them down.’ Jehan was focusing hard on the Raven now, trying to keep his mind away from… from what?
‘Your god is as hungry for blood as any men have bowed to since the world began,’ said Hugin. ‘Tell me, when the first stone struck the first martyr, when Stephen spilled his blood for Christ, did your god smile?’
From blood. The sensations of his torture at Saerda’s hands came back — the taste of the flesh in his mouth, the coursing energy that had filled his body as the warm blood had trickled down his throat. It had been horrible then but now the memory seemed not horrible at all, dear to him even.
‘The god needed a death. The valley wanted a death. She showed me the triple knot.’ The Raven’s hands made a lazy pattern in the air. ‘Three in one, the dead lord’s necklace that slips until it sticks and then slips no more. I went to the abbot in his cell. He had drunk a bellyful and it was easy to do what the god asked.’
Jehan’s throat was dry. The eyes of the child seemed to bore into him. He felt he desperately needed water, desperately needed to eat. He licked his lips. The taste of the stuff he had found beneath the snow was on them, but it did not fulfil him, only fired his will to seek more.
‘By the morning my sister was well. The wild woman said that the price of my sister’s life was her service. I followed them into the hills.’
The whole church seemed to Jehan to rock.
‘Do you say the idol you seek to appease wants death now?’
‘I have given him that. I don’t know what he wants.’
Jehan could think no more about the Raven’s words. The blood inside him was turning the veins and cavities of his body to sea caves, smashed by surf. He could only think of one thing.
‘What is that?’ said Jehan. He struggled to get the words out.
‘What is what?’
‘You have something on you. Something wet.’ Jehan could scent it. He longed to lap it, to suck at the cloth of the Raven’s cloak, to drink in the smell and the taste of the black ichor that covered the Raven’s head, his shoulder and his hands.
‘The same as you, monk. It is tough work that I do.’
‘What is it?’
The Raven smiled. His face, thought Jehan, was familiar. It was a symptom of the sickness that had come upon him since he had come to the monastery, he was sure. He had seen the Raven’s face somewhere before. It was torn, swollen, pockmarked and disfigured, but he knew it.
‘What is it?’
‘It is blood.’ The child dropped back and the shadows covered her. She was a face retreating into a mire of darkness. Then she was gone.
Blood. Jehan fell forward onto the flagstones. He had known what the smell was but he had blocked it from his mind. Blood, as he had tasted in the clearing, blood, as he had lapped it from the snow. The church seemed to spin about him. He felt his throat constricting and his skin clammy, sweaty and cold. His body seemed to bubble with the need for action.
Prayers and snatches of songs, articles of the Church, seemed to split apart and run through his mind, looking to coalesce into something intelligible, looking to bring him back to who he was. One who vomits the host because his stomach is overloaded with food, if he casts it into the fire, shall do penance twenty days… God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made… If those little beasts are found in the flour whatever is around their bodies shall be cast out… We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come… He would not defile himself with the king’s food, nor with the wine which he drank… If a dog should eat it, a hundred days…
The rage inside him felt as though it would split his skin. His throat was burning now with a thirst that demanded immediate satisfaction.
‘You are ill, traveller,’ said the Raven. He looked around him. ‘This is your god’s house but he is not here for you. My fellow, yes, my fellow, he waits in the dark where he has always waited. Here, quench your thirst.’
He passed the confessor a cup. The water in it smelled familiar, though Jehan’s thoughts were too disordered to recognise it. He swallowed it down.
His thirst was not quenched. He wanted only one thing. Blood. He looked at the Raven and knew what he needed to do. He stood. He had the sword in his hand. The Raven stood. Jehan tried to lift his hand to strike but the sword wouldn’t move. His arm would not obey his command.
‘This place wants death,’ said the Raven, ‘and it seems it wants yours.’ He pushed Jehan in the middle of the chest and the monk fell back. Jehan was lying on the floor, the smell of blood filling his mind. He was coughing. He put his hand to his mouth. A black ooze was at his lips. The cup had been poisoned. He had known the taste if only his mind had been functioning well enough to recognise it. And yet the feeling had begun long before he’d drunk the poison.
‘You have killed me.’
‘Not yet,’ said the Raven, ‘not yet.’
Jehan looked up at the scarred mess of the sorcerer’s face and finally recognised it. He had not looked in a mirror since he was seven years old, but there in front of him, thinner, eaten and torn by ritual and privation, scarred and misshapen, was his own face looking back at him.
Jehan collapsed and the Raven took him by the arms and dragged him to the crypt.
38
Prince Helgi the Prophet lay sweating in his bed. The khagan had a problem. He needed to be a bulwark for his people, a rock on which they could depend, so by day he presented a front, was bluff and cheerful, indulged in the drinking games and allowed his warriors to let him win the contests of strength and speed. But at night, in sleep, he had no such control over himself. He cried out in the dark, and his cries were cries of panic. The Norsemen were not a private people: they slept in their longhouses side by side, children, men and women all packed in together. Soon his night terrors were the stuff of marketplace gossip; they undermined him in his dealings with his druzhina, and he heard it whispered that Ingvar’s party were using them to foment trouble against him.
It was as if his fear of the god’s prophecy — that Ingvar would rule — was itself making that prophecy come true.
The rabble of soothsayers and magicians was still around him, living off his coin, but Helgi put no faith in any of them. He went again to the temple of Svarog, into its dark lodge, breathed in the burning herbs, endured the darkness and the waiting, but nothing came, just visions of Svava, watching him, always watching him. He needed more.
He found himself unreasonably irritated with the normal night-time sounds of his hall — a child crying, a mother soothing it, a couple kissing and caressing, an old man snoring and farting — and went outside to look up at the deep stars. He would conquer everything under them, he thought, if only that awful prophecy didn’t hang over his head like an enemy’s axe.
‘You need to take the girl from Paris.’
A voice. Helgi looked around him. There was no one, just the shadows under the lee of the hall roof.
‘Who is this?’
