She looked about her. That place again, the cave of blood. The wolf, the presence of her lover, death, death everywhere, her muscles tight on her head, as if the skull beneath was trying to break through to burst grinning from her skin.
‘No,’ she said, and the arrowhead rune, which shone like the moon shines when it is small and sharp in the sky, burst into fire.
She was back in the cloister, gasping on the floor. The wolfman had dropped her. The first thing she saw was a raven, looking down at her from the roof of the covered walkway, its cold glassy eye fixed on her. There was screaming and shouting. Three Vikings were grappling with Sindre, more pouring from the warming house. A big Norseman lay puking on the ground, his great axe, its haft smashed in two, beside him.
Four Vikings, five, were on Sindre but still he stood. A man’s neck was broken, then the staggering mass fell into a wall, Sindre driving a Norseman’s head into it as he went. Another had his feet swept from under him and sprawled on the stones. Sindre came back towards Aelis, dragging two men behind him. Vikings were everywhere — some laughing, some angry, all drunk. One aimed a kick at Sindre but only succeeded in thumping his foot into the side of one of his kinsmen.
The arrowhead of light still fizzed and spat inside Aelis. What did it mean? Illumination. Clarity.
He kept coming. Two steps more and he had one of the Vikings’ knives from his belt. A breath later the man fell. Aelis looked up at the raven on the roof. She felt strange, dizzy, full of light. Four more came at Sindre, but he tore off the one clinging to him and threw the man at them. They all collapsed in a heap. She watched the raven on the roof. It watched her. And then she allowed the light inside her to travel to meet it. It was like learning to ride a horse, that moment when the beginner begins to feel how it should be done, when the stiff legs, back and arms give way to the rhythm of the animal and the rider becomes one with the gallop. It felt so easy.
Sindre was on her. There was a flutter. The raven had flown away. Aelis was down, Sindre on top of her, but the fury had left him.
‘See,’ she said to him. ‘See who you are.’
And the light that was in her went to him as the Vikings hit him from every side. A lesser fighter than Sindre would have died where he was, but the wolfman needed no second of reflection, no fatal breath to assess where he was and who his enemies were. The trance snapped away from him and he blocked a sword cut at his attacker’s hand, breaking the wrist and sending the sword spinning. He stood, driving the heel of his hand into an axeman’s chin, putting him unconscious to the floor. Then he had Aelis up and was pushing her towards the doorway. The Danes leaped at him with sword and spear but he dodged and ducked, rolled and blocked. Then Aelis was at the the entrance to the cloister.
‘Open the door!’ he shouted. ‘I was bewitched but I will save you. Go! I am destined to be with you — I cannot die here.’
Aelis slipped up the bar that held the door closed and stepped out. She didn’t know where to go. The beach was bright with the light of the moon and she could see the men who guarded the ships running across it towards the monastery. The path led down to the ships or away across the marshes. A scruff of trees was just visible on the horizon. She’d have to run across the salt marshes in the dark with a bunch of wild Vikings behind her.
The light of the strange symbol that lived inside Aelis seemed to shine into every nook of her mind, bringing understanding and clarity. She could not run. She turned and went back into the monastery.
Sindre was very near the door, at the centre of a group of Vikings, snarling and spitting, tearing spears out of hands, dodging attacks at his back, smashing men to the floor. His eyes turned to her for a heartbeat and Giuki ran him through with his sword.
He sank to his knees and tried to speak. Aelis read his eyes at the moment of his death. He wanted to say that it was impossible for him to die there, that his fate was woven in with hers, that a greater destiny, a more important death, awaited him. He coughed and lashed out, driving the Vikings back.
‘I will meet you again,’ he said to Aelis and fell forward. Then the Vikings were upon him like wolves themselves, spears, axes, swords, kicks and punches cutting his flesh and breaking his bones.
The wolfman was face down on the flagstones, blood pouring from countless wounds on his body, his head unrecognisable after the cuts and blows it had sustained. She bent to his corpse and put his hand upon it. She spoke but did not know what she said, the words just tumbling from her: ‘It was not you, Sindre. It was not you. You died for me, and I thank you for that, but you have been misled. The rune is calling but not for you.’
The rune? She had given the symbol inside her a name, one she had no memory of hearing before but that seemed familiar to her.
She put her hand on the wolfman’s head and stroked it. A tall Viking sank a kick into his body. Anger came over her, hot and sudden. ‘You have killed him,’ she said. ‘Are you looking to kill him again?’
‘If I can,’ said the Viking and stamped on the wolfman’s belly.
Aelis looked at him. ‘You face him one-on-one now he’s dead. You came more slowly to the fight when he had breath in his body.’
The Viking levelled his spear at her but Giuki tapped it away with his sword. He bent to her side. ‘You’re more interesting than you look, boy. Since when did you speak Norse?’
‘I…’ Aelis could make no more words come out. She tried again, but when she spoke it was in Roman. ‘I…’ She looked at Leshii. ‘Tell him I need to speak to him. Alone.’
‘ Domina, that is not a good idea,’ said Leshii.
‘ Domina? ’ said Giuki. ‘I know only two words in Roman, one is “fuck” and the other who you do it to.’
Leshii threw up his hands.
‘All pretence is gone,’ said Leshii. ‘By your duty as Helgi’s vassal we really do need to speak to you alone.’
48
By the graves on the headland Jehan prayed: ‘Deliver me, deliver me.’
A voice from the dark: ‘Three ships, Ofaeti. It’s too many!’
‘It’d be a rare death, though, wouldn’t it, Fastarr? They’d sing songs of us, wouldn’t they? Grettir’s people give credit to brave enemies — we’d live eternally in the songs of the skalds.’
‘Are you sure we want to do this?’
‘Sure.’
‘Come on then. We’ll lure them up to the monastery. Get some lights visible up here!’
Jehan couldn’t see. Again, he couldn’t see. A soft blackness had taken his vision. And then the raiders on the beach, the sweet stink of their aggression, the enticement of their excitement and fear cleared his mind like a whiff of Hammonicus salt, and he could see everything. The moon was like a cold sun to him, picking out the men on the broad wet expanse of sand.
His hearing was sharper than it had ever been, bursting on his mind in subtle shades of sound, his ears almost revealing as much as his eyes. He could hear the Vikings next to him breathe and rustle, the quick gulping inhalations of the young boy Astarth, Ofaeti more measured, forcing calm on his body by long slow breaths. He could hear the water slapping on the longships, the suck of the raiders’ feet through the wet sand. He could hear the breath of the invaders, tight and fast. More than just sound, he could sense weakness, strength, doubt and resolve in the whistle of air in a man’s chest.
The dark. Jehan had sought the dark. That howling, the noise from the boat, had set his skin tingling, his muscles seemed to creep on his bones like caterpillars on branches as he slunk tight to the shadows. He spat the meat from his mouth, its dead taste suddenly unpleasant to him. He was hungry, still, but now for something else, for the meat that is warm on the teeth, for the flesh marinated in the seepings and secretions of stress, for the tremble of the body as the soul looks down at the valley of death.
The shadows were strange to him, hardly shadows at all. He could see quite clearly within them but he knew their use on instinct. He clung to them, pressing his body to the walls of the courtyard, slipping down the alley between the scriptorium and the penitence cell. The moonlight caught him and for a second he stopped. He held up
