‘What?’
‘Before. When I swore to protect her.’
‘Before when?’ said Leshii. ‘You’ve been trying to kill her all the way from Paris.’
The Raven ignored him and spoke to Ofaeti: ‘I ask a service of you, fat man, for freeing you from the enchantment of the witch.’
‘I do not know it was her enchantment but I do know it ended when you killed her, so I might believe it was so. What is the service?’
‘A simple one. Find a woman, raise many good sons and tell the story I am to pass to you. Have them tell it to their sons as long as the world lasts. You will have a noble task.’
Ofaeti gestured at Leshii. ‘Why can’t you or he have many sons and tell them these stories?’
‘He is old, and my fate is to die.’
‘How to die?’
‘Opposing the wolf, as I have before and will again. It is my destiny.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘My sister, that thing that I took for my sister, showed it to me, but in a guise I could not recognise.’
‘She was a wide-seeing woman,’ said Ofaeti, ‘skilled in Seid magic. You know your end, and yet you do not seem happy. A man goes smiling to his fate once he knows it.’
‘Because, for all the witch’s lies, there must be a way to break the curse. If not then I will live in the future as I have lived so far — ignorant of myself, beguiled. It may be too late for me in this flesh but not too late as I will be tomorrow. In our future incarnations one of us might recognise what is going on and be able to act to stop it before we are damned to misery and suffering again. We are going to send a message to eternity, fat man, and you are going to carry it.’
‘I will come with you to Helgi,’ said Ofaeti. ‘Not to serve your purpose but because I swore an oath to the girl to protect her. She is in danger, so I will follow you, shapeshifter, not for fame, not for gold or for sons. I will follow because the girl asked me for protection and I offered it. The witch who lies dead on this shore enchanted me and made me harm the lady against my word. I need to repay that or it will be a hard welcome for me in the halls of the dead. And my kinsmen must be avenged. We will find this wolf and kill it. I struck it once and it bled well enough. No reason why I can’t strike it again and see it bleed some more.’
‘You will not be able to kill it,’ said Hugin, ‘until it has performed its part in the god’s great ritual and sent the All Father to death.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Ofaeti. ‘I have met many men who claimed to be invulnerable, Eric Harm-Hard for one.’
‘What happened to him?’ said Leshii.
The fat man winked. ‘He didn’t live up to his name when he fought me.’
‘This is different,’ said Raven.
Ofaeti just grunted and turned towards the monastery.
Leshii looked up at the treeline. There was a lot of forest between them and Ladoga, and mountains too — haunts for all sorts of wild men. And what were they chasing? The thing that had loomed from the darkness to take the lady? That was the sort of creature that wise men ran away from, not towards. Still, he wanted to keep the necklace the Raven had given him, the one he now wore concealed beneath his kaftan. How much did he want it, though? Enough to stay with these madmen who set out to spite the gods. Probably not.
Leshii ran to catch up with Ofaeti. ‘I told you you should have left me on the hill,’ he said. ‘The lady has brought you no luck.’
Ofaeti smiled, though tears were in his eyes. Leshii guessed he was thinking of his dead kinsmen. ‘Too late for that now,’ he said. ‘The past is a wind at our backs. We cannot unblow it.’
Ofaeti walked away across the wet sand to the monastery and Leshii began collecting weapons and other valuables from the corpses. There were ten fine swords there at least, which would give him plenty to trade, should he stop at Birka. The necklace was hugely valuable, and there were also the hundred dirhams in the sorcerer’s pack, but Leshii had had his fill of adventure. When they reached the first market town he would say his goodbyes.
59
Aelis rode into the woods. The runes were all around her like a garland of bright stars. They whispered the wolf’s names to her, one familiar, one strange and one that seemed to shimmer between the two: He is Jehan, he is Fenrisulfr, and he is Vali that is, was and will be.
She seemed to burst with memories — mushroom-hunting at dawn in the woods at Loches, the hawkmoths among the jasmine rising around her as she passed, the flutter of their wings close at her ear like the fear that dogged her. She had told herself it was fear of nothing at all, but she still went running from the dark of the trees to the sunlight of a clearing. Everything had seemed so intense: the inky stains on the cloth with which she lined her basket, the dark juice on her fingers, the rising sun pulling the mist from the dew-soaked grass, her face warm but her feet wet and cold.
She had been looking for something beyond mushrooms, she sensed, and was chased by something more than the rays of the sun. There was a menace to the birth of morning, she felt it in her core. She walked as the deer walks, in fear of the wolf.
Vali.
The name conjured something from her. She saw herself in a place she had never known, by some strange houses that were low and mean, turf roofs not waist-high, a bright river below her down a small hill. She heard the excited cries of children and looked down to see them bathing in the sunlight. Someone was at her side. When she turned to him his face was familiar but she couldn’t place it. It was as if she had seen it before but only through an imperfect glass, its features distorted and blurred.
She looked at her hand. It was the same hand she had always known. The runes had reunited but she had not become a god, nor had she died as the witch had predicted. She made herself calm down and saw the runes all around her in two spinning orbits of eight, the howling rune at their centre, twisting and slinking like a crawling wolf. That one seemed more important to her than all the others put together. But something was missing. A third orbit. While that was not in her she was human still.
She still had not let go of the stone the Raven had given her; in her panic she had hardly noticed it was in her hand. She held it up to examine it, and nearly dropped it. It was just a pebble tied within an elaborate knot on to a thong, but it was etched with the face of a wolf. A phrase came to her: When the gods saw that the wolf was fully bound, they took a fetter and lashed it to a rock called Scream. In her mind she saw a huge wolf, its jaws stretched wide by a cruel sword, tied to an enormous rock by a rope as fine as a ribbon. It thrashed and groaned and howled but could not get free. It was night and a man came to the rock. He was tall and pale with a shock of red hair and he tried to break the fetters. But the fetters would not break. So the man took up a pebble that lay at the bottom of the rock, of the same stone as that to which the wolf was bound. And then, as the day came up, he stole away to inscribe something on it — the head of a wolf.
The runes were showing her these things. The runes knew.
She drove the horse on through the trees. Eventually the animal tired and she stopped to let it forage and rest. The spring was lovely, the forest full of flowers, thick with full-leafed sycamore, birch and oak. The sun dappled through the leaves and turned the light to water; the bark of pale trees flashed from the deep green like the skins of silver fish; mustard lichen changed the carcass of a fallen oak to a chest of gold; flowers of yellow and white seemed to dance on the branches as if caught on unseen currents.
Suddenly the effects of her ordeal by water swept over her. She was aching everywhere, her skin cut from the ropes, sore from the salt water. She was terribly thirsty too. Aelis looked around for water. There was no stream but the woods were damp and it had rained recently. She licked the moisture from leaves and when she found a muddy puddle put her head in and lapped like a dog. She was too exhausted to forage for anything to eat. Spectres of tiredness loomed at her from the trees. She thought she saw movement, heard noises. She was full of
