‘They’ve been robbed before. Look at them.’ It was her language, just. The men were Franks but not her brother’s nor any ruler’s. They were outlaws, some dressed in rags, others wearing finer stuff, obviously stolen.
‘That one would be pretty enough with a good meal inside her.’
‘She’d be pretty enough with something else inside her. What are we waiting for? There are two good slaves here. Let’s fuck her for a bit and then get them sold.’ It was a young man who spoke, small and hard with skin baked brown by the sun. He had broken teeth and a torn ear, and seemed to Aelis to sizzle with colours and sounds — the green stains of mosses at his knees, gold pollen on his sleeves, a sound like burning wood that seemed to express his personality. He was fascinating to her.
She spoke:
‘Alone I sat when the Old One sought me,
That terror of gods, who gazed in my eyes:
“What hast thou to ask? Why comest thou hither?”
“Odin,” said he, “I know you are from yourself hidden.’”
‘Is that the Normans’ tongue? She’s a Viking slut. Danes! We’ll get a good price for them.’
‘We’re far from the sea.’ Another voice.
Aelis could sense its disquiet like a cold wind. She looked for the wolf behind her. There was no wolf, only the confessor lying naked on the ground. Jehan? Where was the wolf? But Jehan was not as she had known him. He was no longer afflicted but whole and handsome. She spoke again:
‘One did I see in the wet woods bound,
A lover of ill, and to Loki like.’
‘This is sorcery,’ said another. ‘Kill her before she bewitches us.’
‘That is not sorcery, or if it is she doesn’t prosper on it,’ said yet another.
The rhyme spoke through Aelis again. The poem was like a wind and she was just a reed through which it sounded.
‘The giantess old in Ironwood sat,
In the east, and bore the brood of Fenrir;
Among these one in monster’s guise
Would soon steal the sun from the sky.
There feeds he full on the flesh of the dead,
And the home of the gods he reddens with blood;
Dark grows the sun, and in summer soon
Come mighty storms: would you know yet more?’
Night was falling. The trees were dark and a wind was in them. How long had the storm been coming? She couldn’t tell. Fat drops of rain fell cold on her skin. The dying sun turned the stormclouds to gold and lead, and the forest seemed to glow around her.
‘Let’s just take them and go. It’s going to be a filthy night.’
‘I’ll have my fun first — it’ll warm me up.’ The man with the broken teeth and a torn ear had a knife.
Her pulse raced and she felt the blood drain from her face. But he seemed so fragile, such a delicate bloom, like a wild flower she could pick at any minute to amuse herself for a moment before casting it away. She felt so strange, as if she existed in many places at once, her mind a wide and several thing.
He touched her.
Aelis was in the forest and not in the forest, in the caverns of her mind where the runes shone and sang and not in that place. Where else? she wondered. In the moon garden of her youth, where the scent of jasmine lay upon the dew and the night air warmed her as she wandered barefoot and dreaming. She saw a tiny candle in a recess in a wall. There were many lamps there, now she came to look. She reached out and extinguished the nearest one to her.
The man in front of her in the forest, the hard young man with the broken teeth, one hand on his knife, the other loosening his trousers, dropped dead.
She felt confusion run through the outlaws, a rustle of thoughts that passed through their minds like the first wind of autumn through the woods of summer.
A couple of the outlaws dropped to their knees and touched the corpse’s face. The man had been dead for only a moment but was already cold. Then weapons were drawn and a word was on their lips: ‘Witch.’ In the moonlit garden she moved her hand; a breeze blew and all the candles went out.
The rain came down hard, turning the leaves to little drums pattering out a rhythm so pleasing it made her want to dance. She went to Jehan, sat him up and lifted his face to the falling rain.
‘Wake now,’ she said. ‘I have washed the wolf away.’
He opened his mouth to the clouds and blinked as the raindrops, each one as big as a berry, burst upon him.
He turned to her and put his hand to her hair. ‘It is me,’ he said, ‘as I was, and as I am. I have travelled so far to find you.’
She knew. In that instant she knew they had lived before and had been lovers whose love had outlived death. What had been her name? What his? She could not recall. The words came to her unbidden: ‘And I have waited so long for you to be here.’
Aelis kissed him and lay down with him among the corpses of the wild men and for the first time since she was a child she did not feel alone.
60
Hugin looked down at the body of his sister on the beach. He had taken her head from her shoulders with a single blow and it lay washed by the surf five paces away from where he squatted by her head. He did not go to it.
The enchantment she had laid upon him had broken when he put on the Wolfstone, he thought. But in truth it had been weakened even before that — when he had seen the lady’s face at the river as she struggled and froze in the water. Why hadn’t he killed Aelis then? He had thought it due to curiosity. He had wondered if she could drown, given her place in the schemes of the gods. They had set her a crueller fate than drowning, he’d thought, but would they relent and let her die of cold in those waters? Or would he, Odin’s servant, take her?
There was another reason he hadn’t killed Aelis as soon as he had the chance — he knew that now. He had sought her in his dreams, though the witch he called his sister had usurped her place. Had he sensed that deceit when he looked at Aelis struggling in the river?
Frozen and parched in the mountain cave, groping in the sightless dark, striving to hold on to sanity, to personality, he had dreamed such dreams. He had been a raven flying on the breeze, hunting the wide land for something he could sense but not name. And he had been in that strange avenue of trees, alongside the river and the wall where the ivy grew and where the small shrine of candles shone in the night. And he had searched for someone he could not name through the dead air of the constricting tunnels, above the mountainsides in the wind and the sun, and under the moon where the water was crumpled lead and the bark of the trees seemed shot with quartz. Always his sister had been there, under the ivy, by the shrine. She had made him believe he was bound to her eternally. She had entered the garden of his dreams and taken the place of Aelis.
Hugin felt very bitter. He had killed for his sister, abandoned his home among the monks, taken her to the mountains and lived as a wild animal, shivering through the winters, soaked in the storms, holding her hand in the dark as the first hallucinations came upon her, following her as the magic seemed to possess her, hearing strange voices in a language that was foreign to him but eventually became more familiar than his own. The gods of the Norsemen were speaking to them, and in ritual, privation and darkness he began to understand them. Still, he wanted to leave.
‘Let us go back,’ he had said, ‘away from this wild woman and her sorceries. Let’s go to some lord or farmer
