Jodis pushed the chest to the front of the table and Disa sat on it, her head slightly above those of the standing crowd, her feet only just above the fire. Jodis took Vali by the arm and sat him on the floor on the other side of the fire, looking up at Disa.
Vali glanced around at the watching faces, long in the light of the flames. It was as if he was at the centre of some strange clearing in the forest, the people hanging over him like twisted trees.
‘Them that don’t have to be here, shouldn’t be here for the next bit - you’ll be in for a long night,’ said Jodis, but no one moved. She pushed through the crowd, took a pot from a shelf at the back of the room, removed a stone serving as its lid and shook something into her hand that looked to Vali like kindling.
Jodis threw the stuff onto the fire and it began to burn, releasing an acrid and unpleasant smoke. Most of those nearest to it, Vali included, pulled their tunics up over their mouths and noses, but Disa breathed deeply and intoned in a strange high voice:I speak the rune of the spell god
I howl the rune of the hanged god
Odin, who lost his eye for lore
Odin, waiting mind blown by the well.
Disa then produced a piece of wood and marked something on it - Vali couldn’t see what - with three strokes of her knife. She put the wood on her knees and held the knife to her palm. She drew in breath, steeling herself, and then made the same three strokes in her hand, but much quicker. Vali recognised the Ansuz rune and was fascinated. He could carve runes himself and knew they were said to have magical properties. He’d asked Disa to tell him what they were, but she had just said that kings and warriors made their magic cutting runes on the bodies of their enemies and had no need for further knowledge.
The blood dripped from Disa’s hand down onto the wood. She smeared it into what she had carved there and then threw it onto the fire.
‘What am I? I am a woman. Where am I? At the hearth. What am I? I am a woman. Where am I? At the hearth. What am I? I am a woman. Where am I? At the hearth. What am I? I am a woman. Where am I? At the hearth.’
Jodis came to Disa’s side and bound her hand, but she seemed not to notice. She continued to chant, eyes vacant and staring into space. Her voice seemed to deaden Vali’s sense of time. He saw the fire restocked both with logs and with the strange herbs by Jodis and then old Ma Sefa returned with more of each.
‘What am I? I am a woman. Where am I? At the hearth. What am I? I am a woman. Where am I? At the hearth.’ Again and again she said the words, rocking slightly on the chest as Vali looked up at her through the fire and the smoke. Sometimes his mind wandered and he thought that she had stopped, but when he came back to himself she was still chanting, How long had he sat there? He couldn’t tell but his legs were numb and his head was heavy.
The smoke filled up Vali’s senses. Tiredness descended on him but he was not allowed to sleep. Every time he began to drift off, Jodis or Sefa would shake him, as they roused Disa. The purpose of her seat became clear. It was uncomfortable and precarious - virtually impossible to doze on. Then Vali noticed the room was lighter and colder. Some people had left; in fact many people had left. Looking over to the doorway, he realised he had completely missed the brief night and the light was that of the dawn.
Around them the farmers came and went: chatting, speculating on how Disa worked her art, wondering what enchantment she was laying on Vali. Some said that she was trying to make him invulnerable to weapons, some that she would turn him into a bird to scour the land for the wolfmen, some that she was pleased her daughter was going to Odin and would frustrate Vali in his quest. A couple began to play at dice; others picked up Vali’s King’s Table set and played that, bored by the ritual but afraid they might miss something if they went home. Two young men even started to mock Disa, repeating her words in silly high voices. Jodis sent them packing with a whack from a broom. Late arrivers, religious women of the outlying farms, came and joined in the chant, hoping to gain the blessing of the god Disa was seeking.
‘What am I? I am a woman. Where am I? At the hearth. What am I? I am a woman. Where am I? At the hearth.’
The chanting never stopped. The light outside grew brighter. It was hot again and then it was cold again. More people came in. Others left. Jodis shook Vali awake, shook Disa awake, steadying her on her platform, throwing more herbs on the fire.
‘What am I? I do not know. Where am I? In the dark. What am I? I am a raven. Where am I? On the field of the slain. What am I? I am ravens. Where am I? Where I can see.’
Was she really saying that? Vali wondered. The ground seemed to rock as if he was on a ship. The air seemed thick and clinging. The light outside was weakening once more. Neither Vali nor Disa had slept in three days. Disa’s voice was cracked, hardly audible.
Something cut through the fug of his thoughts. Disa was coughing and spluttering, then she let out a scream and began to shiver violently. Jodis and Sefa leaped to her side, holding her on the chest. Disa’s body went rigid - it seemed almost as if she would lift off her seat.
‘These pins are so sharp in my skin.’
Disa had spoken but in a way that Vali had never heard her speak before, slow and deliberate, much higher than her normal tone and with a strange accent.
Vali looked up at her, his legs stone with sitting, his mind like a boulder.
‘A rune I took from the tormented god.’
It was a tremulous voice, almost like that of a child, thought Vali. On some sounds it seemed to draw and suck like the sea on shingle but on others cracked and choked like the noise of a dog with a chicken bone.
Disa threw herself back and sat down heavily on the table, the chest going crashing to the side. Her body convulsed but then the shivering subsided, and she became calm. Jodis and Sefa let her go and she stood on the table looking out across the room. The temperature in the room plummeted and Vali felt his skin prickle into goosebumps. His breath froze on the air in front of him. There was something in Ma Disa’s manner that was quite unlike her. She stood tall and proud, surveying her surroundings like a queen. The people drew back from her, a couple giving involuntary cries. A patina of frost had formed at her feet. Vali was sure he was seeing magic working before his eyes. He was right. But it no longer had anything to do with Disa.
12 Enemies
The witch queen had sensed the first death like someone dozing on a summer day might sense a cloud go over the sun. Things had moved quickly then - candles had been lit to pierce the tomb dark of the caves, sisters disturbed from their ritual sufferings, boys dispatched to find the corpse.
Authun was not yet back home from the Wall with the infant Vali when Gullveig located the first body.
The girl was lying in the lower tunnels, close to the wet rocks, near the deep pool where the rite of the water rune was performed. She was hanged, a rough rope thrown over a jutting rock, a triple knot tied at the neck. The witch queen had touched the girl’s cold smile and then the rope. She knew what those knots meant, the three tight interlocking triangles - the dead lord’s necklace, sign of the god Odin, the berserk, the hanged, the drowned, the wise and the mad, the god to whom she had dedicated her life.
The witch queen touched the white of the girl’s throat, her magic-widened senses drinking in the resonances of the child’s death. The bruises had the sense of a delicious stain, she thought, blackberries and dark wine. She took up the girl’s hair in her fingers and breathed in. Baked bread, cinders, straw bedding and dried flowers were the odours of her death. The girl had gone home. It was a suicide, Gullveig was sure.
The dead child had not been unhappy. She had been scared when she had first entered the caves, but the presence of the queen - at twelve years old a child herself - had reassured her and the witches had touched her mind to bring her calm. The pain and suffering of the rituals had not come easily to her, but she had endured, seen the aim, felt her mind widening as her grip on sanity loosened.
She was to have been the inheritor of the rune of
water, to carry the resonance of that ancient symbol within her, to sustain it and be sustained by it. Two girls had been trained. When the old witch who was their mentor died it would be decided who would nurture the rune and who would participate in lesser rituals - to help, to fetch and carry. Now there was only one girl to continue the magic. If anything happened to her the rune would cease to manifest in the physical realm and the sisters’ power would diminish.
There was something else Gullveig could sense in the magical signature of the girl’s death, a feeling of heaviness - the heaviness someone drowning feels as their clothes fill with water, the heaviness of a downward current as it sucks the strength from a swimmer’s limbs. There was a magical presence there, the witch could tell, and it had flowed from the rune the girl had been given to learn. That should not have happened. The witches had suffered losses before but they had been physical ones - sisters frozen, smothered or suffocated by smoke when a ritual had gone wrong. The runes had been within their control for generations. Until that day.
The witch leaned forward and tapped her tongue on the girl’s cheek. The taste was of ocean depths, sightless and empty voids. Gullveig felt the pulling tides, the tug of groping blind sea beasts, the weight of waters above her, all seeming to say, ‘Come lower. Descend, lose sight of the light and give yourself to this heavy darkness.’ She shivered. There would be more of these deaths, she knew, as certain as people of lesser sensitivities know that one wave follows another.
The following years proved her right. Sometimes there were no deaths from one summer to the next; in others there might be two.
Knowledge of the girls’ passing came to the witch queen in different ways. One death presented itself as a lurch in the consciousness, like when you suddenly pull back from the brink of sleep. Another came as a feeling of disquiet from a dream that didn’t stop when she woke. Still another arrived like the taste of tar in the back of her mouth, a nausea that she could not shake until she saw the corpse.
Gullveig held their pale bodies in her arms, touched the bruises at their necks, put her fingers to their swollen lips, stroked their broken limbs and felt an unbearable pressure in her head.
Loki had told her the truth, she thought. Odin was acting against her, killing her sisters. She was certain of one thing - this creeping harvest was only a prelude. Odin would not be content taking one or two lives, nibbling away at her power from the shadows. He was coming, as himself and in force.
It had taken her nearly sixteen years to find him, which did not surprise her. If the god did not know himself then it would take a huge effort for a mortal to identify him. She had managed it, through the old and trusted ways - meditation, ritual and suffering. At first his presence had been elusive in her mind, glimpsed like the glimmer of a fish in water, gone almost as soon as it was there. But over weeks and months, in waking and sleeping she had tracked him, through her agony-induced trances.
She saw herself wandering under the empty spaces of the northern evening until, so startling they shook her from her trance, she saw a pair of pale blue eyes looking at her from a field of snow and heard the lonely howl of a wolf. It was him, the god, appearing in just a fleeting vision, but it was all that she needed. She was on his trail.
She did not see, and could only barely sense, the pale woman with the ruined face who watched her in her meditations. She knew though that there was a presence who walked at her side, hating her, just out of sight. It was that presence that guided her. All the queen could tell was that something travelled with her in her meditations and seemed to know what would harm her. She had sensed its excitement rising when she had caught sight of Odin. The witch did not find this particularly disturbing. She had lived all her life alongside strange entities, faces that flickered from the firelight, shadows on rock that seemed to glower with carnivorous intent. Sleeping or waking, she was never far from the suffocating spirits of the dark.
The thing that followed her now was at least useful. The closer its attention, the nearer she was to the greatest harm of all - Odin.
A year after she had seen the eyes looking at her from the snow, her unseen hater had lead her to Disa, and so back to him.
The witch queen had almost ignored Disa’s call, she was so caught up in the search for her enemy, the god. It was the fourth day of her hanging ordeal - her flesh pierced by thick pins secured by cords to a slab overhanging a scree slope in a steep cave near the surface.
Disa’s words had come to her on a wisp of smoke from the cold air at the top of the Wall. Entreaties from village healers and wise women were not common - such women knew the risks of invoking the witch’s attention - but they were distracting when they came. But as Gullveig prepared to dismiss the call, she felt an interest from the thing at her side. Here, it seemed, was harm and therefore, perhaps, Odin.
The witch allowed her mind to float up over the grey rock, to mingle with the smoke and use it as a road to carry her back to its source.
In her house Disa breathed in the herb-laced fire and with it consciousness of the witch. She shook and trembled, throwing herself back off the chest. Then things became hazy, she felt terribly drowsy, and she had the sense that her body was not her own. There was an odd presence prowling through her head.
As Gullveig looked out through the healer’s eyes, she could see the room with the faces of the villagers gaping back at her. She could also see the youth at her feet. She knew him straight away - the wolf’s brother, the ingredient, the holy victim.
But there was someone else there too. At her side she saw a woman who she thought she remembered, beautiful but with a terribly burned face. In front of her, his form insubstantial and spectral in the firelight, was the god. He was beating a shallow drum with a bone stick, his eyes were piercing and on his head he wore a four-cornered blue hat. The drum was painted with runes, and as he beat it they seemed to fall from it, shaking to the floor and collecting at his feet before disappearing like snowflakes on warm autumn ground.
‘Lord Odin,’ said the witch.
She knew exactly where she was - that space that wasn’t a space, a nexus called into being by ritual, where sorcerers and spirits from remote and distant locations could allow their consciousnesses to assemble. The physical form of the woman with the burned face and that of the sorcerer might be miles from the house but their magical selves were there.
The woman with the burned face extended her hand towards her and Gullveig took it, as if for reassurance.
The god spoke to her. His language was strange, as was the name he called her, but she understood him perfectly. ‘Jabbmeaaakka, the wolf is ours. We have seen your intent and you will not prevail.’
There was a murmur of assent but it didn’t come from the people in the room. Others were collaborating with the god, she thought. The witch was terrified by his presence but she thought she had a chance. If the god did not know he was a god then he may not yet have come to his full power. That meant he could be defeated in magic, or at least beaten back.
She sent her mind like a belch towards the blue-eyed man, a poisonous stink of rot, mould, worms and the crawling things of the earth that spewed forward to engulf him. It wasn’t even really a spell, just an opening of her consciousness, a little glimpse of the places she had been and what she had seen there, enough to cook the brain of anyone who had not walked at least some of those paths themselves.
But something came back, a rhythm, an insistent beat that clouded her thoughts and made her long for sleep. She heard a strange rough singing, felt a blast of cold, saw white fields of snow, creatures thin as runes moving across them, and she longed to step into that cold.
Gullveig, however, was not a wise woman with potions and chants, a village seer or ragged prophet. She was the witch queen of the Troll Wall, lady of the shrieking runes, a creature born and raised to magic. She did not step into the cold; instead, her mind on the edge of disaster, a rune expressed itself in her, a rune like the point of a spear, its steel tip gleaming as
it flew across a clear blue sky.
The drumming burst to a frenzy; raised voices became shouting; she had a taste in her throat, ash and sour milk, the smell of funeral fires, and when she looked again the blue-eyed man was gone. Had she killed him? She doubted it, but there were others about him and she sensed they had suffered from her attack.
Odin had felt weak to her, far from his full power. So he could not yet move against her. So what had he done? The girl with the ravaged face who sat by her side in the hanging cave stroked her hand and the answer came to Gullveig in an instant. He hadn’t the power yet to take on any of the witches directly so he was working where he could - at the girls who were being prepared to inherit the runes. If they died then there would be no women to continue the witches’ traditions. Gullveig would eventually be left alone and isolated. While his strength grew, hers would diminish.
She saw it was time to accelerate the pace of the magic. The wolfboy had been prepared. Now he had to meet his holy victim - the prince.