Then he lay down and pretended to sleep for a bit to see what the woman would do. She fed her children and settled down to sleep herself. She was, as he guessed, no idiot. She wasn’t going to kill her only protector in a strange and hostile wilderness or even run away from him. The bandit was too badly injured to attempt anything. Authun wanted to take the precaution of breaking his remaining arm but feared that the shock might kill him. So instead he just tied him with walrus cord to a tree. Then he prepared for sleep properly and waited for the witch to come.
If it was the witch queen, all well and good. If it was one of the stranger sisters, well . . . Authun was a warrior so he concentrated on what he would do if the worst came to the worst, not what would become of him. He would try to give her the bandit, then the woman, after that himself. With luck the witch queen would appear in time to save the children.
But sleep wouldn’t come for him. The night was fine and temperate, and he was warm in his cloak, but little irritations seemed to keep him awake: a cold nose, a pebble in the small of the back, the smell of the moss on the rock, the taste of the rock even. Then he realised he was not awake but neither was he dreaming. Some of his senses seemed heightened - he could taste the cold on the air like iron, smell the difference between the flowers and the grasses; he could smell the tar and the dirt of a puddle. It was as if his hearing was slightly muted, his vision reattuned so that in the bright moon glare he could see new colours - deep metalled blues, sparkling dark greens and seams of gold on the side of the rock. He was where the witches were, he knew, in that place between waking and sleeping. He went to the tree and cut loose the bandit in preparation for what was to come.
Cries in the dark like a baby wailing. Authun wanted to prepare the woman for the arrival of the witch but they shared no language. She would just have to suffer it. He heard a voice through the rain. Where had the rain come from? He tasted it on his lips - more iron, like the way the hand smells after handling a sword, like blood.
Mother in the pen,
Mother in the pen.
It was a child’s voice, high and piping but clearly audible.
Authun didn’t want to look but knew that he must. If it was the witch queen then she would have to see him. He pulled the semi-conscious bandit to him, ready to throw him to the witch.
Down along the rock face he could see a young woman bent over as she tried to shield herself from the driving rain. She had something in her arms. It was a baby. Authun turned to Saitada. She was holding both her children close to her.
The woman staggered out from the cliff face with the baby and laid it on the ground. She took off its swaddling clothes and exposed it naked to the elements. Then she ran off into the night.
Authun stayed where he was. The witches had all sorts of tricks and he wasn’t about to fall for one so easily.
He watched as the child died. After a short while it stopped moving and then seemed to disappear. So this was magic. Authun kept his hand on his sword.
And then the rain stopped and it seemed that it was a lovely summer evening. The same woman who had left the baby appeared but this time dressed in farm girl’s finery, as if she was going to a dance. A man, also in his country best, walked past her, kissed her hand and seemed to tell her not to be late. Authun recognised the story. It was a fairy tale about an unmarried woman who had exposed her child to die rather than face the hardship of raising it. How did the story end? He couldn’t remember.
The woman smiled and sat on a stool that had appeared from somewhere. She was combing her hair. She finished and got up. Authun recalled that the story told she had gone to check on the pigs before leaving for the dance. She looked into a trough and from within it took something cold and blue. It was a baby, and Authun knew it was dead. The woman held the dead child up and looked at it as it began to move, kicking out its legs as if attempting a jig. And then the rhyme began, a rhyme that seemed to come from inside his head.
Mother in the pen,
Mother in the pen,
Primp and preen to charm the men
Take my swaddling clothes and dance in them.
As the rhyme split its way through his mind all he could see was Varrin’s face, bloated, white and drowned. What had he done? What had he done? The rain came down again, straight and hard in the windless evening.
Suddenly it was night, pitch black, and the young woman, her face pale with madness, clasping the dead child to her, was at Authun’s side. Even the king screamed, though he didn’t forget to push the wounded bandit towards the witch. It was as if the man’s body was swallowed by the night. The king knew that he wasn’t facing the witch queen. She would have recognised him. It was a patrolling witch mistaking him for another plunderer, or worse it was one of the truly terrible sisters, her mind simmering with magic, some half-demon who leaked delusions and madness to those around her and who could kill them without even noticing they were there.
‘Gullveig, Gullveig!’ shouted Authun at the top of his voice. ‘Help us, lady!’
The Moonsword was out, and he looked around for whatever would come next. The light was so inconstant, one instant flat dark, the next the pale washed-out murk of a rain-soaked dusk. He wanted to find Saitada, to throw her to the witch, but she was not there.
‘Authun the Wolf,’ said a child’s voice in his head, ‘mightiest warrior in Midgard, is there no one who can defeat you in arms?’
‘Gullveig! Gullveig!’ Authun screamed, trying to make the witch queen hear him. He must not reply, he knew. He must not accept the delusion, enter into it and become consumed by it.
I know one who can lay you low,
I know one who can prick you so.
If you defeat this one I know
Then, King Wolf, I will let you go.
No mortal had ever challenged him and lived. He did what he had sworn not to: he answered the voice. ‘Bring forth your champion!’
Behind the veil of rain there was a shimmering and the shape of a man took form. It seemed to Authun that the witch had underestimated him. His opponent was a man of near forty with long white hair and a straggly beard. He looked careworn and beaten by his years but there was something in his hand that shone with a cold fire. It was a sword, curved, slim and wicked. Even in the dullness of the rain it gleamed. Authun recognised it at the same time he recognised his opponent. It was the Moonsword. His opponent was himself.
As the realisation hit him something very strange happened. He saw himself with his back to the rock and he saw himself advancing towards the rock. He seemed to be both warriors at the same time, looking out through both men’s eyes. He could see a white figure with a woman and two babies at his back but at the same time he could see the same white figure advancing from the rock and hear the cry of the boys behind him. Authun did not know which warrior he was and in some way he was both.
More reflective men might have wondered what to do, but Authun, both Authuns, had been brought up to value swift action. The kings closed with each other and began to fight. It was a hopeless struggle, each man guessing the other’s moves, each anticipating blows and ducking beneath them or stepping away so their swords sliced through thin air. All things being equal they could have fought like that for ever. But all things are not equal. What we do and how we react is not the same when we are facing up a slope as when we are facing down. Authun might instinctively know his opposing self might offer three feints and then a strike to the legs, but he couldn’t know by how much the ground had raised one of his attacker’s legs higher than the other, where the disposition of his weight lay - largely on one foot, largely on the other or spread. He could not guess when the rain would blind his eyes or when it would clear from his opponent’s. Also, what you do facing a rock, looking only at blackness, is different to what you do facing a man with a moving background of trees. We are not the same people facing north as we are facing south: humans are a inconstant and contingent race. So the king did strike himself, a glancing blow to his flank.
/> Authun felt pleased he had drawn first blood but was also alarmed that he had been wounded. But then the king who struck the blow felt something in his side. An identical wound to the one he had inflicted had appeared. The king could not stop, could not back down, he was incapable of even having such an idea. So he struck again and hit again and both kings took a wound to the forearm. Then one to the ear, then the hand. Who hit and who received the blows became unclear, but Authun kept fighting because that was the only option for someone raised to believe the sword was the answer to everything.
One thing was plain to Saitada, though: if the fight went on she was about to lose her children’s guardian.
Clinging to the boys - she wouldn’t leave them - she sprang out into the rain to interpose herself between the warriors.
‘No!’ she shouted. ‘Enough!’ But her words, incomprehensible to the kings, were lost in the rain, and suddenly it was as if a giant hand had lifted her from the ground and she was shooting up through the sodden air, up the cliff, up and up and up. Then she heard a strange childish voice speak to her.
‘Die,’ it said.
She was falling, squeezing her babies to her. Then it was light and quiet and the same voice spoke again.
‘Forgive me, Lord Loki,’ it said.
‘Sister, we all make mistakes. Forget the error, and forget me too,’ said Saitada, though it wasn’t her voice. It was the voice of the strange traveller, the boys’ father. And then she was on the ground below the rock, and Authun, bloodstained and panting, was standing over her. It was dawn and the sun warmed her face.
‘They have sent a boy to guide us,’ said the king. ‘See to the children and then we’ll get going.’ Strangely, she understood him, though he was still speaking his own language.
A pale child of about eight was in front of them, laden with protective charms, arm rings, amulets and talismans.
‘Follow,’ he said.
And they set off, on the arduous journey across the Troll Wall and up to the witches’ realm.
5 The Loss of Sons
The cliff was perilous and it was becoming clear to Authun that they would not reach the top. The woman had finally yielded her children and they were strapped wriggling and squalling to the king, the mother checking their bindings with irritating regularity.
Authun still shivered to look at her but he could not yet cast her aside. He shivered still more when he thought of the ordeal that faced him in meeting the witch queen.
‘Do you know where you are going, child?’ he asked the boy.
The boy just kept on climbing.
It had been a still day at the bottom, but here, an inexorable ten days up, along winding paths, down others, braving terrible scrambles and awful jumps, the wind almost flattened the climbers to the rock. Authun had thought the slave girl would never make it. There was a path, not that you would see it from the bottom, but it was so narrow in places that even Authun, who had stared down death so many times without blinking, felt a tightness in his stomach as he trusted his life to a root or a fingerhold. He did not look down.
They slept tied on to the cliff with ropes and pegs the boy had with him, and surrounded by charms. The child seemed not to sleep but spent the night chanting a strange song to a broken tune in a language Authun did not understand. The only thing that troubled the king’s dreams was the anticipation of what was to come.
And then the overhang became serious. Impassable. How had he reached the witches before? Authun couldn’t remember. He remembered only the prophecy, the witch queen’s presence and the dark.
Inside the clouds, visibility down to a few paces, the path finally gave out. The child guide seemed to have missed the entrance to the caves. Authun felt the fear drying his mouth. He was weak, the girl was weaker. They wouldn’t survive the climb down, even if the boy agreed to guide them. The boy clambered back around Authun, back around Saitada and then, just visible in the clinging mist, he beckoned them. There in the rock was a gap, no more than a crack. It was only a shoulder’s width and scarcely as tall as a man. Authun would not be able to pass through it with the children, and even without them would have to turn sideways and wriggle his way in. He peered into the blackness and smelled the deep earth. He could see nothing at all but he had to go on. He untied the infants and gave them to their mother. Then he slid inside after the boy. There was only the weak light from outside to see by. He could see an arm’s length, maybe a little more, in front of his face but after that nothing. The mother passed her wailing children in. She was committed to Authun now, whether she liked it or not, and had no other option than to follow.
Authun tied the infants to him and watched the girl climb through. He had come to admire her and had certainly known men with less resolve. She needed no coaxing, morale building or bullying. She just followed.
The child guide stood very close to them and unwound a long cord from his waist. He passed it to the king, and gestured for him to tie it to himself and allow Saitada to take it too. She did. Then they went down into the dark.
Thoughts came and went in the blackness, as Authun fought to keep his footing and protect the children. The entrance on the Wall, he thought, must be how the witches admitted their few guests. It was too impractical as an everyday access. How did they eat? How did they come forth to visit in the night, to sit at the end of a stunned farmer’s bed and barter magic for children? There must be other ways in and out, thought Authun, unless they could fly - as was the rumour.
In the dark he became acutely aware of his breathing, of that of the children and the woman behind him, and of his footfalls, heavy and uncertain. He lost purchase on time. At one point he heard water and felt the boy take his hand and thrust it into a stream. He drank and helped Saitada do the same.
They rested a while and he passed the babies to the girl to be fed. He was aware of how young and fragile they felt as he gave them over. How had the girl endured this journey so soon after giving birth? He admired her. Then the descent continued, sightless. His hands scraped on rock; he stumbled; he felt the boy push him back as they slowed to clamber over a rock fall or squeeze through a bone-crushing passageway. Authun felt terribly vulnerable and hated it. The dark was an enemy he couldn’t fight; there a child could maroon him and he would be doomed. On they went, down and down, first cold then hot. They rested again, and then again. Had they been inside a day? Authun thought so. Down, down, down through galleries blind and cold, crawling into tiny fissures that scraped his face and arms as he wriggled through them. Standing room could have been just out of reach to his left or right and he wouldn’t have known. And still down, the children’s wails echoing through vast chambers or deadened by long coffins of rock.
How long now? Two days? Perhaps. Breathing became difficult; balance had to be fought for. The air itself seemed weak and lifeless. And then Authun felt the rope go slack to his front and heard childish footsteps going away. He pulled the taught end towards him and held Saitada to him with a tenderness that had never come as naturally before. He heard his own voice shaking.
‘We will overcome. Do not let go of the rope.’ He felt to see that she had tied it to her wrist. She had. ‘Sleep,’ he said. He didn’t expect her to understand but she did - not just his words but his feelings of concern and tenderness. She sat down. What else was there to do? Moisture clung to Authun’s skin; he was sweating and then he was shivering. He felt around where he was sitting, aware that he could be a step away from a terrible drop. He pulled the girl to him, presenting her children to her. The terrible danger of their situation made them seem even more precious to him. The girl fed the babies and Authun struggled with the fixings of his scabbard, releasing the cords. When the mother passed the children back he tied their feet to his belt, stowing his sword under the boots he used for a pillow. For the first time in his life he valued something more than his weapon in a time of danger.
It seemed to Authun that sleep came - but what is waking and what is sleeping in such darkness
? The body has its rhythms of hunger and excretion, but when hunger is constant and water scarce these cease to mark time. The woman’s milk failed and the children’s wailing became constant. Then, after a while, it ceased.
‘Who?’
A voice was close in the dark, the word like a note on a flute.
‘Lady?’
‘Who?’ Again, like the hoot of an owl, its breath near to him, foul and hot.
Authun imagined some giant bird next to him in the dark, picking him over in its claws.
‘I am Authun, king of the Horda. I bring tribute of gold and slaves to the palace of the witch queen.’
‘Who?’
Authun felt something climb over him. It was a human form, frail and light but still the king had to restrain himself from reaching for the sword. No. Whatever it was, they were at its mercy.
‘Who?’