Valkyrie's Song

by M.D. Lachlan

Genres: Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

M.D. Lachlan's brooding and powerful tales of Vikings, Norse gods and werewolves have already won praise from, amongst others, Joe Abercrombie, Adam Roberts, Mike Carey and Chris Wooding. With an original and terrifying take on magic, an ability to bring the Norse gods to vivid life on the page, a keen historical eye and a knack for fast-moving and brutally effective plots, M.D. Lachlan's series has won over critics, fellow authors and readers alike. VALKYRIE'S SONG moves the action to Norman England and the Harrowing of the North. An immortal wolf and an immortal woman are on the run, fighting for their lives. They carry a magic within them, runes which flare with power when brought together. But others hold runes of their own, and the runes desire to be united. And when they are, Ragnarok will come.

Release date: May 21, 2015

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 400

Sample

 

 

1 The Harrying of the North

 

 

 

 

It was winter, and the land bloomed with murder. From the shoulder of the frost-stained fell she could see the burning had reached the near villages. Four fingers of smoke clawed at the pale blue sky. The brittle evening was hazy and in her mouth was the taste of other fires, now spent. On another night she might have mistaken the distant screams for the cries of gulls, blown inland from a sea she had never seen.

She had asked about the sea but her grandfather, who had come over from Denmark with Canute and had been a great traveller, said it was a dirty big grey thing that killed people; a serpent that cast its coils around the world, and best avoided by those who had any sense. The Norman invaders, the killers down in the valley, came from over the sea, but it was a different sea to the one her northern ancestors had travelled.

The Normans worked with a terrible industry. From dawn she’d seen them moving in, raising plumes of smoke from the villages like black banners in their wake. Tola had to run if she wanted to live. She had no choice.

She was cold to the bone but she could feel the killers’ effort even at that distance. She imagined herself among those columns of men; her arm warmed by the toil of slaughter, her body glad of the heat of the animal beneath her and the fire of destruction about her. For an instant she felt herself inside the thoughts of a Norman soldier, one real or imagined so sharp he may as well have been real. He felt not entirely warlike but a fussy, particular man. He would see that Old Nothgyth’s apple tree was felled and split to the root, her pigs slaughtered and their blood turned into the hard soil, lest it freeze on the earth and the people creep back to suck at it in their starvation. The axes blunted easily on frozen wood and frozen soil and it was an effort keeping them sharp.

He would see the fields salted from the bulging carts that followed the column, the well fouled with pitch and the corpses of Nothgyth’s sons. He knew the salting was only a gesture but it was worth doing – the rebels needed to believe that their land had been laid waste for a thousand years. When the house was fired and everything she owned along with it, he would lead his men away, turning back at the gallop after a short while to catch her digging at the grain she had buried. He knew all the tricks. Only then would he leave her, standing close by her burning home taking the last warmth she would ever know before she died. He had to hurry away. The scene would be repeated one more time before the end of the day. It had been played out nineteen times already. Sometimes he would leave a survivor to spread the fear for a while before the cold took them. Sometimes he would not. There was no reason in who lived and who died. It was a matter of feel, he’d tell his men.

She heard an echo of words in the man’s mind. If they had been spoken to her face she would not have understood them but in the cavern of her head they took on meaning. She saw a stern-faced man, bald at the front of his head, strong-armed, pot-bellied. ‘No one alive from York to Durham.’ That was the whole world.

She came back to herself and gazed out over the wide land. White everywhere, like the little woollen blanket the travelling fool had put over the coins at the summer fair. When he’d removed it the coins were gone. The world was changing, hiding itself to emerge anew. When it did, there would be no place for her.

How many soldiers? She didn’t know her numbers but she had never seen such a host – not even at the market day at Blackdale. More people than she had ever seen, more than she could ever have imagined seeing. They had come upon the dale at an easy pace, walking their steaming horses through the wide snows. One column from the north, another from the south and a third from the sea. It was not a net, nor even an encirclement. The attackers were indifferent to whether their prey stayed and died or fled to the hills. Death by fire or death by cold; death either way.

‘Yes,’ she said, though no question had been asked. The man who stood beside her was to have been her husband. Hals. He had not been a rich man, though he had a little land and kept a few sheep. She was a poor woman, pretty enough to marry better, her mother said. A man with five or six hides might have considered her. She hadn’t wanted a man with five or six hides. Hals would do. Tola, so sensitive she could put herself into the mind of a Norman across a valley, knew Hals was a good man and she understood him.

She shivered deeply. ‘We can’t stay on the hill all night,’ she said.

Hals hugged her and she sensed the question in him. ‘What can we do?’ He was of the Danish line too, his father coming over with Canute to farm, so Hals would more naturally trust a woman’s opinion than an Englishman of older heritage might.

‘Wait and see if they move through. Then go down. To whatever’s left.’

She saw that he feared they would come back.

‘They’ll go everywhere,’ she said. ‘It’s a hunt to them. What man doesn’t love to hunt?’

He gestured behind him. Nine standing stones circled the hilltop. The local people called them the nine ladies. They were said to protect the valley. They offered scant help now.

When she was girl, wandering up on the fell on a sunny morning, they had spoken to her. The weather up there could not be trusted, and in the afternoon a grey mist had come down so quickly it was as if the day had closed its eyes. She had found herself among the standing stones then. They’d given her a start at first, as she’d thought they were people standing watching her in the mist. She’d realised they were just stones with her next breath. She’d wandered among them, trying to get her bearings. The last stone slewed at an angle, pointing along Blackbed Scar and out to the boggy top. There was a quick route down from there and she knew it well. The mist was cold on her nose and lips, the shawl tight about her as she stepped along the broad arc of the Scar and out onto the sodden earth of the top.

The going was harder than she’d thought. There had been little rain but the bog had held its water. She was soaked within twenty paces, about to turn around, when she’d seen him under the surface. The hanged god, his skin blackened from its long soaking, the frayed noose at his neck, one eye ­ruined and eaten, the other half-open, looking at her. She looked across the Scar and saw the nine standing stones, no longer stones but eight fierce women, staring across the valley, spears in their hands and shields at their side. Where was the ninth?

She saw a vision of a great battle in the north – Danes camped around a river surprised by an onrushing horde of Englishmen screaming over the brow of a hill, a scrambled defence, no armour, no helms, as the English king led his men against them.

And then, from a strange country of chalky soil, the other men came; those she now knew to be Normans with their teardrop shields, their shaved heads. The English king rode south to meet them, his weary warriors at his side, and from every shire and every village men ran to meet him to join and refresh his army, though they might have walked or not bothered at all.

Even Tola knew that the Norman king was done for. She sensed his feeling for his ships; it was a familiar one that she felt largely from the young – one of need and resentment. The king could not go far from the ships. If he was beaten he needed a way home. He had ravaged the land, so he needed to resupply. This man, with the pot belly and the strong arm, was walking a ledge above a crag. He felt vulnerable, arrogant, belligerent and exhilarated. He had come too late in the year. He feared winter, feared being king of only the wasteland he had created, his army coughing, rotting and dying beneath its tents. There was a lurch in the pit of her stomach, a vision of two ravens flying against a stormcloud sunset. The English king would not listen to counsel. His mind sank into the blood mire. He would give the Norman king his battle. She knew that the man in the peaty water was a god and he had entered the mind of the English king to drive him on to death and to a place in stories to last a thousand years.

She fell into the mire and through the god’s mind to a burning city where gigantic beings, half shadow, fought in the ruins. One shadow was a wolf, another the noose god, battling forever under a cold sun. Then the god had turned his eye towards her and she had seen bright shining things, symbols that expressed everything – how a baby grows to be an adult and a calf to become a cow; how the sea pushes against the land and the land pushes back. More light than she had ever known was all around her. After that it was dark.

Her brother had found her, half dead in the water, and ­carried her down to the farm.

Her brother. Where was he in this burning land? He had gone with a party of men to face the Normans, to ambush them as they rode through the woods. It had given her the pause she needed to run to the fell. He was dead now. She could feel the hounds dragging him down, their weight more awful than their teeth; hear the swift and certain stride of the Norman soldier coming through the woods towards him, the punch of the dagger into his ribs.

She used the cold against her emotions, locking them in under ice, under the will to survive.

‘The ladies never offered me help,’ she said to Hals.

He hugged her tighter, his arms shaking with the cold. The last rays of the sun warmed them from the rim of the hills. They’d have to move again soon and keep moving throughout the night if they weren’t to freeze where they stood.

Hals had ice in his beard. There was no wind yet, no rain. Even without them she knew they couldn’t spend the night still in the open.

Hals’ eyes were full of tears. He was a strong man and she had never seen him cry. She knew he wanted her to ask the ladies.

‘It is against God’s law. The priest told us that.’

He drew his knife.

‘That too is against God’s law.’

‘Orm at Ing End took that way out,’ Hals said.

He was trembling, with fear and cold, with misery.

‘His father was a northern man. He should have fought.’ She pulled her cloak around her. ‘You couldn’t kill me, Hals.’

He offered her the knife. ‘You do it,’ he said. ‘You are stronger than me. Kill me and then yourself.’

She turned her eyes away. Out over the valley, a silver half-moon lit the smoke, the dying light rendering the land grey but for the red sun in the west. Away by Alfred’s house a flame sprang up. The Normans were burning again. Surely soon they would stop, if only to secure shelter for themselves.

A flash from down in the valley – someone holding up a bright sword that caught the light of the burning house. A cry, bounding towards them from far away. Had the warriors seen them?

‘Do you remember the rhymes Nana used to tell? About the end of the world?

 

Surt fares from the south with the scourge of branches,

The sun of the battle-gods shone from his sword.

The crags are sundered, the giant-women sink,

The dead throng Hel-way, and heaven is cloven.’

 

She crossed herself. ‘This is the end of the world. Christ must come,’ she said.

‘So where is he?’said Hals.

A group of six riders broke away from the burning farm towards the hill, small as mice in the distance. Tola looked at Hals’ knife, so sharp, so clean. It had caught the sun, she was sure, and given them away.

They couldn’t run. The Normans were burning on the south of the dale too. They might make the woods but it was a scant hope. There was no other option.

‘I’ll go to the gods,’ she said.

Tola walked along the ridge of the Scar to the stones. She knew in her gut the key to what she sought. Pain. Denial.

‘Keep moving, Hals,’ said Tola. ‘Either run down or stay with me but keep moving. You’ll die if you don’t.’

It didn’t take someone of Tola’s sensitivities to see the question on Hals’ face. ‘And you?’

‘Death had his chance with me before here. He won’t harm me now.’

She took off her shawl and laid it down, took off her skirt and her tunic, and stood among the stones in only her underhose and her shirt.

Hals paced the line of stones back and forth, his breath steaming about him. They’d made their decision, he wasn’t about to go back on it now.

Later, Tola would know there was a point of transition in invoking the gods where you went from willing them to appear to willing them to stay away. Colder than she had ever been, human and vulnerable, she stood – warm flesh among the frozen stones. She knew who she sought. The people still had their stories and their faith. They called to Jesus on a Sunday and, if Jesus did not come, they left their offerings and their carvings for the elves and the gods. There was a charm and she spoke it for want of knowing really what to do.

‘Ladies of the Dale, watchers by night and day

Hear me singing your furious song.’

There was nothing that had not been there before, only the shouts of the Norman soldiers in the dale, the pacing of Hals along the line of stones.

‘Hear me singing your furious song.’

She said it again and again and its meaning started to slip. Furious song. Furious singer. The old words for that phrase came to her. Woden. Odin, as Hal’s family called him. Death in his hood, death in his noose, in the waters of the mire, his nails black, his skin leather. Hals kept pacing the line. She felt his anxiety as if it was her own, a lurch in her belly, a need to shit. The feeling faded, her body grew colder.

How long had she been there? Always. She was a stone, watching the valley. Her sisters were beside her, looking down, their dark wings stretching to the sky.

She heard a name she recognised. Waelcyrian – Valkyries, as her father would have called them.

‘Choosers of the slain. Dark ones, overseeing the land.’

She had a sensation of flight, of great wings beating at the sky; wings or shadows, she could not tell. She heard the call of ravens, felt the rush of cold air.

Hals shook her. He was trying to tell her the enemy was coming.

The half-moon was big and bright but there was now a low fog on the hill. She was above it, looking down, the heads of the riders emerging as if they swam through a lake. She saw the bodies of the horses moving through the fog like dark fish through a silty sea, the spears of the riders before them.

‘What is to be given?’ One of the strange women spoke, her voice rattling like earth onto a coffin.

‘I have nothing to give!’

‘Then you must want nothing.’

‘Help me vanquish those I hate.’

‘The price is high.’

‘I will pay it.’

She was on the ground and in the air at the same time. A rider gave a cry and said something in his strange speech. He’d seen them. He turned towards her, his sword free.

He said something else and she heard delight in his voice. He was pleased to find a young woman.

Moonshadows were on the fog and the shadows were the wings of gigantic birds, or something like birds. A dark shape swept past her and she threw up a hand to protect her face. The rider slid down from his horse in an easy movement. His hand was at her throat but it was as if she was watching herself in a dream.

He tore away her tunic and pushed her backwards.

A woman’s face loomed from the mist, a death mask, her skin like pitch, golden hair falling in a braid to a noose at the neck. On her arm was a shield, in her hand a fireblack spear and at her back were wings like those of a gigantic raven but made of moonlight and shadows. She screamed one word – ‘Odin!’ – and Tola knew that name meant death.

The spear was a shadow, thrusting forward to take the Norman at the throat. The man fell backwards onto the frosty ground and the woman followed him, drawing a sharp black knife. She seized the man’s hair and, in a swipe, beheaded him. She passed up the head to Tola and it seemed to the girl a marvellous gift, like a flower. Still she was above the fray in most of her mind, looking down, cradling the severed head to her breast.

Figures condensed from the fog and then were gone, only to reform again – women, some flying on great black wings, others descending on horses of fog and shadow.

The Normans thrashed with their swords in the murk, like beaters trying to drive ducks into the paths of slings and ­arrows. She saw one man lifted straight from his saddle, flying up into the swirling air. The voices of the Normans were urgent, those of the horses panicked and shrill. A horseman cried out as his horse stuttered backwards and reared, falling. Another slashed about him as if the air itself was his enemy. He too fell, though she did not see what had struck him.

Wings were everywhere about her, like the beating of a mighty storm on a door. Horses screeched, men cursed and the women who swooped around her screamed their war cries.

‘Woden, Odin, Grimnir.’ The names sounded inside her like the wind bawling in the hills and she knew their meaning. ‘Fury, Madness. Death.’

On the ground a woman held up her spear and cried out in exultation as her horse gorged itself on the body of a fallen Norman.

Tola cried out for Hals but she could not see him. Only two Normans were left now. One had seen her and his horse charged the arc of the hillside. She had come back to herself and was no longer in the air but in front of those stamping hooves, a frightened and defenceless woman, the fog about her waist. Then the rider was dead, two arrows protruding from his back. From along the ridge she saw a man, no more than a shape in the mist. He wore a bearskin on his head as some of her father’s people had done in war, hoping to take on the characteristics of the animal.

The horse careened on, dragging the rider by the stirrup. It caught her a glancing blow. She spun around, falling back hard on the cold earth. The bear man ran towards her. Above him the dreadful women moved in the fog like embers caught in a swirl of smoke.

Then they rose up above the fog, wings beating, horses breathing a frantic rhythm, looking down on her and the bear as if readying for a charge.

From across the valley came a howl, a long tether of sound that tugged her head around to face it. In the howl was the sound of terrible grief, of mothers screaming as they were torn from their children, of fathers watching their families ­butchered, of old women by the burning ruins of their home.

‘The wolf is in the hills,’ a dead sister spoke. ‘Gift for gift. Your enemies are dead.’

The women, with their peat-black faces, their nooses, their horses, their wings and their spears were submerged by the mist and Hals’ arms were around her but his body was limp, a red wound on his breast. Tola held him and wept at the price she had paid for the sisters’ help.

 

 

 

2 The Slaughter Beast

 

 

 

He had run when his daughter by his mistress had died. She was fifty years old, a high lady of the Byzantine court who had lived a good life and shown him the pleasure of sitting in an olive grove under the sun, watching his grandsons wrestle, answering his granddaughter’s million questions about the world. Little dark Theodora was the one who had been most curious that her grandfather looked younger than her mother. She had visited him at his small hill farm weekly – often she was the only human he saw from one month to the next. He had told her, in the end.

‘I’m immortal, I think. Or rather, I don’t get older.’

‘Could you die if you were run over by a cart?’

‘I think so.’

‘Best look out for carts, then.’

He’d watched her grow from a child. His daughter died and he had seen the grey hair among the black of Theodora’s curls and realised he could not stay any longer.

‘How are you feeling?’ Theodora had asked him, by her mother’s grave.

‘I feel as though I am death,’ he said.

‘There are many men who spend days with potions and ancient books trying to gain what you have got. Never to die.’

‘I think I can die.’

‘How?’

‘I feel mortal. I feel …’ He looked for the word. ‘Vulnerable.’

‘You think too much of the future,’ said Theodora.

‘It seems vast. And it seems empty. What shall I do, Theodora?’

He squeezed her hand and put it to his lips. She smelled as she had used to smell as a child, of the bitter oil rubbed into her hair to counter attacks of the lice. She had been putting it on her own children, no doubt.

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You have robbed death and he will have his compensation from you.’

‘Weregild.’

‘What?’

‘My father was a northerner. A Varangian of Norway. If a man kills another he must pay money to his family. Perhaps death wants gold for life.’

‘If it was only gold you could pay it. Will you not see my children? They might bring joy back to you.’

‘I will not see them.’

‘Then you have made your decision to leave the world,’ said Theodora.

He remembered Beatrice – mother to Célene. She had never stood for sentimentality either.

Most of the time, Beatrice was a fleeting presence in his mind. She wouldn’t sit still to be looked at. Only when he told Theodora about her, how he had met her when they were both Normans – she a lord’s daughter, he a monk brought in to tend her in a fever – did she live again in his mind.

Beatrice had pretended to be ill for weeks in order that he could keep visiting her. What had they talked about? He’d forgotten. He remembered only her voice, its timbre and tone. Not what she said and the shifting light in the little cell where she lay, the chaperone dozing by the scented fire. For this. For this. Anything.

‘I would have liked to have known her.’

‘And she you.’

He’d never told Theodora how he had fought the old mad gods of his fathers by the World Well in the catacombs ­beneath Constantinople where the Norns sit spinning the destiny of all men, or how Beatrice had given her life in bargain for his. It was a deal he had never wanted her to make. He’d never said, either, how he’d travelled through the catacombs of his mind to free the great wolf that the gods had bound and how it had set upon the gods. Had they died? He didn’t know but the wolf had put its eye on him, mingled its soul with his, and from that moment Loys had never aged, never changed.

He could feel the wolf inside him, watching him. He had chained it down and subdued it. Around his neck he wore a stone – part of the magic rock called Scream to which the wolf had been fettered. If he took the stone off then the world crackled and spat with sounds in regis­ters he had never heard as a human. Smells no human had ever smelled burst upon him – meat-deep, berry-rich, smells that did not evoke memories like the bitter oil on Theodora’s fingers but that were of the now, only themselves, and opened the gate in the garden of his mind to wild places, to hunger as deep as love. He knew then that without the stone the wolf would claim him and he would be no more than an animal. It was time to let the claim be made.

Suicide, by his Christian code, was unthinkable. By the law of the old gods he had seen at the well, it was the path of a coward and thus contemptible. But to live as a wolf, to anchor oneself to the present as an animal is anchored, would be possible and, as an animal, he might die. To seek danger was the noble path of the Christian saint and of the pagan warrior.

He kissed Theodora for the last time and then he ran from the south and Constantinople, up through the forests of the Dneiper, past the Ever-Violent Rapids that promised death, through the bandit lands that promised death, waiting for winter with its promise of death.

He had lived because he wouldn’t let him die – the god, the pale traveller, the one who called himself Loki. Loys didn’t know if the god existed or was just the product of a brain fever. The Pechenegs of the Dneiper had captured Loys by the Laughing Rapids but they had been afraid of him, even as they stripped him and tied him, ready to throw him down into the raging waters as a sacrifice. They were an intuitive people. Had they sensed he was marked by the gods?

They’d taken the stone he wore on a thong at his neck – the little triangular pebble with its wolfshead etching. Even as they cut it free he felt the world change subtly. The men who tied and bound him, haggled over his few clothes, his fine sword and his good shoes, were no longer quite people. They weren’t even enemies or threats. He was curious about their movements in the way a cat is curious about the movements of a spider. The Pechenegs were scared of him – the three who tied him would not even show their faces but wore their blank-eyed war masks whose impassive silver features were terrifying to him. After they cut away the stone, the rooms of his mind’s mansion fell in and he saw the world only in broad categories. Living and dead. Food and not food. Enemy and bird.

‘We kill you, devil’ said a warrior, in corroded Greek.

Loys heard the fear in his voice. How did they know what he was?

‘Yes,’ said Loys.

Loys tumbled into the waters, felt their mighty weight shoving him down, saw the green of the riverbank, the black of the rocks in that jumbling, breathless churn.

He did not die. Instead peace came down on him and the waters stilled. He looked up from them at a smooth black rock, slick under the moonlight. On the rock sat an extraordinary figure – an impossibly tall man with a shock of red hair. He was naked, save for a white feather cloak, and his face was torn and bloody, his teeth visible through his cheek.

‘See what you did?’ He gestured to his face.

‘I did nothing but try to protect those I loved.’

‘That’s every murderer’s excuse,’ said the man. No, not a man. A god. Loys could remember his name, if only he could clear his head. He had met him before.

‘I committed no murder.’

‘You are murder, Fenrisulfr.’

‘Don’t call me that.’

‘You are the wolf, the wolf who killed King Death at the twilight of the gods. But now the king is gone. And you want him back, don’t you, Fenrisulfr? You want him to live again.’

‘He is not gone. I see death all around.’

‘Funny that,’ said the god.

‘What do you mean?’

Loki – that was the god’s name. He was a liar, Loys remembered, but not a malevolent one. He had helped him.

‘You need to die. A new age is being born but it cannot come to be until the fates have their final sacrifice.’

‘What sacrifice?’

‘You. You were supposed to die after you killed Odin but you cheated destiny.’

‘Then kill me.’

‘I would if I could, but I can’t.’

‘Who can?’

‘You are death. You can.’

‘Then let me die here.’

‘Not so easy. You can die here but you will be reborn. I was thinking of something more permanent. Your total and abiding extinction. Forever. Then the world can heal. Look down into the waters.’

Loys did and it seemed to him that he was both sitting on the rock under the cold metal moon and in the water at the same time, his vision flashing between the dark and the light.

‘The dark is appealing, isn’t it? Less confusing. Less demanding.’

‘Will you let me die here?’

‘I can’t let you die anywhere. You’re the killer, Fenrisulfr, you need to work out how to die for yourself. I wouldn’t have thought it was too difficult.’

‘How do I die?’

‘I don’t know. Follow your nose.’

The god gestured to the bank and the waters raged again. Loys splashed, gulped, thrashed for air. In the tumult and the panic he felt his humanity wash away like dirt in a flood. He was an animal, fighting for survival. His arms had come free of the bonds and he reached out, his hand catching on stone, steadying him against the flow. The night bristled with sensations – he heard the scratching of insects in the leaf mould, the soft wings of the bats who hunted them in the dark, the muffled flight of the owls that hunted the bats.

He smelled decay and death in its rich glory – the browning leaves, the body of a fox, the autumn growth of mushroom and spore. It was as if his life before had been lived under the influence of some deadening drug and now he saw the world as it truly was. He’d felt this way before, when the wolf had looked at him when he had freed it to face the old gods. He was strong and he was certain. He pulled himself from the waters. The rapids’ roar was like a dim echo of the roar he felt inside himself.

Two of the Pechenegs saw him and one fitted an arrow to his squat little bow, sending it unseen through the night. Loys didn’t have to think, he just ducked and the arrow snicked through the air above his head. He ran forward, bounding from rock to rock. Two more bowmen fitted arrows, other warriors found swords and axes but it was too late. He was gone, into the dark of the trees.

He heard the Pechenegs arguing, their vo. . .