Death of Kings

‘Why would he care?’ she demanded. ‘So long as he gets his silver he doesn’t mind what god they worship.’ She was a Saxon, as were most of the folk in the small town, but she spoke of Cnut with evident respect. No wonder. He was rich, he was dangerous and he was said to be the finest sword fighter in all Britain. His sword was said to be the longest and most lethal blade in the land, which gave him the name Cnut Longsword, but Cnut was also a fervent ally of Sigurd. If Cnut Ranulfson knew that I was on his land then Buchestanes would be swarming with Danes seeking my life. ‘So are you here for the hot springs?’ the widow asked me.

‘I seek the sorceress,’ I said.

She made the sign of the cross. ‘God preserve us,’ she said.

‘And to see her,’ I asked, ‘what do I do?’

‘Pay the monks, of course.’

Christians are so strange. They claim the pagan gods have no power and that the old magic is as fraudulent as Ludda’s bags of iron, yet when they are ill, or when their harvest fails, or when they want children, they will go to the galdricge, the sorceress, and every district has one. A priest will preach against such women, declaring them heretic and evil, yet a day later he will pay silver to a galdricge to hear his future or have the warts removed from his face. The monks of Buchestanes were no different. They guarded the Roman bathhouse, they chanted in their chapel and they took silver and gold to arrange a meeting with the aglæcwif. An aglæcwif is a she-monster, and that is how I thought of Ælfadell. I feared her and I wanted to hear her, and so I sent Ludda and Rypere to make the arrangements, and they returned saying the enchantress demanded gold. Not silver, gold.

I had brought money on this journey, almost all the money I had left in the world. I had been forced to take the gold chains from Sigunn, and I used two of those to pay the monks, swearing that one day I would return to retrieve the precious links. Then, at dusk on our second day in Buchestanes, I walked south and west to a hill that loomed above the town and was dominated by one of the old people’s graves, a green mound on a drenched hill. Those graves have vengeful ghosts and, as I followed the path into a wood of ash, beech and elm, I felt a chill. I had been instructed to go alone and told that if I disobeyed then the sorceress would not appear to me, but now I fervently wished I had a companion to watch my back. I stopped, hearing nothing except the sigh of wind in the leaves and the drip of water and the rush of a nearby stream. The widow had told me that some men were forced to wait days to consult Ælfadell, and some, she said, paid their silver or gold, came to the wood, and found nothing. ‘She can vanish into air,’ the widow told me, making the sign of the cross. Once, she said, Cnut himself had come and Ælfadell had refused to appear.

‘And Jarl Sigurd?’ I had asked her. ‘He came too?’

‘He came last year,’ she said, ‘and he was generous. A Saxon lord was with him.’

‘Who?’

‘How would I know? They didn’t rest their bones in my house. They stayed with the monks.’

‘Tell me what you remember,’ I asked her.

‘He was young,’ she said, ‘he had long hair like you, but he was still a Saxon.’ Most Saxons cut their hair, while the Danes prefer to let it grow long. ‘The monks called him the Saxon, lord,’ the widow went on, ‘but who he was? I don’t know.’

‘And he was a lord?’

‘He dressed like one, lord.’

I was dressed in mail and leather. I heard nothing dangerous in the wood and so went onward, stooping beneath wet leaves until I saw that the path ended at a limestone crag that was slashed by a great crevice. Water dripped down the cliff face, and the stream gushed from the crevice’s base, churning itself white about fallen rocks before sluicing into the woods. I looked about and saw no one, heard no one. It seemed to me that no birds sang, though that was surely my apprehension. The stream’s noise was loud. I could see footprints in the shingle and stone that edged the stream, though none looked fresh, and so I took a deep breath, clambered over the fallen stones and stepped into the cave’s slit-like mouth that was edged by ferns.

I remember the fear of that cave, a greater fear than I had felt at Cynuit when Ubba’s men had made the shield wall and come to kill us. I touched Thor’s hammer that hung at my neck and I said a prayer to Hoder, the son of Odin and blind god of the night, and then I groped my way forward, ducking under a rock arch beyond which the grey evening light faded fast. I let my eyes grow used to the gloom and moved on, trying to stay above the stream that scoured through the bank of pebbles and sand that grated beneath my boots. I inched my way forward through a narrow, low passage. It grew colder. I wore a helmet and it touched rock more than once. I gripped the hammer that hung about my neck. This cave was surely one of the entrances to the netherworld, to where Yggdrasil has its roots and the three fates decide our destiny. It was a place for dwarves and elves, for the shadow creatures who haunt our lives and mock our hopes. I was frightened.

I slipped on sand and blundered forward and sensed that the passage had ended and that I was now in a great echoing space. I saw a glimmer of light and wondered if my eyes played tricks. I touched the hammer again, and then put my hand on the hilt of Serpent-Breath. I was standing still, hearing the drip of water and the rush of the stream, and listening for the sound of a person. I was gripping my sword’s hilt now, praying to blind Hoder to guide me in the blind darkness.

And then there was light.

Sudden light. It was only a bundle of rushlights, but they had been concealed behind screens that were abruptly lifted and their small, smoky flames seemed dazzlingly bright in the utter darkness.

The rushlights were standing on a rock that had a smooth surface like a table. A knife, a cup and a bowl lay beside the lights, which lit a chamber as high as any hall. The cave’s roof hung with pale stone that looked as if it had been frozen in mid-flow. Liquid stone, touched with blue and grey, and all that I saw in an instant, then I stared at the creature who watched me from behind the rock table. She was a dark cloak in the darkness, a shape in the shadows, a bent thing, the aglæcwif, but as my eyes became used to the light I saw that she was a tiny thing, frail as a bird, old as time and with a face so dark and deep-lined that it looked like leather. Her black woollen cloak was filthy and its hood half covered her hair that was grey-streaked black. She was ugliness in human guise, the galdricge, the aglæcwif, Ælfadell.

I did not move and she did not speak. She just gazed at me, unblinkingly, and I felt the fear crawl in me, and then she beckoned to me with one claw-like hand and touched the empty bowl. ‘Fill it,’ she said. Her voice was like wind on gravel.

‘Fill it?’

‘Gold,’ she said, ‘or silver. But fill it.’

‘You want more?’ I asked angrily.

‘You want everything, Kjartan of Cumbraland,’ she said, and she had paused for the space of an eye-blink before saying that name, as if she suspected it was false, ‘so yes. I want more.’

I almost refused, but I confess I was frightened of her power, and so I took all the silver from my pouch, fifteen coins, and put them in the wooden bowl. She smirked as the coins clinked. ‘What do you want to know?’ she asked.

‘Everything.’

‘There will be a harvest,’ she said dismissively, ‘and then winter, and after winter the time of sowing, and then another harvest and then another winter until time ends, and men will be born and men will die, and that is everything.’

‘Then tell me what I want to know,’ I said.

She hesitated, then gave an almost imperceptible nod. ‘Put your hand on the rock,’ she said, but when I put my left hand flat on the cold stone she shook her head. ‘Your sword hand,’ she said and I obediently laid my right hand there instead. ‘Turn it over,’ she snarled, and I turned the hand palm upwards. She picked up the knife, watching my eyes. She was half smiling, daring me to withdraw my hand, and when I did not move she suddenly scored the knife across my palm. She scored it once from the ball of my thumb to the base of my small finger, then did it again, crosswise, and I watched the fresh blood well from the two cuts and I remembered the crosswise scar on Sigurd’s hand. ‘Now,’ she said, putting the knife down, ‘slap the stone hard.’ She pointed with a finger to the smooth centre of the stone. ‘Slap it there.’