M. Lachlan: Lord of Slaughter

Beatrice kicked the horse again but it didn’t move, standing as if entranced.

‘Come, lady, the ice is cold and my fire is warm. Though you, I think, have a chill in you no flame can dispel.’

‘It’s not seemly for me to be here with a man on my own. Go away from me, sir. My father does not like to hear of vagabonds on his lands, let alone ones who approach his daughter so boldly.’

‘You are a beauty. The god always wants beauty and lives that are painful to lose. He could go to the starving, to the sick and the imprisoned and take them — and take them he does — but it is the lovely life he wants the most, the life like yours. Dismount.’

Beatrice did so, though she didn’t want to, as if her body was not her own to command.

‘Who do you speak of?’

‘Why, who else? Old man death himself. Lord Slaughter. King Kill. The back-stabbing, front-stabbing, anywhere-you-like-and-plenty-of-places-you-don’t-stabbing murder god. Odin, one-eyed corpse lord, corrosive and malignant in his schemes and his stratagems. But of course you know all this, you’ve met him before.’

‘I don’t know who you’re talking about. It sounds like idolatry.’

‘Funny,’ he said. ‘They call us idol worshippers, while they are on their knees before their painted saints. And what do the saints ever bring them? Misery and death at every turn.’ He clicked his fingers and pointed at her. ‘Ask what I bring you.’

‘What do you bring me?’

‘Why, me,’ said the man. He bowed and walked forward to take Beatrice’s hand. ‘And, lady, there is no richer gift.’

Beatrice felt very odd indeed. Was this another fever? She had seen this fellow in her fevers before, she was sure, but this seemed so real.

She walked with him through the wood towards the little fire. Beside it he spread his feather cloak and lay down. Beatrice did not think it odd that it surrounded the fire in thick down for twenty paces about. It looked so warm and wonderful. She dearly wanted to test the comfort of the feathers. She lay down too, next to the man, all fear of him gone. The feathers were truly very comfortable, more comfortable than any bed she had ever lain on. Beatrice gazed into the man’s eyes and thought they were the green eyes of a wolf. She wanted to confide in him.

‘I have dreams.’

‘So do I,’ he said, ‘and sometimes it’s easy to fall in love with a dream. I did once.’

‘Am I a dream?’ She didn’t know quite what she said.

‘The very idea! You, lady, are reality. You are to where the dreams of gods fall with a thump.’

‘I go to a place by a river and there is a wall full of candles. I cannot touch them.’

‘Are you the only one there?’

‘There are others.’

‘What others?’

‘A boy who seems lost and a thing in the darkness. I cannot see it but I know it is there.’

‘It is a wolf and it hunts you.’

‘Why is the wolf hunting me?’

‘To love you and to kill you.’

‘Why would he kill someone he loved?’

‘Well I don’t think he means to. It’s just that he always associates with such disreputable types.’

Beatrice breathed in the aroma of the man’s skin — like incense and smoke, like the freshness of rain, like iron in the hand.

‘Why does he follow me?’

‘For what you have inside you. The thing that howls and calls. The wolf trap rune. You are a mighty bait, lady, irresistible to a creature of such palate.’ Something seemed to stir within her and she saw a shape, a long thin line with a sharp slash through it. She heard a howl in her mind and a shiver went through her flesh. The shape was calling to the wolf, however odd that seemed.

‘What can I do to escape him?’

‘I have told you enough. For that, lady, I require something more from you.’

‘What is it?’

‘You have been too long a maiden.’

The threat was clear but Beatrice did not feel scared. The man’s statement felt curiously reasonable.

‘Can you truly tell me how I can escape him?’

‘I can.’

‘How do I know you are telling the truth?’

‘I am a god.’

‘There is but one god.’

‘So forcefully stated,’ he said, ‘and so obviously untrue.’

The air danced with points of light, like the silver shimmers that appear in the eyes on rising too quickly, but unfading. Snowflakes fell, as big as saucers, and yet she was warm.

‘Tell me and I will give you what you want.’

‘Give me what I want and I will tell you,’ he said.

‘Tell me a little, so I may know if you are trying to deceive me.’

‘Give me a little, so I may know if you are trying to deceive me.’

He undid the brooch that held the neck of her tunic together and dropped it onto the feathers. Then slid his hand inside the robe’s neck onto her breast. Her body tingled, her skin tightened, a delicious chill like going out into the frost after too long in a stuffy room.

‘If he insists on following you,’ he said, ‘take him to the place he would least like to go.’

He kissed her and she inhaled his scent. It seemed so complex — like a bright stream, like wet grass and like earth, like the sea on a sunny day, but under it all the odour of burning. The moon was a sharp crescent, the morning star sparkling like a jewel next to it.

‘Where is that place?’

‘You will know it. Now I will know you.’

He lifted up her skirts and did what he had asked to do and it seemed to Beatrice that, in her pleasure and her abandon, the world opened to her, gave up its secrets. She felt the lives of everything around her, of the trees with their questing roots, of the swallows never still, of all creation in its tumult and uproar, its wild delight. And when it was done she slept. The sun and the shouts woke her.

‘Beatrice! Beatrice!

The winter sun was bright. The man, with the feather cloak had gone, taking the night with him. Loys bent over her, his bundle of firewood at his side.

‘What happened to me?’

‘You fell from your horse! Are you all right?’

‘I think so.’ She hugged him, and he kissed and comforted her.

So it had been a dream, a vision brought on by a faint. But it didn’t feel like a dream.

In the blue evenings of the weeks that followed, walking the earthen ramparts of her father’s fortress, she heard the voice of a wolf in the hills and something inside her trembled. She understood what the wolf was saying, or rather caught the message in its voice. It was lonely and calling for its friends. But when she dreamed, the same voice called for her and she found herself standing in her father’s hall at midnight, wandering outside to look at the hills.

Something was coming for her and the idea had assumed an unreasonable importance in her mind. In sleep she went back to the river where she had been in her fever, back to the wall where little lamps burned and where something crawled and crept towards her in her bed. But someone else waited unseen, someone who wanted to help her. When she woke she’d seen Loys and felt that with him the dream demons could not harm her.

The instinct to leave Rouen had been just that — an instinct. ‘You will know,’ the strange man had said. She did know. The thing that sought to harm her was there and she had to run from it.

A disturbance in the street, men’s voices, Greeks. She craned from the window to see what it was, but couldn’t. Boots tramped on her stairs — a man’s footfall. It wasn’t Loys. This fellow jingled like a shook purse. She recognised the sound. A hauberk of mail. A warrior was outside her door.

She went to the back room to hide, not knowing what to do. The door was bolted but any man who wanted to have it down could do so in a second. She had only the little knife she used to cut her thread. She took it up as a voice, thick and foreign, spoke loudly in Greek.