The next morning the traveller was gone, along with the fine wolf pelt. Around Saitada’s neck, tied in a strip of leather, was a strange stone. It was a token, the night caller had said, of his affection and protection. It didn’t seem to do her much good.
The livestock had been slaughtered. The dogs were dead and Saitada was blamed for lying with a stranger while the wolf devoured the pigs. The farmer’s wife wanted to forgive her, to comb her hair and call her daughter again, but the farmer, brave in the wolfless light of day, wanted revenge.
She was sold with only the clothes she stood up in and the pebble charm the strange fellow had given her to her name. The priests had bought her and told her to make a virtue of her suffering. When they discovered she was pregnant they set to chastise her but found they could not. Something about her, maybe the charm, maybe that eye that seemed to see all their sins, stopped them, and they let her live among them unpunished.
Then Authun had come.
So what stopped Authun’s thoughts of murder on the ship? The stone at her neck was no more than a pebble with the head of a wolf scratched on it. Perhaps he had seen the rough little picture — his family sign — and felt some deep-seated fear that this foreign woman was kin. Or perhaps he just felt sorry for her.
He looked north, up into the white-capped peaks where he would meet Gullveig, witch queen of the mountains, that mind-blown child. She had been no more than ten years old when he’d first faced her the summer before. Authun knew the stories surrounding her. As the old witch queen was dying, she had appeared to Gullveig’s father, a warrior at the court of King Halfdan the Just. She had told him to take his pregnant wife to the Troll Wall to give birth. He knew better than to refuse, surrendered the girl child and gave thanks for the luck the sacrifice would bring the family. Gullveig had been a decade in the dark of the mountain caves, breathing in magic like a fisherman’s children breathe sea salt on the wind.
Authun looked at the mother cradling her twins. No, he couldn’t kill her. He’d give her to the witches, he thought. The chosen boy would survive the journey from the Wall to his wife without feeding. The girl couldn’t even speak Authun’s language, would never know what had happened to her children. What harm could she do waiting on the witches? It wasn’t as if she was going to escape them: no one could even find their way in and out of their caves without a guide. In this way Authun the Pitiless, burner of the five towns, allowed the privilege of life to a deformed slave that he would not allow to his kinsmen, and in so doing sealed his fate.
When they came ashore, the summer valley was pleasant and hummed with fertility but Authun could take no pleasure from the scenery. All his life he was a man of the necessary, someone who did what needed to be done and thought no more about it. He was pitiless but as a means to an end. The fouler the fate of his enemies, the more tribute he could exact from others without having to lift a spear. But, as the woman’s strange eye seemed to watch him wherever he went, he could not rid himself of the image of Varrin’s face as he’d faced death and spoken of his wife. He would, he decided, carry the message to the widow as his first priority after he had given the child to his wife.
There was a river between the coast and the Troll Wall and Authun would have liked to have sailed up it. Single-handed, however, it would be impossible. And anyway the witches had called down enough rocks to make it impassable even with a full crew. So they walked.
The woman went in front of Authun, where he could see her. Her hair hung loose, as the wimple the priests had made her wear was now in the North Sea. In her tatty fifth-hand nun’s habit and the overlong cloak that had once belonged to Hella she looked like a beggar. The king did too, in his salt-stained cloak and sea furs. Authun carried the Moonsword tied on his back, hidden away. The hills, he knew, were full of trolls and bandits, and he didn’t want to go advertising his wealth.
They faced no supernatural opponents on their journey from the sea but on the second day saw three riders approaching in the distance. The girl looked for cover, which Authun thought a very reasonable course of action — for a woman. The king himself simply stood where he was. The men dismounted and approached, which Authun took as a sure signal of violent intent.
When taking on a warrior such as Authun the Wolf the best plan is to stalk him and cut him down in his sleep. Taunting him from afar and then approaching with ‘What have we here?’ is ill-advised. Still Authun, who was in a curiously melancholy mood, would have let the three pass had the first not attempted to shake him by the shoulder. Authun grasped the man’s hand so he couldn’t let go of his intended victim, took a pace back with his left foot to expose the arm and, in one movement, drew the Moonsword from his back and cut the limb in two. Before the bandit could realise what had happened, Authun struck him again, this time hard to the leg. Authun had no intention of killing him; already he was thinking how he might use him. His leg damaged, the man had sought to steady himself but had instinctively put his weight onto the missing hand at Authun’s collar. He fell forward at the king’s feet, bleeding heavily. The remaining two robbers stared in disbelief at the Moonsword. They knew now exactly who they were facing — they had heard so many stories of Authun the Wolf it was almost as if they knew him personally. One thing was clear in their minds. Fighting him was certain death.
They tried to flee, but Authun, even at thirty-five, was too fast for them. The king had noticed as soon as the men appeared that both were wearing costly byrnies. Thus encumbered, they died before they had run twenty paces.
He cleaned his sword on the fallen men’s clothes and returned to Saitada and the bleeding bandit. Working quickly, he took out a length of walrus cord from his pouch and tied off the man’s arm to stop the bleeding. The bandit was unconscious, which suited Authun. Saitada looked at the two bodies and then at the king. He found himself explaining.
‘If I’d let them go they would have come back when we were sleeping, perhaps in numbers,’ he said, though he knew she couldn’t understand. ‘They’re scavengers. They never paid for those horses. See the byrnies? They’re taken from the bodies of brave fools who came to steal the witches’ treasure, treasure that is only there to draw fools on to death. They use them in their magic then they throw them from the rock.’
The rock. In the distance they could see it, already huge three days’ march away. It was their destination: the Troll Wall, as tall as a thousand men standing on each other’s shoulders. It was a monstrous overhanging cliff, like something from a dream, an obstacle which blocks all further progress, something symbolic, with a resonance far beyond its daunting physical mass. He looked up at it. It was impossible, he thought, to imagine climbing it, though he had done so before. It was the only way into the witches’ caves that the sisters were willing to reveal to outsiders. The back of the mountain was even more impassable, swathed in permanent ice and perilous loose boulders, and defended by hill tribes under the witches’ thrall.
So they would have to climb — almost to the top of the Wall and then into it, to the caves. Authun knew, though, that the Wall would not be the greatest impediment to seeing the witch queen. That would be the witches themselves.
4
Between the hour of the dog
And the hour of the wolf
Between waking and sleeping
Between the light and the dark
Is the doorway of shadows
Step on, traveller,
Do not tarry on that grim threshold.
Authun read the runes someone had carved into a boulder. He was below the dizzying overhang of the Troll Wall, a cliff so high that the top was invisible in clouds. Human bones and rotting clothing lay about him but it was the inscription that made him shiver. Mundane perils of bandits and falling rocks were bad enough without thinking of what other horrors waited in the dark.