Free Lord of Slaughter by M. D. Lachlan

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.
    ‘Open. Lady Beatrice, we know you and your station. Open the door and we will do you no harm.’
    Beatrice crossed herself. She came back into the main room and ran to the window. The street was too far to jump.
    ‘No man enters here without a chaperone!’
    Too late. A heavy blow, the door smashed in and she stood facing the soldiers.

7 The Road to the Dark
     
    The wolfman trembled before the walls of Constantinople. They were vast, stretching from the water up the hill as far as he could see, almost too bright to look at in the morning sun, burning like he imagined the walls of the city of the gods would burn. Could Asgard be so vast?
    The army had disembarked at a port ten miles down the coast so it could march into the city and receive the accolades of its people. The Varangians – Vikings and their kin from the Russian steppes – led the column. The wolfman was behind, with the emperor’s Greek guard, who marched leaderless and subdued. He had watched their great men hang.
    It had been a weak and yellow dawn, the sun trapped beneath deep cloud, burning like a poor candle seen through the vellum of a window. The light had come up but the rain had not relented. They hanged them on a plum tree, one after the other. Everything was wet through and the hanging ropes were swollen and would not slip, so they’d tied the ropes as tight as they could, thrown them over a branch and pulled, leaving the men to dance and throttle. None of the victims said a word and none of their men made any protest. It was, said the soldiers, the Roman way.
    Their job was to guard the emperor, and someone