Chapter Nineteen

The warrior, Gunnarr, came to Ursula many times after she answered his question. Each time he brought a small animal and slaughtered it. Sometimes he offered her the blood and one time, when she had been hunting with wolves, she came back to herself sufficiently to be able to drink it.

Sometimes she ate the offerings but mostly she ignored both the man and his questions. He wanted to know the future but when the present was so infinitely various, what did she care about the future? He talked too about the land he was going to be given by the war leader Guthrum, and how now that the fighting was done and Aelfred soon to be dead, he might give up the Viking life for the life of a landowner. Guthrum would give him land he was sure, and he knew quite a bit about farming. He had his eye on a local girl who was of high Aenglisc birth and had the body of a goddess, though, he added hastily, she was as a toothless old crone when compared to the loveliness of Ursula herself. Actually he called her ‘Freya’ but Ursula knew what he meant. She was only half aware of his low-voiced talk, though she found the soft rhythms of his voice soothing, almost like music, holding a part of her still connected to her own body, to her own ears and to that element within herself that still understood ambition and desire. She did not speak – the greater part of her mind was elsewhere – but the man’s earnest confiding voice reminded her of something precious.

Time passed and the man went away and came back again. He was strong and single-handedly carried her to another cart. He would not let anyone else touch her. He alone arranged her robes around her and took care that the cart was well padded. In return she did not burn him or harm him in any way, but allowed his large calloused hands to handle her fevered flesh: she was on fire with magic. He rode at her side as she was conveyed somewhere else. He did not speak to her so much then but she knew he was her guard and her protector and that amused and comforted her, he got through to her even in her strange detachment. He was very like someone, but she could not remember who.

They travelled for a time and the warrior lifted her head and fed her the still warm blood of a deer they had slaughtered on the road. They ate the venison and this time Ursula allowed the warrior to feed her choice morsels while her mind still hunted with hawks and entangled herself in the roots of the sleeping forest. They were almost ready to wake, those roots. She could feel the power of future growth building within them. She amused herself by forcing some parts of the forest into an early growth, but it was cold and would do the plants no good, so she stopped.

They came at last to a sizeable town where the air was thick with pride and exultation, with the sense of conquest. There were women there too – captives chiefly, cowed and terrified. They feared more violence: the men had been drunk for weeks and they were running low on food. Ursula found it was difficult to engage with so many thoughts and emotions. It made her nervous and worried. There was death and there was birth and all around there was tension. She did not like it and let herself slip away to simpler, cleaner worlds of running and killing or flying and killing or hiding and killing, where all the killing made sense and where fear was easy to understand and untainted by the complexity of the thinking of men. She left even the warrior behind, though he still sat beside her in the middle of a garden in a small copse. They kept torches burning around her and a brazier to keep her warm, though she had need of neither the light nor the warmth, carrying her own flame of magic within her. The warrior stood guard and whispered to her still, but she could not stay to hear him and she only noticed that he was gone when music drew her back from her journeying.

‘This is indeed a goddess. What does it mean that she is here?’ It was a man’s voice speaking when the music ended. She did not want to hear his thoughts, which were, in the main, ugly and confusing and full of desire.

‘It means that good fortune will accompany you in all that you do. She is a being of great power and if she is with us, none can stand against us.’ It was the voice of a woman and it chilled Ursula’s overheated blood. It was a voice that knew how to call to the magic in her and she did not want that magic to be called. This was a person who knew about magic. She did not wield it – not as Ursula did – but she knew how it worked. Ursula wanted nothing to do with her. She turned her mind away from the woman and escaped.

It was the singing that brought her back, the high reedy voice of the woman chanting. Ursula’s recumbent form developed goose pimples and shivered. The song was repetitive and tuneless, an unmusical refrain in a strange, unlovely soprano, but it called to the magic in Ursula and she found that she had to open her eyes. The woman was bending over her, stretching out her small hands over Ursula’s body as though she was warming herself.

‘Ah! The Goddess, she has come to us. She will speak to us, but you’d better be quick. She is little interested in the affairs of men.’

The woman was very small and childlike in appearance; perhaps, for all her authority, she was no more than a child. She was like a malnourished eleven-year-old with straggly, dirty blonde hair. It hung loosely in rat’s tails about her thin shoulders. She smiled briefly at the leader, Guthrum. His emotions spilled out of him and into Ursula’s awareness. Here was a man who liked killing for the sense of power it gave him, for the fine treasure in gold and silver it won him and for the sheer pleasure of seeing someone else suffer. Ursula saw that the girl, though frail, was enormously self-possessed. Guthrum was afraid of this snaggle-toothed girl and that gave her a great deal of power.

‘What do I do?’ Guthrum asked.

‘Speak to her as you would to anyone else with power.’ Ursula could feel the girl’s quiet confidence like a small, cold hand on her heart. She thought she had the measure of Ursula as she had the measure of Guthrum. Ursula was aware of Guthrum nodding and gathering his thoughts. That did not take long; he did not have many that were worth gathering.

‘Will I win?’ he said, and without willing it Ursula had a vivid picture of the man drunkenly holding court in a gold-decked hall. He was sitting on a carved chair while men around him sat on benches. He was playing some game and betting wildly and luck was on his side. Ursula could feel the heat of the hearth fire in the centre of the hall. She could smell the ale and the stale smell of sweat and congealed grease and the musky odour of the dogs, one of which had been rolling in the rotting carcass of a rabbit. It was as if she were there. The raucous, triumphant sound of Guthrum’s laughter rang in her ears. Her mouth was dry and it was difficult to get her voice to work again. It seemed to have been a long time since she’d spoken – she did not know how long; she had almost forgotten how to count the days.

‘Yes,’ she said throatily and then closed her eyes. She had done what the woman had called her to do and she fled as far away as she could, letting the magic clear the memory of Guthrum’s vileness from her and allowing the image of the girl’s pale green, blind eyes to fade.