Fenrir by MD. Lachlan Page A

the touch had raised in him and tried to reason. What would he do if he was Sigfrid? The Viking was no fool and he must see that holding the monk was dangerous for him. Would he ransom him? Jehan doubted it. Why bother? The city would fall soon enough and then he’d have whatever was in it for free. No, while he lived, the confessor realised he was only a unifying force for Sigfrid’s enemies. The Viking king would kill him, he felt sure.
    He turned his mind to prayer but could only think of the touch that had set his skin singing. Jehan was in some ways a humorous man, and it did strike him as ironic that he had discovered the sin of carnal pleasure just in time for it to admit him to hell. He made himself pray: ‘Heart of Jesus, once in agony, receive my sinner’s soul.’ In the morning, thought Jehan, he would see Christ’s face and, he hoped, be taken into his peace. He knew his fate among the Normans was God’s way of chastising him for his pride. It was Lucifer’s sin, and Jehan’s old weakness, to think yourself better than others. He had let them call him a saint, a living saint. Well saints suffered and died, so God had granted that he would do the same. The Norsemen had crushed three churchmen at Reims with great stones. He put it from his mind. He was going on a journey. The conveyance did not matter.
    There was the sound of shouting and the men all around him got to their feet.
    ‘Who are you?’
    ‘King’s man Arnulf. Sigfrid wants to see you straight away. You have something of his.’
    ‘That will be me,’ said the eastern voice.
    ‘The Christian holy man, the flesh eater, he wants him.’
    Perhaps, thought Jehan, he would be seeing the face of Jesus sooner than he had anticipated.

9 Alone
     
    Confessor Jehan had been taken. In the rush of her flight and the fear of her capture Aelis had forgotten he had been at her side when the Norsemen attacked. And her brother, what of him? Eudes was a peerless warrior, a prodigy at arms according to his tutors. It had never even occurred to her that he could be hurt, let alone killed. But the Norsemen had walked away with the confessor. Eudes would never have allowed that while he had breath in his body. She went cold. Did her brother still live?
    She had touched the confessor on impulse, to reassure him, or rather just to let him know he was not alone. She could imagine what he would say to that. ‘I am never alone; I am with God.’ And yet it had felt right to reach out to him.
    Now her mind began to clear and she was terrified. Inside the church she had been unable to bring home to the confessor just how real her dreams had been. And then the wolf had appeared, a wolfman rather, who had given his life for her. The simmering sense of danger she had in her dreams of the wolf now spilled over into her waking life. What of that thing that had come from within her to speak to the mules – what was that? She tried to force her attention back to the present. The immediate danger from the Norsemen should be her concern, she thought, not the threat of devils.
    The Norsemen were all very drunk and stumbled to find their weapons. She couldn’t tell what they were saying but they seemed worried. She kept away from the imp, fearing him. The others had become louder and more friendly with the drink; he had become withdrawn, more sullen, sitting at the side of the fire with a weak smile of contempt for his guffawing companions.
    They all went down a slight slope to the biggest house in the area. It was a mean dwelling, as all those outside the city walls were, timber-framed with unfinished mud for its walls. It had been decorated in a hideous pastiche of the Roman style, its steep pitched roof timbered but daubed in painted checks to try to give the impression of tiles, leaving it more unpleasant-looking than if it had been built as a simple peasant’s dwelling in unadorned wood. Scraps of vellum hung at the windows. Aelis guessed the Norsemen had cut them through