Black Monastery (15 page)

“Hello, husband,” a woman said from behind.

He turned, his heart sinking. Freya sat on a fallen tree trunk, her small hands clasped over her knees. She was as beautiful as she had always been. She wore a simple green dress, and her striking red hair was pulled back and tied in a ponytail over her shoulder. Her skin was white, like snow, with a sprinkling of freckles over her tiny nose. She looked like the young bride she had been, the perfect companion with whom he would raise children. But she was dead, and there was a chill in her eyes that hadn’t been there in life. As she regarded Asgrim, this coldness seemed to seep into him, freezing him.

Lightning flashed again, and for a moment, she was naked and covered in blood.

He moaned, shutting his eyes. “I’m so sorry. So sorry.”

“It is too late for sorry, husband,” she said. “You of all men should know this.” Her voice carried no warmth. It was the voice of the dead, devoid of all joy, all happiness.

When he found the courage to open his eyes again, she was as she had been before, unhurt, as if she were alive. But she wasn’t.

“If not for you, we would have been together. He would have married me—as he should have—and I would have had Frodi’s children, beautiful little girls and handsome boys. The boys would have grown up to be leaders of men, perhaps even kings someday.” She looked away, deep into the shadows of the forest. “I can’t even cry now. Even that’s been taken from me.”

“Are you… are you… at peace?”

She gave him a look of pure hatred. He stared at the ground, shivering, knowing he could never atone for this act. He would have no redemption.

“Another sent me to speak to you.” She laughed abruptly without any joy. “I am among only women now, forever separated from my true love. This other begged me to speak to you, to warn you. I have become a herald for the woman’s afterlife.”

“Who begged you?” asked Asgrim.

“It has to be me,” she continued, “because of the link between us, a link forged by your violence.” She shook her head and then looked away again. “What a cruel joke.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There is another, one who resides with me here. She believes you are a human being. She’s wrong, I think, Asgrim Wood-Nose, killer of young lovers, kinslayer. You can never really know a man until you lie with him, and there is nothing good within your black heart.”

“Another?”

“A woman who loved you once, if such a thing is possible. One who gave you life.” Freya glared at Asgrim. “Better for all, I think, had she smothered you as a babe.”

Lightning struck, again and again. The hair on his arms stood straight as a sword blade, and the air throbbed with energy.

“There is little time,” said Freya. “And I have made a promise. So listen well then to my warning. You face a great evil, one even fouler than you, if such a thing is possible. The Saracens have tricked you, and an eastern evil has been released.”

“The bones,” whispered Asgrim.

She nodded. “The
Saracens
call this spirit a
djinn,
and for years, the spirit was bound away within the tomb of Philibert, the first of the black monks. Now it is free again, free to torture and slaughter—and these acts give it joy. It will butcher every man, woman, and child with whom it comes into contact, for as long as it is free upon the earth, killing and killing and killing. And somehow,
you
must stop it, husband. This is your burden now. If it escapes the island—”

“The gods take this spirit!” said Asgrim. “The Frankish monks released it, and the damned
Saracens
tricked me into coming here. I will take back my men
and
my ship—and I will leave.”

She glared at him, slowly shaking her head in disgust. “I told her. I told her what kind of a man you were, but she didn’t believe it, didn’t want to.” Freya looked away and snorted in disgust. “A mother’s love is blind.”

Asgrim’s flesh burned, and he stared at her feet. “This isn’t my burden to bear, not my responsibility. I’m sorry for what I did to you and Frodi, but—”

“Stop! Just stop talking, you fiend! Your soul is as scarred as your face. You knew I loved him. I told you before we married. I begged you to take back your money, to cancel your deal with my father. You forced me to marry you anyway! Forced me to lie with you.”

Her rage rolled off her in waves, and he staggered back, holding his hands in front of his face. When he looked up again, she was gone.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, knowing his apology would never be enough. “I… thought you could grow to… love me.”

The fog had returned, all at once, and it rolled in on him, surrounding him.

“I’m sorry.”

And he was.

And it didn’t matter.

* * *

Crack!

Searing pain coursed through him as his shoulder popped back into its joint. He screamed, arching his back. Hands pushed down on his shoulders, forcing him to lie back again. The worst of the agony began to pass. His eyelids were sticky and didn’t want to open. Everything around him was blurry and dark, but he could just make out a woman’s face, one he recognized, staring down at him.

“Freya,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry…”

Something wet dribbled on his face and into his mouth, and he realized how parched he was. He swallowed greedily but then began coughing as pain wracked his body all over again.

Freya said something, but he couldn’t understand her words, only her tone, smooth, soothing, like a mother, like his mother.

He drifted back to sleep, returning to a world where he hadn’t murdered two young lovers.

But that world was only a dream.

* * *

When he awoke again, he saw her more clearly and recognized the truth. He had already suspected as much: it wasn’t Freya who nursed him but the Frankish woman, the villager with Freya’s bright-red hair.

He lay on a soft bed in the corner of a round hut that looked as if it was ready to fall down. Blankets covered him, and he shivered despite the summer air. His shield arm was tied to his chest and held tightly in place. He flexed it, just to test it, and was rewarded for his stupidity with a vertigo-inducing white-hot wave of pain that ran up his arm and into his jaw. He closed his eyes and waited until the throbbing began to lessen.

Was his shoulder broken?

When he opened his eyes again, he considered the hut in which he lay. Beams of sunlight stabbed down through the many holes in the rush-covered roof. A small, smoky fire burned in a firepit, and the smoke escaped through the ceiling. A small fish sizzled and dripped over the fire. He should have been hungry, but instead, the smell made him feel nauseated and dizzy.

The peasant woman sat on a stump of wood several feet from him, watching him with a bold arrogance that Asgrim had rarely seen in women. He snorted, rose to the challenge, and stared back at her, considering her carefully. If she were intimidated by his ugliness, she didn’t show it.

She wasn’t afraid of him. Why not?

Despite the hair, she looked nothing like Freya. She was older than he had first thought, past the age when she should have had a husband and many children. Freya had been much younger, still in her teens. This woman looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties, closer to his age. She didn’t have Freya’s freckles; this one’s skin was as white and smooth as a bowl of cream. Her hair was the same bright-red color as Freya’s, but hers shimmered with long, flowing curls that fell to her waist. She was no beauty; in truth, she was plain. Her eyes, though, were the most intense blue he had ever seen and clearly masked a keen intellect. She regarded him with these eyes, staring at him as if she could see right through him to the evil that resided within him.

He looked away first.

“Alda,” she said, speaking just that word and pointing a long narrow finger between her breasts.

When he looked back, the slightest hint of a smile was on her lips.

He nodded and used his good hand to pat his chest. “As… Asgrim.”

“Asgrim,” she repeated, letting his name roll off her lips.

He liked the way she said it.

Nine

Alda’s Hut,

August 4, 799,

Midday

Alda watched the northman sleep; he was snoring softly. She had managed to get him to drink some broth and eat a little, although he had only managed a few bites. His shoulder had been dislocated, and she’d needed considerable effort to pop it back into place. The tendons and muscles around it had been damaged, but she was certain he would recover his full strength, which she could tell was considerable. This man was built like a knight, with wide shoulders and heavily muscled arms. He looked far stronger than her husband Marellus had been. Of course, Marellus had been a farmer, not a warrior; he was used to pushing a plow, not swinging a sword.

For a while longer, Alda sat beside him, watching his chest rise and fall. What kind of man was this? What had she done?

He was a Viking, this Asgrim, a ravager, a heathen. But the monks who had murdered her sister Celsa had been Christians. Good, pious men of God.

At the thought of her little sister, who had never hurt anyone, the grief swept over her again, like a tide, threatening to wash her away. The torment Celsa must have gone through before dying… it was too much for Alda to think about. She closed her eyes and whispered a prayer for Celsa. Could her sister be in heaven if she had been murdered by holy men? Would God have taken her? And what of the monks who had murdered her? Were they in heaven, laughing with Jesus, or in hell, screaming for all eternity?

The latter, please, Jesus, the latter.

Not for the first time, Alda wondered if the monks had taken her sister because of her. Had it been her fault? But if so, why had they taken the other women, as well?

She would never know.

For two months, she had lived alone in the woods, as an outcast from the village. Only Celsa had visited her regularly. Alda had no doubt that her sister’s cowardly husband punished her each time she did. Others from the village would come see her only when they had to, when they wanted her help. Some within the village, especially her former mother-in-law, whispered lies about Alda, accusing her of prostitution. She would not have put it past the wicked old crone to accuse Alda of being a witch, as well. In fact, it was likely. She snorted. If anyone was a witch, it was the mother of her dead husband.

Her mother-in-law hadn’t always been so evil; once, she had been kind. How different Alda’s life would have been had she had children. Then, after Marellus had died of the Black Death, her husband’s family might not have blamed her. How quickly they had turned on her. Within days of Marellus’s passing, the lies and whispering had started. ‘Alda was a healer,’ they said, ‘so why hadn’t she healed Marellus?’ She had tried, Jesus only knew, but nothing had worked, and he passed so quickly—leaving Alda alone, a twenty-nine-year-old widow with no children and no future. And as bad as her mother-in-law was, her brother-in-law was far worse.

When Marellus died, he came to visit her, making a secret offer. She would have sooner have taken a pig to bed.

So the whispers started. Alda had no family within the village; they were almost strangers. Alda had no brothers to defend her. Her father had been an elderly widower, but he had tried. Jesus bless him, he had tried. And for his courage, her brother-in-law had beaten him nearly to death in the village square, an abject lesson to others who dared challenge him. Then, that night, when all were asleep, he had come to pay his first nocturnal visit to Alda, kicking open her door and catching her in her bed.

No one helped her, although everyone must have heard her screams. Her father died soon after, heartbroken. Alda fled into the woods, finding refuge in an abandoned hut that had been used to store hunting supplies.

She hated the lying hypocrites—and not just her brother-in-law and his mother, but all the others who had done nothing to help her. She felt trapped. But where could she go? What could she do? If she moved back to the city, she would be forced into prostitution in days. She had absolutely no doubt of that. And then she would become what they whispered she already was.

She wanted revenge—revenge for Celsa, revenge for her father, and revenge for herself. But what could a woman do?

Nothing.

She considered the sleeping Dane.

This one, though, was a warrior—a man of violence and death. There was little this one couldn’t do.

Is that why she had saved him when she found him beside the stream, why she made a litter and dragged him through the woods to her hut? So that he could take vengeance on her enemies? What kind of a Christian was she?

What did she want from him?

He had saved her from his men. They would have taken her, one after another, but he stopped them. He had even fought for her, battling that black-eyed giant with the ax who would have killed her. And he had set fire to that damned black monastery. Surely that had been the act of a good man, cleansing that foul place with fire. But he didn’t look like a good man. Never before had she seen such a face. His nose had been caved in and mangled, and it had healed badly, so it was more hardened scar tissue than flesh. And the skin surrounding his left eye and all the way down to his cheekbone was discolored and misshapen. The bone around his eye socket had been crushed, she knew. He had the visage of the devil. But she could tell that before these injuries, he had been handsome. Her brother-in-law was a handsome man, but his soul was black and weak. She no longer trusted how a man looked. Only naïve little girls made that mistake. She felt there was good in this man—as well as evil. He was of two sides, like a coin.

But which side was stronger?

She bent forward and placed the back of her hand against his cheek. It was still warm to the touch and feverish.

“Why did I save you?” she asked aloud. “Did I do it for you or for me?”

* * *

Asgrim’s dreams troubled him. In them, he was half-frantic with some uncertain fear, convinced he was being pursued by a dark force. But whenever he turned around or looked over his shoulder, nothing was there. He was certain, though, that if he stayed in place, he would die. So he ran, struggling and panting through dark forests. Twisted branches snagged at him, slowing him down.