‘Well.’ She crossed her arms, her bare forearms huge and strong. ‘Well.’
Sunngifu ignored her, being too busy returning Wulf’s stare.
. . . beautiful.
So strong, that was the thing.
When Swithhun, a bear of a man, came rushing in, it was to hug the women, Sunngifu first and then his wife Eadburga, before clapping Wulf on the shoulder. Then he roared for mead – servants ran for the skins and horns – before turning back to Wulf.
‘I did not know whether to think she was dead or eloped and betrothed,’ he said. ‘And if the former—’
‘She would have taken souls to Niflhel with her,’ Wulf told him. ‘She despatched three men, sir.’
‘Did she?’
‘Brave Wulf slew five others, Father, and truly, to be honest, a sixth. I just helped that one on his way.’
Her voice was steady now. And Swithhun was looking thoughtful
‘You know why Mercia is the greatest of all the kingdoms?’ he asked. ‘Because we are organised and disciplined. A man of fast decisions and bravery is exactly what we need in the city guard, and I’m getting too old.’
So that was why half the guard had been out looking for Sunngifu: she was the commander’s daughter.
‘Wulf already makes a living,’ Sunngifu said. ‘He sells—’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Wulf, and looked at her. ‘Join the guard, train them and exercise whatever command I’m given.’
That’s right.
Because when evil arrives – evil such as reavers or rapist-kidnappers – someone has to stand up for those who cannot fight for themselves. Someone has to respond, to run towards the danger and not hide themselves away or flee, when the helpless sound an alarm.
I’m a fighter and a killer.
The only question was, what was he fighting for? On whose behalf?
Who would he be willing to die for?
Sunngifu stared at him.
Snow fell on their wedding day, two days before Saturnalia, which was also, handily, the day that the Roman god Mithras was born, along with the Christ-Mass, so that everyone could feast together. Wulf kept his Thórr’s hammer beneath his shirt, and was content to join in whatever festivities his new family celebrated.
Two months later, when Sunngifu told him she had not bled for eight weeks, and had thrown up after breakfast that morning, Wulf waited until dark, then slipped from the house, with his crystal-tipped spear in hand, and jogged off into the night.
At the Roman walls where he had met Sunngifu and killed her attackers, he found a spot to bury the spear, close to a stone mask carved upon a wall in the guise of Mithras, and symbols representing the Mithraic Mysteries. Perhaps that old god could watch over a weapon that Wulf had no need of now, for there were no more troll-spirits to be slain, at least not by him. The crystal-tipped spear went beneath the soil, and then it was covered up, not forgotten but no longer relevant, like so much of his past.
‘My wise wolf,’ Sunngifu told him on his return, after hearing his long explanation. ‘My wise and careful Rathulfr.’
Her grandfather had hailed from the Danelaw, and she spoke the Tongue almost as well as Wulf himself. In private, for the rest of their lives and as they raised their many children, that was the name she would use for him: her Rathulfr, her wolf who was wise.
And he would try always, with a warrior’s strength, to live up to her image of him.
FORTY-FOUR
EARTH & SIGANTH SYSTEM, 2607 AD
It was the first of July, and the four hundredth anniversary of his wife’s death. Kian knew better than to visit the place where they had lived so happily: the body of water that he had called The Pond and Kat referred to as their lake was no longer there, and the site of their cottage, the last time he had been in Iowa, was a slow-morphing tower-town formed of slick blue-grey biocrete that looked like intestines. Instead, after his rendezvous with the courier in London, he made his way to Oxford, where back in the mid-twenty second century, his twin brother Dirk had been a student, here amid the mediaeval sandstone buildings that were so different from Caltech where he, Kian, had studied.
Voluminous greatcoats, designed to billow easily as if they were cloaks, seemed to be in fashion. That made it easier for Kian to walk among crowds without attracting notice, for with the burnt claw that formed his right hand and the silver scar tissue disfiguring his face, along with the trace of a limp, he clearly belonged to the minority who for one reason or another refused (or were unable to undergo) corrective and cosmetic surgery, available in any health booth in any major town.
And yet there was a warrior’s grace to his movements, and even among dense clumps of passers-by, he walked without brushing against anyone, always anticipating position and motion, never caught by surprise.
He stayed in a tall hotel overlooking central Oxford, a newish building on the site of an historic tower where Augusta ‘Gus’ Calzonni had been in residence in 2102, when at the age of one hundred and thirteen, she had instructed her lawyer to book her a shuttle flight into orbit, where she could see with her own faded eyes the success or failure of the first attempted voyage into mu-space.
A floating biographer-globe had recorded her final moments, and the cerebral stroke that occurred just after she heard the famous words of the returning captain, leaving one last legacy: the sight of someone smiling as they died.
‘Kat,’ said Kian now to the empty room. ‘My magic. My world.’
People had called them K’n’K or TwoK, for in the happy years they were inseparable, she with the brash mouth (and ready fists – they had met in Toronto, when an anti-xeno activist had attempted to attack Kian, and while Kian had used a pseudo-hypnotic verbal technique to interrupt the assault, it had been Kat’s looping punch out of nowhere that had dropped the man), massive intelligence and ready laugh.
He checked his anti-surveillance motes once more, then opened up the message-seed slipped to him by the non-Pilot courier in a float-hall over the Thames. The sender’s sigil would make no sense to anyone but him; he knew it for that of Rowena James, one of his Labyrinthine contacts with only low-level security clearance, yet in a position to deduce much from Pilots’ schedules as devised and recorded by Far Reach, along with other unwitting sources of information.
Security measures were tighter these days, but that was all right: they depended, at least partly, on checking for sympathy towards and contact with Schenck’s renegades, and neither Kian nor his occasional associates had any love for darkness-controlled Pilots.
He was what he was without need for labels, and most certainly did not require followers; but there was a need for continuity, if he was to carry out his work while continuing to lead the same kind of time-skipping life that Dirk and their mother had gravitated towards. What Kian had founded, the Tri-Fold Way, was imbued with something of Buddhist philosophy, and a dash of utopian far-sightedness mixed in with practical rhetoric and rigorously applied psycho-emergenics, while he himself was ‘a superposition of Mahatma Gandhi and the Unknown Ninja’ according to a Labyrinth-based activist back in the day.
The extremes of both secessionist Pilot politics and the let’s-control-humanity crowd were anathema to him; but while the middle path meant eschewing violence as much as possible, and he in personal life was normally the gentlest of beings, Kian McNamara was not in the strictest sense of the word a pacifist: he could be as deadly as his flamboyant brother, maybe more so.
Still, when he performed his daily tai-chi-like routines at dawn on Calzonni Meadow, once University Parks, wild-life was unafraid to watch, and this morning a sparrow had alighted on his shoulder during standing meditation, and stayed there chirping until a noisy spaniel came bounding into view.
The situation in Labyrinth was not one to inspire personal calm and oneness with either universe. While there was one disturbing detail in Rowena’s report, the bulk of it was straightforward, implying the gathering of militarised forces, and it was no act of scholarship to understand how rapidly Pilot society might change under the pressure of all-out war-fare, if things went that far. He mulled over the details as he left the hotel and went on a thoughtful walk around the old town, the sandstone buildings coated with diamond these days, which did not preserve the old look so much as create an entirely new mystique; and he wondered whether he should have come back to Earth at all.