The Way Between the Worlds Read online

  The painting was extraordinary, and it throbbed with life.

  ‘Behold Mithras.’

  I did not know who spoke the words. It might have been Gurdyman, but it didn’t sound like his voice.

  There was a long silence. I stood awestruck, and eventually I felt Gurdyman take my hand and lead me away.

  ‘This house is on the spot where, many years ago, a rich merchant built himself a fine dwelling.’ It was Gurdyman who spoke; it was some time later that day and we were sitting in the sunshine in his inner courtyard. I still felt very odd; it must have been past the time for the midday meal, but I had no appetite. My stomach was tense with – nerves? Excitement? I was not sure.

  ‘We know the merchant must have been a wealthy man,’ Gurdyman went on, ‘because he built in stone. As you will be aware, child, there is very little stone in this area and it has to be brought in from elsewhere.’ He glanced up at the clouds floating across the blue sky. ‘He could also afford to choose a location well away from the bustle and the stinks of the quayside,’ he went on, ‘which must have pleased him, for no doubt he had quite enough of that during the working day.’ He smiled happily at me. ‘Imagine him, Lassair, coming home at the end of a long, hard day. Tonight is special, for a very select group of men will make their quiet way to the house later for a ceremony. They will meet up here, then one by one they will descend the steps and prepare themselves, washing carefully and dressing in their ceremonial robes. Then they will go into the cave, and there the god will welcome them into his presence.’

  ‘I felt him,’ I breathed. ‘I’m sure I did, I—’

  Gurdyman held up a hand, and I knew I was not to say any more. ‘I believe you did, child,’ he said softly.

  We sat in silence for some time. I heard a blackbird singing, and the sound seemed far too normal for a day when something so extraordinary had happened. As if the blackbird thought so too, abruptly the song ceased. After a while, I said, ‘How do you know, Gurdyman?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘How can you be so sure about the merchant and the – and what he made down there?’

  Gurdyman smiled. ‘You do not doubt what I say, then?’

  ‘No!’ It hadn’t even occurred to me. Deep within myself, I knew that all he had said was right.

  ‘Good,’ he murmured. Then: ‘As to how I can be so sure, there are ways, Lassair.’

  The word seemed to hang in the air. ‘Ways?’ I repeated in a whisper.

  ‘The barrier that divides time can be crossed, you know,’ he said softly. ‘If one has the courage to try.’

  Out of nowhere I heard my own voice, relating the tale of my ancestor Luanmaisi and her daughter, my namesake. ‘Luanmaisi walked with the spirits,’ I murmured, ‘and they took her between the worlds to encounter beings of other realms.’

  My mind detached from the present and I remembered what else I knew. I seemed to hear Granny’s voice: Luanmaisi learned much powerful magic from the spirits and the elves, and it was said that her daughter surpassed even her mother. Both women were shamans, healers and shape-shifters. Luanmaisi’s animal spirit was the hare: solitary, independent, representing immortality and symbol of the corn spirit, a fighter who will always ferociously defend his own territory. Lassair’s was the silver fox known in the northlands: clever, adaptable, cunning, able to move unseen. Fox has great magic in his pelt, and his element is fire . . .

  I wondered now if it could be possible that either mother or daughter, or even both, became sufficiently great shamans that they left this world and went into another one, where they existed still.

  Gurdyman’s eyes were on me, demanding my attention, and they seemed to bore into mine, as if he was trying to get inside my head. ‘She was of your blood, this woman?’ he asked.

  I nodded. ‘She bore a daughter, although nobody knew who the child’s father was. The daughter was called Lassair.’

  Gurdyman beamed widely, as if something had just been proved to his enormous satisfaction. ‘Hrype was right about you,’ he observed. ‘Child, so much awaits you!’

  ‘Will I do it?’ I asked in an urgent hiss. ‘Will I cross the barrier and go between worlds?’

  I thought for one wonderful, terrifying moment that he was going to answer me. But then he smiled very kindly, reached out to pat my hand and said, ‘Not today.’

  And as if a vast door had slammed on a room full of golden light, suddenly the magic that had been humming and thrumming in the air was shut off. We sat, a round old man in a shabby robe and a thin girl who looked like a boy, on a spring day in the sunshine, and somewhere above us, unconcerned, a blackbird sang.

  I was dreaming . . .

  I am up in that wild country where the humps of low hills march steadily along the horizon. I am very afraid. Someone is after me. The giant with the axe? I do not know, but the urge to flee, to run till I can’t run any more, is quite irresistible. My feet keep stumbling, the soles of my boots caught in something tacky, and I realize it is blood. I cry out loud, and my voice is swept up in the bitter wind that whirls and swirls, sending dark clouds flying across a low orange sun.

  I have to find a place to hide!

  I am in that strange place where the ruins are. Beside me, the open grave pit beckons. I would be safe in there, wouldn’t I? I bend and creep inside, but the soft earth crumbles around me, falling on my face, in my eyes, in my mouth, and I forget about having to hide and scream because I think I am being buried alive. Then there is a figure in a cloak with a knife in his hand, and he leaps on the back of a bull and slits its throat, and the blood spurts over me, warm, pulsating with each beat of the mighty beast’s dying heart . . .

  I woke up.

  I was lying on the floor of the crypt beneath Gurdyman’s house, wet with my own sweat, hot with the fever of my dream and yet shivering with cold. Gurdyman was crouching over me. He had a thick blanket across his shoulders, and he removed it and wrapped it tightly round me. It was warm from his body. I realized I was sobbing and, with an effort, made myself stop.

  I looked up into his kindly, concerned and – I had to admit – fascinated face. I understood something about Gurdyman then: he would always look after my welfare, but his overriding interest in me was because he recognized some potential in me that as yet neither of us fully understood.

  I was a little disappointed. But it was better to know, then I would not expect more than he could give.

  ‘You have been sleepwalking,’ he said. He moved away from me slightly, going to sit down on his low cot. ‘Clever of you,’ he added in a light tone, ‘to have negotiated both the ladder down from the attic room and the dark steps into the crypt without mishap, but then it’s said that sleepwalkers rarely come to harm in their own houses.’

  ‘How did you know I was down here? Did I – did you hear me screaming?’ I was very embarrassed to think that again I’d woken him with my noise.

  ‘I did, but I was already on my way to find you. I had dozed off in my chair out in the courtyard.’ That was why he’d been wrapped in the lovely, warm blanket. ‘There was a disturbance in the air, and that was what woke me.’

  A disturbance? I wondered what that meant. Had the power of my dream shaken the whole house? The idea scared me.

  He was watching me, his expression unreadable. ‘I think you had better tell me what you saw,’ he said softly. ‘The spirits do not send a dream of such resonance unless they seriously expect you to pay heed.’

  I drew a deep breath, gathered my courage and then made myself go back to those awful scenes. I spoke even as I thought; I knew that if I hesitated, I might not dare put them into words.

  ‘Tell me more about this pit,’ he said when I had finished. ‘You have seen it before, I think. With an occupant, as I recall.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. It – the body isn’t there any more. It was empty when I – when I went inside.’

  ‘Is it close to the ruined building?’

  I pictured it. ‘Yes. It’s beside a struct
ure that looks like a hearth, and there’s a stumpy, square pillar nearby with marks carved into it.’

  Gurdyman was nodding even before I had finished speaking. ‘Yes, yes, it all fits,’ he muttered. Then he looked down at me and gave me a beaming smile.

  ‘You know this place, don’t you?’ I whispered.

  ‘I believe I do,’ he agreed. ‘The terrain that you describe is familiar to me.’ He paused, frowning, and I sensed his attention had momentarily gone far away. With a small shudder, he brought himself back. ‘I told you yesterday about the soldiers’ religion, Lassair. These same soldiers were sent to guard the great wall that their emperor ordered to be built up in the north, and there they made the caves where Mithras was worshipped. Everywhere they went, they kept their god close. I told you too about the ordeals that the men endured in order to progress to higher degrees. Fire was frequently required, and sometimes the ordeals involved being buried alive in order to be reborn into a better, more refined state. I think you saw a certain Mithraeum on the great wall. You saw the hearth, and you saw the altar: what you described as a short, stumpy pillar. The hole in the ground where you tried to hide was the ordeal pit.’

  I looked at him. ‘Have you been there?’ I whispered. He must have; it was the only explanation.

  His expression was enigmatic. ‘I have seen the place,’ he said.

  ‘It is surely a long way to travel,’ I persisted. ‘Did you—’

  He held up a hand. ‘Enough, child,’ he said, mildly but firmly. ‘It is not for you to enquire.’

  For a moment I felt the very edge of something . . . some great force that existed within him but that usually was kept well concealed behind the genial facade. It frightened me. I wrapped the blanket more closely around me and seemed to feel myself shrink.

  When he spoke, his voice was as friendly and cheerful as ever. ‘I wonder,’ he mused, ‘why you should be sent this image so insistently.’ He looked at me, his face creased in a frown. ‘Is it possible that one of your kin lives there in the north?’

  ‘No,’ I said, without hesitation. I knew the full tally of my kinsmen and women – it was part of my job as the family’s bard to memorize not only the past generations, right back to our first occupation of the fen lands, but also the details of the living.

  ‘Could anyone be visiting the region?’

  ‘No. None has any reason to be so far from home.’

  As I spoke my mind was distracted. A suspicion was beginning to grow, at first no more than the first tiny patch of cloud that will later bring a storm. Nerving myself, I stared at him and said, ‘What is there up there, where you say this Mithraeum is? What sort of a place is it?’

  ‘It is border country, a place where two kings fight for possession,’ he replied. ‘Both men wish to reinforce it to protect their own land.’

  My small cloud was waxing steadily. ‘Is there danger there?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ He looked grim. ‘I fear that there is.’

  ‘Could – might a man be hurt there? Could he be injured, if there was fighting?’

  ‘Yes, child.’

  Such a wounded man, far from home and friendless, might need a place to hide. A place deep in the earth where, like a wounded animal, he could lie and lick his wounds. Call out, perhaps, to someone he loved. Dream of her; send his essence to appear in her dreams . . .

  I knew then who I had seen lying in that pit. I knew who had called out to me, who had said, again and again, come to me, and then, where are you? I need you!

  Half of me wanted to sing and shout with joy because he had not forgotten me. In need, perhaps in pain, it was I to whom he had called out in his despair.

  The other half was plunged into an abyss of dread because he was hurt.

  SEVEN

  He had been in the north country for twelve long months, and he longed with all his heart and soul to leave.

  He longed for her, too. For that slender but tough girl with the watchful, wise eyes who had flashed so briefly into and out of his life and yet left such an enduring impression in her wake. The total amount of time they had spent together might have been brief, but what had happened to them on the island of Ely seemed to him to have linked them in some way.1 He hoped – he was almost sure – it was the same for her.

  Even before the terrible thing had happened, he thought of her constantly, and he felt that he carried her with him, inside himself. Once he had seen her in a flash of waking vision. He had been jubilant, full of the thrill of battle, the blood lust still on him. He thought he heard her call out to him, and then he saw her. She was pale, her face tense, and the scar on her cheek that she had won when she fought side by side with him had stood out livid white. She was in danger – he knew that, although he had no idea how he knew – but in the same instant that he felt the stab of fear for her, he understood that she was stronger than her opponent and would not die.

  He lay in his secret place, the pain from his wound so severe that he knew he would not sleep. He understood that he must keep his mind occupied, for if he did not, he might give in to the despair and the loneliness. Death was lurking; if he did not fight it, he could easily succumb. Slip into its kindly embrace. Wasn’t he already lying in his grave? This was what could so very easily happen, if a man proved himself too useful to his king . . .

  Enough, he told himself firmly.

  He tore his mind away from the present and went back to the day when it had all begun . . .

  One of the many problems besetting King William II was that which his mighty father had always said to avoid if at all possible: fighting enemies simultaneously on two fronts. Early in the fourth year of his reign he sailed for Normandy, where the ongoing problem of his younger brother, Duke Robert, had broken out once again, with Robert nibbling away at William’s possessions in the region and going so far as to besiege the castle of one of William’s loyal barons. On arrival William immediately outbid his brother for the support of the barons and the services of the mercenaries, who abandoned Robert and flocked to William. Robert had no option but to come to terms with William, resulting in a treaty to which both brothers signed their names.

  William, however, was not given long to savour the victory. Word reached him while he was still in Normandy that King Malcolm of Scotland had invaded northern England, advancing across a wide front and pushing on determinedly until the local inhabitants organized themselves sufficiently to drive the Scots back. William raced back to England, where he hastily gathered a large army and sent them north, some by sea and some travelling overland.

  It was by then September, and one of the worst early autumns men had ever known. It was cold, it was wet, and the wind blew with a steady, brutal, unvarying force that drove people half-mad. William’s army, making what haste they could to shore up the northern border, suffered appallingly. Those in the land-army were beset by severe cold and by hunger that had many soldiers weak from near starvation. The ship-army fared even worse, for the equinox brought gales of such strength that their ships foundered and sank and almost all the men perished.

  What remained of William’s army found King Malcolm calmly waiting, in an area of Lothian south of the Forth that was English to its very bones. Malcolm was the aggressor, but William, far from his power bases in the south and with half his army dead, was in no position to use force. The two kings negotiated a settlement: Malcolm agreed to become William’s vassal, giving him his allegiance as he had done to William’s father. Such support was not lightly given, and William well knew it. In exchange, he offered to return to Malcolm the twelve English townships that the Scottish king had held under the Conqueror, as well as an additional gift of twelve gold marks, to be paid annually.

  As he oversaw his army’s preparations for setting out on the long road southwards, William was already planning what to do next. Among his plans, handing either the gold or the towns over to King Malcolm did not feature at all.

  He was far from satisfied with the outcome of the recent foray.
It was true that, with the loss of the ship-army, his forces had been severely weakened and he had been in no position to fight. Nevertheless, to have been forced to make such concessions to the Scottish king – even ones he had no intention of honouring – had amounted to a grave loss of face.

  What was needed, the king decided, was a major fortification of the borderlands between England and Scotland. An area of land that was securely under English control, with strong castles and inhabited by Englishmen who would live and work there, would keep the Scots at bay back on their own side of the border. In addition, the men who settled up there would provide a fighting force if Malcolm tried to invade again.

  William turned the scheme over in his mind. After some more careful thought, he decided exactly how his plan should be carried out. He also knew who would be the first man he would summon to aid him as he set it in motion.

  Rollo Guiscard had been in the border country in the summer when King Malcolm pushed south into England. Rollo knew that he had managed to impress King William more than once and the king now appeared to regard him as one of the more able of his spies. William recognized and appreciated intelligence and subtlety, both of which he saw in Rollo. Accordingly, before leaving for Normandy early in 1091, the king had secretly summoned Rollo to a meeting attended by just the two of them and issued his instructions. Rollo was to watch the northern border and, should any advance be made while the king was out of England, instantly send word.

  Rollo had fought his way through the various skirmishes of the midsummer, emerging almost unscathed; the discomfort of a minor wound had been more than compensated for by the awareness of a job well done.

  Now King William needed Rollo’s services once more. A summons was sent, via one of the few of the king’s messengers who actually knew where Rollo was. Rollo was good at melting into the background: when, as now, he was with a group of dirty, tired soldiers grumbling as they prepared for their long journey, he was indistinguishable from the next man. At other times, his temporary identity as a merchant, a soothsayer, a dutiful son on his way to visit his sick father, or even a monk or a priest, would be equally convincing.