Wolfsangel c-1 Read online

  Most of the way the snow was shallow and they didn’t need their snowshoes, but as they got higher it deepened and they had to stop to tie them on. They climbed up through stark lines of spruce and pine that towered out of the fields of white like an army of giants until the trees began to lose their fight with the altitude and grow smaller and thinner, eventually shrinking to the size of shrubs.

  In a small valley next to a waterfall turning to ice the berserk stopped.

  ‘I am to leave you here,’ he said. The berserk was a rough man but even he gave a sad smile. ‘Take care, little Feileg. We will miss you. You have enough to eat to last you until tomorrow. You know how to climb a tree with your rope, and remember the wolves will not want to risk injury. If they come, attack them and make them look for something weaker.’

  The child said nothing, but as the berserk turned down the slope, he followed him.

  ‘You are to stay here,’ said the man. ‘Your time with us is over.’

  He turned to go once more, but the child followed him again. The berserk, though rough and given to beating him, was the only father he’d known, his wife his only mother. He wanted to go back to the cooking pot and his brothers and sisters, to help his father at his forge and lie next to his mother in the cold nights, warm and protected.

  ‘You stay,’ said the berserk. He didn’t have to say what would come next. He’d already asked once more than he normally would. There would be no third request, just the lash of his belt.

  Feileg felt frightened and very alone. He clutched his spear and said, ‘One day I will come back and kill you.’

  The berserk smiled. ‘It truly is a shame to lose you, Feileg. I believe you will. When you are a man you’ll be a great warrior, and I’ll be old, should I live so long. It will be an honour to die by your hand. Don’t be frightened. Your destiny is already woven and it doesn’t end today.’

  He turned again down the slope and in moments he was gone.

  Feileg looked about him through the slit in the cloth he had tied around his face to shield his eyes from the glare. It had begun to snow lightly. Above him was a ridge, below him the valley. He saw the footprints that had brought them there but he had hunted for long enough to know that the snow would have already obscured the rest of the way home.

  He didn’t know what to do, so he just stood wondering why he been brought to such a desolate place and what he had done to offend the people he considered his family. Presently his feet began to feel cold and he decided it would be good to find shelter. The days were short and already the sun was low in the sky.

  Feileg had never been treated as a child and so had never thought as a child. He had hunted almost from when he could walk and had been expected to sharpen weapons, cook food, make fires and clean himself from the moment he had been able to understand what to do. Raised to self-reliance, he came up with a plan. He would do what his father did when caught by a blizzard — dig a pit beneath a tree, build a platform of branches within the pit and sleep there. The next day he would head down and see if he could find someone who would take him, maybe even sneak home and tell his mother he was sorry and beg to be taken back.

  He went back down the slope and found a suitable tree near a small cliff that he thought would provide wind protection. He had been scraping away with a rock for about half an hour when he heard the howling. A single wolf, somewhere above the trees, towards the sinking sun, he thought, but it was difficult to tell in the mountains. He checked his spear was near and carried on digging. An answering call came from down the valley. He carried on digging. A third call, this time closer. He looked up to see a large white wolf, much bigger than he was, sitting on the ridge above him. The animal was just visible against a large rock. A heartbeat later it had moved, vanishing into the snow. Feileg kept digging. Life with the berserks had taught him never to think too much on consequences. He needed a shelter; it was getting late; he had to dig. If the wolves came for him, he would die. If he was outside without a shelter, he would die. Climb the tree and die, so dig and hope the wolves do not come.

  But they did come, soundlessly assembling on the ridge. The howls had been to locate each other. There was now no need for any more noise, no need to alert rival packs. As the weak sun dipped behind the ridge and the dusk turned the sky to a metalled purple, eight wolves watched the digging boy. As soon as the first one moved, Feileg grabbed his spear and gave a shout.

  The largest wolf was darker than the first he had seen. It had dirty red and grey fur, was as tall as the child at the shoulder and looked much heavier. It halted halfway down the slope at Feileg’s cry. The berserk had been right. Wolves in the wild are scavengers first, killers second and fighters only as a last resort. In the snowy woods getting injured means limited mobility, which means starvation and death. Like all animals, humans included, wolves prefer their prey weak, preferably defenceless.

  Feileg fixed the animal with a stare and forwarded his spear. The light was dropping and flattening the perspective. His vision swam and he fought to maintain concentration on what was in front of him. From the corner of his eye he saw a wolf insinuating its way around to his right. A glance to his left confirmed the same was happening on the other side. Feileg wasn’t scared.

  ‘I am deserted and ready to die!’ he shouted. ‘Which one of you, my lords of the forest, wants to do the same? When I am in Odin’s halls and you are at his feet, how I shall kick you!’

  One of the wolves was behind him now, he could sense, and more were filing left and right. Still he fixed the dirty red-grey wolf with his spear. That was the biggest and would die, which would make a good tale at the feast table in the all-father’s halls.

  The big wolf ambled towards him through the floating light. For the first time Feileg felt fear rise in him. There was something strange about its movements, something wrong. The other wolves had seemed to glide on the snow. This one, he could see, was very powerful but more uncomfortable in its gait. Was it injured? The dusk was falling, vision difficult. What was wrong with it? It was huge. What he had thought was merely a large animal he could now see was of truly terrifying proportions. It was as big as a man, bigger. His father was the biggest man he had seen but this creature was taller by a head.

  Ten paces away, the wolf stopped and looked at the boy through the greying dusk. Feileg, who had been raised to regard his life as a trifle, to believe that the noblest destiny lay in death in battle, who coveted that fate like others might covet gold or a fine house, began to tremble. This wasn’t an ordinary wolf, he was sure, but a creature of myth.

  The animal lowered its head to the snow. ‘Kin,’ said the wolf.

  The word seemed to judder into Feileg’s mind. He looked into the creature’s eyes.

  Then he realised — it was a man, peering out from under a wolf skin. He was huge and powerful, and awfully weather-beaten with frost in his blond beard. He had no fur on his arms and legs, just a long reindeer coat of the sort you could see on any winter hunter, though he carried no bow or spear and wore no snowshoes or skis.

  Suddenly all the fear that Feileg had been holding in flooded over him, and he felt terribly cold. The night seemed to collapse upon him and the stars awoke like the eyes of a million wolves all hungry for his blood.

  ‘Help me,’ said Feileg, unable to stop his tears.

  The man said nothing — as he would never say anything again — but turned and walked up the slope. The boy followed him, with the pack trailing behind. The berserk had done as the witches had asked — given the child over to Kveld Ulf, the Evening Wolf, the shape-shifter of the hills. He was not a werewolf as Feileg would later come to understand it, but a man who had become by instinct and thought half animal.

  The boy grew up as much in the dark as in the light. This was not the solid, tomb dark of the witches but the northern dark that bristles with stars and is shot with stripes of light, where morning brings mirages of cities floating in the distance and evening falls under a wide silence. There was no
fire, just a cave den and the bodies of the pack close about him. He would warm his hands by plunging them into the carcass of a reindeer the pack had taken, use the moon for light and learn to love the taste of uncooked meat.

  In the short days of winter he fed well — animals were weak and easy to catch. Summer was the spirit time, perpetually light and the pickings more scarce. Feileg would push on in fruitless hunts, hardly sleeping, never speaking, his thoughts freeing themselves from the anchor of language in years of silence, his mind ever more animal, his body ever tougher. In the weak dark of the summer night Kveld Ulf would beat his drum and sing discordant chants. They would cut out the bladders of reindeer that had eaten strange mushrooms and drink the piss, and the boy would be transported to the spirit kingdoms where he ran through dark passageways and dripping caves, drank from subterranean streams and felt the darkness of the underground world widen his mind. He had a sense, as powerful as the smell of reindeer musk, of something alive in those tunnels. The caves, he thought, were hungry.

  When he came back to himself it seemed his body could feed on the dreams, making him unnaturally strong and fast. By the age of twelve he could kill a reindeer with only his hands, his spear having long since broken and Kveld Ulf refusing to allow him another. At fourteen he began raiding, but not as Vali did. His prey were travellers through the land, merchants heading north with goods for the Whale People or the king’s men travelling south on sleds and skis with tribute taken from them. He and Kveld Ulf stole from them as they slept and attacked them if they woke to challenge them, tearing flesh with their teeth and nails, breaking limbs and snapping necks, dashing swords to the floor and pulling spears from hands. He still understood the cries of the men in the camps but their real meaning — of fear, anguish, longing for loved ones — was becoming lost to him.

  They kept the plunder in their dens high in the mountains. It meant nothing to Feileg — you couldn’t eat it and it wouldn’t keep you warm — but Kveld Ulf knew that the fine walrus ivory combs, the gold arm rings and good swords would one day be useful to the boy. He would be going back to the witches, and it would not hurt to have some gifts for the witch queen. Kveld Ulf knew from his own dealings with the witches that a gift of some sort could distract the sisters long enough for them to remember that he wasn’t an intruder and they had, in fact, sent for him.

  By the age of fifteen Feileg saw as a wolf and thought as a wolf, his body hard, his teeth a weapon. The mountain winds tearing through his mind, past-less and future-less, he lived caught in the moment with no more thought than a snowflake on the breeze. That summer the hunting was thin, and he found himself down in the foothills, ghosting around the farmsteads to try to take a duck or a pig. He was wary of being discovered because the farms were a tight network. One blow on a horn could very quickly bring twenty or thirty armed men.

  That was when he had come to the ruin. It was a small longhouse, the roof broken in by the weather. It was raining and he decided to seek shelter there. He went inside. Scavengers — animal and human — had taken everything of value, but there were some signs of the former occupants — a broken distaff on the floor, a worn-out shoe, even a small rickety stool. There was better shelter at the back of the house but he decided to stay near the centre, next to where the smoke vent would have been. He didn’t know why but instinct made him pick up the stool and sit on it — something he hadn’t done in nearly ten years. And then he saw them in his mind: his sisters by the fire, his father, massive and silent on the bench at the back of the room, drinking, his mother patching clothes. It was his house, where he had lived until he was seven. He hadn’t known what to make of the feelings the memories stirred inside him and he had gone out into the rain. He had never returned.

  At sixteen he awoke in the dusk of the cave mouth and stood up ready to hunt. Kveld Ulf tapped him on the chest and let him know with his eyes that today would be different. He led him across two valleys to where the pack’s oldest wolf had fallen down a gully and lay dying at the bottom. The men descended to sit beside it. The wolf’s eyes were cloudy and its breath shallow. Kveld Ulf looked at Feileg, and Feileg understood that the wolf’s spirit was to join with his own.

  For two days the men sat and chanted, beat the drum and shook their rattles. On the third day the wolves came and added their voices to the music. They sat in the galleries of frost and howled out a strange chorus of exultation and lament. Feileg, his head buzzing with tiredness and the noise, took the creature’s head in his lap and stroked its ears as it died.

  His body trembled and there was a taste of blood in his mouth. Strange longings coursed through him and, where the world had seemed wide beneath the stars, now it narrowed to a thin stream of hunger raging through his mind. He stripped the skin from his fallen brother with a sharp stone, tore out his entrails, ate his heart and liver. Then he placed the bloody pelt around him, looking out from behind the wolf’s face, as the wolf had done, as the wolf.

  After that, Feileg had no story, no progression of events from day to day. He hunted and he fed and he slept and sat howling beneath the stars. He was part of nature, moving beneath the wind and the sun as heedless of his identity as the foam upon the surf.

  And then, at midsummer, when the sun never dipped beyond the suggestion of dusk, his double came and his life changed again and for ever.

  10

  The Dead God’s Bride

  ‘What did you say?’ Vali turned to face the person who had spoken. It was Ageirr, one of Forkbeard’s sworn bodyguard, a man of around nineteen, two years older than Vali though not much taller.

  It was over three years since the raid — three years in which Vali had gone no further than half a day’s travel from the farms. He had asked Forkbeard to let him go trading, asked him even to allow him to command his own raids, but the king was adamant. Vali would go and fight as a common warrior or not travel at all. So Vali did not go.

  There were many reasons for his refusal. One was that he would not take part in needless slaughter when there were so many easier ways of extracting loot. He had calculated the profit that had been thrown away on the raid on what he now knew was a monastery, and had concluded that the price of the slaves he’d lost to Bodvar Bjarki’s brutality alone could have bought him ten head of cattle, before he even started considering how many possible captives had gone free because the berserks hadn’t bothered to surround the island.

  Another reason for his reluctance was that he thought his people had things to learn from the West Men. One of their priests — the men with the shaven heads — had visited Eikund when Vali was fifteen. To Vali’s disappointment, Forkbeard had refused to even let him tell his stories. When the man showed him his writing and pointed out how useful it would be in the administration of his kingdom Forkbeard had torn it up in front of him and told him to go while he still had his life. It had been the talk of the village. Vali had learned the man was a member of the cannibalistic religion of Christ, whose followers ate flesh and drank blood.

  The main reason he kept away from war, though — hardly acknowledged to himself — was that he wanted to be branded sword-shy. He hoped Forkbeard would not let his daughter marry such a man, which would leave him free to marry Adisla. But so far the king had refused to release him from his obligation. Vali had also got a merchant to carry a message to his father telling him point-blank that he would not marry the girl but there had been no reply. Vali took it as a rebuke and felt foolish. His father could hold him to his duty if he chose, his protestations and refusals were meaningless.

  He had to accept he was a prince but, until he was forced to confront the fact and marry Ragna, he would indulge the fantasy that he was a farmer — a free man, as they were called. He gave Adisla’s little brother Manni his seax and only attended training with Bragi to allow the old man to retain his self-respect. Without a valued task, he knew Bragi would wither. Out of gratitude for the kindness Bragi had shown in guiding him through the raid, he tried hard too. When he was beating B
ragi’s shield with the stave that stood in for a sword, he let the injustice of his inability to marry Adisla fuel his aggression.

  For the rest of the time he helped Adisla and her mother around their farm or worked the flocks with her brothers and spent his evenings chatting in Danish with Barth. He would not go raiding though. That took all his courage. He knew that the gods hate nothing more than a coward, and only the knowledge that he was acting for the right reasons allowed him to keep up the pretence that he was.

  The king didn’t call Vali a coward to his face but there were plenty in his bodyguard who murmured the word as the prince passed. Ageirr was one of them. Vali would have preferred to take the insults, looking on them as helping him on the path that he wanted to travel, but he wasn’t made like that and always reacted.

  ‘I said, what did you say?’

  ‘Nothing, prince, nothing at all.’

  Vali had heard the word but he didn’t want to press Ageirr to repeat it. If he did, Vali would be forced to challenge him to a duel. Ageirr was no keener. He wanted the fun of taunting Vali but didn’t want to push it to a fight. Vali was still Authun’s son and so valuable to King Forkbeard. The penalty for killing the prince, in a legal contest or not, would be severe. And besides, he had seen the way the prince split those staves against Bragi’s helmet. He didn’t want to find out what he could do with a sword.

  Vali grunted and turned away.

  ‘Are you looking forward to the wedding? We’ll have a rare feast that night, I think,’ Aegirr said as he did so.

  ‘What wedding?’

  ‘Adisla, the slut from the top farms, is to marry Drengi Half Troll from over the valley. What a union that will be!’