Wolfsangel c-1 Page 33

  ‘We saw, in here — ’ again he tapped his head ‘- that the way to turn this magic was through you. Her weapon will be our weapon. We need powerful magic to do this. There is another spirit, a wolf god. We can set him against her if we can bring him here. He will come — looking for you.’

  He was shaking quite badly now.

  ‘And what happens when this spirit arrives?’

  ‘Through you,’ he said, ‘he grows teeth.’

  ‘Do spirits have teeth?’

  The man swallowed some more water.

  ‘Spirits and gods take many forms. They are here — ’ he tapped the ground ‘- and they are everywhere. You are just here.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Everywhere. Sometimes.’

  ‘How?’

  The man tapped the ground again.

  ‘This is solid when this — ’ he tapped his head ‘- is solid. When this — ’ his head ‘- becomes as water then this — ’ the ground ‘- can flow away. When it does, I fight the goddess. Our minds tangle and we battle each other.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Through resolve and persistence. I steal her magic. We are winning.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to do you much good,’ said Adisla. ‘You look fit to die.’

  ‘The things I win from her…’ He seemed to be having more difficulty framing his words. ‘I would not take them unless it was necessary.’

  ‘Does she harm you in this struggle?’

  ‘Not so very much. She seems weak or distracted. I cannot tell. To do what we need to do, to make the thing that will kill her, we have to steal her power from her. The damage is not in the taking of it but in the having. There are things of great power — runes, symbols older than the gods. I rip them up by their roots and take them from the death goddess and plant them in my mind. Sustaining them, it seems, is what costs.’

  ‘And these runes will help you call your wolf?’

  ‘I think so. I cannot tell. Sometimes I can sense him, sometimes not. Sometimes he is a man, sometimes a wolf. I see his face and I know he will come. I am sure of that.’

  ‘How are you sure?’

  ‘Many ways.’

  ‘Be careful the wolf doesn’t use his teeth on you,’ said Adisla.

  Noaidi nodded. ‘I have gone to him in dreams and called him. When he arrives I will bind him. He will use his teeth where he is meant to — when he grows them.’

  Adisla continued to question Noaidi. She discovered that Noaidi was not his name but rather a title given to sorcerers in that region. His real name was Lieaibolmmai, which Adisla found very difficult to say. He had become a magician because as a child he had shown the gift of prophecy.

  ‘All my life,’ he said, ‘I have seen this day coming. All my life I knew that Jabbmeaaakka would strike at me.’

  The fire in the tent burned on and the two of them fell into silence.

  Adisla thought Lieaibolmmai seemed a gentle man and couldn’t believe he was planning anything bad for her. After a long time she asked the question that was concerning her most. ‘Am I a sacrifice?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She looked into his eyes and saw nothing to reassure her.

  ‘Am I to suffer?’

  ‘No,’ he said but looked down and would not meet her gaze. ‘Magic is like speaking. You know what you want to say, but when you speak, not the exact words you are going to use. His mind, he who is coming, must open, it must be shocked into opening. Then the spirit will come to earth fully. Perhaps his mind can open without you, perhaps not.’

  ‘Which spirit?’

  ‘The wolf, the wolf who will protect us.’

  Then he would say no more.

  After a month, under a sky of slate, men came over from the mainland in boats. They took Adisla to Lieaibolmmai’s cave in the hollow light of the late day. It was a huge wound in the side of the rock, three times as high as a man and more than three times as wide. It was strewn with rubble and dipped down into blackness. The sorcerers lined up at its mouth, peering into the dark through their animal masks.

  ‘Down,’ said Lieaibolmmai to Adisla. He was not friendly now but serious. He was wearing his wolf mask so his face was invisible, but she could see that under his red robes he had become terribly thin. His voice was quiet, like a fever sufferer’s, and she saw sweat at his neck despite the cold of the day.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘This is where the spirits are,’ he said. ‘Here they can come through. Here the wolf comes to earth.’

  ‘I will not go.’

  Lieaibolmmai swayed slightly, as if her refusal was causing him pain.

  ‘Until he comes you are safer here.’

  ‘I will not go.’

  He took off his mask and looked at her. ‘Please,’ he said with gentle eyes. ‘It is easier if you agree.’ One of the other Noaidis came to his side and supported him. Lieaibolmmai was trembling, standing as stiff as a tree in his battle to stay on his feet. A man who was willing to put himself through such an ordeal was unlikely to tolerate much more resistance.

  Adisla thought of what she had done to her mother, of the grief that had dogged her every day since the raid and her apparently remote chance of ever returning to a normal life. Then she went down with the Noaidis. Remarkably, Lieaibolmmai came with her.

  At a point where the passage narrowed and dropped so much that she had to bend her head to continue, it fell away into a shaft. There was a flat boulder leaning against the wall, a great slab. Underneath it were some wooden wedges. Adisla looked at it and shivered. They were going to seal her in.

  Lieaibolmmai caught her look. ‘Only a precaution,’ he said. ‘If he is human, as we expect him to be, there will be no need for it.’

  Adisla wondered what he meant but decided she would rather not know the answer and said nothing more.

  A Noaidi showed her how to wrap a rope around herself in order to climb down. There was no light as she descended, just darkness and the smell of wet rocks. She went down about the height of five men and found herself on an uneven floor. Lieaibolmmai was lowered, limp as a hanged man. He untied himself and sat panting for a while. Then he gently pushed her forward through the dark.

  She felt her way, a hand on the ceiling, another on the wall, her feet testing for further drops. It seemed that they went a long way forward. Then she felt the passage open out and Lieaibolmmai told her to stop. He struck a flint, set some tinder burning and lit a whale oil lamp. A wolf’s head loomed at her from the dark, its teeth bared and its eyes angry. She screamed but quickly realised it was only a carving, though very disquieting. The sickly light showed the cave around her smeared with runes, a tiny stream of water filtering into a pool at the back. He pushed the flint and tinder into her hands, set down a pack beside her and took off his thick reindeer coat.

  ‘For your comfort,’ he said.

  ‘What happens here?’ said Adisla.

  ‘Magic is like speaking,’ said Lieaibolmmai. ‘Let us see what we are required to say.’

  ‘What am I waiting for?’

  ‘You will see in good time.’

  ‘How much time? How long must I spend in here?’

  ‘Not long, I think. It is hard to tell. We are working the magic as best we can. He is not easy to find sometimes. Today. Many days. I don’t know.’

  Noises drifted down from above: drumming and chanting.

  Lieaibolmmai gave Adisla a sad smile. Then he turned and was swallowed by the dark. Adisla heard the sound of the Noaidis heaving him up and then the slither of the other rope as it was pulled in. She was alone in the blackness and the damp.

  40

  Wolf Hunt

  Feileg woke. Around him were the voices of ravens. His fever had gone and his wound was healing. He sat up and looked around. For a heartbeat he didn’t understand what he was seeing. Where there had been a family, a fire and welcoming smiles, now there was only ruin.

  Of course, he had been among corpses before, and corpses he had m
ade too, but never anything like this blood swamp. The bodies had been devastated: men were unrecognisable from women, children from animals. How long had he lain there? He looked at the bodies. They were beginning to rot.

  The scene did not repulse Feileg or make him retch as it might have someone who had not spent half his life as a wolf, but it did make him shake. Since he had been looking for the girl, humanity had come back to him; suffering had started to mean something. He felt the years that had been denied to these children, the tendernesses and the joys. He thought again of his own mother, the break from his family that had felt like an amputation.

  Feileg pondered what to do. He had no idea what these people’s customs were or how they preferred their dead to be treated. The birds were there and he knew that the wolves would come down when the darkness held for long enough to conceal them. It seemed a good way to him, so he just set their stone back on the stump that served for an altar, put the drum beside it and left.

  It was not difficult to track Vali. The ground was wet, though not sodden, and the prince’s footprints were clearly visible at points, blood on the grass at others.

  Feileg thought of what he had seen on the boat, the tempest made flesh that the prince had become, thought of the sight of him among the dead bodies, feeding. The wolfman, for all the killing he had wrought with hands and teeth, had never eaten human flesh. He never had the need in the winter, when animals were weak and easy prey, nor the opportunity in the summer, when most travellers went by sea. And besides, Kveld Ulf had not taught him to eat men. The shape-shifter knew the diseases that could emerge from cannibalism and the madness that it brings.

  Feileg was sure that Vali had attacked the reindeer hunters. Whatever enchantment the prince was under had consumed him. And yet Feileg felt he had no choice but to follow. Vali was looking for Adisla, which meant that Feileg was bound to him. When Feileg freed the girl and she married him, he would ask her to release him from his vow and he would kill Vali.

  Feileg followed Vali’s trail east for days, relying on scent, tracks and hunter’s intuition. In a pass through some black mountains, he came across a cave. Vali had stayed there for days, he could tell. The prince had not been his normal fastidious self, and on the ground at the mouth of the cave was human shit. Feileg saw that it was sticky and cloying and it smelled of blood. It confirmed what he already feared.

  He didn’t want to sleep there, so he followed Vali’s trail across the pass.

  As he continued east, it became colder and the skies more grey than blue. The vegetation turned to scrub, a stunted tundra of dwarf trees and shrubs that seemed to cringe from the wind. Shelter became difficult to find. Feileg ate what he had taken from the ship — he hadn’t been able to bring himself to take the family’s food, even though he had known he would need it. He drank from streams and hid in caves and holes when it rained. Weeks passed and he began to find indications that Vali was not moving as quickly. He was stopping regularly, sometimes in caves, sometimes in the open, but there was a different smell to the mess he was leaving now. Beneath the human scent was something else. Feileg knew it better than any smell in the world. It was wolf.

  After days more travel the mountains ended and Feileg was at the edge of a broad plain going down to low hills by the sea. After some scouting, he found a place where the grass was flattened. He followed the trail and saw a mob of ravens ahead of him. They scattered to the sky as he approached, rising like the spirit of the corpse they had been eating. The dead man had been a hunter. His squat bow was nearby. Feileg took it along with the arrows. He hadn’t shot a bow since he was a child, nor used any other weapon, but now he would accept any help he could get. The ravens were watching from a distance. ‘You’ll eat when I’m done here and not before,’ Feileg said. He knelt to the corpse. The skull was sheared in two. No bird had done that.

  Half a day’s walk yielded another find. He could see something had rested beneath the lee of a rock and, from the flatness of the grass, that it had been there for some time. Leading away were prints but they were not Vali’s. This was something bigger, still on two legs but with a huge stride. Feileg sniffed at the footprints and the same signature came back: wolf. As he went on, there were other tracks too — reindeer and broad sled marks on the wet grass obscuring all signs of the prince. The clouds hung black over the land. Great petals of snow began to fall, settling cold upon his skin.

  With Vali’s trail gone, Feileg simply followed what looked like a path towards the sea. How long had he been on the prince’s trail? The moon had been full twice and when it could be seen was now a silver sliver in the night sky. But it wouldn’t be visible that night. The weather was closing in but there was no prospect of shelter nearby. Over the two months his strength had returned and Feileg kept up a good pace. Then he spotted the island. It was a long flat loaf of rock, like a reflection of the clouds, a white tear into the dark fabric of the sea.

  He had no coat, only the wolf pelt, a pair of ragged trousers the Danes at Hemming’s court had given him out of pity, a shirt and a cloak he had taken from the ship. He had something else he could use to protect himself from the cold but hesitated to do so. He had kept them around his neck since he had taken them from a body on the Danish ship but hadn’t yet had the courage to put them on. It felt like a betrayal of Kveld Ulf to even carry them. But he saw the sense now. Most of his life he had simply tied pieces of reindeer fur around his feet in the cold. Now he pulled on the pair of boots. They were a little too big but good enough. He wondered if he should stuff grass inside them to insulate them, as the farmers did.

  In his mind he heard Bragi’s voice: ‘Are you going soft on me, son?’ Feileg smiled to himself, the memory keeping him warmer than any of his clothes.

  He could smell something on the breeze — reindeer. He stopped and listened. He heard the clicking of their hooves, that distinctive sound reindeer make even on soft grass, and he could tell they were standing. On again, on through the whitening world, running now to keep the cold at bay, hoping to kill a reindeer and crawl inside its carcass for the night for warmth. In the dying light he saw movement and realised that the reindeer were not alone. There were figures of men about them, and the beasts were tied to small flat wooden sleds.

  Feileg slowed to a walk. Across on the island he could just about see figures making their way to the top. Some sort of assembly was taking place. He came to a small cliff over a short beach of silver shingle. The sea below him looked angry. From across the water howling and drumming filled his ears. He started to feel very odd, almost as though his limbs weren’t his to command. He walked on to where the reindeer were and saw something like his own reflection. A man beside a sled was wearing a wolf pelt, almost like his own, but white. Another wore a coat of black feathers and had his hair shorn and spiked to resemble a bird. They ignored him, finished tying the legs of their animals and made their way down to the beach. He followed them across to the sea, where they began to push a tiny boat out into the heaving water.

  Feileg was acting on impulse now, the howling and the drumming filling his mind. He had to find shelter. The men could find him shelter. Throwing away the hunter’s bow and arrows, he ran forward, helped push the boat out into the water and got in with the two men. They didn’t say a word; just helped him aboard for the short but terrifying trip to the island.

  The boat grounded on a tiny beach beneath a cliff and they all climbed. The jabber was intense now, and his companions pulled out their own drums to join in as they ascended. At the top Feileg found himself on a plateau. Fifty men in animal masks faced him, all drumming, shrieking, barking and roaring. The sight paralysed him.

  Then, as if on a command, a sudden silence. The men parted and a small man in a wolf mask came forward. He was frail and clearly in pain. He approached Feileg, gazed into his face, then turned to his brothers and said something in a strange language.

  The drumming took on renewed life and hands grasped Feileg. Charms and icons were shoved into hi
s face, water thrown on him, and then he was being carried across the island. He fought and tore and knocked men to the ground, but the press of numbers was too great, and he was shoved and manhandled, kicked and clubbed across the island. Ropes were produced and thrown over him; when he shook them off others replaced them. The drumming seemed to be draining him of strength, and finally, inevitably, he was bound. By this time there was no need. The drums had entered his head, robbing his limbs of movement.

  They dragged him to a cave, a gaping mouth that seemed to transform the hillside into the jaws of some ugly monster. He was mobbed into the hole by the dancing firelight of lamps and long shadows reached out like spider legs as if to inspect him as he descended the slope into darkness. Then, where the floor fell away, the man in the wolf mask came forward, holding a torch in one hand and a bright iron knife in the other.

  ‘Lord,’ he said in Norse. He bowed his head and turned Feileg to face the dark. In one movement, he slashed the bonds on his arms and pushed him hard in the back.

  Feileg tried to turn to strike him but couldn’t seem to make his body respond. He dropped into the dark. It was a heavy fall and he was stunned for a couple of breaths. When he recovered his senses, he could hear someone panting, trying to control themselves but taking in great gulps of air in panic.

  ‘What are you?’

  ‘Lady?’ said Feileg.

  There was another cry. He was sure it was Adisla. Even through her sobs he was certain it was her voice.

  ‘Is it you? I swore to protect you, remember? Adisla, is it you?’

  ‘It is me,’ said the voice.

  ‘Lady,’ he said, and she came to him, hugging him and saying his name.

  Above them the drumming stopped.

  Lieaibolmmai turned to his brothers. His voice was weak but he was resolute. ‘We have unbound him now and the spirit will find him. In hunger the wolf will out, and he will do what he needs to do to welcome the god. ’

  Now the animal cries and howling struck up again, but in a higher key.