Wolfsangel c-1 Page 36

  So, the prince was in the north and Haarik was in the north and even this girl who seemed so important was there. He suspected magical beliefs figured in her disappearance and a look around the Whale People’s holy sites might uncover her. The prince wouldn’t be far behind. Veles thought he’d give it a go. It was better than returning empty-handed to Hemming, and maybe there really was gold up there, though he doubted it.

  The journey was excruciatingly slow, hampered by argument and indecision. The whole trip should have taken them a couple of weeks, even against the current. Instead it consumed months. The berserk wanted to go after Vali but didn’t seem to realise that they first had to find out where he had been. There was no point randomly hurtling around the coast, as Bjarki seemed to want to do. They needed to ask if there had been a shipwreck, if strangers had passed by, if anyone had taken captives.

  The Whale People were simple and friendly folk. They started out hostile and threatening, waving spears and screaming but if you gave them a coin or two they thought you a very fine fellow indeed and no threat — otherwise, why would you have given them the coins? So they wanted to please. Yes, there had been a shipwreck. Yes, strangers had gone past. Yes, there were captives. In their little dwellings on the headlands behind beaches, in their tents and by their fires Veles listened to them tell their stories of great storms, men with burning eyes and princesses of southern kingdoms tied to reindeer sleds and taken north to marry water spirits. The most recent of the stories, he guessed, was around fifty years old.

  He had been freezing on and off the boat for two months when they came to where there was no further land to the north and the coast turned east.

  ‘What now?’ said the berserk. It was cold, very cold.

  ‘We go on,’ said Veles.

  ‘To what end?’ said the berserk. ‘The prince is wrecked on the coast. We should turn round and look for him.’

  ‘Tell me, Bjarki,’ said Veles. ‘Is this near where you were wrecked with Haarik’s son?’

  ‘Half a day’s sail south,’ he said. ‘We never did get to the sorcerer’s gold.’

  ‘No. Perhaps we should just take a peek down the coast and see what we can see.’

  Bjarki shook his head. ‘They enchanted me. I became weak.’

  ‘You’ll suffer fewer enchantments if you don’t drink their wine.’

  ‘It wasn’t wine.’

  ‘I dread to think what it was,’ said Veles. He knew very well — fermented milk, a drink he always found deeply unpleasant and one he’d had enough of in his travels.

  ‘It was enchantment,’ said Bodvar, ‘not the wine. Drums. They made me weak.’

  Veles raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Well, I’ve been weak all my life, so I have no strength for these sorcerers to rob. Come on, just a peek. I think I can only guarantee a rock in the sea, but who knows? You might get enough to pay Forkbeard his compensation. You did vow to pay him, didn’t you? You should do something to show your mettle. You do have something of a history of failure.’

  Veles was treading a fine line between goading the berserk to action and enraging him.

  The berserk looked at him. ‘I saved you,’ he said.

  ‘And now I will save you. The prince, if he is alive, will be on the holy island. If not, then their holy men will have heard of him. And these are peaceful people — they lie down at the first threat. If there is no treasure then there will at least be fine furs to be taken.’

  ‘They are sorcerers.’

  There was no point in appealing to reason any more. The best way was to agree that the Whale People were powerful sorcerers — in which case they were doing rather badly — and that their spells needed to be taken seriously.

  ‘I have thought of that,’ said Veles. ‘I have brought this mask with me. They use it in their ceremonies and it deflects their power away from you.’

  ‘Then the mask is mine,’ said Bodvar Bjarki.

  ‘As you wish,’ said Veles. ‘But if we are enchanted, I shall rely on you to come to my rescue.’

  Bjarki nodded and took the wolf mask from Veles. He put it to his face. It was tiny against his massive skull and the ties at its back hardly reached around his head.

  ‘This will protect me?’

  ‘All of you, the crew included.’

  ‘Good. If you are lying, Libor, then I’ll cut off your head.’

  Veles thought that if he was lying and the sorcery was real Bjarki might not be in a position to cut off anyone’s head. If the sorcery wasn’t real, well, he was sure the mask offered good protection against people clicking their fingers and banging their drums at you. The berserk didn’t really think things through, thought the merchant.

  The boat travelled east down the north coast into the falling cold. The sea didn’t freeze but they began to see smears of white on the landscape. The little ballast fire did something to keep him warm but Veles couldn’t quite stop shivering. It was a sort of crafty chill that you could banish momentarily by the fire or by adding another fur but that always seemed to work a freezing finger in — a cold of the bones, dropping from iron skies.

  Two weeks past the turn east they came to what he thought he was looking for, but when they stopped, the local Whale People told him that the island he was seeking — Domen, also known as Vagoy, the wolf island, the blood-red rock — was further east still. He gave them a little money and said he would prefer that island to be beneath his feet as he spoke but only a couple then said that it was. The Whale People weren’t liars, he knew, just very eager to please.

  ‘Is there treasure there?’ asked Bjarki, but Veles did not translate this. Instead, he said, ‘Do your people hold it very holy?’

  ‘It is the place where our ancestors are. It is the mouth of the other worlds.’

  ‘And offerings are left there?’

  ‘More riches than you can imagine.’

  ‘That’s quite a lot,’ said Veles in his own tongue.

  ‘What did he say?’ said Bjarki.

  ‘I don’t think we’re going to be disappointed,’ said Veles.

  They went on, and a week later, under a sickle moon, spotted the island. The dusk was flat and cold and the island rose from the sea in a featureless hump with a thin snow covering.

  ‘This?’ Bjarki was at his side.

  ‘Fits, doesn’t it? The blood-red rock?’

  ‘Looks more black to me,’ said Bjarki.

  ‘Use your imagination. No, on second thoughts don’t bother,’ said Veles. ‘Just find a landing spot, will you?’

  ‘Will the prince be here?’

  ‘I think we’ve established that I don’t know,’ said Veles. ‘Something may be here that may lead us to him. If not, there may be something else for us. And if not that, then the next time I hear of treasure in Ultima Thule I’ll be able to tell whoever it is they’re talking rubbish. Or perhaps I won’t. Perhaps I’ll send them up here to freeze their backside to the boards as I’ve done.’

  The ship reached a small beach, grounding easily in the calm sea. Veles noted that anyone on the island wouldn’t get off without help. There were a number of little boats across the narrow strait drawn up on a mainland beach but none on the island itself.

  Veles disembarked, as did the berserk and his men. Bjarki had his sword drawn. Veles glanced at it. In his experience a sword was more of a liability than a help in some situations. What was the berserk going to do if two hundred baying Whale Men appeared to defend their holy island from invaders? Wasn’t it better not to appear threatening? Particularly and especially if you actually were offering a threat.

  They made their way up a rusty slope of loose stones. Veles thought the Whale People had chosen a very unpromising location for their gateway to the gods. He had been in many such places and some of them were very pleasant — gardens in the sunshine, vineyards even.

  Veles shivered. He wanted to get out of this place — but not until he had found what he had come for.

  ‘Aha!’ said the
berserk. ‘Maybe you are right, Veles.’ He was holding up a fine reindeer coat. ‘This’ll fetch a decent bit when we’ve given it a scrub.’

  Veles looked at the coat. It was well made and relatively new. It would fetch a reasonable price, he thought, though he was more inclined to put it on against the cold. He stroked the fur and something came off on his hand. Blood.

  ‘That, as my mother used to say,’ said Veles, ‘is the mule of stains, and very difficult to get out. It’s dried on too. It won’t fetch much.’

  They went on and found other things. There were drums and shoes, clothes and packs. Everywhere there was blood. Then they came upon their first body. And another. And another. All were awfully mutilated.

  ‘It’s a corpse hoard,’ said Bjarki, ‘a trove of slaughter.’

  Veles might have argued with his choice of words but not with the sentiment. The top of the island was a field of the dead.

  ‘Lord Odin has had some fun here,’ said Bjarki. He had the wolf mask over his face. He looked slightly ridiculous, as it only stretched to just below his mouth.

  ‘Indeed, indeed,’ said Veles. He looked around and was glad he had given the mask to the berserk. Whatever had done the killing seemed to favour men who masqueraded as animals. There were about thirty corpses, or what the birds had left of them. A wolf’s nose jutted out here, a gigantic beak there. The ears of a huge Arctic hare lay at his feet. Veles could read what had happened. The coats and drums had been dropped by people who had not wanted to risk anything hampering their escape.

  He kicked over a mask with his foot. There was a head inside it.

  ‘Looks like somebody beat us to it,’ said Bjarki, ‘though they’ve left enough furs. Doubtless their ship was too laden with gold.’

  He was more used to this sort of sight than Veles and he picked his way through the corpses while the merchant caught his breath and composed himself. Veles looked about him. He wanted to be certain that whoever or whatever had caused this mess had gone from the island. The bodies had not been there for very long and the ravens still had some rich pickings. One pecked at a corpse next to him, watching Veles as the corpse itself seemed to watch him through the eyes of a stag mask. He didn’t like this at all and shooed the bird away. His confidence in the non-existence of supernatural powers was always stronger by a fire, drinking with his fellows, than it was in such wild places.

  The crew spread over the island, looking to loot the unlootable. There was the odd fur, the odd knife, but these people had been very poor. Their drums might be worth a bit, Veles thought. He could always sell them back to them, or offer them as curiosities to the courts of the south.

  ‘Here’s your treasure!’ It was Bjarki’s voice, shouting from somewhere down the slope towards the open sea.

  Veles couldn’t see where he was calling from. He walked down. This slaughter must have been some sort of mass human sacrifice, he thought.

  ‘Some Blot, eh?’ said Bjarki as if reading his mind. ‘Old King Hrutr did nine slaves at midsummer one year, but this beats that head or rump however you look at it.’ He pointed into a cave. ‘Down there,’ he said. ‘Look.’

  Veles squinted into the darkness. He could see nothing. Anxiety gripped him. He wondered if Bjarki was luring him into the dark of the cave to kill him. No. The berserk would have had no qualms at all about splitting his skull in broad daylight, in front of a market-day crowd if the mood took him. If Bjarki had wanted him dead, he would be so already.

  ‘Do you have any way of seeing better?’

  Bodvar Bjarki picked up a dead brand from the fingers of a corpse with as little disquiet as if the man had still been alive and simply passed it to him. Veles struck a flint, kindled the sparks on some wood shavings he had in his pouch and applied them. The torch flamed and the men went down.

  Shadows danced around them as they descended. The light of the torch seemed merely an absence of dark, not a thing of itself. In it they saw runes painted on the walls.

  ‘Can you read them?’ said Bodvar Bjarki.

  ‘Treasure,’ said Veles, ‘and good fortune.’ He had never bothered too much with runes, preferring the Latin alphabet. He could read them but with difficulty. He wished they did say that, but it seemed to be the normal bilge about spirits and gods.

  ‘How did you see in here?’ said Veles. It seemed very dark to him.

  ‘It’s obvious it’s a tomb,’ said Bjarki.

  ‘So you haven’t actually been in here?’

  ‘I have no intention of letting you out of my sight, merchant. I don’t trust you. You’d strike a bargain with the men, maroon me here, sell the boat and cheat them out of the profit if I gave you as much as half a chance.’

  ‘The idea never occurred to me,’ said Veles. It hadn’t actually, but it was good to know Bjarki feared a mutiny, and kind of him to suggest a way it might be done.

  The passageway stopped at a large mound of stones. There was no sign of collapse on the tunnel roof, so Veles took them to have been placed there. On one large block a rune had been carved, a jagged sideways swipe with a line through it.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I’ve never seen it before,’ said Veles.

  Some other men were behind him now, peering through the wavering light.

  ‘It’s a holy sign of their people,’ said one.

  ‘Very likely,’ said Veles, ‘and whoever did this slaughter has taken care to secrete something here.’

  ‘What?’

  Veles shrugged and smiled. ‘We won’t find out until we open it, will we? I suggest you get to work.’

  Bjarki grunted. Then he began on the pile of stones.

  46

  From the Dark

  Saitada sat in a shaft of light that cut through from a finger-width opening in the side of the upper cave. She watched her image looking back from the blade of the sword.

  She was much older. How much? She didn’t know. The unburned side of her face was not pretty any more: her skin was tight on her bones, pale from lack of light, dirty and cut.

  Saitada had been a long time in the dark. The witch caves were endless and deep. She had not known at first that her boys had been taken and had remained underground, trawling the blackness with her fingertips, reaching for a hand, the brush of some hair, listening for the cries of her children in the dark, living off the water of streams and food she could beg from the witches’ servants.

  For years, Saitada hadn’t known why her children had been taken. But crawling through blind chimneys, emerging from dripping sumps of rock where her mouth had stolen the inch of air between the water and the tunnel ceiling, taking candles from the boy servants and watching the light struggle against the deep dark, she listened and she learned. The witches, who from their lowest caves could hear a hare’s breath on the mountainside, to whom the rock and the ice of the Troll Wall were just a veil through which they saw from sea to sea, did not notice her, and she did not know to think that odd.

  The older witches of course did not speak, and the boys knew only that they needed to fear and to serve them. Neither yielded any information about what had happened to Saitada’s children. The girls, however, initiates new to the dark, shivered and trembled and clung to what they had been. Saitada came to them, sat with them, hugged them and calmed them, though she never thought to say anything. The girls needed to talk, to confess their fears as they would have to their mothers. They told her, among other things, of the threat that was coming, of the deaths and the terror of death. They told her too about two boys who would become one wolf to kill the murderous god. One boy’s body would host the spirit of the wolf, the other would be his food, giving his brother the strength he needed. The witch queen had taken the boys and only one would live. Saitada never found it strange that she could understand the girls’ language. She only knew that her babies had gone.

  They were always in her mind, their memory like a tumour that ate everything else she had seen, everything she had been. After years alone
she was not a person, just a love and a hate encased in flesh — cherishing the thought of her children, loathing the witch queen who had taken them — watching death begin to creep through the caves.

  The girls had all died when Saitada’s grief was at its height. She had gone to the deep dark, where she had thought she would die, when five of them were dead, and emerged to find none alive. The boys were all dead too. From one she had taken tinder and lit a candle. She had no idea why she had come back — her own motivations were now a mystery to her — but in a week her purpose became clear. She had come back to watch the witch queen kill her sisters.

  Some went in their sleep; some were strangled and some burned. The majority would have died from neglect, with no boys to tend them, but Saitada brought them food from the sacrifices. It wasn’t kindness. She saw the distress the murders caused the witch queen and didn’t want starvation or thirst to spare her a single one. Saitada saw how the deaths drove the queen on to madness and she sought to guide her hand, leaving rope or tinder, stakes or, once, a long pin that she found in some cloth left as a sacrifice. The queen quickly put Saitada’s gifts to use.

  Saitada watched for the arrival of the god the girls had talked about but saw nothing. Rock, pool and stream remained the same in the yellow light of a candle stub; the torpid air and dripping damp didn’t change when the flame was spent.

  When the witches were all dead, she tried to kill the witch queen herself. She could not go through with it. Twice she pulled the queen from the Pools of the Dead by a rope at her neck; once she took a little knife, pressed it to her breast but then drew back. Were the runes protecting the witch queen? Even Saitada could sense them now, chiming and splashing and fizzing in the blackness as the witch endured her daily sufferings by water and cold. Frustration began to overwhelm Saitada and she spent a long time trying to think how she could strike her enemy down. But every time she moved against her she faltered.