Wolfsangel. Part 11

'The rumour is, lord, that you only have eyes for that farm girl.'

Vali made himself laugh. He had turned the conversation just the way he wanted it.

'She is a useful piece in my strategy with Forkbeard. The weaker he thinks my pa.s.sion for his daughter, the greater will be her dowry.'

'You are a cunning man, sir,' said Hogni, laughing. 'They say no one in the north is your better at king's table.'

'No southern man would beat me either,' said Vali, mindful that such men as these respected bravado. 'Now bring me my horse.'

Hogni gave up his mount for his prince without question.

Vali looked across at Orri, who was swinging himself into his saddle. He was a lean man, lightly dressed, no armour, only his spear and helmet. Could he outrun him on a strange and potentially unreliable horse? No.

Vali turned to him. 'This animal stinks. Give me yours, Orri.'

Orri looked oddly at the prince. 'This one stinks the same, sir.'

'I want the horse, not a debate. Get down.'

Vali looked into Orri's eyes and the warrior thought that he glimpsed a little of King Authun in the prince. Orri dismounted, and as he did so Vali brought his own animal's hindquarters into the flank of Orri's horse. The beast stepped sideways, knocking Orri to the ground. Vali s.n.a.t.c.hed the reins, put his heels into his own horse's flanks and shot forward, taking both animals with him. He was clear of the men in an instant, not even bothering to look back as he urged the creatures on.

They shouted after him.

'You have sentenced us to death, sir!'

'We cannot return without you.'

'The Rygir's fate is sealed.'

'They are as the dead!'

He didn't turn, just kept driving on up the valley, the feeling of sickness leaving him as he moved. He had, he thought, a good chance of getting away. He had two horses, was well rested and would be pursued on foot by men needing sleep.

He reached the top of the valley and found himself on a broad ridge above hills that stretched away to distant mountains skirted by trees, a fjord just beneath him. Did he follow the ridge or drop down to the east? He rode a few steps east, then north. Did he feel any more sick going in one direction than another? He couldn't really tell.

He allowed the horses to slow at the top of the hill and his mind turned back to the house and Ma Disa.

Ansuz was the rune she had carved, the rune in which she had put her faith. Vali visualised the rune in his mind, even moving his hands in the air to mark out its three lines, one vertical, the others on a slant. He tried the rhyme Disa had used.

'Who I am? I am a man. Where am I? In the hills of the north.'

He only succeeded in making himself feel ridiculous. But something did happen. His horse stumbled. He looked down at it. The animal was in a great sweat. At first he thought he might be in the presence of some supernatural thing - they were said to frighten animals - but the other horse was not sweating nearly as much. He looked around him. The light was subtly different. The ridge was coming into trees. Then he realised he had travelled a great way. The animal desperately needed rest. He dismounted and led the horses to a stream. There was plenty enough gra.s.s for pasture, though he had no food himself. Never mind, he thought. The feeling of nausea was faint but surprisingly welcome. It was a lucky coincidence to be off your food if you had none.

A fire was out of the question with pursuers on his back, so he watered the horses, removed the tack, hobbled them and waited. He didn't attempt to sleep, nor to take his mind off the cold and, beneath that, his nausea and hunger. It was as if he was driven by some instinct that told him suffering was something he could offer the G.o.ds. He had never seen the point of sacrifice, of stuffing funeral ships with gold or slaughtering animals and slaves, but here, in tiredness and discomfort, he felt connected to something fundamental inside him. His bodily pain was nothing to what he felt for her. He could endure far worse, he knew, and his love would sustain him.

The next morning he set off again, picturing that rune in his mind. He saw Disa carving it, first on the wood and then on her hand. He saw the blood drip and fall, and where it fell it ran again into the shape of the rune. Then he was aware of the warmth of the horse under him. By the position of the sun he had clearly been riding for hours. It was a peculiar feeling - driving forward with great purpose but not really knowing where he was going. The horses allowed him to travel much more quickly than he would have managed on foot. Vali found himself riding across high pa.s.ses, dropping down perilous slopes of scree, fording rivers and skirting fjords, but always as a pa.s.senger, rather than as someone choosing his way. He seemed to instruct the horses without thinking about it. There were signs he was on the right route - broken and discarded footwear by the side of a trail, the occasional marks of wagon wheels and hooves.

He saw next to no one, just far-off shepherds and the occasional homestead. He took care to sound his horn as he pa.s.sed, to avoid being mistaken for an outlaw, but did not stop. Only the needs of the animals slowed him down, and though sometimes he drank when they drank, he never ate and rarely slept. Thinking about Disa's rune seemed to have wakened something deep inside him, but thirst, hunger and tiredness combined to dull his conscious mind.

It was hardly surprising then that he did not hear the approach of the wolfman.

14 The Prince and the Wolf.

Feileg had been watching the rider for days, a.s.sessing the man's strength. Lone hors.e.m.e.n in the inland mountains were never seen, and to the large part of Feileg's mind that had become wolf this was suspicious. Also, the traveller was not on the trading route. He was two days north of that, in the backcountry, just above the treeline in a narrow dark gorge, following a tiny stream. All animals are wary of things they haven't seen before and Feileg was no different. But there was something uniquely threatening about the man in the valley.

In other circ.u.mstances he would have called across the mountains to Kveld Ulf, but the shape-shifter had been gone for days, as he sometimes was, leaving Feileg to hunt with only three of the pack for company. The wolves, and Feileg, of course, wanted the horses and knew that the easiest way to get them was to wait for the man to sleep. Without Feileg's help, the wolves would have had to wait for one of the animals to wander off at night, which might not happen.

Stories of wolfmen attacking camps of travellers were sometimes true but it wasn't something they did by choice and usually only in summer. In the hungry hot months, when the animals ran swiftly and the berries were not yet on the trees, Kveld Ulf and Feileg had to take their food where they could get it.

Native traders wondered why the Whale People of the northern edge managed to travel by land without trouble from the wolfmen and imagined that they had some charm or spell that kept them safe. It was simpler than that. The Whale People lived among bears and stored their food well away from their camps, hanging it in packs from the thinnest possible branches of trees. The wolfmen would only fight if travellers caught them stealing their food and animals. The Whale People sometimes lost their dinners but always kept their lives.

Feileg waited for the rider to sleep, but the rider did not sleep, or at least Feileg could not be sure he was sleeping. When the pale grey of the long dusk came down, the man just dismounted and saw to the horses, then sat on the ground, clinging to his sword and rocking back and forth. Feileg saw few people with black hair, fewer still who seemed to care for their animals better than they did themselves and none who never ate, but none of these things accounted for the feeling of disquiet he had when looking down from his hiding place at the figure below him.

Feileg had some remaining idea of magic from his time with the berserks, but having spent so long with Kveld Ulf he no longer saw it as something separate from any other way of being. It was no more incredible that he could send himself into a trance where he would track, move and fight as a wolf than it was that a stream fell down a mountainside or that birth and death came to man and animals - no more incredible than breath, the rising and sinking of the sun and moon, the movement of the tides. To Feileg, creation seemed a rhythm that he connected to in ritual and meditation with rattle and drum. That man, there in the valley, was where the rhythm broke down, he felt. When he looked at him, he shivered. He had the wordless sense that the rider was a stumble in nature's beat.

The wolfman scented the wind. Nothing to learn there, just the smell of horses and rain coming from the dark mountain behind him. Then he realised what was strange. He wasn't interested in the rider for his horses or his food; he was curious about him. For some reason he wanted to see him closer. It was the sort of human feeling he had allowed to atrophy and its reawakening left him feeling puzzled and a little miserable. He put it to the back of his mind and concentrated on his hunger.

Vali's thoughts were elsewhere. He thought of Adisla, imprisoned by Forkbeard; he thought of Disa; mostly he just thought of that rune. Its image and, even more strangely, its sound as Vali imagined it, had been humming through his head for days. The rune seemed to bring with it a music that was related to how people said its name - Ansuz - but was more than that. He remembered the voice of the thing that had spoken through Disa sounding like the drawing and pushing of the surf. That was how the rune sounded.

Then, in an instant, all the human feelings he had ignored on his long ride came back. He was terribly hungry and thirsty, and tired as he had never been before. These feelings seemed important to him, to contain a message. No more nausea. He had arrived where he needed to be. He looked around, his eyes heavy and refusing to focus properly, his mind telling him that the most important task he had was sleep.

Vali pushed his face into a stream and drank. Then he opened his pack. He took out some hunks of salted bread along with some pickled fish. He ate the food quickly, drank again and then settled down. He had not made a proper bed the whole journey. Now he spread a walrus skin on the ground, put his cloak about him and used the pack as a pillow. His tiredness had not quite taken his reason away and he was careful to conceal himself with scrub beneath an overhang, but in the dwindling grey light of the midsummer dusk he could not make his eyes scan for enemies. He was simply too tired and he sank onto the comfort of his bed.

Feileg watched all this from above. Now he felt he could move. When he did, it was with liquid speed, dropping silently down the sides of the gorge to the shadows of the valley floor.

He went forward alone, the wolves watching him from the valley lip. Feileg kept to the same side of the gorge on which Vali was sleeping, slinking low but fast towards his target. The horses were past the sleeping man, and Feileg felt there was a chance he could take them without waking him. It was too big a risk, however. Who knew who was riding to meet the sleeper? Who knew if he was an experienced tracker or even a sorcerer? He would have to die. To Feileg's keen senses threat oozed from the sleeping man. It hummed like a nest of bees in a cave mouth, seeped into his consciousness like fire on the breeze. There was only one way to make it go away.

The quickest way to kill someone in their sleep depends on how they are lying. If he is on his front then it's relatively easy to break his neck with an arm around the head and a knee in the back. Feileg had done this two or three times and found that even if the neck didn't break he still had an effective stranglehold on his prey and could finish him very quickly. If the man was on his side or back then he might stamp him to death. Other times, when silence was necessary, he had power enough in his fingers to crush his throat.

Feileg - perhaps it is better to call him the wolfman because the hormonal surge he felt within him at the prospect of killing made his humanity seem a weak and withered thing - didn't make a sound as he reached the brush that concealed the sleeping man. The man was on his back and the wolfman decided to creep up on his victim and twist his neck.

There was a growl, low and guttural. The wolfman glanced around to see where it had come from. He hadn't made the noise himself. It was like nothing natural, and he felt a chill creep down his spine. Every pore seemed open and sweating, his body signalling danger with every sense. The growl came again, even lower, like rock on rock.

Feileg flattened himself to the ground. A third growl, this time like something coming from the lower earth, and a word: 'Adisla.' Feileg looked up. The noise was coming from the sleeping man. He was snoring. Feileg's mind went back to the hut of the berserks where he had been raised. His memories of that time were now just impressions: the dark of the hut, the smell of his mother's skirts, a glimpse of himself being chased in a game by the girls he considered his sisters. Only one incident stuck out. The man he had called father had snored like thunder, especially when drunk. The children had put feathers on his lips and hooted as he puffed them away. He remembered one of the girls putting one next to her father's behind to see if that moved when he farted. It had moved and Feileg had thought he would never stop laughing. Looking down at the sleeping Vali, he heard another strange noise, like the babble of a stream. It was, he realised, coming from himself. He was chuckling. He hadn't done that in a long time.

As he laughed, a glimpse of the meaning of human interaction returned to him, or rather a fleeting delight in inanities, and he felt a sort of fellowship with the snoring man, almost the desire to wake him and tell him how loud, how funny, he sounded. But Feileg had to kill him. The focus - those who didn't know wolfmen called it rage - that made this easier though had been carried away by his laughter. He looked hard at Vali. Feileg hadn't seen his own face since he was six and then only rarely. His image of himself had been mainly formed by looking into the shiny surfaces of the sword blades he had taken so he wasn't immediately struck by his resemblance to the man before him, but something within him made it difficult to murder him outright.

Feileg sat for a while at the man's feet. He studied him closely. He had - by ritual, the consumption of strange mushrooms, privation and lack of practice - lost the habit of thinking in words. So it was a shapeless, sliding thought that came to him as he looked at Vali's combed and clipped hair, the fine sword that lay at his side, the rich colour of his woollen coat. He could not have articulated what he felt but this made the sense no less powerful. There was himself, as he could have been, had the fates weaved him a different skein. The man had said a word: Adisla. Feileg instinctively recognised it for what it was - a girl's name. He did not feel unhappy, or at least he could not identify his emotion as unhappiness, but he did begin to feel uncomfortable about the path that the fates had chosen for him.

He breathed in, smelling something sweet and something rancid. He saw Vali's pack and felt his saliva rise. He opened it and, without pausing to examine what he found, began to eat. He ate the honey and the stale bread and the cheese. He ate the berserker mushrooms and the long root. He couldn't abide even the smell of the wolfsbane but the sleeping mixture was sweet and palatable so he sucked it down and pushed his tongue into the pot to get the last drops. Then he ate the mint and drained Vali's wineskin. He began to feel peaceful, warm and relaxed.

From up the valley the wolves began to howl, but he could not hear them to reply. Disa's white night potion had made the world soft. Feileg lay down on the gra.s.s and slept.

15 A Captive.

Vali really did think he was dreaming. He came to himself with that strange sensation that you sometimes get when waking in unfamiliar surroundings, when reality makes a sudden lurch and you don't know where you are or how you got there.

At his feet, sleeping face down, was a powerfully built man dressed in little but a wolf pelt. The ruins of the pack were next to him, all food gone, and his wineskin lay flat as a blanket at his side. At first he thought it was dark but then he realised it was the shadow of the horses. They had pressed in as close as they could to him. No wonder. From down the valley he heard the call of a wolf.

Vali grabbed for his sword and drew it, pointing it at the sleeping figure. This had to be a wolfman. Vali didn't know what to do. He knew it would be far more impressive to take the bandit alive and - more than that - it would be proof he had a wolfman and not some dressed-up slave. But the man - no older than he was - was impressively muscled. Even the thralls who did most of the heavy labour on the farms were not made so powerfully. If he awoke while Vali was tying him up then the prince didn't fancy his chances in a wrestling compet.i.tion.

Vali looked around him. The pack was completely empty, everything in it gone. There were the little cloth bags in which he'd carried Disa's herbs all torn; there was the empty honey pot and the one containing the sleeping draught.

He smiled to himself when he realised what had happened. Carefully, he pushed the tip of his sword into the wolfman's back, drawing a little blood. That was a relief, knowing that ordinary weapons could hurt him. The wolfman didn't even stir.

Vali took the cord from the saddle at his side. He had never actually needed to tie anyone up before and didn't quite know how to do it, so he erred on the side of caution, binding the man's hands behind his back, then his legs, then his hands again and his legs again.

He had never thought of himself as religious or superst.i.tious but he was almost afraid to touch the wolfman and certainly didn't want to move the wolf pelt he wore over his head. It was a magical item, capable of transforming the man into a snarling half wolf. Even the merchant Veles Libor had taken those stories seriously.

Vali thought of the remedies for magic that he knew - not many, he'd had no reason or opportunity to learn them. However, he knew that magicians were supposed to be able to enchant you with their gaze and a way to negate this power was to blindfold them. He had nothing that would do for a blindfold; he did, however, have the bag that he had taken the rope from. But as he lifted the wolfman to slide the bag over his head, he caught a glimpse of something extraordinary.

The man was strikingly similar to Vali himself. His face was far more weatherbeaten and lean, and his hair was wild, but his beard was spa.r.s.e and thin, like Vali's, his features virtually identical. Vali shivered. This was truly a shape-shifter.

He pulled the bag over the man's head, taking care not to touch the magical wolf pelt, breathed out heavily and told himself to be calm. Was this a shape-shifter? It was possible, he thought, that the man simply resembled him. He had seen very few dark-haired men. Perhaps they all looked the same. Bragi said the people of the far west islands had dark hair, and you couldn't tell one from another. He also said that they stank - and this man certainly did.

Vali thought on. He had heard rumours and stories brought back by traders of something called a fetch, an evil spirit that copied someone's appearance. He couldn't remember what it was meant to do but he was sure it wasn't very pleasant. He tried to regain his calm. He told himself he had been tired. No wonder he was seeing things. The sooner he was back at Forkbeard's hall, the better, he thought. He tacked up the horses.

Vali didn't quite know the best way to transport the wolfman, so he improvised. He pulled the man up to a standing position and then shouldered him across the saddle of the horse. He tied the wolfman's hands to his feet around the animal and then looped a rope around his waist. He wound that around the pommel of the saddle at the front and the cantle at the rear. All the time the wolfman lolled and flopped as if he was dead. Vali pushed and tugged at him to make sure he was secure.

When he was satisfied with his work, the prince tied the reins of his captive's horse to his own saddle, mounted and kicked towards home. From somewhere up towards the black bulk of the mountain he heard the wolves call. He headed down the valley with the horses at a trot. The sooner he was out of this country, he thought, the better.

16 An Engagement.

News of his arrival had spread from the outer farms and the people of Eikund were there in numbers to greet him as he arrived at Forkbeard's hall.

He had gone there by the most direct route, bypa.s.sing Disa's house. He'd asked the first person he'd met about her and had been told she was very poorly. Visiting her, he thought, would be too much for her at that moment and he decided to wait until the clamour that greeted his arrival had died down, though he sent her word of his success. Every child in the area was running ahead of him, shouting and whooping and calling him a hero. Some of them touched the wolfman as he pa.s.sed, or threw mud and cursed him. Women too rained insults on the man, and hit him with sticks for good measure. Vali had to tell them to stop it, as they were frightening his horses. The men stood with their arms folded, shaking their heads and laughing to themselves. They had misjudged Vali, it seemed, and they were glad to have been mistaken. Finally, he had acted in a way they understood. One or two of the farmers came forward with knives, shouting that they would kill the wolfman there and then. Vali drew his sword and they backed off. They were glory thieves, he thought, and if they wanted to kill a wolfman they could go and get one of their own.

It had taken two weeks for Vali to make his way home. The return had been in some ways harder than his outward journey. Leaving Eikund, he had been in a trance and had had to make no decisions regarding his direction of travel. On his way back he had no such help and had to decide his way for himself. However, he did recognise the country he had travelled through, and in the lush northern summer his tracks were clear - hoofprints from his horses, the nibbled bushes and manure that showed he had made camp. He even managed to shorten his journey by getting fishermen to row him across a few of the fjords. They refused payment when they saw his captive, glad he had rid them of a dangerous bandit.

There were practical difficulties. The wolfman had woken up after a day and Vali had been forced to chase after his horse, which had been spooked by his kicking. Vali had talked to the man and he had become calmer, accepting his fate like an animal. The wolves had proved a disquieting presence. During the day he didn't see them, although he felt always that he was being watched, but in the long dusk he heard them in the hills. He had expected the wolfman to reply. Vali knew these sorcerers were said to command wolves. He decided that if the wolfman called for help he would have to kill him. His prisoner remained silent though.

There was the problem of untacking the horses at night, and of replacing the wolfman in the saddle every morning but, these difficulties aside, the journey had gone smoothly. They pa.s.sed farmsteads and Vali asked for supplies. The farmers would have been generous to any traveller but, like the fishermen, when they saw the prince had a captured bandit, they were elated. They gave freely and Vali ate well.

At first Vali was almost pleased to see that the wolfman had developed sores from the chafing of the saddle on his side. He allowed him to drink, sparingly, once a day - though he never fully removed the bag - but he gave him no food. This meant that if he should work free of his bonds he would be less able to fight or run. Part of him was almost inclined to let him die. But Vali had finally begun to appreciate the merits of portraying himself as a hero. It might be a lie, but it gained him the respect of his fellows and made life easier. A week from home Vali had begun to feed the wolfman, to give him more water and to sit him upright on the horse. He wanted him to look fierce when he arrived back, the better to reflect on himself.

Vali's success, it was agreed, was spectacular. It had been thought the mission would take him a minimum of two months and that Adisla would hang. He had returned in less than one and she was free.

Adisla was not at the hall. With Forkbeard gone to the a.s.sembly at Nidarnes along with all the n.o.bles and the rest of the court, enthusiasm for keeping her confined had waned. She had never been more than half a day's walk from her farm in her life so was unlikely to run off, reasoned her guards. Her habit of singing in a discordant voice during the evenings hadn't endeared her to them either, and they'd let her go back to her mother.

However, as Vali tied up his horses, he was led aside by Hogni and Orri, both in a fever of agitation.

'Prince Vali, Prince Vali,' said Hogni, 'I must talk to you.'

'You have nothing to say to me,' he said. 'Your animals are safe and you may take them back now.'

Hogni kept his voice as low as he could. 'You are in great danger.'

'Are you my va.s.sals?'

'Yes, lord.'

'Then act like it: fetch me mead and be silent.'

'Lord, we must speak to you.'

Hogni grabbed at his arm. Vali glowered at him. 'Do you presume to touch your prince?'

'You must leave this place. You must leave now,' said Hogni.

'Why?'

'It is cursed. A calamity is about to befall these people.'

'What sort of calamity?'

'We have only heard whispers, lord. Some say it will be a plague, some say the Danes are coming, but your mother wants you out of here by the next full moon.'

'Tomorrow.' Vali smiled. 'Well, my mother can wait. You have a choice: stay here and share whatever fate befalls us, or go back to my father and do the dead lord's jig, should he keep his temper long enough to hang you. Personally, I think your chances of survival are vastly better here.'

Hogni and Orri stood tall.

'We are warriors and not afraid to die.'

'Then prove it. Stay to the full moon and then I'll be happy to accompany you back to my father's court. You are dismissed. '

The Horda men walked away, overcome as much by the change in Vali as by his refusal to go with them. He was no longer the daydreaming sword-shy boy he had appeared before, but now acted in a way they would expect from the son of Authun the White Wolf.

Vali watched them go. The Rygir were beginning a celebration. A horn of mead was shoved into his hand and he drank it down. Something was happening, he didn't know what, but his mother would never have acted on hearsay. What was most likely? A plague? There was nothing he could do about that. His mother might have seen it through a witch's vision, he supposed, but Yrsa had a well-known dislike of magic. What else? He made himself think practically. Pipes were playing inside the hall; Jokull the Skald was already singing a song about him. The only eventuality he could do anything about was a raid. If that was going to happen then he should stay to defend the people who had raised him.

Vali looked down at the little port. It was empty save for a few fishing boats. Forkbeard had taken his three drakkars with him and the knarrs were all away on trading missions. He had chosen a bad time for glory, he thought.