Wolfsangel. Part 28

Bragi scanned for enemies, straightened his bent sword under his foot against a timber and slid his knife into his belt. That done, he put his hand up to the flap of skin at his chin and called out to Vali behind him,'Well, you remembered something I taught you, though you did a good enough job of hiding it for long enough. I . . .'

Feileg watched as Bragi looked at the prince. Vali was kneeling beside of one of the fallen men, chewing into the flesh of his face and trying to rip the meat from the bone with his teeth.

'Prince, I . . .' Bragi put his hand on Vali's shoulder.

Vali gave a boiling growl.

'Prince,' said Bragi, 'you are bewitched. Prince, friend, please-'

He never finished his sentence. Vali stood and in the same movement threw Bragi onto his back. Then he was on him, biting at him, tearing his skin, punching and kicking. Feileg saw the old man's head loll as Vali poured in blow after blow, but Bragi was a formidable fighter and responded with blows of his own. The two men rose, locked together, crashed back over the rail of the ship, fell into the enemy vessel and rolled apart. Danes surrounded them. Four, five, six men tore into the pair, attacks coming in from all sides. Vali lost his footing. Axes and spears were raised but Bragi got free of his opponent and charged headlong at Vali's attackers driving three of them to the boards. Bragi lost his sword and much of his hand to an axe but Vali broke the axeman's neck with a blow to the head.

Bragi went down, locked to an opponent. They broke, shoving each other away as they stood, but the Dane had s.n.a.t.c.hed the old warrior's knife from his belt. Bragi reacted immediately, driving his head forward into the man's face, sending his opponent crashing over the rail of the ship into the sea.

Vali seemed to catch the idea. He tossed two men over the rail into the water and turned to face the rest. The Danes fell back, a half-circle of them around Bragi and Vali, too scared to come on but with nowhere to retreat to.

Bragi was unarmed, all his weapons gone in the fight and his right hand a b.l.o.o.d.y ruin, as was his face. He smiled at the prince. 'All my life I've dreamed of doing this with you. You're a great sc.r.a.pper, as long as you concentrate on the enemy. But you want to watch those berserker mushrooms.'

Vali swayed uncertainly in front of him.

Bragi put a hand on his shoulder.

'I'm proud of you, lord. You're a mighty man, and it does my heart good to see you fight like that. I'd have lost my hand before if I'd known it would have that effect on you.'

And Vali took him, leaping on him like a wild animal and tearing out his throat with his teeth. Bragi instinctively reached for his sword with his b.l.o.o.d.y hand and for his knife with his good one, but they were gone. He staggered back, his blood engulfing him and engulfing the prince. Vali shoved him to the deck, where the old man lay writhing, his hands tearing at his belt for the weapons that were no longer there.

The Danes around them seemed to decide as one they wouldn't take on Vali and scrambled onto Bodvar Bjarki's crippled ship. The pirates on the other ship took this for a renewed attack and came pouring over in numbers themselves. Feileg fought hard and lost track of time, then he saw Vali leap back onto the centre boat with a terrible snarl.

Some of the Danes seemed transfixed, stopping as if turned to stone. Feileg had heard his father tell stories of this - the battle fetter - where Odin descends and strikes the enemy motionless. Others, though, were not affected and came forward to meet Vali. The fighting was terrible. Men lost their footing and were stabbed or trampled on the blood-slick boards; friend struck friend in the confusion but Vali seemed untouchable. Opponents fell back from him as if blasted by a gale, pushing back to their own ships. Some made it. Those who didn't were crushed, torn or broken by Vali's merciless attacks with teeth and hands.

Feileg took a blow across the shoulders and staggered, but then his opponent was down, felled by Bjarki. He was not berserk - he hadn't had the time to chant his chants and consume his brew of mushrooms - and when he spoke Feileg recognised what he said for sense.

'We have to take one of their boats. Leave him here. He is berserk like I've never seen and will harm us as much as the Danes.' Bjarki was no fool and realised that a common enemy could make for strange friends. He pointed to the ship where Bragi lay.

Feileg nodded and jumped across. He went to Bragi. The wound at his neck was terrible and his eyes were dim. He was reaching around, searching for something. The wolfman instinctively knew what to do - he had spent his earliest years with berserks, after all. He picked up a fallen spear and pressed it into the warrior's good hand. Bragi's fingers curled around it and he drew Feileg to him. His voice was hardly audible and Feileg had to crane down to hear it.

'I taught him many things,' he said, 'but I never taught him that.'

Bragi began to laugh and then stopped. Feileg touched the old man's face. He had died as the men of his people would have wanted to, thought Feileg, with a weapon in his hand and a joke on his lips.

Only a few of the Danes remained on the boat and the fight had gone out of them. Seeing the berserk and the remains of his crew climbing across towards them, they rushed back the other way to join what was left of their comrades on the far boat. Only Vali remained between the two groups on the middle ship. The Danes knew they were facing a monster rather than a man and had already started cutting the ropes they had lashed to Bjarki's ship at the start of the encounter.

On the oarless ship, red with blood, surrounded by bodies, Vali was suddenly still, looking about him as if slightly puzzled. A pair of eyes appeared above the rim of one of the barrels. Someone was still in there, Feileg realised.

'Now or never Veles Libor,' shouted Bjarki.

The merchant stood in the barrel looking at Vali. He trembled as he stared at the prince. Even from twenty paces away Feileg could see him shaking.

Veles looked towards Feileg's ship, his movements very slow as if he feared he might draw attention to himself. Then, with a very surprising turn of speed, he levered himself out of the barrel, ran to the rail of the boat and rolled over to join the wolfman and the berserk, flattening himself to the bottom of the boat as if he was still in the middle of an arrow storm. Bjarki gave a snort of contempt but Feileg was minded to throw the merchant into the water. Luckily for Veles, the wolfman had other things to think about.

'Can we take the prince with us?' Feileg asked Bjarki.

Busy cutting ropes, the big man shook his head. 'He'll still be berserk. We'll follow the current and try to keep him in sight.'

'And if we lose him?'

Bjarki shrugged. 'We'll pick him up easy enough if we let ourselves drift. If I stay tied to him I'll have a mutiny on my hands. He's bewitched and the men won't stand for it.'

The fog came over them again, the taunts of Bjarki's crew following the Danes as they disappeared into it. Vali was only a shadow on the corpse boat, though one last rope still connected it to Feileg's ship.

The rope was cut and the boats began to move apart. Feileg looked at the body of Bragi. Then he turned to Bjarki. He pointed to the old warrior's corpse. 'Tell tales of him,' he said, and then jumped to join his brother as the fog bank swallowed them.

37 The Hunters.

It had been three days since Vali had woken and he felt very strange indeed. He was uncommonly energetic, hardly slept, felt stronger and had no urge to eat at all.

The scents of the night were enthralling to him and he would sit under the stars breathing in the many odours of the boat while Feileg chewed dried fish from the Danes' provisions. The days seemed alive with sensation: the sun on the water was a field of diamonds, the sky a limitless and entrancing blue and the wind, when it came, brought a bounty of scents in a thousand varieties he had never noticed before - beach tar and wet stone, bird droppings, stranded fish - each one containing its own notes, its fascinating signature. When the skies bloated with cloud he could smell the rain coming in and sense which way the wind would turn. None of this seemed strange to him, or rather he was aware of his heightened perceptions as something new but they didn't feel wrong or unusual. He felt more comfortable with his new senses than he had with his old ones.

He thought of Bragi - sometimes he could think of nothing else. Had he killed him, as Feileg had said? The wolfman had called him 'battle blind' but would not explain further. Vali felt so distant from his old self that it almost seemed possible . . . No, the wolfman had got it wrong. Feileg had mistaken what he had seen. The mess of battle had confused him.

Then, in a rising sea, his eyes confirmed what his nose had told him - land, a strip of rusty red cliffs against the iron black of the ocean. He took the rudder, saved from the side-swipe of the pirate ship by the curve of the hull, and tried to turn landward. It was frustrating work. The current was pulling across the sh.o.r.e and the ship responded sluggishly when it responded at all. Feileg was no use, slumped in his usual position, sat with his head between his legs, staring at his feet. But they were getting closer.

The coast was unpromising, with few beaches and fierce cliffs making a landing very tricky at best. He steered, allowed the current to take them, steered again, let go again. Then they were racing under dirty brown cliffs a boat's length away. The sea was getting higher, the wind whipping up about them. Vali didn't think he would have much of a chance if the boat struck the rocks. He looked at Feileg. The wolfman would have none.

The boat was pushed into the cliff by a wave, crashed into the rock face, and bounced off, spinning round. Vali let go of the rudder. Nothing to do now but hope. They were speeding backwards, the cliffs racing past so near Vali could have touched them. The boat wouldn't survive another such impact, he knew. Again they turned, and again, and then another crunch and the boat was still. The ship had come to rest on a sandbank. It was no more than a couple of boat's lengths to a narrow beach.

Feileg stood up. 'I will swim,' he said.

'I know you can't even if you try,' said Vali. He picked up a spear, a bow and a sword from the bottom of the boat. He was feeling very peculiar: one instant his head was thick, as if he was drunk, the next it had a sharpness he had never known. 'Get some provisions. If we're lucky you'll be able to wade to sh.o.r.e.'

The wolfman did as he was bid, and Vali stepped uncertainly into the water. It only came up to his thighs. He began to wade with the wolfman watching him. He made it easily - the sea was chest deep at most. Feileg followed. Vali was surprised to see how hesitant he was. Could someone so fierce in battle really be afraid of wet feet?

They were on a small beach beneath a long broken cliff of that reddish rock. Vali said nothing, just made his way towards it. The cliffs were tall but uneven and climbable and they found their way to the top quite easily, Feileg pausing to take some birds' eggs. The view was immense. They had reached a spot overlooking a green land of birch forests falling towards long fjords and a wide gra.s.sy plain stretching to distant mountains that rose like black dragons on the horizon.

Vali breathed in. He smelled smoke on the wind and something else. Cooking meat. He held his hand to his forehead and squinted into the distance. There, beyond the barrier of a fjord, over a short hill in the gra.s.sland, a plume of grey reached up, curving in the wind. It was a fire.

'What is this land?' said Feileg.

'I don't know,' said Vali, 'but I intend to ask.'

The two made their way around the fjord and over to the gra.s.sy plain. The fire was three day's walk away but still Vali did not feel hungry. He thought of the blood he had vomited. It was possible something was wrong with him, though he didn't feel at all ill. In fact, he felt uncommonly well, like that point after a drink of beer when you first feel its effects - your tongue seems looser, your wit quicker, your body more able, and yet a dullness stalks you, as if your reason and discernment are fading away. Reindeer herds were moving in the distance, he could tell, and thunder coming in on the wind.

Feileg gathered herbs to dress his wound but it was clear to Vali the wolfman was not well. He was sweating heavily and visibly hot with a sweetness to his breath that Vali could smell ten paces from him. The prince was irritated to have to stop to let him rest, irritated beyond reasonableness, he recognised, but he wanted to press on. In fact, he was angry with Feileg, and that anger seemed caught up in how he had been feeling since he had woken on the boat. Why couldn't he leave him? He just couldn't. He felt utterly bound to Feileg, like the rain was bound to the land.

He had tried to kill him at Hemming's court and told himself the intervention of the boy had saved Feileg's life. But in reality his own will had failed. As his senses changed and his thoughts distorted, Vali realised why he had not been able to stab him. The wolfman felt like kin. The thought was heavy inside him, but he couldn't acknowledge its weight any more than he could deny it.

A storm swept over them hard and cold but Vali did not pause. The fire was invisible now but he still could scent its wet embers through the downpour. There was another smell too - the sour smack of the wolfman's wound. Vali tried to ignore what it was doing to him but a bubbling growl seemed to fill his mind and he struggled against acknowledging it for what it was. A call for blood. Blood. The taste and the scent of it had not left him since the ship and he could not shake its savour.

They found the remains of a camp as the sun was beginning to dip behind a large black peak, spreading a span of rays across the sky. There was no one around, but the earth was flattened and there were the cold ashes of a fire and the smell of animal skins on the gra.s.s where people had slept.

'They went inland,' said Feileg.

Vali nodded. He knew. 'Then follow,' he said. He spat. For a day he had been salivating heavily.

The prince seemed possessed to the wolfman. Feileg looked at him with fear in his eyes and he did as he said.

The storm had gone and the sun was rising by the time they came upon the reindeer hunters. A new fire had led them there, seductive in its smell of cooking meat.

A single family was gathered around two squat conical tents of birch poles and reindeer skins. The tents were open at the top where the sticks met, and in one of them was the small fire that had drawn Vali and Feileg in. Of more immediate concern, however, were the two men who challenged them a bowshot from the camp. A bowshot was an appropriate measure of distance because both of the hunters had strange short bows in their hands. Arrows were stuck in the ground in front of them, not nocked, but available for easy access.

Vali felt his blood rising in his veins, ready for the fight, and tried to tell himself there was no need. Yet his focus had shifted, it seemed. His first response was to think of murder. He felt a hand at his side and his sword was drawn without him touching it. Feileg tossed the sword towards the bowmen and sat down on the ground. Vali exchanged a glance with him. The wolfman was wounded but Vali had only ever seen him respond to newcomers with seething anger before. Now he acted as Vali himself would have wanted to act, had he been in more control of his mind. Vali remembered the raid on the monastery. Hadn't he made a gesture like that once? He tried to recall that thought, to drop an anchor to hold him still in the tide of animosity that was engulfing him.

The hunters, who wore dark blue coats trimmed with red and gold bands, gave a friendly wave and walked towards the brothers. They were an interesting people, thought Vali, with dark hair and blue eyes like his own. They all exchanged smiles, and the hunters said something in a strange language and sat down in front of them. Vali didn't understand a word.

The wolfman was opening his pack with weak fingers. He offered the hunters wine in a skin, which they drank from gratefully. It was the same skin Vali had tried. He had thought it was bad but the hunters seemed to like it well enough. One of them gestured towards Feileg's wound and then to the camp. Vali stood to follow them but realised that Feileg could not get up. He had spent the last of his energy on the overnight trek. The prince had never seen the wolfman weak before. He knew what had happened - his wound had turned. There wasn't long for him now.

Vali forced himself to think, to be the boy who had grown up around Forkbeard's farms, the young man who had loved Adisla and had vowed to die for her. That dirty mire water was in him though, and he struggled to frame his thoughts. It came to him that he should help Feileg to his feet. He crouched, put the wolfman's arm around his shoulders and got him up. The human gesture seemed to restore Vali and his head cleared some more. These were Whale People or their kin from the interior of the country who lived from reindeer. Hemming had said that Haarik intended to exchange Adisla for his son. Perhaps they would know where or who this Domen was that Bodvar Bjarki had spoken of.

At the camp the men made signs for the brothers to sit inside one of the tents. A woman was in there, holding a young child. She looked at them with wary eyes but pointed to some furs for Feileg to lie on. Vali lowered the wolfman to the ground and then went outside. The interior of the tent was unbearably stuffy. He needed to be under the sun.

Feileg lay breathing heavily on the deerskins. The pace Vali had demanded had nearly killed him. The wolfman was convinced that some sort of sorcery had taken the prince but he was still determined to follow him. Something had moved in Feileg when he had spoken to Adisla and he was set on following his impulse to find her until the end. He breathed in the aromas of the tent: cooking and curds of goats' milk, reindeer hide and the birch fire. Feileg found it all immensely comforting and recalled evenings sitting in the dark with his brothers and sisters and listening to stories of adventure and glory. He had had no idea he was different then, marked for a special destiny among the wolves. Feileg had not wanted to be inside for years, but now he was content. It was Vali who sat in the open, head bowed and looking at his feet.

A man came in. He was smaller than the others and wearing a hat of four corners, like a parcel of cloth folded back on top. He nodded and smiled a greeting, sat down and put a hand on the wolf pelt Feileg wore. The wolfman felt no threat and allowed him to pull it aside. The man examined the wound. He shook his head and ran his fingers lightly across it. Then he turned and said something to the woman. She brought Feileg some stew in a bowl and he ate it gratefully.

'Ruohtta,' said the man to Feileg. He pointed at him and made a gesture of lying down on his side and turning up his eyes. Feileg realised he was telling him he was going to die.

Feileg had never feared death. When he was with his family he had been told it was glorious; when he was with Kveld Ulf he had seen it as simply a happening - a transformation, a different kind of day among other days. He thought he would be happy to die in the little tent with its domestic smells, among the kindness of these strangers, although the peace of that place, the company of the children and the women, the smiles of the man in the four-pointed hat, made him want to live. He wanted this for himself, he thought. The words 'I am a wolf' came to him again, but what wolf ever thought that? He was separate from his forest brothers, for all that he had been raised to be like them. The man in the hat got up and left.

Outside, stew was brought to Vali. He ate a little and drank some of the fermented milk drink he was offered. He could hardly stomach it and accepted only out of politeness. He smiled at the woman who had brought him the stew but the gesture was for him, not her. These rituals of etiquette and manners seemed vitally important to him now. He needed a link to the everyday, the human, he thought, to keep him from - what? He didn't know, but he was afraid of the feeling within him, halfway between nausea and elation. It was something that seemed ready to evict him from his own head. The prince knew he was losing something valuable to him.

Everything felt different. He had thought before that the sensation was a bit like being drunk, and that impression was stronger now. There was a feeling of freedom, like when the wine first takes effect. There was the knowledge that he was entering a different sort of consciousness. There was even some fear, but this was accompanied by an odd delight, an inner sn.i.g.g.e.r that said, 'Go on. Give in to it. Step away from yourself and change.' He did not know where he was going, nor what had happened to him, but instinctively he knew he had to fight it. Mad thoughts jostled in his head: I am becoming not myself, but how can that be? Myself is what I am, therefore I am leaving myself to become myself. Myself is more than one thing. I am uncontinuous and broken, I am . . . He struggled to find a word to sum up how he felt. And then it came to him: hungry. Yes, he was hungry, but not for anything that the pot could provide.

He looked inside the tent and realised that Feileg would not be coming with him. He wanted to leave right now, to find Adisla. The love he bore her seemed to take on even more importance. It was like a light seen through rain by a lost traveller, something to guide him to safety. He saw her face as he'd seen it for the last time when she'd kissed him goodbye - fearful, anxious but full of love for him.

Vali waved to the man in the four-pointed hat. He willed his unwieldy brain to concentrate on what he needed to do, using Adisla as the focus for his thoughts.

The man came and stood next to him. Without a shared language, they struggled to communicate.

'Haarik's son?' said Vali. He scratched in the dirt a picture of a ship then mimed it being wrecked by smashing his fist into his hand. He drew a crown and mimed s.n.a.t.c.hing it.

'Domen,' he said. 'Where is Domen?'

The man smiled at him and made a calming gesture with his hands. Then he turned, ruffled the hair of one of the children, kissed the woman who had brought the stew and set off across the plain towards the distant mountains.Vali felt helpless. He sat outside the tent with the reindeer family watching him, saying nothing.

He began to lose concentration, to just exist beneath the changing light, the moving clouds. Vali didn't know how long he had been sitting there when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

'No tribute.' The man spoke Norse, however badly.

The man was back, and with someone else just like himself in a dark wool tunic and four-pointed hat. Beside them was a roped reindeer. The nervousness of the beast seemed to flood over Vali; he could taste its fear.

Instead of a bow the newcomer had a broad shallow drum in his hands. Vali started. It was just like the one he'd seen in his dream on the boat, where he'd glimpsed Adisla surrounded by those odd masked figures. This one though wasn't decorated with that crooked little rune that had tumbled from the skins of the drums in the vision, but with scenes of hunting and fishing.

'No tribute.' The man said it again.

'No tribute,' said Vali. 'I'm looking for a person, not furs or gold.'

The man smiled, and Vali saw that he had two extra teeth in his upper jaw. He knew this was how the Whale People chose their holy men - by physical peculiarities like withered limbs or odd-coloured eyes. Veles Libor had told him as much. The thought of the merchant's name filled Vali with nausea.

'Domen?'

The holy man looked at him blankly.

'Domen. Drums.' Vali pointed at the drum. 'Domen.'

'Vagoy?' said the holy man.

'Domen.'

The holy man shook his head and gestured inside the tent, pointing at Feileg. He scratched a sort of rough circle and a wavy line in the dirt. Vali didn't understand. The man took up a rock. He scratched out a little hollow in the earth, put the rock in it and poured some water from a container around the rock.

'Vagoy,' he said, pointing at the rock. Then he howled, splashed at the water and mimed beating the drum.

Vali suddenly saw it - he was showing him an island, an island full of wolves where the drum was beaten.

'Domen?' said Vali, pointing at the rock.

'Ahhh! Dooerrrrrmaaan,' said the man, and Vali realised he had got the p.r.o.nunciation wrong.

'Yes, Domen.'

The man nodded.

'Jabbmeaaakka,' he said. Then he pointed at the tent, shook the flap that covered its entrance, said slowly, 'Hel. G.o.ddess. Fight,' and snarled with a grabbing gesture.

Vali pointed about him: which way?

The holy man gestured east, waving his arm several times to indicate that it was a long way.

Vali didn't wait. He got to his feet immediately and strode off in that direction but the man called after him in his incomprehensible language. The prince turned and the man pointed at him, then at himself, then east again.

'You will take me?' said Vali. He echoed the man's gestures.

The holy man gave a slow nod and disappeared inside the tent.