Wolfsangel. Part 33

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 G.o.d 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.

She found his sword in the lowest caves - it thumped against her knee as she stumbled on the uneven floor. She knew what it was the instant she held it - the slim curve in the jewelled scabbard, the keenness of the blade when it was drawn.

He could kill the witch. He could kill anyone. Saitada knew only one thing about him - his name. Authun. It was enough. She took the sword and went up towards the light.

47 Descent.

Feileg could not sail so they were forced to travel by land. The landscape now looked entirely different to when he had come north, a wide field of white leading to distant mountains. But he knew well where they should go - a wolf can always find its home - and he headed south under the swirling skies with Adisla behind him. With her wound she could not walk far, but Feileg sat her on one of the reindeer sleighs and led the animal. The Noaidi who had owned it had not appeared to claim it. The wolfman loaded the sled with good reindeer coats, a tent, furs, snow shoes and boots, and took some flints and plenty of tinder. He also took a spear. He didn't need it to fight but wanted a sign to warn anyone they encountered to look elsewhere if robbery was on their mind.

The Noaidis who had survived were in no mood to argue. By the time Feileg finished piling the stones all but one sorcerer had gone. The man had marked a stone with a rune, put it on the heap and left.

To Feileg the rune was vaguely familiar. He wished he had asked what it meant but he had no language in common with the holy man. Was it a seal to magically hold the beast in place? Or was it something else, a warning maybe?

He thought on it as they headed south for the Troll Wall, as he made up the tent and the fire within it and brought Adisla the things he had caught and killed for her. The wolf is the king of winter, and Feileg was almost happy, bringing in his kills and allowing Adisla to cook them rather than eat the meat raw as had been his habit. It was the life he had glimpsed as he had kissed her by the post where she had cut him free.

Adisla, however, was withdrawn. Her tears had been replaced by silence. Vali's condition, she was sure, was her fault. There was no logic to her thinking, but she couldn't shake her conviction that her liaison with someone so far above her social standing, what she had done to her mother, even her capitulation in agreeing to marry Drengi, were all to blame for what had happened to him. She had grown up with a powerful belief in magic, been raised to learn healing and even some divination. Things were linked, she felt. Her mother had said people stand at the edge of an ocean of events that touches unseen islands and sh.o.r.es. She had allowed something bad to grow between her and Vali. Now something far more terrible had grown within him.

But as they rested by their fires and Feileg described the amazing events of his childhood, the hopelessness she felt about her relationship with Vali bore the seed of hope for a future with Feileg. Slowly, she found she could talk to him. She spoke about her youth with Vali and then just about herself and her life with her brothers and, most of all, her mother. The wolfman listened without comment, and when she told him what she had done to Disa, he just sat for a while before saying, 'I wish I had known such love.'

'To kill her?'

'To save her,' he said. 'She was fated to die and she knew it. Better quickly, at her daughter's hand, than after the torments of the Danes. She chose the instrument of her death - you, who she loved. You are no more to blame than if she had used the knife herself.'

'I wish I could believe it.'

'Do you think your mother would have wanted this grief for you?'

'No.'

'What would she have wanted?'

Adisla looked up into the shining whorls of the night sky. 'For me to get on with my life, to meet a good man and bear fine sons,' she said.

Feileg smiled. 'Then make that your aim,' he said.

Feileg, she could see, was not a wolf. The shaman had not taken his humanity with his chants and brews. Feileg was a man, plain and simple, someone who had been raised to savagery but who had reclaimed himself from it. He would make a good husband, she was sure, and she would have been proud to be his wife, had the fates put them together before.

The days were short as they travelled through the mountain pa.s.ses, but when the moon was bright, Feileg pressed on.

'Do you know where you're going?' she asked him.

'The south,' he said. 'The mountains there are like a fold from this sea to the Troll Wall. We will follow the coast as best we can and then use them to steer us to where we want to go.'

Adisla was left breathless by the beauty of the northern winter, of the bleak hills and the blinding plains, though she found the country barren and threatening compared to the softer features of her coastal home. The journey was rough and b.u.mpy, though the sled was warm beneath the furs and she even managed to doze.

They had been travelling for weeks and the snow was thick when the land in the distance seemed to buckle into ridges of black. As they got nearer they saw them, the Troll Peaks, rising up in crests like the gigantic waves of a solid sea. They appeared daunting, though the way to them was easy - the ground frozen solid, rivers turned into roads. Occasionally they came upon a family hut. There were signs of life - or rather lives that had been. No one came to greet them; no dog barked; no child called out. Clothes left in the sun to dry had bleached and rotted before they froze.

Adisla looked at Feileg and shrugged as if to say, 'What happened here?'

He shrugged back. 'These hills leak nightmares,' he said, 'they always have. Perhaps it all got too much.'

As they moved through the country at the back of the Troll Wall it seemed the leak had become a flood. Everything was abandoned, everything in ruins; not a house was inhabited.

They followed the hills inland, skirting them before climbing up through a narrow valley. In the heavy light of evening wolves howled invisibly from the ridges.

Adisla, who could walk well by now, looked at Feileg in alarm, but the wolfman was calm.

'They are my brothers,' he said, 'and they are welcoming me home.'

He returned their call and Adisla saw them. What she had taken for rocks were animals, now moving down the slope. Feileg smiled and cut the fretting reindeer free of the sled.

'The animal has served us well,' said Adisla.

'They would have him, tied to the sled or free,' said Feileg. 'This way he dies free. It is what he was meant to do.'

There was no way out for the reindeer - wolves ahead and behind. It turned one way and then the other, a pattering run forward, a pattering run back. And then it stopped. In a moment the pack was on it.

'It didn't even try to run,' said Adisla.

'It knew there was no point. Why die exhausted? It's bad enough to die without being made to work for it.'

'What are we doing?' said Adisla.

'Working for it,' said Feileg.

'You sound like Bragi.'

'Thank you.' He hadn't told her the old man was dead. She had enough to contend with.

The wolves fed, and when they had finished Feileg shouldered the tent and they walked on up the pa.s.s. The pack followed behind. The mountain in front of them had seemed big from a distance. Close up it was immense, bigger than anything Adisla had ever imagined, an enormous barren sweep of grey and white rising out of the valley floor and disappearing into cloud at the top.

'If I saw the world tree,' said Adisla, holding Feileg's hand and looking up at it, 'this is how I think it would look.'

'We are going into it,' said Feileg.

'How?'

'We need to find a wolf trap,' said Feileg.

Adisla thought of Vali, transformed and starving in that horrible cave. She let go of Feileg's hand and said no more.

Feileg led the way up the mountain and Adisla's wound began to pain her. Feileg saw her limping.

'I can go on my own. It might be better like that.'

'I'll stay with you,' said Adisla. 'I am linked to you now. I'll die in this wilderness without you.'

Feileg longed to hold her, to tell her how he felt about her, but he saw the resolution with which she drove herself on, her dedication to the prince, and he concentrated on picking a safe route for the climb.

The lower reaches were easy enough, snowy but not deadly cold as long as you kept moving or had fire. There was even a track winding across the mountain. Adisla had always imagined mountains as unrelenting climbs but this one had frequent breaks in the slope. They scrambled up scree or through fields of boulders, then along ridges where they seemed to go sideways rather than up. As they ascended, the path cut across slopes so steep that Adisla had to dig the b.u.t.t end of the spear into the snow field to prevent herself sliding off the mountain. The light was bleak and drained of colour. Feileg stopped where the path gave out on a broad area of barren scree, a shoulder in a ridge that went up into ice. In the snowless lee of a big rock there were several pots on the ground, along with two or three bottles.

Feileg picked up a pot and sniffed it. 'b.u.t.ter,' he said, 'but licked clean by my brothers.' He took up a bottle and removed the wooden bung.

'Mead,' he said. 'This is as far as normal men can go without being certain of madness. It's where offerings are left, but no one has collected them. Look!'

He pointed to the side of the track behind them. Adisla saw a dark area.

'That was a wolf pit, to protect the offerings,' said Feileg. 'Men fear the witches, wolves do not. I snapped its spikes.'

'How do they ever get anything before the wolves?'

'They have servants, and they take it quickly,' said Feileg.

Silently, a wolf had come to his shoulder. It nosed the ground before glancing at Feileg and going on. The animal had almost looked as if it was asking for instructions.

They went on, up, up and then down to a valley, up again and down into another valley. Here the land was barren and rocky. A river plunged almost as a waterfall off one side of the hill, tumbling into a wide pool before leading away down the mountain. The wolf with Feileg streaked across towards the pool. Just in front of it he stopped and picked something up in his mouth. Adisla and Feileg followed. The wolf had a human hand, a child's, in its mouth.

Feileg breathed in. 'It is near here,' he said, 'very near.'

They searched for two days but found nothing. There was little dry wood for the fire, food was running low and Feileg didn't have time to catch anything - he was scouring the mountain, directing the wolves back and forth like a shepherd with his dogs. Adisla sat in the tent and tried to keep warm, resting her aching leg.

Feileg returned to the pool.

'Nothing,' he said. 'The wolves can tell children go all over this mountain, but the tracks go over and over each other. They drink here and then go up there. Then they come back. Or so it seems.'

Adisla looked at the water. It was very clear and strangely not frozen. They were a good height above the valley floor, and even down there the river was solid and any pools were frozen a hard blue. This was still liquid.

'There is no ice here,' said Adisla.

Feileg looked at the water. That hadn't occurred to him. He dipped his hand in. It wasn't warm, but it was nowhere near as cold as it should have been. It was clear too, very clear.

'Enchantment?' he said.

'Perhaps. Is this an entrance, do you think?' she said.

'Maybe one of them. There are supposed to be many, but neither I nor the wolves can find them.'

'Will you go in?'

'Yes.' First he built a fire inside the Noaidi tent. Then he spent a few moments puffing and blowing beside the water, rubbing his hands and stamping his feet. Adisla wondered what he was doing and thought he looked far from confident. He went in up to his waist.

'It is not cold,' he said, 'not at all.'

He went in deeper, made of few back and forth movements, tried to dive but immediately came back to the surface choking and coughing. Then he tried again, but with the same result.

'Are you all right?' said Adisla.

'Yes.' He was shaking. He steeled himself and put his face into the water. Then he did dive and didn't appear for a couple of heartbeats. He came back up in a flurry of flapping arms and kicking legs, beating at the water with his hands and gulping down mouthfuls. Gasping, he managed to find his feet and stagger to the fire, where she cradled his shivering body in her arms as the Noaidi had done for her when she had gone over the side of the ship.

He regained his breath. 'There is something down there, a lip on the bottom. It is possible to go underneath. I will try again.'

'Wait a moment, you need to rest,' she said.

She had never seen him look like this. For the first time since she had known him, the wolfman had fear in his eyes.

'What is it?' she said.

'There must be other ways in.'

'Is this a way in?'

'There is a rope and it is secured to something. I think it's a guide. But there will be other ways in. The boys can't take everything in this way. It would all be soaked.'

'This is the way in we have; why search for another?'

Feileg looked at the ground. 'I don't like the water,' he said.

'Oh Feileg,' said Adisla. She squeezed him to her. He looked into her eyes and on impulse she rested her lips on his in a light kiss. Feileg didn't know what to say, still less what to do.

Adisla slipped from his arms, took three big gulps of breath and dived into the pool.

48 The Pool of Tears.

At first Saitada had gone north by mistake, through deserted farmsteads, past houses where now only rats sheltered from the cold. She had picked up some things of use to her there - two mouldy blankets which provided some warmth, enough rags to cover her face, bind her feet and wrap the sword, and a cup in which to melt snow for water.

It had been three days before she had seen smoke from a hut, and when she had spoken the name Authun and gestured to ask if he was there, the people had laughed and pointed to the south past the Troll Wall. They thought she was a simpleton but still poured their advice into her ears. It was not safe to travel to the south. The land around those mountains was cursed. Nightmares of death and torture had come down from the slopes and now no one could stand to live there. The witches, it was said, were dying and their magic had poisoned the land. Saitada listened and said nothing more. She could understand them, though she didn't know how.

That night the son of the house decided to have a look at what the old beggar had in her bundle, but as he went to prise it from Saitada's fingers he caught a glimpse of that burn on the side of her face and went back to his bed. In the morning, ashamed by his actions the night before, he gave her a warm cloak, some old boots and a rough tunic that the dog had been using for a bed. Saitada bowed to thank them for their hospitality and turned for the long journey south.