Wolfsangel. Part 8

One of the wolves was behind him now, he could sense, and more were filing left and right. Still he fixed the dirty red-grey wolf with his spear. That was the biggest and would die, which would make a good tale at the feast table in the all-father's halls.

The big wolf ambled towards him through the floating light. For the first time Feileg felt fear rise in him. There was something strange about its movements, something wrong. The other wolves had seemed to glide on the snow. This one, he could see, was very powerful but more uncomfortable in its gait. Was it injured? The dusk was falling, vision difficult. What was wrong with it? It was huge. What he had thought was merely a large animal he could now see was of truly terrifying proportions. It was as big as a man, bigger. His father was the biggest man he had seen but this creature was taller by a head.

Ten paces away, the wolf stopped and looked at the boy through the greying dusk. Feileg, who had been raised to regard his life as a trifle, to believe that the n.o.blest destiny lay in death in battle, who coveted that fate like others might covet gold or a fine house, began to tremble. This wasn't an ordinary wolf, he was sure, but a creature of myth.

The animal lowered its head to the snow. 'Kin,' said the wolf.

The word seemed to judder into Feileg's mind. He looked into the creature's eyes.

Then he realised - it was a man, peering out from under a wolf skin. He was huge and powerful, and awfully weather-beaten with frost in his blond beard. He had no fur on his arms and legs, just a long reindeer coat of the sort you could see on any winter hunter, though he carried no bow or spear and wore no snowshoes or skis.

Suddenly all the fear that Feileg had been holding in flooded over him, and he felt terribly cold. The night seemed to collapse upon him and the stars awoke like the eyes of a million wolves all hungry for his blood.

'Help me,' said Feileg, unable to stop his tears.

The man said nothing - as he would never say anything again - but turned and walked up the slope. The boy followed him, with the pack trailing behind. The berserk had done as the witches had asked - given the child over to Kveld Ulf, the Evening Wolf, the shape-shifter of the hills. He was not a werewolf as Feileg would later come to understand it, but a man who had become by instinct and thought half animal.

The boy grew up as much in the dark as in the light. This was not the solid, tomb dark of the witches but the northern dark that bristles with stars and is shot with stripes of light, where morning brings mirages of cities floating in the distance and evening falls under a wide silence. There was no fire, just a cave den and the bodies of the pack close about him. He would warm his hands by plunging them into the carca.s.s of a reindeer the pack had taken, use the moon for light and learn to love the taste of uncooked meat.

In the short days of winter he fed well - animals were weak and easy to catch. Summer was the spirit time, perpetually light and the pickings more scarce. Feileg would push on in fruitless hunts, hardly sleeping, never speaking, his thoughts freeing themselves from the anchor of language in years of silence, his mind ever more animal, his body ever tougher. In the weak dark of the summer night Kveld Ulf would beat his drum and sing discordant chants. They would cut out the bladders of reindeer that had eaten strange mushrooms and drink the p.i.s.s, and the boy would be transported to the spirit kingdoms where he ran through dark pa.s.sageways and dripping caves, drank from subterranean streams and felt the darkness of the underground world widen his mind. He had a sense, as powerful as the smell of reindeer musk, of something alive in those tunnels. The caves, he thought, were hungry.

When he came back to himself it seemed his body could feed on the dreams, making him unnaturally strong and fast. By the age of twelve he could kill a reindeer with only his hands, his spear having long since broken and Kveld Ulf refusing to allow him another. At fourteen he began raiding, but not as Vali did. His prey were travellers through the land, merchants heading north with goods for the Whale People or the king's men travelling south on sleds and skis with tribute taken from them. He and Kveld Ulf stole from them as they slept and attacked them if they woke to challenge them, tearing flesh with their teeth and nails, breaking limbs and snapping necks, dashing swords to the floor and pulling spears from hands. He still understood the cries of the men in the camps but their real meaning - of fear, anguish, longing for loved ones - was becoming lost to him.

They kept the plunder in their dens high in the mountains. It meant nothing to Feileg - you couldn't eat it and it wouldn't keep you warm - but Kveld Ulf knew that the fine walrus ivory combs, the gold arm rings and good swords would one day be useful to the boy. He would be going back to the witches, and it would not hurt to have some gifts for the witch queen. Kveld Ulf knew from his own dealings with the witches that a gift of some sort could distract the sisters long enough for them to remember that he wasn't an intruder and they had, in fact, sent for him.

By the age of fifteen Feileg saw as a wolf and thought as a wolf, his body hard, his teeth a weapon. The mountain winds tearing through his mind, past-less and future-less, he lived caught in the moment with no more thought than a snowflake on the breeze. That summer the hunting was thin, and he found himself down in the foothills, ghosting around the farmsteads to try to take a duck or a pig. He was wary of being discovered because the farms were a tight network. One blow on a horn could very quickly bring twenty or thirty armed men.

That was when he had come to the ruin. It was a small longhouse, the roof broken in by the weather. It was raining and he decided to seek shelter there. He went inside. Scavengers - animal and human - had taken everything of value, but there were some signs of the former occupants - a broken distaff on the floor, a worn-out shoe, even a small rickety stool. There was better shelter at the back of the house but he decided to stay near the centre, next to where the smoke vent would have been. He didn't know why but instinct made him pick up the stool and sit on it - something he hadn't done in nearly ten years. And then he saw them in his mind: his sisters by the fire, his father, ma.s.sive and silent on the bench at the back of the room, drinking, his mother patching clothes. It was his house, where he had lived until he was seven. He hadn't known what to make of the feelings the memories stirred inside him and he had gone out into the rain. He had never returned.

At sixteen he awoke in the dusk of the cave mouth and stood up ready to hunt. Kveld Ulf tapped him on the chest and let him know with his eyes that today would be different. He led him across two valleys to where the pack's oldest wolf had fallen down a gully and lay dying at the bottom. The men descended to sit beside it. The wolf's eyes were cloudy and its breath shallow. Kveld Ulf looked at Feileg, and Feileg understood that the wolf's spirit was to join with his own.

For two days the men sat and chanted, beat the drum and shook their rattles. On the third day the wolves came and added their voices to the music. They sat in the galleries of frost and howled out a strange chorus of exultation and lament. Feileg, his head buzzing with tiredness and the noise, took the creature's head in his lap and stroked its ears as it died.

His body trembled and there was a taste of blood in his mouth. Strange longings coursed through him and, where the world had seemed wide beneath the stars, now it narrowed to a thin stream of hunger raging through his mind. He stripped the skin from his fallen brother with a sharp stone, tore out his entrails, ate his heart and liver. Then he placed the b.l.o.o.d.y pelt around him, looking out from behind the wolf's face, as the wolf had done, as the wolf.

After that, Feileg had no story, no progression of events from day to day. He hunted and he fed and he slept and sat howling beneath the stars. He was part of nature, moving beneath the wind and the sun as heedless of his ident.i.ty as the foam upon the surf.

And then, at midsummer, when the sun never dipped beyond the suggestion of dusk, his double came and his life changed again and for ever.

10 The Dead G.o.d's Bride.

'What did you say?' Vali turned to face the person who had spoken. It was Ageirr, one of Forkbeard's sworn bodyguard, a man of around nineteen, two years older than Vali though not much taller.

It was over three years since the raid - three years in which Vali had gone no further than half a day's travel from the farms. He had asked Forkbeard to let him go trading, asked him even to allow him to command his own raids, but the king was adamant. Vali would go and fight as a common warrior or not travel at all. So Vali did not go.

There were many reasons for his refusal. One was that he would not take part in needless slaughter when there were so many easier ways of extracting loot. He had calculated the profit that had been thrown away on the raid on what he now knew was a monastery, and had concluded that the price of the slaves he'd lost to Bodvar Bjarki's brutality alone could have bought him ten head of cattle, before he even started considering how many possible captives had gone free because the berserks hadn't bothered to surround the island.

Another reason for his reluctance was that he thought his people had things to learn from the West Men. One of their priests - the men with the shaven heads - had visited Eikund when Vali was fifteen. To Vali's disappointment, Forkbeard had refused to even let him tell his stories. When the man showed him his writing and pointed out how useful it would be in the administration of his kingdom Forkbeard had torn it up in front of him and told him to go while he still had his life. It had been the talk of the village. Vali had learned the man was a member of the cannibalistic religion of Christ, whose followers ate flesh and drank blood.

The main reason he kept away from war, though - hardly acknowledged to himself - was that he wanted to be branded sword-shy. He hoped Forkbeard would not let his daughter marry such a man, which would leave him free to marry Adisla. But so far the king had refused to release him from his obligation. Vali had also got a merchant to carry a message to his father telling him point-blank that he would not marry the girl but there had been no reply. Vali took it as a rebuke and felt foolish. His father could hold him to his duty if he chose, his protestations and refusals were meaningless.

He had to accept he was a prince but, until he was forced to confront the fact and marry Ragna, he would indulge the fantasy that he was a farmer - a free man, as they were called. He gave Adisla's little brother Manni his seax and only attended training with Bragi to allow the old man to retain his self-respect. Without a valued task, he knew Bragi would wither. Out of grat.i.tude for the kindness Bragi had shown in guiding him through the raid, he tried hard too. When he was beating Bragi's shield with the stave that stood in for a sword, he let the injustice of his inability to marry Adisla fuel his aggression.

For the rest of the time he helped Adisla and her mother around their farm or worked the flocks with her brothers and spent his evenings chatting in Danish with Barth. He would not go raiding though. That took all his courage. He knew that the G.o.ds hate nothing more than a coward, and only the knowledge that he was acting for the right reasons allowed him to keep up the pretence that he was.

The king didn't call Vali a coward to his face but there were plenty in his bodyguard who murmured the word as the prince pa.s.sed. Ageirr was one of them. Vali would have preferred to take the insults, looking on them as helping him on the path that he wanted to travel, but he wasn't made like that and always reacted.

'I said, what did you say?'

'Nothing, prince, nothing at all.'

Vali had heard the word but he didn't want to press Ageirr to repeat it. If he did, Vali would be forced to challenge him to a duel. Ageirr was no keener. He wanted the fun of taunting Vali but didn't want to push it to a fight. Vali was still Authun's son and so valuable to King Forkbeard. The penalty for killing the prince, in a legal contest or not, would be severe. And besides, he had seen the way the prince split those staves against Bragi's helmet. He didn't want to find out what he could do with a sword.

Vali grunted and turned away.

'Are you looking forward to the wedding? We'll have a rare feast that night, I think,' Aegirr said as he did so.

'What wedding?'

'Adisla, the s.l.u.t from the top farms, is to marry Drengi Half Troll from over the valley. What a union that will be!'

Vali was stunned. He even forgot the insult to Adisla.

'That is not so,' he said.

'I'm afraid that it is,' said Ageirr. 'I heard it from her brother this morning. Go and ask if you don't believe me.'

'If you're lying, you'll answer to me,' said Vali. Then he ran. He knew that Drengi had asked Adisla to marry him before and been refused. Drengi was a good man, strong and hard-working, but he was known as Half Troll because he was both ugly and not much given to talk. Adisla, thought Vali, could never agree to marry him, could she?

He made Disa's house at a sprint. Adisla wasn't there when he arrived, but her mother was sitting outside in the sunlight pulverising some acorns from her store with a large stone.

'Is it true?'

He saw by her eyes that it was.

'Why?'

Disa stopped her pounding.

'You are of a different rank, Vali, and sworn to a princess. My girl is three summers past the age she could have married. It's right that she should do so.'

'I love her, Ma. Is it right she should turn her back on that?'

Disa tapped the pounding stone on the edge of her wooden bowl.

'She hasn't said yes to him yet, though I think she intends to.'

'Don't let her. Make her refuse him.'

She pursed her lips. 'What life would it be as your concubine, Vali? You can't marry her so that's all she can ever be. What if you tire of her?'

'I will not tire of her.'

'Won't you? Forkbeard changes his concubines with every season.'

'I'm not Forkbeard,' he said.

Vali wanted to say more, to reason with Disa, but he was too shocked. He had never discussed it with Adisla but had always a.s.sumed he would have to marry Forkbeard's daughter, if that's what their peoples demanded. Then he would father a son and never have much to do with her again, taking Adisla as his wife in all but name. Once Adisla was married to another man, it became a different proposition. That brought spears, blood and feuds.

Vali glanced around, looking for Adisla's brothers to see if they could talk some reason into Disa. They weren't there, though - gone away to Nidarnes as part of Forkbeard's advance guard to prepare the way for the meeting of kings before midsummer.

'I won't let this happen,' said Vali to Disa.

'It's for the best. You love her now but will you offer her the security a husband can when she's old? Will you-'

He didn't wait for her to finish speaking. Forkbeard's hall was a good distance inland but he arrived there in a heartbeat. The king was hearing a dispute between two farmers when Vali burst in. The farmers recognised him and withdrew to the side of the room.

Another man, further down the hall, stood up as Vali entered. He was tall, young and powerfully built. His clothes were out of the ordinary. He wore a bright white silk shirt, the like of which Vali had only ever seen in the possession of the trader Veles Libor. Vali thought that perhaps he recognised him, but the thought was fleeting. He approached the king and bowed. Forkbeard - one of those squat strong men who gives the impression of being wider than he is tall - was slurping at a bowl of soup and getting much of it down his beard. He was a tough man who'd come to kingship through fighting his way there. His court was not one of intrigue and debate but a place where, to carry an argument, you had to outfight or outdrink your opponent, preferably both.

'If, prince, you're here again with some fancy plan about how we can win battles without fighting, then save your breath. A man goes into war thinking only of his foe to his front and his friend at his side, not weighed down with schemes. Raid and fight or stay put, that's the deal. Take it or leave it and don't ask me again. We've been here too many times before, haven't we, lads?'

A couple of the bodyguard nodded and said that they had. Vali had repeatedly annoyed Forkbeard with his contention that planning could win a battle more effectively than direct attack. Forkbeard had always just asked him where glory fitted into his schemes.

'I have not come about that.'

'Then what is it?'

'I want you to release me from my marriage pact with your daughter. I am not the son you want, and the Rygir deserve a better, stronger prince than me.'

Forkbeard snorted. 'You're right there, son.'

Vali's heart skipped.

The king lifted his beard and licked the soup off it. He seemed to ponder for a moment.

'But forget it. Too many questions if I release you - half the kings along the coast would think I was planning to have a go at Authun. And, worst still, so might he. That is a war-loving fellow indeed. Ain't that right, lads?' The bodyguard said that it was.

'My father will not take offence, and he has not raised a sword these ten years.' Even though Forkbeard was not given to niceties, Vali instinctively gave him the respect of high speech.

'Too long for a man like that,' said Forkbeard. 'I tell you, son, if I could think of a way to stop this marriage then I would. Your children will be weaklings, but what can I do?'

'Find another prince, lord.'

Forkbeard shook his head. 'Your old dad wouldn't like it,' he said, 'but, as it happens, there might be a way out after all. Hogni, get up here.'

The young man in the silk shirt came forward and bowed to Vali and Forkbeard.

'Hogni son of Morthi,' he said, 'messenger to King Authun.'

So that was where Vali had seen him, at Authun's court.

'Tell the prince what his father has said.'

The man bowed again and looked slightly nervous.

'Go on,' said Forkbeard. 'No one gets the chop here without my leave. It's me who's asked you to speak to him, so say what Authun told you. If the prince wants to pick a fight about it he can pick one with me, and that's a bit of trouble he won't want, I can tell you.'

'That's right!' said a bodyguard.

Hogni glanced at Forkbeard and then addressed Vali precisely and formally. 'Exalted King Forkbeard, terror of the south, mighty in battle, lord of the Rygir, know that it is my wish that my idle son be shaken from his life of ease. Reports tell me that he ignores arms, counsel and raiding in favour of conversation with women. Let him prove himself. The land to the north of our kingdoms is beset by bandits. Merchants, shepherds and farmers all fear attack from the savage men who plague the Troll Mountains. Truly these men are wolves, sorcerers able to a.s.sume the form of that monstrous animal, striking down with fury and viciousness all that cross them, invulnerable to weapons and murderous in intent. Seven of my own men have died trying to wipe out this scourge. My son will bring you the head of one before midsummer. If he does not, then I leave it to you to impose a meaningful penalty.'

Vali looked at the man and then back to Forkbeard.

'Why this? Why now?'

'Who are you whying?' said Forkbeard.

Vali ignored his belligerence. 'It makes no difference to my request. Release me from the pact with your daughter and allow Adisla to marry me, or at least forbid her from marrying anyone else.'

Forkbeard looked to the rafters.'That farm girl is the cause of all the bother in my life. I have less problems with the b.a.s.t.a.r.d Danes than I do with her!' He lowered his eyes and stared straight at Vali. 'Return with a wolfman's head - no, better for proof, the whole man - or your Adisla is Odin's bride at the summer blot. She'll hang to please the G.o.d.'

Vali went pale.

The bride of Odin was a tradition almost never celebrated in individual kingdoms. He had heard that on great feast days, when kings from all over the land met for a festival, a blot, there were human sacrifices, but Forkbeard had never insisted on one before.

'You can't do this,' said Vali.

Forkbeard sipped from a jewelled drinking cup, booty from a raid. Vali thought of the Odin-blind berserks and the needless deaths they had caused, thought of the stupid frenzy that had exposed his kinsmen to danger and the valuable slave hanged on the returning boat. One day he would drink Odin's blood, tear that G.o.d down and make him pay for his corpse l.u.s.t.

'Can't I?' said Forkbeard. He leaned forward and said in a forceful whisper, 'I might have to go running to the a.s.sembly to get my laws pa.s.sed but religion is my turf and mine alone.' Now he stood and shouted, 'I'm the king, the top boy, Odin's priest on earth, bargaining with the G.o.d, telling all you lot what he wants for his favours! Do you get that?' He sat again, but he was pointing at Vali. 'Well, he wants this girl for his bride unless you bring him the head of his enemy, the wolfman. Your father reckons you've got what it takes. I don't. We'll see who's right. I expect you'll die even before you get to the wolfman, which'll suit me down to the ground as I'll be able to get someone with a bit of b.a.l.l.s about him for my daughter. And you'll have the consolation of knowing that your farm girl will be filling your cup in the halls of the slain.'

'You can't take a free-born woman and sacrifice her. The people will know she didn't volunteer,' said Vali.

Forkbeard shook his head.

'She's a threat to the kingdom, lad! And it's you who's made her one. The people will understand why she had to die. And if the G.o.ds want to stop it, then they'll bring you success. Seems straight enough to me. What don't you understand?'

Vali stood shaking. He wanted to shout that if Adisla died, it wouldn't be the head of the wolf that he presented to the people of Rogaland but that of Forkbeard himself, but he saw now how stupid he had been, how artless. He should have hidden his true thoughts from others, partic.i.p.ated in their chaotic attacks, bragged about the slaughter of old men and boys. As a respected warrior he would be in a much better position. Forkbeard would treat him seriously, would ban Adisla's marriage at least. He wouldn't even need to ban it. If word of his displeasure reached the prospective groom's house, he would never go through with his suit. Now this. And what if he couldn't find the wolfman? His only option would be to challenge Forkbeard to single combat. He was confident he could survive on a battlefield but a one-on-one duel with a man who had cut his way to kingship was a different thing. Never mind. If Forkbeard tried to harm Adisla then Vali would defend her.

'This is a perilous course for all of us,' said Vali.

'Perilous courses are my favourite sort,' said Forkbeard. 'Remember, kings are made for glory, not long life.'