Chapter 15
I am probably the youngest being here, with only slightly more than three centuries to my name, but it seems I have hated Thor for longer than that—though he wronged me personally only ten years ago. It is strange how raw emotions can expand time or contract it. It is stranger still how a god can cultivate a reputation for being a friend to man when he is so often an enemy—for I know that Thor has done you all a great wrong, else you would not be here. I also know that we are not the only men in the world to whom he has offered injustice. I have heard whispers and stories, rumors of casual cruelties and petty behavior. It is, perhaps, his nature to be capricious and shockingly vicious, since his body is a bottle for extremely bad weather and his will makes for a weak stopper. His sense of right and wrong is no doubt somewhat storm-tossed.
Yet that is not an exculpatory condition. Werewolves contain ruthless predators within, and we must control our wolves if we wish to survive in the world. We must firmly adhere to pack law at all times and to mortal law where it does not conflict with pack law. Law is all that separates us from barbarism and the howling within; it is a necessary leash on our darker natures. The same should be true of gods. As we are subject to law and order, they should be also. We hear in tales that their justice is administered by a supreme god, if at all. But it is never commensurate to the crime, while the punishments they deal out to mortals are often excessive and eternal. I think it is time a god received his comeuppance.
To appreciate fully what Thor did to me, I must take you back to Iceland in the year 1705.
In that time I was a courier and peddler. I circuited the island in the summers, delivering messages and doing a little trade out of my pack, sharing news and providing some isolated farmers the sense that they were not alone in the world. Often they were just as glad to see me as I was to see them. I got free room and board for the gossip in my head, and they had the opportunity to reconnect with friends and relatives by entrusting me with a letter for a small bit of coin or provisions for my horse.
The visit I made to Hnappavellir farm that summer changed my life. Most of the household was out in the field; the only person at the farmhouse was a girl named Rannveig Ragnarsdóttir, nineteen years old and disaffected with rural existence. She had hair like summer wheat and a soft blush to her cheeks when she smiled. When I arrived, she was wrestling with a ball of dough in the kitchen, flour on her dress and completely unprepared for company. My presence flustered her as she tried to remember manners she’d learned long ago but had never practiced until now. I thought her completely lovely, and once we were seated with drinks and talking across a table, she thought my humble existence was somehow romantic and adventurous. The way she looked at me began to change after a few minutes; she became flirtatious, and I admit that I encouraged her. I had not known a woman’s touch in weeks. Before long, she was suggesting a short excursion to look for lost sheep. She packed some dried strips of meat and some biscuits along with a blanket, then selected a mare from the stables and led me to what is now Skaftafell National Park. There was a special place there, she said, that I should see. It was a waterfall called Svartifoss that tumbled over black columns of volcanic basalt, which had slowly cooled and crystallized into hexagonal shapes. It was a place of dark, musical beauty, and after the sun went down she said she wanted to have me there. I let her.
There were few escapes to be had in Rannveig’s life. Twenty people lived at Hnappavellir, most of them related, and there was nothing for a young girl to do in such a situation except be obedient. I was supposed to be a happy interlude, quickly enjoyed and long savored afterward, and I understood that and was grateful for it.
She was ravenous in her lovemaking, and I remember that she told me she wanted to do more than merely dwell on the earth; she wished that she could truly live. She and I interpreted this to mean that a nice shag under the light of a full moon sure beat the hell out of snoring through the night and then scrambling all day to bake the bread and keep the hearth fire burning. But that particular comment of hers was overheard and interpreted much differently.
The wolf who savaged us called himself Úlfur Dalsgaard. While we were locked in each other’s embrace, he bit deeply into my hamstrings and then tore at Rannveig’s calves. Utterly crippled and unable to flee or fight effectively, we thought we were finished. We half expected an entire pack to descend upon us, but soon enough we realized that there was only one wolf—a huge wolf, to be sure—and he’d backed off to watch us bleed.
I couldn’t believe my eyes at first: There had never been any wolves in Iceland, but of course I had heard tales of them. This one didn’t act like the wolves in stories. I didn’t understand the behavior. We were wounded, bleeding, and scared, and that should have been more than enough encouragement for him to kill us, but he wanted us to stay there, nothing more. If we tried to drag ourselves away or call for help, he growled and lunged at us. We were being saved for something special.
“What does he want?” Rannveig asked me.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “But I don’t think we have any choice but to wait.”
“You think he’s eaten our horses?” We’d heard nothing from them since we’d staked them perhaps a mile away and left them to graze—but that was not surprising, considering how close we were to the waterfall and the distance between us.
“No idea,” I replied. There was nothing to do but wait and wonder if we’d perish from blood loss or from jaws at our throat.
Our answers came at dawn. When the sun outshone the pale glow of the moon, the wolf writhed and howled on the ground, suddenly overcome by a series of snapping bones and popping tendons and shifting, sliding skin. During this grisly metamorphosis, he could not pursue us, and Rannveig thought it a good opportunity to flee. She gathered her clothes, rose to her feet, and said, “Come on, I’m well enough to run,” and I saw that her calves had healed very well in the hours before dawn. I looked down and realized my hamstrings were likewise remarkably restored, and this, coupled with the evidence of the transformation in front of me, explained the wolf’s odd behavior.
“He’s a werewolf!” I cried. “And he bit us during a full moon!” The stories of werewolves today vary greatly in their details, but at that time it was clear that they could add to their numbers only by biting someone during a full moon. The evidence pointed to a horrifying conclusion, but Rannveig had yet to realize it.
“Come on, Gunnar! Let’s go now!” Rannveig said, already yards away.
“No, look, do you not see? He is a man!” I pointed at the twitching form on the ground, now clearly recognizable as human. He was a bit shorter than me but thicker and more muscled. His blond hair was cropped closely around his skull, but his beard was full. The twitching stopped even as I spoke and he stood before us, naked and unashamed.
“You said you wanted to truly live,” he called to Rannveig in a mocking baritone. “So now I’ve given you the opportunity. Tonight, the moon will not be completely full, but it will be more than enough to trigger the transformation. You will become werewolves like me or die in the attempt. We will be Pack, and together we will live in the worlds of men and of nature.”
“But I don’t want to be a wolf!” Rannveig protested.
The man scoffed at this objection. “It’s necessary only once a month after you establish control. Think of it as a menstruation, except you won’t be the one bleeding.”
“Why didn’t you ask us first?” I said. “This is not a life I would choose.”
“It’s a life that chooses you,” he corrected me. “I could hardly ask you while in wolf form. And you cannot appreciate what you’re refusing until you’ve tried it. You will like being a wolf. Trust me.”
“Why should I trust you?” Rannveig demanded. “You bloody bit me!”
“And you’re welcome,” Úlfur replied. “I know you’ll get around to thanking me later.”
“Thank you? For what? Turning me into a monster? For condemning me to hell?”
“You are concerned about hell?” He waved a hand at me and laughed. “This man is not your husband, am I right?”
Rannveig’s face turned red. “God forgives weakness. He does not forgive … abomination!” She shouted the last word and then hurriedly began to dress herself. I should probably pause to explain at this point that Rannveig was a Lutheran—as was I, at the time, along with most of the rest of Iceland. But throughout Scandinavia, the Old Norse religion persisted among some individuals, as I believe it still does today. Úlfur, a Danish transplant, was one of those who still followed the old gods. (We had a steady trickle of Danish immigrants because Iceland was under Danish rule then, but Frederik IV largely ignored us, occupied as he was in the Great Northern War with Sweden.)
“It all depends on which god you’re talking about,” Úlfur said. “The Æsir are perfectly content with dual natures.”
“You see?” Rannveig said to me. “He spouts pagan nonsense. He is damned, and now so are we.”
Úlfur threw his head back and laughed heartily. “You are blessed, not damned. You will come to know this in time. Run with me under the moon and hunt, taste hot blood on your tongue—”
“Gah!” Rannveig covered her ears and ran away. She did not want to hear about hot blood on her tongue. I grabbed my clothes and chased after her. Úlfur laughed again and called after us.
“Run now if you wish! But don’t be near any men when night falls, or the hot blood you taste will be human!”
Rannveig didn’t slow down for half a mile. She hurtled as fast as she could to where we had left the horses, and I couldn’t close the gap between us until we were nearly there. She was gasping and crying by the time we reached the spot where we’d staked them, and when we got there only one remained. The other was a mess of blood and bones and bits of skin and flesh.
“Oh, God! Oh, God!” Rannveig cried. “He ate my horse! Gunnar, he ate my horse!”
“Well, if it kept him from eating us, I’m grateful to the horse,” I said.
She whirled upon me and started pounding my chest with her fists. They weren’t weak punches either. She was letting loose with everything she had, fury erupting from her like a volcano. “How! Can! You! Be! Grateful!” she yelled, landing a blow with each word. “We are fucked! Fucked, you hear me? We heal like demons! We are no longer human! Our salvation is gone! Gone!” She dissolved into sobs and sank to the ground, clutching me. I knelt to hold her, but I did not know what to say. I could not tell her everything would be all right. She was going to have a hard time explaining to the men at the farm what happened to the horse. And if she truly turned into a wolf that night, everyone there would be in mortal peril. Rather than expose them to such danger—and to give us more time to concoct a tale if we found we could return—we decided to continue on my westerly path to Kirkjubæjarklaustur. That proved enormously difficult, because the remaining horse would not suffer our touch. It neighed in fear and reared up defensively whenever either of us approached, and we finally had to cut it loose and let it run away. It ran back in the direction of the Hnappavellir farm.
Seeing no other choice, we began trudging after it. A day without food or water we figured we could survive, and then we would make the farm by early the next morning. We did not see or hear from Úlfur all that day.
Rannveig and I were exhausted. We had not slept at all through the previous night and had been traveling all day. By mutual agreement, we collapsed together underneath a tree as the sun set. We both feared what was to come but no longer had the energy to waste worrying about it. I actually managed to take a short nap.
My awakening was the rudest possible. My skeleton snapped in a hundred places and knitted together again in alien shapes, organs squished and remade themselves, and you know those headaches you get between your eyes? They are worse than excruciating when there’s a snout growing out of that spot. Being confined in human clothes didn’t help the process along either.
Rannveig was enduring a similar transformation. Her cries and snarls of pain were even louder than mine, and I wasn’t holding back. Our clothes eventually tore and the shifting stopped. The pain faded as we lay still under the tree, whimpering. I turned my head and saw much better than I ever had before. Where Rannveig had been, there was a light-gray wolf with white socks surrounded by shreds of Rannveig’s clothes.
I got to my feet—all four of them—and took a deep breath. Smells I’d never known or perceived before flooded my mind. There was a burrow of wood mice somewhere nearby; their droppings littered the small stand of timber in which we stood. I could smell the lingering traces of my horse’s fear on the trail back to Hnappavellir. Thinking of the horse made me realize how hungry I was. I needed to hunt.
Rannveig was up now, and she looked hungry too. She smelled the horse, and we set off after it together. I do not know how we communicated; there must have been something happening on an instinctive level, because as of yet we had no pack link.
Running felt good. It wasn’t an all-out run but rather an easy lope. Rannveig ran beside me, and she seemed to be enjoying herself as well. I could tell we were getting closer to the horse. It was either slowing down or had stopped altogether with nightfall, unsure of the path. But as we grew nearer, we smelled and heard other horses and another smell on top of them: humans. I began to drool, and what was left of my own human thought drifted away as the wolf took over not only my body but the remainder of my mind. The next thing I remember is coming back to awareness with someone else’s voice in my head.
Rannveig came back to herself and processed what was going on. I didn’t recognize the body we’d torn apart, but she did. She leapt back from it and yipped in alarm. Through the pack link, she screamed.
He must have come looking for her. I turned to survey the scene; there was another body back along the trail. I didn’t know who it was, because I’d never seen anyone at the farm besides Rannveig, but I suspected she would recognize him.
I asked. She wasn’t paying attention. She was hung up on eating her brother and trying to vomit. I felt sorry for the men but didn’t hate myself; I saw already that I had done nothing. These men were literally killed by wolves, not murdered.
Úlfur said,
She padded over and looked at what was left of the face.
I said.
By the same token, there were no large land predators in Iceland. The most ferocious was the Arctic fox. No one would believe these men were taken down and savaged by Arctic foxes. When they were found, people would start hunting for whatever had killed them.
Looking miserable wasn’t difficult, since the transformation back to human was every bit as painful as it had been to wolf. The good people of Kirkjubæjarklaustur gave us clothes and food, and Úlfur bought us packs to carry supplies in for our long trek. We hiked cross-country between two glaciers to the north side of the island, sleeping in the open at night and fearing nothing. Rannveig spoke little to either of us and often wept at night. She did not want to be comforted.
We broke our journey for a time at Mývatn before continuing on to Húsavík. There we secured jobs on the coast; we could not join the fishermen or whalers for fear of being at sea when the full moon came around, so we found work elsewhere. We slowly became accustomed to being werewolves and added two more to our pack in Húsavík, another male and another female.
The plague hit Iceland two years later, in 1707. A quarter of the population died. I suggested to Úlfur that we grow the Pack a little bit more quickly than he intended, for every wolf would be safe from the plague and we would be saving lives as well as changing them. This was the first time I became aware of his deep-seated racism and outright bigotry. Úlfur agreed that saving lives while expanding the Pack was a good idea, but only for those of Scandinavian descent. Celts weren’t allowed, nor was any other ethnic stock, and he’d prefer they be pagan as well. I did not understand the preference or the decree that consigned all other ethnic groups in Húsavík to a gruesome death.
When I tried to question him about it, Úlfur bristled and asked if I was questioning his leadership. I was second in the hierarchy, but the three other wolves in the Pack would often talk to me rather than to him. Rannveig, in particular, didn’t talk to Úlfur unless she absolutely had to.
“Not your leadership,” I replied, “only the reasoning behind your decision to exclude Celts from joining the Pack. I know of two sturdy men we could save from the plague at the next full moon.” It was only three days hence.
“Celts would disturb the harmony of the Pack and sow dissension among us,” he said, though I wasn’t quite sure of what harmony he spoke. There was plenty of unrest and dissension as it was, even though our numbers were still in single digits at the time.
When we returned from our run under the full moon, those Celtic men were either dead or dying of the plague. It was a waste and a poor decision in my view, and it was the beginning of my discord with Úlfur.
“We could have saved those men,” I said, and he snarled and cuffed me, sending me sprawling and turning my eyes yellow.
“The purity of species is pack law,” he growled. “Never suggest again that we alter it.” I thought he had a poor understanding of the difference between races and species, but I quelled the response in my throat and broke eye contact.
“As you wish, alpha,” I said.
The next week I met a werewolf from another pack. His name was Hallbjörn Hauk. “I am the second in Reykjavík,” he said, “under the leadership of Ketill Grímsson. You are the second for Úlfur Dalsgaard, are you not?”
“I am.”
“I wonder if we may speak privately for a time?” he asked.
“There are few places we could go without the Pack knowing about it,” I said. We were a small pack, but Húsavík was also a very small town.
Hallbjörn smiled. “I understand. I will be brief, then. Were you aware that Úlfur Dalsgaard used to be a part of the Reykjavík Pack and was cast out a little more than two years ago?”
“No, I was not. Why was he cast out?”
“He had ideas about racial purity that Ketill and others found distasteful. He would constantly denigrate or taunt pack members of differing backgrounds, including myself. I’m Anglo–Saxon on my father’s side. Ketill told him to take his racial crusade elsewhere and banished him from Reykjavík.”
“Why are you here?”
“To let you and the rest of your wolves know there is another pack in Iceland if you ever feel like moving elsewhere. You’re welcome so long as you leave Úlfur’s ideas behind. We are a motley crew.”
“That’s it? You came all the way here for that?”
“No. I’m also curious what you know about pack law.”
“Úlfur makes it. The alpha’s word is law.”
“Of course. But what mechanism exists for a change of leadership?”
“I … what?”
“Say that someone in your pack disagrees with the alpha’s word. It may be someone lower in the Pack, or it might be you. There might even be a majority of the Pack that agrees there should be a new alpha. What happens next?”
“I don’t know.”
Hauk snorted and shook his head, as if he’d expected such an answer. “Anyone may challenge the alpha for leadership at anytime. There’s a fight. The winner is the alpha.”
“What kind of fight?”
“The bloody kind. One wolf either yields or is wounded past the ability to heal.”
“Interesting. Úlfur neglected to mention this particular pack dynamic to me.”
“Guard your thoughts,” Hauk warned. “If he hears what you’re thinking through the pack link, you’ll have a fight before you’re ready.”
“He can hear it now,” I said. I called everyone except Úlfur to my house immediately for a meeting. He’d figure it out sooner rather than later, and either he’d show up to accept my challenge or he wouldn’t. There were still people in Húsavík who could be saved from the plague.
Though it was the dark of the moon and our wolves were at their weakest, I announced my challenge to Úlfur through the pack link, then made the painful transformation of my own will and waited for Úlfur to arrive.
I will not dwell on the duel; it was short and brutal and I killed him in less than a minute. I did not realize my own strength until circumstances made it necessary for me to reach for it. But as he died, there was a small chill in the air that I did not remember or have an explanation for until many years later. I became alpha of the Húsavík Pack and then, later, alpha of all Iceland, after a dispute with Ketill Grímsson that has no bearing on this tale. My first act as alpha was to change pack law.
“When we recruit, ethnic heritage will not be a criterion determining a candidate’s worthiness,” I said. “Does anyone wish to question that decision or challenge my leadership?” No one did. They had supported Úlfur’s replacement from the start.
My pack was twenty wolves strong when I moved us out of Iceland after the eruption of the Laki volcano in 1783. We came to the New World, and slowly we added to our numbers with wolves from many different backgrounds. Some of these left my pack and joined others, but many remained. Our largest jump in population occurred during the Spanish influenza outbreak of 1918. Until that time, I had not had many occasions to save lives through the gift of lycanthropy—which, as I was well aware, thanks to Rannveig, not everyone considered a gift. But during that time of terrible disease, I was reminded of the plague in Iceland and of our failure to save lives when we could. I was determined not to repeat that mistake this time. And so on the days immediately prior to the full moon that year, I instructed the Pack to keep their ears open for word of possible recruits. I wanted people who were without dependents to care for and who were on the verge of death. They also had to be dying at home in a rural area rather than in a hospital. We could not afford to give our existence away.
Few people matched my criteria, but wolves saved eight people that year who otherwise would have died of influenza. None of them was Scandinavian.
There was a Native American man and a Mexican one, two Chinese women, a German teenager, a thin boy from India, a girl from England, and an immigrant from the Philippines who’d already lost the rest of his family to the virus. They were all lovely people and fantastic wolves. They enriched the lives of my entire pack, but especially Rannveig’s.
She and I turned out to be very different wolves, you see. I was very dominant and she was quite submissive, despite her occasional flirtations with adventure. I could not take her for a mate, because she was incapable of behaving as an alpha, and the Pack would never accept such a submissive wolf in a leadership position. In fact, while everyone liked her, no one in the Pack wished to be her mate. So I was very glad for her sake when she fell in love with the man from the Philippines.
His name was Honorato, and he was finally able to relieve her of two centuries of misery. I am telling you, she was a new person once they paired off. Her earlier ideas about being damned faded, for how could such love be permitted to those who were damned? For the first time, she began to view her wolf as a blessing rather than a curse. If Úlfur had not chosen us centuries ago, she never would have met Honorato.
But Úlfur, though dead for hundreds of years, found a way to reach out and ruin her happiness from beyond the grave. That cold air I’d felt when he died—that was the Valkyries choosing him to join the Einherjar in Valhalla. I am sure of it. And there, while preparing for Ragnarok day after day, he must have distinguished himself enough to draw the attention of Thor. And once he gained that attention, he used it to turn a god into an assassin.
Ten years ago I took the entire pack on holiday in Norway. We visit someplace special every year, and since most of the Pack was of Norwegian or Icelandic background, they wanted to visit the homeland. We were to be there for a week, hunting and playing and indulging our wolves. On our third night there, the night of the full moon, the eight dear friends I’d saved in 1918—including Rannveig’s husband—were struck down by lightning bolts. All the Scandinavian members of the Pack were left untouched. And I stress to you that we were not out in a storm. The sky was only partially cloudy, and I knew immediately that this could not possibly have been some accident of nature. My proof came when Thor descended in his chariot and spoke to me briefly. He took care to hover out of the Pack’s reach.
He said, “Regards from Úlfur Dalsgaard, one of the finest Einherjar in Valhalla. He urges you to rethink your pack law regarding the recruitment of mixed races.” And then he laughed at us as we snarled and barked at him, enjoying how powerless we were to confront him. He flew away without saying another word, leaving us to howl and mourn.
Rannveig, as you might imagine, was devastated. The howling she did that night for Honorato, her murdered husband, still haunts me to this day.
Thor is not part of my pack. He will never be part of my pack, nor can he have any voice in what pack law says or doesn’t say. He had no business renewing a feud that I had justly settled long ago by sending Úlfur to Valhalla. And, from a human perspective, he had no business murdering people for any reason, much less for the color of their skin. There is nothing Úlfur could have offered him to make it worth his while, you see? He did it solely for his own entertainment. Can he therefore be called anything but evil?
Rannveig … well. She fell in battle two months ago against witches armed with silver knives. Though I miss her, I wonder sometimes if it wasn’t a mercy. She was suicidal after her husband’s death. I think she would have done it were it not for her wolf and her Lutheran faith.
And now you see why I must go to Asgard. I cannot kill Úlfur again—and even if I could, it wouldn’t help, since he learned nothing from the first time I killed him. But I can kill Thor to avenge eight lives and one woman’s heart, and I will. Then, perhaps, I will not hear the howling at night.
Except for the crackling of logs in the fire, there was no sound when Gunnar sat back down on his boulder. I was thinking about the two werewolves that had fallen in the battle against Aenghus Óg at Tony Cabin. Their deaths had always been a touchy subject with the entire pack, and now I understood a bit better why that was so.
“I’m sorry about Rannveig,” I said to Gunnar, breaking the silence, and he nodded sadly, though I wasn’t sure if he thought he was accepting an apology or sympathy.
Zhang Guo Lao spoke up. “It pains me to hear that Thor has treated you and your pack so abominably. I am sorry to say it seems consistent with what I know of his character.”
“Is monstrous fuckpuddle,” Perun asserted, and everyone turned to stare at him with equal parts amusement and bemusement. “What? Is this not English word?”
I suggested that if it wasn’t a word, it should be, and the others agreed.
“I, too, have a crime to lay at Thor’s door,” Väinämöinen said after the levity of Perun’s neologism faded. “His feeble mind insists that his arrogant trespasses are somehow justifiable since he is a member of the Æsir. Any criticism levied against him is met with a thunderbolt. Listen, and I will tell you how he violated a wonder of the world.”
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