Wolfsangel

38

The sun set, which it had not since they had left the south. Autumn was coming and, soon behind it, winter. Feileg could almost taste the ice on the air.

He had a freezing fever and his body shook with cold. They brought him out under the deep stars and laid him next to a fire. He smelled the chill on the grass but the flames were fragrant and kept him warm. A little girl stroked his hair and her mother brought him blankets. A small platform made from the stump of an uprooted tree was set down at his side. A stone was placed on it, along with a stick carved into the likeness of a man. Cheese and meat were laid out. Spruce twigs were put there too. The reindeer was tethered close by. The reindeer man came to Feileg. He touched his wound. Pain shot through Feileg and there was blood on the man’s hands. The man stood and walked to the reindeer, smeared the blood across its face and back.

Something was cooking on a pot, though Feileg knew it was not food. It had a bitter aroma to it that he didn’t like at all.

Vali was there too, sitting looking out to the east, talking to nobody and with no one trying to talk to him.

One of the hunters took a cup from the pot and put it to Feileg’s lips. He swallowed and, as he did, he recognised the taste — it was very similar to the brew that Kveld Ulf had fed him during their rituals, the drink that unlocked the doorway to his wolf nature.

The reindeer man drank himself and passed the cup around. He went to Vali and offered it to him but Vali was blank and distant. The reindeer man was insistent and pushed the cup to the prince’s lips. Vali suddenly seemed to awake from his trance, took it and drained it.

Then the drumming began and the reindeer man intoned a harsh but beautiful chant. A hunter accompanied him on a small bone flute and Feileg lost himself in the music. The drumming went on and on, as the chanting rose and fell like the sea, or like the voices of his wolf brothers in the hills.

The skies were wide and beautiful and Feileg saw bright streaks flashing across them. He saw the people around him, caring for him, and he thought them very like his own family. He saw the face of his mother looking down at him, telling him she was sorry to have sent him away and he could come home now.

The reindeer man was there, but he wasn’t the reindeer man; he was a reindeer and his antlers were made of stars. There was another presence too. The stars seemed to have taken shape and fallen to earth in the form of a man who rode a horse of stars and carried a bow of stars which held an arrow that was a comet.

‘Ruohtta… Ruohtta… Ruohtta…’

The other hunter had the reindeer to the ground, though it brayed in protest. Then it screamed. There was the sound of sawing. Something was put into Feileg’s hands — a pair of antlers. He held the antlers out how the reindeer man showed him. The chanting went on and on. He saw the man of stars raise his bow but it was not pointing at him. He knew the figure for what it was — a god of death — and it had come for him, but the hunters had tricked it. The comet arrow flashed towards the reindeer. There was a final hideous bray from the animal and then it was quiet.

Feileg trembled. The women and children came to lie close to him, warming the chill of the fever away, but the chant went on. The man of stars had not gone; he was fitting another arrow to his bow, though none of the hunters seemed to notice.

Vali listened hard to the drumming. It was in him and around him and did not beat alone. From behind the mountains where the fat moon dipped another rhythm answered it. The taste of the holy man’s brew filled him up and he thought he might vomit but then he felt the drums commanding his own heartbeat.

Someone was speaking to him from a long way away. The sound of the drums seemed to have a physical form, like a rope winding over the mountains to twine around him and pull him in, and he heard a voice from far away in that odd foreign language rasping out its chant.

‘Jabbmeaaakka… Jabbmeaaakka… Jabbmeaaakka…’

Vali knew that the name was chanted in hate, not invocation. Something wanted Jabbmeaaakka dead and he was caught up in that wish.

The brew was percolating through his mind, stripping away his reluctance to yield to the hunger that was calling to him. He looked at his hands. They were beautiful, and he spent a long time studying them. It had never occurred to him before just how long his fingers were, how pointed, more like talons than anything human. His teeth felt uncomfortable, too big for his mouth; he couldn’t stop licking them. There was that taste. There it was, iron and salt and a depthless beauty that held all the pull of roasting meat to a hungry man. The blood, the deep and alluring scent of blood, was in him.

‘I am strong.’ He said it out loud. The drum was faster now, the voices harsher.

‘Jabbmeaaakka… Jabbmeaaakka… Jabbmeaaakka…’

And then the rhythm seemed to take a mad tumble, fast as a rock fall. She was there, he knew, the thing they had been calling to.

He saw a child with a woman’s face, gaunt and lined. She was covered in gold, and precious gems stuck to her skin as if she were some shining snake. She was watching as the drumbeat curled around him to draw him on.

The beat was telling him something. He had to go on a long journey. She was there — Adisla, the one he had come to find.

His final thought, when it came, did not arrive from outside. It was not a stream of symbols seeping into his mind with the rhythm of the drums, though that is what the rhythm seemed to intend. Neither did it come from the grotesque girl-woman who looked on from the firelight. The magic around him was just a spark to a fire, igniting something far bigger than itself. The thought came from himself, from within. He spoke, to give it form.

‘I must fortify myself,’ said Vali.

He stood. He felt very long and sinuous, more like something made of shadow than flesh. Things were moving around him. Vali reached out to catch them, to break them, to feed on them. He felt a blow and brushed it away. He heard screams but was lost to the taste of the meat. He fed deeply, feeling the stress of his prey seep into him with a gorgeous tingle.

‘I am fortified,’ he said. There were some broken things on the ground, things that had been useful to him, things that had been going to help him, direct him and show him the way. He didn’t need them any more; he knew where he was going. He was going towards the drumming.