Wolfsangel

40

Feileg woke. Around him were the voices of ravens. His fever had gone and his wound was healing. He sat up and looked around. For a heartbeat he didn’t understand what he was seeing. Where there had been a family, a fire and welcoming smiles, now there was only ruin.

Of course, he had been among corpses before, and corpses he had made too, but never anything like this blood swamp. The bodies had been devastated: men were unrecognisable from women, children from animals. How long had he lain there? He looked at the bodies. They were beginning to rot.

The scene did not repulse Feileg or make him retch as it might have someone who had not spent half his life as a wolf, but it did make him shake. Since he had been looking for the girl, humanity had come back to him; suffering had started to mean something. He felt the years that had been denied to these children, the tendernesses and the joys. He thought again of his own mother, the break from his family that had felt like an amputation.

Feileg pondered what to do. He had no idea what these people’s customs were or how they preferred their dead to be treated. The birds were there and he knew that the wolves would come down when the darkness held for long enough to conceal them. It seemed a good way to him, so he just set their stone back on the stump that served for an altar, put the drum beside it and left.

It was not difficult to track Vali. The ground was wet, though not sodden, and the prince’s footprints were clearly visible at points, blood on the grass at others.

Feileg thought of what he had seen on the boat, the tempest made flesh that the prince had become, thought of the sight of him among the dead bodies, feeding. The wolfman, for all the killing he had wrought with hands and teeth, had never eaten human flesh. He never had the need in the winter, when animals were weak and easy prey, nor the opportunity in the summer, when most travellers went by sea. And besides, Kveld Ulf had not taught him to eat men. The shape-shifter knew the diseases that could emerge from cannibalism and the madness that it brings.

Feileg was sure that Vali had attacked the reindeer hunters. Whatever enchantment the prince was under had consumed him. And yet Feileg felt he had no choice but to follow. Vali was looking for Adisla, which meant that Feileg was bound to him. When Feileg freed the girl and she married him, he would ask her to release him from his vow and he would kill Vali.

Feileg followed Vali’s trail east for days, relying on scent, tracks and hunter’s intuition. In a pass through some black mountains, he came across a cave. Vali had stayed there for days, he could tell. The prince had not been his normal fastidious self, and on the ground at the mouth of the cave was human shit. Feileg saw that it was sticky and cloying and it smelled of blood. It confirmed what he already feared.

He didn’t want to sleep there, so he followed Vali’s trail across the pass.

As he continued east, it became colder and the skies more grey than blue. The vegetation turned to scrub, a stunted tundra of dwarf trees and shrubs that seemed to cringe from the wind. Shelter became difficult to find. Feileg ate what he had taken from the ship — he hadn’t been able to bring himself to take the family’s food, even though he had known he would need it. He drank from streams and hid in caves and holes when it rained. Weeks passed and he began to find indications that Vali was not moving as quickly. He was stopping regularly, sometimes in caves, sometimes in the open, but there was a different smell to the mess he was leaving now. Beneath the human scent was something else. Feileg knew it better than any smell in the world. It was wolf.

After days more travel the mountains ended and Feileg was at the edge of a broad plain going down to low hills by the sea. After some scouting, he found a place where the grass was flattened. He followed the trail and saw a mob of ravens ahead of him. They scattered to the sky as he approached, rising like the spirit of the corpse they had been eating. The dead man had been a hunter. His squat bow was nearby. Feileg took it along with the arrows. He hadn’t shot a bow since he was a child, nor used any other weapon, but now he would accept any help he could get. The ravens were watching from a distance. ‘You’ll eat when I’m done here and not before,’ Feileg said. He knelt to the corpse. The skull was sheared in two. No bird had done that.

Half a day’s walk yielded another find. He could see something had rested beneath the lee of a rock and, from the flatness of the grass, that it had been there for some time. Leading away were prints but they were not Vali’s. This was something bigger, still on two legs but with a huge stride. Feileg sniffed at the footprints and the same signature came back: wolf. As he went on, there were other tracks too — reindeer and broad sled marks on the wet grass obscuring all signs of the prince. The clouds hung black over the land. Great petals of snow began to fall, settling cold upon his skin.

With Vali’s trail gone, Feileg simply followed what looked like a path towards the sea. How long had he been on the prince’s trail? The moon had been full twice and when it could be seen was now a silver sliver in the night sky. But it wouldn’t be visible that night. The weather was closing in but there was no prospect of shelter nearby. Over the two months his strength had returned and Feileg kept up a good pace. Then he spotted the island. It was a long flat loaf of rock, like a reflection of the clouds, a white tear into the dark fabric of the sea.

He had no coat, only the wolf pelt, a pair of ragged trousers the Danes at Hemming’s court had given him out of pity, a shirt and a cloak he had taken from the ship. He had something else he could use to protect himself from the cold but hesitated to do so. He had kept them around his neck since he had taken them from a body on the Danish ship but hadn’t yet had the courage to put them on. It felt like a betrayal of Kveld Ulf to even carry them. But he saw the sense now. Most of his life he had simply tied pieces of reindeer fur around his feet in the cold. Now he pulled on the pair of boots. They were a little too big but good enough. He wondered if he should stuff grass inside them to insulate them, as the farmers did.

In his mind he heard Bragi’s voice: ‘Are you going soft on me, son?’ Feileg smiled to himself, the memory keeping him warmer than any of his clothes.

He could smell something on the breeze — reindeer. He stopped and listened. He heard the clicking of their hooves, that distinctive sound reindeer make even on soft grass, and he could tell they were standing. On again, on through the whitening world, running now to keep the cold at bay, hoping to kill a reindeer and crawl inside its carcass for the night for warmth. In the dying light he saw movement and realised that the reindeer were not alone. There were figures of men about them, and the beasts were tied to small flat wooden sleds.

Feileg slowed to a walk. Across on the island he could just about see figures making their way to the top. Some sort of assembly was taking place. He came to a small cliff over a short beach of silver shingle. The sea below him looked angry. From across the water howling and drumming filled his ears. He started to feel very odd, almost as though his limbs weren’t his to command. He walked on to where the reindeer were and saw something like his own reflection. A man beside a sled was wearing a wolf pelt, almost like his own, but white. Another wore a coat of black feathers and had his hair shorn and spiked to resemble a bird. They ignored him, finished tying the legs of their animals and made their way down to the beach. He followed them across to the sea, where they began to push a tiny boat out into the heaving water.

Feileg was acting on impulse now, the howling and the drumming filling his mind. He had to find shelter. The men could find him shelter. Throwing away the hunter’s bow and arrows, he ran forward, helped push the boat out into the water and got in with the two men. They didn’t say a word; just helped him aboard for the short but terrifying trip to the island.

The boat grounded on a tiny beach beneath a cliff and they all climbed. The jabber was intense now, and his companions pulled out their own drums to join in as they ascended. At the top Feileg found himself on a plateau. Fifty men in animal masks faced him, all drumming, shrieking, barking and roaring. The sight paralysed him.

Then, as if on a command, a sudden silence. The men parted and a small man in a wolf mask came forward. He was frail and clearly in pain. He approached Feileg, gazed into his face, then turned to his brothers and said something in a strange language.

The drumming took on renewed life and hands grasped Feileg. Charms and icons were shoved into his face, water thrown on him, and then he was being carried across the island. He fought and tore and knocked men to the ground, but the press of numbers was too great, and he was shoved and manhandled, kicked and clubbed across the island. Ropes were produced and thrown over him; when he shook them off others replaced them. The drumming seemed to be draining him of strength, and finally, inevitably, he was bound. By this time there was no need. The drums had entered his head, robbing his limbs of movement.

They dragged him to a cave, a gaping mouth that seemed to transform the hillside into the jaws of some ugly monster. He was mobbed into the hole by the dancing firelight of lamps and long shadows reached out like spider legs as if to inspect him as he descended the slope into darkness. Then, where the floor fell away, the man in the wolf mask came forward, holding a torch in one hand and a bright iron knife in the other.

‘Lord,’ he said in Norse. He bowed his head and turned Feileg to face the dark. In one movement, he slashed the bonds on his arms and pushed him hard in the back.

Feileg tried to turn to strike him but couldn’t seem to make his body respond. He dropped into the dark. It was a heavy fall and he was stunned for a couple of breaths. When he recovered his senses, he could hear someone panting, trying to control themselves but taking in great gulps of air in panic.

‘What are you?’

‘Lady?’ said Feileg.

There was another cry. He was sure it was Adisla. Even through her sobs he was certain it was her voice.

‘Is it you? I swore to protect you, remember? Adisla, is it you?’

‘It is me,’ said the voice.

‘Lady,’ he said, and she came to him, hugging him and saying his name.

Above them the drumming stopped.

Lieaibolmmai turned to his brothers. His voice was weak but he was resolute. ‘We have unbound him now and the spirit will find him. In hunger the wolf will out, and he will do what he needs to do to welcome the god. ’

Now the animal cries and howling struck up again, but in a higher key.

Adisla held Feileg to her in the darkness. ‘Are you going to kill me?’

‘I am going to die for you,’ said Feileg, unpicking the bonds around his ankles.

Above, Lieaibolmmai sat down and took out his drum. It was two months into the final stage of his wolf-summoning chant and the sorcerer was sweating heavily. His magic had been growing stronger by the day since he had battled Jabbmeaaakka, goddess of the underworld, but still he had not been sure the wolf would come. It had taken years to frame the magic correctly to call him, years of toil. Then he had torn something from the goddess, a bright gleaming rune that seemed supple and to grow like a tree. He had thought on the rune in his chanting and had felt the wolf move towards him. Then, just two weeks ago, something had changed, and he had lost the creature, or so he thought. But now he had arrived, and he was just as he had seen him that first day in the mire. His face was exactly as he had seen it in his vision. The sorcerer could begin the transformation now.

It would be the work of another month, maybe more, to get to where they needed to be, but Leiaibolmmai was willing to wait. He had sent instructions to his whole nation, called every man of knowledge from wherever he hunted whales or stalked the reindeer, and now he was to reap his reward. He knew that many of the Noaidis were weak and would not last the course of the magic, that some had untold miles to cross to be there, but he was content. Some would fall away but others would take their places. He and those who began would be able to rest and rejoin the ritual as they saw fit.

He felt physically drained but ready. The battle with the goddess had strengthened him magically. He had ripped her knowledge from her, seen her accomplices die and forced her to hand over their secrets, the screaming runes that he had torn from the grasp of the dead sisters. But the battle had unbalanced him too. The runes buzzed within him, denying him sleep, filling him with odd energies and unwelcome sensations. Lieaibolmmai was a gentle man but not strong enough for those terrible symbols. He felt constantly sick, unsettled and not a little mad.

He thought of a rune like a spear, long and pointed. He concentrated on that — it would give him purpose. It did, though an unaccustomed anger rose up in him too. The runes were unmanageable and vastly dangerous, some raging like torrents of images and sounds that threatened to sweep away his sanity, others with a calm presence disguising deep undertows into madness.

The chanting went on and the nights lengthened. Magnificent smears of colour appeared in the sky, the foxfire that meant the celestial fox spirit had been called to their gathering. Lieaibolmmai knew the omens could not have been better. The fox was the most magical of creatures and had blessed their ceremony by beating his tail until sparks flew across the heavens in shades of glowing green.

He concentrated on the image he had seen of the dark goddess’s lair in his mind, that terrible cliff. He needed to implant that into the mind of the wolf, so that it knew where to go when it emerged transformed from the cave.

For two weeks the chanting never ceased. Feileg and Adisla lost all sense of time in the darkness. There was only the food in the pack and just the tiny stream of water to drink. Adisla, less used than Feileg to physical hardship, began to fade.

Feileg, though his body remained strong, was losing his grip on reality under the relentless chanting. He sweated and coughed as the image of the Troll Wall came into his mind. It was not strange to him as it was to the sorcerers. He had hunted in that area many times, walked the land at the foot of the mountain and looked up at it in awe.

‘Act, and then you will leave this trap. Set out for your destiny,’ he heard a voice say in his head. ‘Kill and be free.’

He felt compelled to do something, to step closer to something, but he couldn’t see what it was, and the feeling made him miserable and uncomfortable. He was like a slave who finds his master screaming instructions at him in an incomprehensible language, wanting to act but not knowing what to do. Adisla felt him trembling. She was weak and terribly hungry.

Outside, up on the surface, in the hollow light of an Arctic dawn, Lieaibolmmai felt beyond tiredness, unnaturally awake. He had broken from the ritual to eat a little, to rest his voice and to try to sleep for the first time in days. He almost didn’t hear the chanting now. The runes were all around him, as if they had lives of their own — hanging in space, fizzing, snapping, hissing, sometimes even sounding with rich musical notes. They had helped him though. He had achieved that higher level where he could feel the animal heart of the wolf in the pit and talk to him, direct him, show him where to go. He had contacted the wolf many times in long and difficult rituals, spoken to him over vast distances and heard him answer as a beast. The man in the pit seemed just a man. And yet it was him, he knew: the runes had shown him his face. He took it for another confusion of the magic, another product of his self-induced insanity.

A howl split the grey air. Lieaibolmmai shivered, not recognising what was strange about it but feeling disquiet anyway. The other Noaidis on the rock glanced at each other. They too thought it had sounded odd. The perspective was wrong, if sound can have a perspective. It sounded far away, hollow, but it was loud too, as if near. No one thought of the simplest explanation: the creature was much bigger than any wolf they had ever heard before.

In the cave Feileg sat up, feeling a cold dread. He knew better than anyone that the cry of the wolf was unnatural.

Lieaibolmmai had a terrible ache in his head but still he smiled. The wolves of the plain were greeting the wolf god’s arrival, he was sure. The howl from the mainland was repeated. It was very loud, thought the sorcerer, very loud indeed. Unease rippled through the Noaidis but excitement too. The howling was just a side effect of the magic. Their defender was coming, they were sure.

Down on the beach a youth was getting out of a boat, calling to them. From his accent Lieaibolmmai recognised him as an eastern Noaidi, typically late for the ceremony. He was glad to have that thought, pleased to be linked to a world of mundanity away from the dreadful presence of those runes.

‘The wolf! The wolf is coming! The wolf is here!’ the young man was shouting.

Lieaibolmmai huddled into the fire. Did the boy really sense the wolf, or was he just trying to make up for in enthusiasm what he lacked in timeliness?

‘Pick up your drum and join in, brother,’ a man next to Lieaibolmmai called down, his voice hoarse from chanting.

‘A black wolf with eyes of foxfire! He is there, out on the plain! He is there!’

‘He is within,’ said Lieaibolmmai.

A gust of air chilled his shoulder. He turned to look at the Noaidi next to him, surprised to see that, though momentarily the man was still standing, he didn’t have a head.