Wolfsangel

41

Vali was lost, really lost. The drums no longer called to him. He could still hear them in his mind but he felt no desire to follow them any more. The beat was more urgent. He understood its demands. It wanted him to step forward inside himself, to become what he could. He found it easy to ignore. He had killed some things and that had helped him grow, he recalled. And when he had grown, the drums had lost their power. He was stepping forward all right, but under the impulse of his own magic, urgent and compelling as a tidal surge.

As his body rippled with vigour, his mind contracted. He had difficulty following any chain of reasoning. Images of his life were there and gone again like mountains under fleeting cloud. A yearning, an adolescent itch for action, was upon him, though he couldn’t think what he wanted to do. He didn’t sleep for days, and it seemed to him that he didn’t quite fit in his skin. His heart would beat fast for no reason and he feared he would die, then a smirking calm would descend and he would start to feel unaccountably pleased with himself.

He looked at his body and it seemed to him a very fine thing. His hands were strong and large, his muscles huge and pronounced, and his teeth felt like shining knives in his head.

He was aware that he had forgotten a great deal. He couldn’t remember how he had come to the cave. For a moment or two he would recall why it was important that he found out how he had come to lie naked underground far away from anything he recognised, but then it would slip from his mind and all curiosity about his condition would disappear. He had no difficulty, though, recalling the deep savour of the meat that moves and then is still, the prey that had surrendered its power to him, and it seemed that, as he digested the flesh of his victims, the memories, or rather the sentiments and attitudes of those he had consumed, were digested too.

Vali spent a while playing with rocks on the floor of the cave, knocking one into another as if he was a child; he sat with endless patience, watching the snow fall as a woman waiting for a hunter to return might; he pictured the man he had surprised in the valley, saw the shaking hands trying to nock an arrow to the bowstring. The memory of the archer’s fear was delicious, recalled like the scent of baking bread.

When Vali slept his dreams were full of Adisla but they were full of the wolf too. It was bound, agonisingly bound, the fetters digging into its flesh and that awful sword holding open its mouth. Vali had one of those strange feelings that only make sense in dreams and blink away with the morning light. He was dreaming about the wolf, he knew, but it seemed to him that the wolf was dreaming about him too, or rather was simply dreaming him. He felt he didn’t exist outside of the god’s mind and the boundaries between himself and the wolf were insubstantial things, as nothing to their shared communion of pain. He felt its constriction as his own, a crushed, tied, pinioned sensation that would suddenly relent and snap into release and contentment. When he awoke, his limbs were longer and his teeth bigger.

He didn’t know how long he lay in that cave — weeks or months — but it was cold when clarity finally came to him, in that moment between hunger and satiety. It was as if, his appetites in balance, his mind was free to think.

He went outside and looked around. Snow was falling, the sky was heavy and the light was flat. It was dusk. The air was full of scents. Over the hills behind him a bear was moving — late to its hibernation, he could tell — and down on the plain people were gathering. In the far distance was the sea, purple and blue, and in the sea an island. Men were going to it, he could smell them moving across the plain. Their odours of sweat and grime were powerful and alluring. Reindeer were with them, one or more geldings, their piss and shit unpungent.

Voices came through the still air. He listened. There were three distant heartbeats, one animal, two human. Now he could see them: a man and a youth driving a reindeer pulling a sled, to which was attached a pack of provisions and a shallow drum.

He saw them look up at the cave, but they didn’t spot him. They were clearly thinking of resting there for the night as the snow became heavier. They were debating something, one pointing on down the trail, the other up into the cave. Vali could see that the two were hurrying to something and wondering if they could make it by nightfall in the worsening weather. The man held out his hand and let the snow fall on it. Then he shook his head and the travellers began to make their way up the slope.

Vali shrank away inside the cave, right to the back. Saliva rose to his mouth and his limbs felt looser. The men were at the mouth of the cave now. A stone came whistling in, then another. They were checking for wild animals. He heard them speak to each other. When he peered out from his hiding place in the shadows, he saw them examining something on the floor. The man rubbed it in his fingers and looked at the youth. Then he shrugged and stood. Vali saw he had a spear. The man stared hard into the cave, picked up another stone and threw it past Vali.

There was a roar. Vali felt his heart racing, his muscles clenching, his head dizzy. The youth leaped back with a shout but the man was laughing. He had pretended to be a bear. The joke seemed to calm them both and they set about building a fire and bringing the reindeer up. The creature wouldn’t come inside, and eventually the youth gave up and left it tied at the cave mouth.

The smell of the fire comforted Vali and penetrated into his mind far more deeply than any aroma he had ever known. The smoke seemed unlike any other smoke he had ever smelled, and he could tell the tree that had been used for the fire had been a strong one, fed from an underground stream, not felled for its wood, just a few branches taken.

Vali thought of Adisla. Her presence in his mind was now all that kept him from giving in to the beast inside him. If he could find her, he might feel better. Something had happened to him, he could tell, a sort of illness. Vali did not want a cure, though, didn’t want to go back to what he had been; he just wanted to feel right, not to have this terrible sensation of dislocation and restraint bearing down on him. It was love like a hunger, sharp and selfish.

The men cooked, but their own odours were far more appealing to Vali. The sweat, the saliva, the secretions of the glands of their hair and skin, all seemed sizzling little calls to murder. Then a sudden wave of repugnance took him and his thoughts nauseated him.

The travellers were tired and the fire was warm. They both fell asleep where they sat, still in their furs. Silently Vali came forward. He was surprised to see how small they were. Light on snow removes all perspective and it had been impossible to tell their size from a distance. These men were dwarfs, people who had seemingly walked out of a story. The man, standing up, would hardly have come up to Vali’s waist; the boy was even smaller. The reindeer began to fret. It was tiny too, full grown with wide antlers — and old — but much smaller than he had ever seen a mature stag before. And the cave mouth had shrunk. When Vali had come in, it was too high to touch. Now he almost had to stoop to stand up in it. Some strange shrinking magic was happening, he was sure.

Vali sat down by their fire and warmed himself. Thoughts brawled in his mind. He thought of Disa, of the fire at her home, of winter evenings with Adisla by his side; he thought of blood, the smack and savour of the kill, he thought of Bragi taking his arm on the longship, telling him everything was going to be all right; he thought of the ruin of his rage, the bloody dead.

He watched the sleeping men and had the urge to kill them. Something was stopping him though: it was as if the ghost of himself was haunting what he had become, drawing him back from the inevitable. The fire was warm and fragrant, and he lay down. He slept and dreamed he was himself, a man who loved a woman and thought that was enough.

There was a shout. It was light. One of the tiny men was yelling and the other had a spear. Their movements seemed very slow and cumbersome to Vali. The man threw the spear. Vali just stepped around it.

The smell of their dread swept over him, urging him on to attack, but he fought the impulse. The dream of the person he had been was in his mind — he could still be that man. He tried to speak, to tell them they had no need to be afraid, but when he did he was shocked. A low rumble filled the cave, like thunder in the hills. He was growling, he realised.

The youth was on his hands and knees, trying to scramble past Vali. The man had picked up a stone and was hurling it at him.

‘Kill a hundred of them for me.’ The words were harsh but an echo of what Adisla had meant came back to him: ‘Return. Be with me again.’ The memory suffocated his anger and he was paralysed. The boy had got past him and was screaming to the man to do the same. He did, diving under Vali to where the reindeer was going wild.

The men released the panicking animal and just ran for it, almost falling down the slope in their haste. Vali went to the cave mouth, sat breathing heavily and watched them flapping over the plain towards the shore. The snow had stopped but it was still difficult to see any distance.

Vali felt shaken. He had had the overwhelming urge to kill them, but he had fought it — fought whatever disease or enchantment was on his mind — and he had won. There was a way back to Adisla.

The men ran for a while and then stopped. They looked back at him and saw that he hadn’t pursued them. They stood talking and, presently, Vali could see they were having an argument, sense their stress on the breeze. Then one walked off towards the sea and that distant island while the other called and caught the reindeer. He took something like a broad dish from a pack on its back, let the animal go and began to walk back towards Vali.

Vali felt nothing as he watched him come, no more than he did when he looked at the sky or the sea. The man approached slowly. He was beating a drum. The rhythm was different to the one Vali had heard that had led him to this place, the one that had vanished as he came to the cave. It was slower and more deliberate, and backed with a forceful chant. Vali smelled fear but also excitement. The man came closer, stopping eventually at the foot of the scree slope that led up to the cave mouth. Here he stood fixing Vali with a stare, banging the drum and making gestures towards him.

It all meant nothing to Vali, who was lost in himself, holding the door to the slaughterhouse of his thoughts hard shut. He knew what he wanted to do — eat this fool in front of him and then chase down his companion and do the same to him. But he wouldn’t. Why not? He had forgotten the reason; he just knew it was important to restrain himself. Vali could hear the drummer’s heartbeat, sense the blood flowing through the cavities of his body, almost taste his presence on the air.

The man’s breath was hot with excitement, his skin basted with fear. He brought the drumming to a climax, hammering out a frenzy of blows on the skin, gave a heavy last strike and threw his drumstick onto the ground in front of Vali, his eyes wide with challenge and expectation. Then his expression changed. His spell had not worked. Vali, now more wolf than wolfman, tore out his heart.