Sky Wolves (11 page)

‘Oh,
that
cord,’ said Gentleman Jim, and Jenny couldn’t be sure, but she thought he was smiling. She ignored him, and carried on.

‘He said that if I did not return, then –’ and she whispered, so that only the trees shook – ‘Ragnarok would come to this world as well.’

All the dogs, even Checkers, looked shocked.

‘I see,’ said Gentleman Jim after a short pause. ‘So you have to return.’

‘Yes.’

‘And take the mistletoe back to – what was his name again?’

‘Baldur.’

‘How?’ asked Flo, and Jenny looked away for a moment, then said, ‘I think I must jump once again into the void.’

‘And then what?’ asked Gentleman Jim, after a short pause.

‘I don’t know,’ said Jenny. After a moment she tried to speak but failed, then tried again. ‘Baldur must die.’ She looked so sad as she said this that Pico nuzzled her in sympathy.

‘And Ragnarok –’

‘Stop
saying
that,’ said Flo, as the earth lurched.

Gentleman Jim shook his head and gave a great snort, like a horse.

‘How do we know any of this is coming? It might not happen at all.’

‘We do know,’ said Jenny, ‘because the Fimbulwinter is already here.’

The dogs all looked blank. Boris opened his mouth, then shut it again, convinced he would only say something stupid, but Checkers said, ‘Fimbulwinter?’

‘The snow and ice are the first signs,’ said Jenny. ‘Then three cocks will sound the alarm, from Valhalla, Midgard and Niflheim, and two wolves, Skoll and Hati, will devour the sun and moon. Then the great Gjallarhorn will sound, to summon the forces of the universe to do battle on the plain of Vigrid.’

‘Sounds like quite a party,’ said Gentleman Jim, and when Jenny just looked at him, he said, ‘I suppose there’s no chance at all that someone’s having you on?’

Jenny stared at him. ‘It’s not a
joke!
’ she said. ‘It’s happening now, all around you! Look – the Fimbulwinter has begun!’

And indeed the snow was falling more thickly and the light in the sky had disappeared.

All this time Pico had stood beside Jenny without saying anything. He wasn’t sure he understood what was going on, but he understood that he was being buried slowly in snow and that his bones were rattling with cold. He shook the snow off him and stamped his paws.

‘Now look,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I know that Jenny is our friend, and if she says she’s come from another world, then I for one believe her. We all knew she was special.’

Jenny touched her nose to his in gratitude.

‘And if she’s in trouble, then I for one will stand by her. She’s not jumping into this void-thingy alone. I think I’m not alone in saying that. We will all go with you, Jenny,’ he said, shaking the snow off his pelt again.

‘Er, well -’ said Flo.

‘We cannot all plunge into the void,’ said Jenny.

‘No, indeed!’ said Flo, and when they all looked at her she added feebly, ‘It’s getting late.’

‘We will
all
go with you,’ Pico said fiercely. ‘Even to certain death.’

‘Hooray!’ said Checkers, for no obvious reason, but Flo said, ‘Excuse me,’ and Gentleman Jim said, ‘Now just wait a minute, all of you. It’s all very well, this talk of wolves and battles and voids, whatever they are, but we don’t live in a world of gods and demons, we live in the real world. Look around you. There’s the croft and there are all the houses. It sounds to me,’ he said kindly, ‘as if you’ve had a very bad dream.’

‘That’s what I thought!’ said Boris, amazed and delighted that someone else had had the same idea. ‘I used to have terrible dreams when Mrs Finnegan started that course on experimental cookery!’

‘That’s what I mean,’ said Gentleman Jim. ‘It’s probably something you ate.’

Jenny trembled all over in protest. She opened her mouth to give Gentleman Jim a piece of her mind, but before she could say anything, there was the unmistakable sound of a cock crowing. Checkers charged off, barking, while the others looked all around, but there was no sign of a cock, or any other domestic bird. Jenny shivered.

‘The first cockerel has crowed,’ she said, and just as she said this, the sky started flickering.

‘Look!’ cried Flo.

Everyone looked upwards. As if in appreciation of this, the sky flickered some more. Black clouds broiled, then rolled apart like theatrical curtains to reveal a blood-red sun. In the eastern corner, where the sky was clear, there was a pale full moon. But what attracted the dogs’ attention was the shape of the surrounding clouds. They looked, undoubtedly, like wolves; two great wolves in fact, one galloping towards the sun with open jaws and the other towards the moon.

‘Good grief,’ murmured Gentleman Jim, and his great ears flopped forward over his eyes, while Flo stared in horror and Checkers ran back and forth, barking madly at the sun and moon as though to warn them.

‘Skoll and Hati,’ murmured Jenny, her heart sinking in dread.

‘Oh dear! Oh, my word!’ gasped Flo. ‘I think one of my funny turns is coming on.
OW!
’ she said, because Jenny had nipped her slightly.

‘Come on, all of you,’ Jenny said. ‘We need to find shelter.’ And she trotted towards a cluster of low-lying bushes.

‘What’s happening?’ said Boris desperately, following Checkers, and Flo shrieked, ‘We’re all going to die!’

‘No,’ said Jenny firmly. ‘None of you is going to die. I can prevent Ragnarok from coming here. I will return.’

Then Pico stood in the middle of the circle of dogs and raised himself to his full, unimpressive height. ‘I have
already said that you will not go alone,’ he said. ‘But what I want to know is, if you have changed the course of destiny once, can it not be done again? Is there no other way?’

Jenny closed her eyes for such a long time, chasing a distant memory, that Boris thought she might have fallen asleep. ‘Yes,’ she said eventually. ‘There might be another way.’ Then she lowered the mistletoe dart towards Pico. ‘You must prick me with this,’ she said, ‘until the blood flows.’

‘Ooo-er,’ said Flo, and Pico said, ‘I can’t do that,’ looking very shocked.

‘You must!’ said Jenny impatiently. ‘For there will be a message in the blood that falls.’

Pico could hardly bear to watch as he held out the mistletoe dart and Jenny drove her paw down on to it, holding it there until nine drops of blood fell on to the snow. Then shakily she held the wounded paw up and sniffed at the blood on the ground.

‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘There is a message.’

By the time Sam got home from school, the snow was falling fast. He couldn’t wait to take Jenny out into it. He let himself in at the back door and shouted for her, then stopped. Jenny was always there, waiting for him. Sometimes she started barking before he had even reached the back gate, and when he got to the door she would jump up and down, wagging her tail so hard that it looked as if she was doing a funny kind of dance. Once he’d let himself in they would both leap around the kitchen in excitement and then Sam would take her for a walk. But the kitchen was empty. She wasn’t there.

Mystified, Sam dropped his school bag on to the floor and went into the lounge.

‘Jenny!’ he called. Jenny?’

He ran into each room, but there was no sign of her. Panic rising, he hurried back into the kitchen. There he noticed for the first time that the dog flap fitted by their neighbour looked as though it had been disturbed, and he remembered that the back gate had been open when he had run through it. His heart gave a hollow thump. Surely she couldn’t – she wouldn’t – have run away. Why would she?

Sam stared at the back door without seeing it. He was so distracted, he didn’t even notice the scorch marks on the cupboards and floor. His mind was filled with a single, awful thought. Suppose Jenny had run back to where she had come from?

No, she wouldn’t do that, Sam thought fiercely, brushing a tear from his eye. She would never leave without saying goodbye.

He knew he had to do something. He lifted Jenny’s lead from the hook by the door and, although his mother had told him to wait in after school until she got home and do his homework, he opened the door and ran out into the whirling storm.

Jenny lowered her nose to the first drop of blood.

‘The great hound seeks the mistletoe twig,’ she said, and the other dogs looked at one another, mystified. ‘He must on no account be allowed to have it, for with it he can unleash Ragnarok on the nine worlds and reign supreme.’

She paused, understanding finally why Fenrir had tried to trick her into giving him the twig. She shuddered at the thought of what would have happened had he succeeded, and the other dogs looked at her dumbly.

‘Only one other hound can defeat Fenrir,’ she said, sniffing the second drop. ‘The greatest of all hounds. The Guardian of the Darkest Way.’

‘Er – who?’ asked Boris, but Jenny didn’t answer. She knew who the Guardian of the Darkest Way was, she just didn’t know why he would be on their side, or even how they could find him. Suppressing these questions, she moved on to the third drop of blood.

‘The greatest hunter must sound his horn,’ she said, ‘to end the final battle.’

‘And who might that be?’ asked Gentleman Jim, but Jenny only moved on to the next drop.

‘He shines above three worlds, but his soul is in a place far below,’ she said, and paused for a moment, perplexed. The message was getting more mysterious, if anything.

‘What’s she talking about?’ Boris wanted to know, but Checkers hushed him.

‘His soul must be released,’ said Jenny, sniffing the next drop.

‘Er – how?’ whispered Flo, but Gentleman Jim nudged her warningly.

‘The Guardian of the Darkest Way will not come willingly,’ she added after examining the sixth drop of blood. ‘He must be fought, if necessary, and brought from his lair. So that the soul of the hunter can be released.’

‘A fight – hooray!’ said Checkers, but no one else spoke.

Jenny trembled. She dared not think about fighting the Guardian of the Darkest Way. There was nothing for it but to press on with the message.

‘The great wolves must be kept at bay until the hunter returns,’ she said, after sniffing the seventh drop. ‘So that they do not swallow the sun and moon.’

She shook herself lightly, so that the others wouldn’t see how scared she was. This was getting worse and worse.

‘Only the Thread of Destiny can restrain the great wolves,’ she said, touching the next drop with her nose. She paused for a moment, deep in thought.

‘Well, go on, then,’ said Checkers, bounding round them all. ‘What’s next?’

‘The mistletoe dart must be returned,’ said Jenny, and she looked up.

There was a short silence.

‘Er – it doesn’t say
how
we’re supposed to do all this, does it?’ asked Gentleman Jim.

Jenny went back along the nine drops of blood. She sniffed for a long time, so that Checkers nearly burst with impatience.

‘Each of you will have to enter the void,’ she said finally. ‘Follow the Dog Star. It will take you on your separate journeys.’ She looked up to see blank expressions on the faces of her five friends. ‘That’s all,’ she said.

‘Oh, right,’ said Gentleman Jim. ‘Er – you do know that none of that made sense, don’t you?’

Checkers looked ready to bound off straight away, then he paused and said, ‘Void?’

‘Fimbulwinter?’ said Boris, who was still trying hard to keep up.

And Gentleman Jim said, ‘It doesn’t make sense. What does it all mean? What are the nine worlds?’

But Jenny shook her head. ‘I do not know them,’ she said. ‘I only know my world and yours. Each of the worlds has its own gods. Mine has the ancient gods Odin and Freya and Thor. This hunter, whoever he is, must belong to a different world, with different gods, but I do not know which one.’

‘Oh, well then,’ said Flo, who was suffering from the cold now and was anxious to get back home. ‘We can’t go there unless we know where it is, can we? And we don’t, because, as Gentleman Jim says, the message doesn’t make sense -’

‘It does make sense,’ said Jenny. ‘I have to return the mistletoe dart.’

‘Yes, but how?’ said Flo. ‘I vote we all go home and think about it after tea.’

‘Some of us don’t have homes to go to,’ said Gentleman Jim, looking very sad, and briefly he told them about monstrous Maureen.

Then Checkers said he wouldn’t be in a hurry to get back either, and told them about John, who had turned into a raving lunatic just because Checkers had eaten a bit of paper. And Boris said he didn’t care where he went, so long as it wasn’t back to the dogs’ home.

‘Well, some of us
do
have homes to go to,’ Flo said, a little desperately. ‘Pico? Your mum must be missing you by now.’

Pico seemed sunk in a reverie. ‘I don’t know,’ he said in a distant tone. ‘I always wondered when my time would come to travel to far horizons. And I think this may be it.’

Flo shook herself to get rid of the snow. ‘You’re mad, all of you,’ she said. ‘All this talk about wolves and gods and strange messages in the snow. I know what that message means. It means we should all go home and have a good night’s sleep.’

Just then, a terrible howling filled the air, above the howling of the storm. It was a howl of desolation, destruction and ravening hunger. If the end of the world could be put into a howl, it would sound like this one. All who heard it felt they had gone temporarily insane. Flo shrieked and tried to hide, rather unsuccessfully, behind Pico, and all Checkers’s hair stood on end, so he looked like an enormous toilet brush.

‘What – was – that?’
gasped Gentleman Jim.

Jenny stood her ground, though her bones were rattling with fear. ‘Fenrir,’ she said.

Fearfully, the dogs followed the direction of her gaze. They could all see that the great wolf-clouds were nearer to the sun and moon now. They seemed to be travelling slowly, which was a good thing, but not if you considered that they were actually covering immeasurable distances of time and space. Exactly between them, on the far horizon, they could see a dark speck, growing bigger.