Wolfsangel (44 page)
Authors: M. D. Lachlan
‘Ruohtta,’ said the man to Feileg. He pointed at him and made a gesture of lying down on his side and turning up his eyes. Feileg realised he was telling him he was going to die.
Feileg had never feared death. When he was with his family he had been told it was glorious; when he was with Kveld Ulf he had seen it as simply a happening - a transformation, a different kind of day among other days. He thought he would be happy to die in the little tent with its domestic smells, among the kindness of these strangers, although the peace of that place, the company of the children and the women, the smiles of the man in the four-pointed hat, made him want to live. He wanted this for himself, he thought. The words ‘I am a wolf’ came to him again, but what wolf ever thought that? He was separate from his forest brothers, for all that he had been raised to be like them. The man in the hat got up and left.
Outside, stew was brought to Vali. He ate a little and drank some of the fermented milk drink he was offered. He could hardly stomach it and accepted only out of politeness. He smiled at the woman who had brought him the stew but the gesture was for him, not her. These rituals of etiquette and manners seemed vitally important to him now. He needed a link to the everyday, the human, he thought, to keep him from - what? He didn’t know, but he was afraid of the feeling within him, halfway between nausea and elation. It was something that seemed ready to evict him from his own head. The prince knew he was losing something valuable to him.
Everything felt different. He had thought before that the sensation was a bit like being drunk, and that impression was stronger now. There was a feeling of freedom, like when the wine first takes effect. There was the knowledge that he was entering a different sort of consciousness. There was even some fear, but this was accompanied by an odd delight, an inner snigger that said, ‘Go on. Give in to it. Step away from yourself and change.’ He did not know where he was going, nor what had happened to him, but instinctively he knew he had to fight it. Mad thoughts jostled in his head: I am becoming not myself, but how can that be? Myself is what I am, therefore I am leaving myself to become myself. Myself is more than one thing. I am uncontinuous and broken, I am . . . He struggled to find a word to sum up how he felt. And then it came to him: hungry. Yes, he was hungry, but not for anything that the pot could provide.
He looked inside the tent and realised that Feileg would not be coming with him. He wanted to leave right now, to find Adisla. The love he bore her seemed to take on even more importance. It was like a light seen through rain by a lost traveller, something to guide him to safety. He saw her face as he’d seen it for the last time when she’d kissed him goodbye - fearful, anxious but full of love for him.
Vali waved to the man in the four-pointed hat. He willed his unwieldy brain to concentrate on what he needed to do, using Adisla as the focus for his thoughts.
The man came and stood next to him. Without a shared language, they struggled to communicate.
‘Haarik’s son?’ said Vali. He scratched in the dirt a picture of a ship then mimed it being wrecked by smashing his fist into his hand. He drew a crown and mimed snatching it.
‘Domen,’ he said. ‘Where is Domen?’
The man smiled at him and made a calming gesture with his hands. Then he turned, ruffled the hair of one of the children, kissed the woman who had brought the stew and set off across the plain towards the distant mountains.Vali felt helpless. He sat outside the tent with the reindeer family watching him, saying nothing.
He began to lose concentration, to just exist beneath the changing light, the moving clouds. Vali didn’t know how long he had been sitting there when he felt a hand on his shoulder.
‘No tribute.’ The man spoke Norse, however badly.
The man was back, and with someone else just like himself in a dark wool tunic and four-pointed hat. Beside them was a roped reindeer. The nervousness of the beast seemed to flood over Vali; he could taste its fear.
Instead of a bow the newcomer had a broad shallow drum in his hands. Vali started. It was just like the one he’d seen in his dream on the boat, where he’d glimpsed Adisla surrounded by those odd masked figures. This one though wasn’t decorated with that crooked little rune that had tumbled from the skins of the drums in the vision, but with scenes of hunting and fishing.
‘No tribute.’ The man said it again.
‘No tribute,’ said Vali. ‘I’m looking for a person, not furs or gold.’
The man smiled, and Vali saw that he had two extra teeth in his upper jaw. He knew this was how the Whale People chose their holy men - by physical peculiarities like withered limbs or odd-coloured eyes. Veles Libor had told him as much. The thought of the merchant’s name filled Vali with nausea.
‘Domen?’
The holy man looked at him blankly.
‘Domen. Drums.’ Vali pointed at the drum. ‘Domen.’
‘Vagoy?’ said the holy man.
‘Domen.’
The holy man shook his head and gestured inside the tent, pointing at Feileg. He scratched a sort of rough circle and a wavy line in the dirt. Vali didn’t understand. The man took up a rock. He scratched out a little hollow in the earth, put the rock in it and poured some water from a container around the rock.
‘Vagoy,’ he said, pointing at the rock. Then he howled, splashed at the water and mimed beating the drum.
Vali suddenly saw it - he was showing him an island, an island full of wolves where the drum was beaten.
‘Domen?’ said Vali, pointing at the rock.
‘Ahhh! Dooerrrrrmaaan,’ said the man, and Vali realised he had got the pronunciation wrong.
‘Yes, Domen.’
The man nodded.
‘Jabbmeaaakka,’ he said. Then he pointed at the tent, shook the flap that covered its entrance, said slowly, ‘Hel. Goddess. Fight,’ and snarled with a grabbing gesture.
Vali pointed about him: which way?
The holy man gestured east, waving his arm several times to indicate that it was a long way.
Vali didn’t wait. He got to his feet immediately and strode off in that direction but the man called after him in his incomprehensible language. The prince turned and the man pointed at him, then at himself, then east again.
‘You will take me?’ said Vali. He echoed the man’s gestures.
The holy man gave a slow nod and disappeared inside the tent.
38 What Is Within
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.
39 The Nature of Magic
Adisla had now been on the island for months and to her surprise had been treated very well. It wouldn’t have been her first choice of a home - a long flat rock rising out of a turbulent and cold sea - but her fear that she was to be some stinking Whale Man’s bed slave had not been realised.
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