A storm swept over them hard and cold but Vali did not pause. The fire was invisible now but he still could scent its wet embers through the downpour. There was another smell too - the sour smack of the wolfman’s wound. Vali tried to ignore what it was doing to him but a bubbling growl seemed to fill his mind and he struggled against acknowledging it for what it was. A call for blood. Blood. The taste and the scent of it had not left him since the ship and he could not shake its savour.
They found the remains of a camp as the sun was beginning to dip behind a large black peak, spreading a span of rays across the sky. There was no one around, but the earth was flattened and there were the cold ashes of a fire and the smell of animal skins on the grass where people had slept.
‘They went inland,’ said Feileg.
Vali nodded. He knew. ‘Then follow,’ he said. He spat. For a day he had been salivating heavily.
The prince seemed possessed to the wolfman. Feileg looked at him with fear in his eyes and he did as he said.
The storm had gone and the sun was rising by the time they came upon the reindeer hunters. A new fire had led them there, seductive in its smell of cooking meat.
A single family was gathered around two squat conical tents of birch poles and reindeer skins. The tents were open at the top where the sticks met, and in one of them was the small fire that had drawn Vali and Feileg in. Of more immediate concern, however, were the two men who challenged them a bowshot from the camp. A bowshot was an appropriate measure of distance because both of the hunters had strange short bows in their hands. Arrows were stuck in the ground in front of them, not nocked, but available for easy access.
Vali felt his blood rising in his veins, ready for the fight, and tried to tell himself there was no need. Yet his focus had shifted, it seemed. His first response was to think of murder. He felt a hand at his side and his sword was drawn without him touching it. Feileg tossed the sword towards the bowmen and sat down on the ground. Vali exchanged a glance with him. The wolfman was wounded but Vali had only ever seen him respond to newcomers with seething anger before. Now he acted as Vali himself would have wanted to act, had he been in more control of his mind. Vali remembered the raid on the monastery. Hadn’t he made a gesture like that once? He tried to recall that thought, to drop an anchor to hold him still in the tide of animosity that was engulfing him.
The hunters, who wore dark blue coats trimmed with red and gold bands, gave a friendly wave and walked towards the brothers. They were an interesting people, thought Vali, with dark hair and blue eyes like his own. They all exchanged smiles, and the hunters said something in a strange language and sat down in front of them. Vali didn’t understand a word.
The wolfman was opening his pack with weak fingers. He offered the hunters wine in a skin, which they drank from gratefully. It was the same skin Vali had tried. He had thought it was bad but the hunters seemed to like it well enough. One of them gestured towards Feileg’s wound and then to the camp. Vali stood to follow them but realised that Feileg could not get up. He had spent the last of his energy on the overnight trek. The prince had never seen the wolfman weak before. He knew what had happened - his wound had turned. There wasn’t long for him now.
Vali forced himself to think, to be the boy who had grown up around Forkbeard’s farms, the young man who had loved Adisla and had vowed to die for her. That dirty mire water was in him though, and he struggled to frame his thoughts. It came to him that he should help Feileg to his feet. He crouched, put the wolfman’s arm around his shoulders and got him up. The human gesture seemed to restore Vali and his head cleared some more. These were Whale People or their kin from the interior of the country who lived from reindeer. Hemming had said that Haarik intended to exchange Adisla for his son. Perhaps they would know where or who this Domen was that Bodvar Bjarki had spoken of.
At the camp the men made signs for the brothers to sit inside one of the tents. A woman was in there, holding a young child. She looked at them with wary eyes but pointed to some furs for Feileg to lie on. Vali lowered the wolfman to the ground and then went outside. The interior of the tent was unbearably stuffy. He needed to be under the sun.
Feileg lay breathing heavily on the deerskins. The pace Vali had demanded had nearly killed him. The wolfman was convinced that some sort of sorcery had taken the prince but he was still determined to follow him. Something had moved in Feileg when he had spoken to Adisla and he was set on following his impulse to find her until the end. He breathed in the aromas of the tent: cooking and curds of goats’ milk, reindeer hide and the birch fire. Feileg found it all immensely comforting and recalled evenings sitting in the dark with his brothers and sisters and listening to stories of adventure and glory. He had had no idea he was different then, marked for a special destiny among the wolves. Feileg had not wanted to be inside for years, but now he was content. It was Vali who sat in the open, head bowed and looking at his feet.
A man came in. He was smaller than the others and wearing a hat of four corners, like a parcel of cloth folded back on top. He nodded and smiled a greeting, sat down and put a hand on the wolf pelt Feileg wore. The wolfman felt no threat and allowed him to pull it aside. The man examined the wound. He shook his head and ran his fingers lightly across it. Then he turned and said something to the woman. She brought Feileg some stew in a bowl and he ate it gratefully.
‘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, a
nxious 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 befo
re 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.