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.
42 Success for the Sorcerer
Panic swept the rock. The resting Noaidis tried to help those still lost to the power of the drums and chanting. Some woke easily, others not at all and had to be left to death as their brothers sought what little protection the bare island provided.
Lieaibolmmai found himself flat on his face concealed in the dark of the cave entrance, digging in his furs for his little knife. There was a squelching noise like a man walking through a swamp, and he saw the monster put its back paws through the chest of the Noaidi in the bird mask.
The gigantic creature was hideous. Its black wolf’s head with eyes of shining emerald sat on a body that was a twisted stand-off between man and wolf, though three times the size of the biggest man Lieaibolmmai had ever seen. The creature loped on all fours, its back limbs and front left those of a wolf, while its front right, which it used to tear and smash the Noaidis, to pull them into its crushing jaws, was the arm of a freakishly big human.
The sorcerers had been taken completely by surprise. Some were slashing at the creature with their knives, some were th
rowing rocks, a few were shooting arrows from squat bows, but most were scrambling for the boats that would take them off the island.
Lieaibolmmai cleared his mind. Hadn’t he bound the wolf? He had gone to it in its dreams, called it with his drums, commanded it into the cave and done all the magic as the runes had revealed. He had also heard the girl with the wolf and it was certain they were known and important to each other. And hadn’t the wolf appeared in exactly the form he had seen in his visions? So what was this thing?
He felt himself pissing where he lay. He had to control himself, to think clearly.
Then he understood that he had been deceived. Somehow the goddess had tricked him. He had snared a wolf but not the one he was looking for. And yet he had touched its mind, run with it in the wide dark of the mountains, breathed its joy in the kill. He could not understand it.
Lieaibolmmai was an honest man. He had no delight in the dark magics he had been shown and looked for power only to defend himself rather than for its own sake. He knew what he had to do - to give the girl he had uprooted and the wolfman he had enchanted and damned a chance. He went further into the cave and threw down the ropes.
‘The wolf is here,’ he said into the darkness. ‘Stay until it has finished killing. I will do my best to control it. I will—’
He never finished his sentence. A primordial sense told him that something was behind him, something worse than a neck-break fall. He stepped forward into the darkness.
At the bottom of the shaft Feileg and Adisla heard Lieaibolmmai crash to the ground beside them and then his scream. He had torn his arm from its socket and couldn’t stifle his agony.
Then something else dropped softly down the shaft, some sort of creature.
In the blackness there were retching and coughing noises. The creature hacked, growled and snapped again and again. She heard it snuffle forward, its snout testing the darkness. Adisla was close to collapse. She could concentrate on nothing, think of nothing but the awful scraping sounds coming from the creature’s throat, within which she seemed to hear some words.
‘My love,’ it said. ‘I have found you.’
43 A Sacrifice
Vali. That name still described what faced Adisla in the black of the pit.
How much change must you go through before you are no longer you? How many planks can you replace on a ship before you have to say that you have a new boat?
Vali’s jaws dripped with the blood of the sorcerers, his mind was full of the scent of their panic, and yet, now that he had found Adisla, a glimpse of who he was came to him, indistinctly, hardly discernible, as a distant shore might appear through haze. This was the girl he had loved since the instant he met her. He fought down his other perceptions - the delicious aroma of anxiety that clung to her, the succulence of her flesh, even her threat. She was not him, and every living thing that was not him now seemed hostile and dangerous.
‘No,’ said Adisla. ‘No.’ She could see nothing in the darkness, nothing at all, but that made the creature more terrible - its rasping voice, the heat of its breath.
‘I have found you, as I vowed,’ said Vali. ‘Come from this place.’
Adisla shied back, reaching for Feileg’s hand.
‘What are you?’ she said.
‘Your love. Vali.’
The Noaidi was trying to bite back his pain but his suffering escaped him in suppressed groans. Vali felt the attraction of the holy man’s agony, calling him to feed. His skin felt alive, his muscles drawing power from his questing hunger.
‘Keep away from me,’ said Adisla. Her body convulsed as she clung to Feileg in the dark. Vali could see them clearly and felt his lips draw back from his teeth, his legs prepare to spring. He willed himself to be still.
Feileg spoke. ‘It is him. I saw the beginning of this change. It is the prince.’
Adisla was shaking her head.
‘Let me take you from here,’ said the wolf.
Adisla drew in her breath and backed further away. ‘I will not go.’
‘Better that than the damp and dark,’ said Feileg. ‘Go. If it is your turn to die then you will die.’
‘I do not fear death, only him.’
‘He is as the Norns wish him to be. Now go.’
Still she did not go. Feileg pushed her forward. Then fear killed all her thoughts, and she did not resist as Vali gathered her up. Her weight was nothing to him and he lifted her to the top of the shaft and then pulled himself up using his human arm. Three Noaidis stood at the mouth of the cave. The sun had risen behind them, turning the rocks inside to burning gold and revealing Vali and his burden to the sorcerers. They let fly with their bows. Vali turned his back to them to shield Adisla. The arrows hit him hard but didn’t even break his skin. Vali put the girl down, turned again and made a stuttering, snarling run towards them. They fell back and scattered. Vali returned to Adisla.
She tried to summon her strength, not for herself but for him.
‘Do you remember what you were?’
‘I remember the betony you gave me when I first went out to fight. I remember you at the river, the sun on the water and you racing your brothers from bank to bank. I remember how you kissed me when we last saw each other. I remember you, Adisla, so I remember me.’
Adisla looked at him. Somewhere in his expression, in the inclination of his head, she could see her Vali. It was him, so how could she be afraid?
‘Do you know what you have become?’ said Adisla.
The creature bowed its head. It stammered, ‘I am a b-better thing.’
‘No, Vali, you are not. You must come back to me,’ said Adisla. ‘We must break this curse.’ Feileg was beside her. He had climbed one of the ropes Lieaibolmmai had thrown down the shaft.
The wolf spoke: ‘It feels like a blessing. I am so strong and the world is so beautiful.’
‘We have had only one blessing in life, and one curse,’ said Adisla. ‘Each other. You have found me and I will find you. There are sorcerers who will help you, and we will take them the gifts they ask to save you.’
To Vali, Adisla’s body sparkled with scents, sang with her fear. And there was another sensation too, something even more persuasive. They would be together for ever if he ate her. They would be the same person. What closer love than that is possible? No! Her connection to him was stronger than hunger. Her love burst over him like cool water on hot iron and made a blade of his will.
‘What would you have me do, Adisla?’
‘Wait here, on this island.’
‘I cannot command myself.’
‘Then let us command you. Vali, this is a trap and a refuge. Go within and let us keep you here. We will bring your salvation, I promise.’
‘I will starve.’
‘Your hunger is worse fulfilled. It will be a noble agony and, I promise, my love, it will end.’
The great beast craned its head in something like thought.
Vali saw the flight of the arrow and knew it was going to miss him, so he ignored it. He hadn’t thought where else it might go. It struck Adisla in the leg, spinning her to the ground in a hard fall.
The bowman died for her, killed not for his arrow but so that Vali’s hunger could feast on flesh that was not Adisla’s. She was trying to stand, her stricken movements firing all his wolf senses, impelling him to take her.
He leaped towards her and stood above her, the man he had been struggling to spare her, the wolf he had almost become simmering in resentment at that restraint. No. Yes. No. Yes. Yes.
The wolfman shoved at Vali’s side, punching and slapping at him, trying to shake his attention from the stricken girl. Slowly the wolf turned its head to him, the black bulk of its body almost featureless against the light of the cave mouth.
Feileg was shouting at Vali, trying to get through to him. ‘After her there is no way back! After her this, always.’ Blood filled up Vali’s senses. He seemed almost to teeter above Adisla, rocking and keening as he struggled to fight the pull of
her distress.
There was a scream from below. Lieaibolmmai had tried to climb from the shaft but the ruin of his arm made it impossible and he had fallen. The wolf lunged at Adisla. She felt his breath on her face, his teeth brush her neck. But Vali, still there inside the wolf, pulled his animal body back, slammed Feileg to one side and threw himself into the shaft after the sorcerer. He tumbled down, crashing to the floor.
‘I am lost,’ said Vali, not in the wolf’s growl but in the voice of his mind, ‘and I will never be found again.’
Lieaibolmmai scrambled back through the darkness, back away from the thing he had summoned. He knew he had lost to the goddess and his duty was clear. ‘Seal us in!’ he shouted. ‘Seal us in!’