An odour of burning seeped into her consciousness, not a pleasant smell at all, nothing like wood or straw on fire. It was closer to hair.
‘See what they did to me, see what they did!’
She climbed out of the sink hole and walked down to the lower caves, and then lower still, following the burning smell and the voice.
‘I am blind, I am blind!’ The voice spoke again.
The witch moved on down. The caves became smaller. She had never been in them before and sensed they were not part of the real world, but some place accessible only by magic. She could taste the smoke in her throat, thick and bitter, and the voice became louder. Then in the dim light she could make out a figure. At first she thought he was shrouded in mist, but as she drew nearer she could see something between steam and smoke hissing from his thrashing body.
The man was naked and tied to a rock with bloody and glutinous ropes, while above him snakes of vivid purple, green and yellow writhed, dripping venom onto his face and into his eyes. His features were swollen, bruised and black. His tongue was mottled blue and white and the poison sizzled on his flesh. His pale skin was burned into welts and his red hair singed to patches. He was screaming and howling, tearing at his bonds, but he couldn’t get them off. The witch had practised enough minor magics to recognise the fetters for what they were. They were entrails.
Suddenly, for the first time since before she had joined her sisters underground when she was small, the witch queen felt like the child she was. The presence of this tormented man terrified her. This, she knew, was a creature even the gods feared.
Next to him was a silver bowl. The witch came forward and picked it up, collecting the venom before it fell onto the god’s face. She knew now who it was - Loki, lord of lies, betrayer of the gods, bane of heroes but sometimes, occasionally, friend of man.
‘I send my mind forth in torment. I travel the nine worlds in agony, witch. Do you see what they did to me, the slaughter-fond gods, they who have taken numberless heads in battle, just because I took one little life? Who could love Baldur, the perfect god, the stinking lickspittle? Not so perfect he couldn’t die, eh?’
The witch had hardly spoken since she had been a girl, her only language what she picked up from initiates and servants who came to the caves late - aged seven or eight at the oldest. So she said nothing now.
‘You have given me something, you have granted me respite. What is it you want?’
He turned his head to hers. Even during her long training, in her conversations with the rock spirits, with the dwarfs and the elves, she had never seen such a terrible sight. His whole face resembled a blood blister ready to burst. The bowl was overflowing, her fingers swelling as the venom splashed on them. She flung the steaming liquid to the floor, but before she could return the bowl to its place, the venom of the snakes fell once more on Loki, singeing and blackening his flesh. The god screamed and vomited and the witch shoved the bowl back under the flow of poison.
‘Twice you’ve given me respite from this torment. What is it you want? For the first respite you gave me, I will tell you that you and your sisters are not long from death. You have grown too strong in magic and knowledge and he, the lore-jealous lord Odin, will strike at you. Odin is coming for you in your realm on earth. He has taken human form and is upon you, in the flesh, mighty in his corrosive magics.’
This puzzled the witch. She was close to Odin. She had looked for the god many times, and it was he she had expected to find through the ordeal of water.
Loki went on, coughing and retching from the effects of the poison. ‘For the second respite you granted me, I will tell you that you have it in your hands to avoid this fate. He does not yet sense himself. The god is not yet awake; he does not know who he is. Act quickly and strike at him. There are two boys, Fire and Frost. One to live, one to die.’
The bowl overflowed again, Gullveig cast aside the poison and replaced it above the screaming god. Now her own arms were swollen and burned, her fingers numb. Only her training helped her ignore the pain.
‘No one has ever stayed to offer me three bowls of respite,’ said Loki, ‘and for this service I grant you your answer. At the end of the world Odin will fight with the wolf and die. You must bring the wolf to earth as Odin is on earth. Make the spirit of the wolf come to flesh in a man as the god has come to flesh. This is your rune and your guide. It will kill a god. Take it from one who knows.’
A thought sprang into the witch’s mind: ‘Show me my enemy.’ But then the steam of the venom obscured her sight, the acrid smell choked her and she dropped the bowl. Darkness descended. For the first time in nine days she cried out, and the boys threw down a loop of rope to pull her from the stream.
The witch hacked and coughed out the water from her lungs as she was hauled from the sink hole. The boys moved back and the sisters came to her. They didn’t bring food, fire, blankets or medicine but the scrap of belt and the brooch pin. The witch looked down at her fingers. They were swollen and blackened. Despite her pain, she took up the brooch and carved a rune into the leather, then she threw it to the floor and collapsed onto her hands and knees, panting and retching.
The circle of sisters looked down at the rune and felt a muttering thought of disquiet pass among them. Half of them saw this.
It was not one of the twenty-four runes given by Odin that they had expected to see. It was a new rune, something that hadn’t been given to a witch queen for eight generations.
These witches knew it was something special, though they struggled to grasp its importance.
To some the resonance of the symbol was only slightly clearer than their existing forewarning of momentous change, which had come to them in the idea of a storm. It signified a thunderbolt. They took the feeling of the rune into their minds and turned it over. Then one saw the mouth of a river between two hills. Another saw a church on a hill and knew something important was inside it: two boys, each in his way important to them. A long magic was needed, taking years to make but lasting years too. What were the boys? One was the subject of the spell, the other something else. What? They couldn’t see. A helper? No. A sacrifice? No. Something different. The other boy was like the extinguished candle, like the bowl of rainwater, like a hundred other things the witches used to work their magic. A medium for something? Not quite. Then they saw it. He was an ingredient.
Others saw a different meaning in the rune, one that it would bear down the centuries until one day someone gave it a name. Wolfsangel. This was not a word the sisters would have recognised, though its sense was clear to them - wolf trap. They saw themselves flying beneath a heavy moon as a smudge of starlings to settle at midnight on the roof of King Authun’s hall, to call to the sleeping king and tell him that his wife would never give him a boy and that, if he needed counsel, then the witches would receive him. They saw the further future too. A girl on a hillside. She had bright blonde hair. She was important too, they could tell but none of them could see how.
Some of the witches who huddled around the rune saw the symbol on its side.
These sisters felt a chill, as ordinary people do when they hear wolves in the hills. The rune’s resonance went through their minds like a hungry howl. It said ‘werewolf’.
That was the point of the magic, what the two brothers were for: so that the wolf god could take form inside a man.
The witch queen was at the point of blacking out, unable to connect to her sisters in her normal way. Exhausted, her consciousness balled in on itself like a child left alone in the dark.
She tapped at the rune and, her voice cracking, she spoke.
‘Protector,’ she said.
7 What Was Lost
The beauty of the summer seemed to fill him to bursting, the fjord sparkling with a light that was almost painful to look at, the meadow flowers among the green grass like flames beneath the sun. Away over the hillside a man was calling.
‘Vali! Vali! Where are you? You goat!’
‘He’s su
pposed to be hunting murmuring birds with me but he can’t even find where I am,’ said Vali, looking at the man from a hollow in the ground. He was about thirteen, ready to go to raiding almost, but still laughing like a little child.
‘You’ll be beaten,’ said the girl with him. She was the same age, in a full skirt. She was pale, had long blonde plaits and in her hair was a whalebone comb. Next to her was a basket of herbs that she’d been collecting for her mother.
‘It’ll be worth it,’ he said, and kissed her. It was the first time, just a peck.
‘Get off me!’ said Adisla, standing up. ‘Bragi! Bragi, he’s over here!’
And the big man had come running.
‘Prince Vali,’ he said, ‘you make things very difficult for me at times. Where is your spear? Where is your bow?’
‘I’m sure they’re around here somewhere,’ said Vali. ‘I left them down by the stream when I saw Adisla.’
Bragi, a battle-scarred old warrior of around thirty-five, shook his head.
‘Those weapons must never leave your side, you know that. When the time comes for you to go raiding, and it is awful soon, what are you going to do? Leave your shield and sword in the ship as soon as you see a pretty girl?’
‘I think that highly likely,’ said Adisla.
‘You, young lady, can keep your mouth shut. Look at you, pale as a princess. A farm girl like you should show more signs of honest toil.’
‘This conversation could be regarded as toil enough for a lifetime,’ said Adisla.
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said Bragi. ‘I’m going to speak to your mother.’
The girl shrugged in a do-what-you-like way.
Bragi pointed his finger at her.
‘I make no bones about it,’ he said. ‘I blame you for what has happened to him. Before he started ignoring the court and spending his time with farmers’ daughters, he showed some promise at arms. Now his weapons lie neglected and he spends his days at your mother’s house, whittling away his time in games and talk. The son of Authun the White Wolf a cinder biter!’
Vali laughed. He had always wondered about that particular expression. Did cinder biters really bite cinders? If so, he wasn’t one. But if it meant he was happiest at the hearth, sitting beside Adisla and listening to the stories of the farmers, then it was true, he was a cinder biter.
‘I haven’t cast a spell on him,’ said Adisla.
‘No,’ said Bragi, ‘but you may as well have. Come on, we’re going to see your ma.’
It was a stiff walk up the valley to Adisla’s farm and hot work in the sun. Bragi made Vali carry both packs and all their weapons as punishment for running off while hunting, and when he saw the prince wasn’t encumbered enough added a few rocks to the bags for good measure.
Adisla’s mother was Disa, a noted healer who lived in a house above the growing port of Eikund in Rogaland, home of the Rygir people. In Vali’s time there it had blossomed from eight to twelve houses and so was considered a large settlement. Vali had been sent to Eikund by his father Authun five years before to guarantee the treaty between the Horda and the Rygir that had ended a bloody war.
Bragi had been sent with him to see to his training in hunting and swordsmanship but it had become apparent very quickly that the old retainer and the prince were temperamentally unsuited. The only time they seemed to get on was sailing Vali’s little skute around the coast, hunting for seals and fishing. Neither ever said much on these trips. Vali was too engrossed in the sun and the water, the feel of the small boat as it moved with the wind like an animal. Bragi didn’t speak because he had a superstition that it drove the fish away.
Vali was sweating by the time he reached the house, which was no more than a large hut. He was glad that it was high summer, where time began to lose definition and night was just a sliver of darkness in the broad wash of the day. Even though it was late, the sun was still high and down in the river that skirted the farms people were still bathing, as they did every Saturday. As soon as he got the chance, he would join them.
He laughed as he remembered the first time he’d met Adisla. He’d been at Eikund a week when he’d heard a commotion. She had gone to the bottom of the river and held her breath until her mother had plunged in after her on a mission of rescue only for Adisla to pop up behind her, giggling wildly. Even then, five summers before, no one could swim like Adisla. Her brothers called her ‘The Seal’, the first of a series of ever-evolving nicknames they had for her, not all of which were particularly flattering. Seals were known as ‘dogs of the sea’, so she had been called Garm for a while, after the hound that lives in Hel, and then - after Disa had objected to that - Woofy. Vali sometimes called her that himself when he was with her family, but he always used her real name when they were alone.
Vali loved this place - the smoke with its promise of food issuing from the vent on the roof, chickens running around his feet and dogs coming out to bark at him in greeting, not warning.
He had a place in the long hall of King Forkbeard in the port below but, since he’d come to Rogaland, this was where Vali had always felt most at home and he’d spent as much time at Ma Disa’s as he had at the court.
‘Hello, Ma!’ Vali shouted, and a woman taking drying herbs from the low roof of the hut turned to see them approach.
‘Been up to your usual tricks, I see,’ said Disa. Unlike her daughter, she was as brown as a baked barleycorn, having given up applying the lotions that kept her pretty and pale at about the same time she had ceased caring if she was attractive to men. Disa had divorced her husband and, since he was heavy with his fists, the assembly had voted that she be allowed to keep his farm. He’d died the next year on a raid that was intended to restore his fortune, and she hadn’t been sorry. Now she was queen of her house, which teemed with her own children and those of the surrounding small farms.
On the summer evenings Vali would sit outside with Adisla and her family, playing the board game King’s Table, telling and listening to stories and eating the food from Disa’s incomparable hearth. He even managed something of an education there. Old man Barth, Disa’s only thrall, had been captured in a skirmish with the Danes. Vali was fascinated to learn his language and spent a long time talking to the slave about his homeland and customs. Barth had been a slave in Denmark and, it turned out, regarded Disa as a better mistress than the Danish jarl who had owned him before.
In the winter everyone would cram into the tiny smoky hut, eating baked roots, salted fish and laughing until they couldn’t laugh any more. Her brothers, particularly Leikr and the youngest, Manni, were very dear to him and were his friends in hunting, play and conversation.
‘Ma,’ said Bragi, ‘I need to talk to you about your daughter.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘I want you to forbid her from seeing the prince.’
‘I’m not in the habit of forbidding my children anything,’ said Disa, ‘but I’ll talk to her.’
‘You can’t call her a child - she’s thirteen years old at least. There are girls of her age a year married and all the better for it.’
‘What appears to be the problem?’
Bragi threw his hands into the air and gave a sound like a hiss, as if the bubbling cauldron of complaint he kept inside himself had finally boiled over. Still, he tried to maintain a grip on his politeness, to temper his language and to use fine words to emphasise the difference between himself and the farmers around him.
‘The problem is this. I am an oath-sworn retainer of King Authun the White Wolf. I am a veteran of twenty-three raids. I stood side by side with the king as we faced the Geats at the Orestrond, hopelessly outnumbered, ready for death. With that dread lord I cut my way through twenty of the enemy and made the ocean red with sword sweat to reach our boats . . .’
Disa was having to suppress a smile. Behind Bragi, Vali was miming the story. He’d heard it all a hundred times and in a hundred ways - boasted before the drinking hall, whispered around a campfire, shouted at
him as an example to greater effort. He knew the words by heart.
‘I am a warrior, and I was honoured and delighted to be offered the post of bodyguard and tutor to this boy. I find, however, that it is increasingly a burden of loathsome proportions. Loathsome proportions. I feel like Loki, tied to the rock and my eyes filled with venom. He is ungovernable, madam, and your daughter is to blame.’
‘In what way?’
‘I curse the day he laid eyes on her. At first it was an innocent friendship of children, but in the last year he has had no time for hunting, none for weapons training. His father had the very unusual idea of allowing him work in the smithy, in order that he should know everything about weapons from their time as rocks of the earth to their effect on an enemy shield. He is absent from the forge. He is absent from the assembly meetings where Forkbeard was to teach him statecraft. He is absent when I call for him to test him with sword and spear. He is absent everywhere, madam, other than at your daughter’s side, where he is, very annoyingly, present.’