Veles looked at the coat. It was well made and relatively new. It would fetch a reasonable price, he thought, though he was more inclined to put it on against the cold. He stroked the fur and something came off on his hand. Blood.
‘That, as my mother used to say,’ said Veles, ‘is the mule of stains, and very difficult to get out. It’s dried on too. It won’t fetch much.’
They went on and found other things. There were drums and shoes, clothes and packs. Everywhere there was blood. Then they came upon their first body. And another. And another. All were awfully mutilated.
‘It’s a corpse hoard,’ said Bjarki, ‘a trove of slaughter.’
Veles might have argued with his choice of words but not with the sentiment. The top of the island was a field of the dead.
‘Lord Odin has had some fun here,’ said Bjarki. He had the wolf mask over his face. He looked slightly ridiculous, as it only stretched to just below his mouth.
‘Indeed, indeed,’ said Veles. He looked around and was glad he had given the mask to the berserk. Whatever had done the killing seemed to favour men who masqueraded as animals. There were about thirty corpses, or what the birds had left of them. A wolf’s nose jutted out here, a gigantic beak there. The ears of a huge Arctic hare lay at his feet. Veles could read what had happened. The coats and drums had been dropped by people who had not wanted to risk anything hampering their escape.
He kicked over a mask with his foot. There was a head inside it.
‘Looks like somebody beat us to it,’ said Bjarki, ‘though they’ve left enough furs. Doubtless their ship was too laden with gold.’
He was more used to this sort of sight than Veles and he picked his way through the corpses while the merchant caught his breath and composed himself. Veles looked about him. He wanted to be certain that whoever or whatever had caused this mess had gone from the island. The bodies had not been there for very long and the ravens still had some rich pickings. One pecked at a corpse next to him, watching Veles as the corpse itself seemed to watch him through the eyes of a stag mask. He didn’t like this at all and shooed the bird away. His confidence in the non-existence of supernatural powers was always stronger by a fire, drinking with his fellows, than it was in such wild places.
The crew spread over the island, looking to loot the unlootable. There was the odd fur, the odd knife, but these people had been very poor. Their drums might be worth a bit, Veles thought. He could always sell them back to them, or offer them as curiosities to the courts of the south.
‘Here’s your treasure!’ It was Bjarki’s voice, shouting from somewhere down the slope towards the open sea.
Veles couldn’t see where he was calling from. He walked down. This slaughter must have been some sort of mass human sacrifice, he thought.
‘Some Blöt, eh?’ said Bjarki as if reading his mind. ‘Old King Hrutr did nine slaves at midsummer one year, but this beats that head or rump however you look at it.’ He pointed into a cave. ‘Down there,’ he said. ‘Look.’
Veles squinted into the darkness. He could see nothing. Anxiety gripped him. He wondered if Bjarki was luring him into the dark of the cave to kill him. No. The berserk would have had no qualms at all about splitting his skull in broad daylight, in front of a market-day crowd if the mood took him. If Bjarki had wanted him dead, he would be so already.
‘Do you have any way of seeing better?’
Bodvar Bjarki picked up a dead brand from the fingers of a corpse with as little disquiet as if the man had still been alive and simply passed it to him. Veles struck a flint, kindled the sparks on some wood shavings he had in his pouch and applied them. The torch flamed and the men went down.
Shadows danced around them as they descended. The light of the torch seemed merely an absence of dark, not a thing of itself. In it they saw runes painted on the walls.
‘Can you read them?’ said Bodvar Bjarki.
‘Treasure,’ said Veles, ‘and good fortune.’ He had never bothered too much with runes, preferring the Latin alphabet. He could read them but with difficulty. He wished they did say that, but it seemed to be the normal bilge about spirits and gods.
‘How did you see in here?’ said Veles. It seemed very dark to him.
‘It’s obvious it’s a tomb,’ said Bjarki.
‘So you haven’t actually been in here?’
‘I have no intention of letting you out of my sight, merchant. I don’t trust you. You’d strike a bargain with the men, maroon me here, sell the boat and cheat them out of the profit if I gave you as much as half a chance.’
‘The idea never occurred to me,’ said Veles. It hadn’t actually, but it was good to know Bjarki feared a mutiny, and kind of him to suggest a way it might be done.
The passageway stopped at a large mound of stones. There was no sign of collapse on the tunnel roof, so Veles took them to have been placed there. On one large block a rune had been carved, a jagged sideways swipe with a line through it.
‘What does that mean?’
‘I’ve never seen it before,’ said Veles.
Some other men were behind him now, peering through the wavering light.
‘It’s a holy sign of their people,’ said one.
‘Very likely,’ said Veles, ‘and whoever did this slaughter has taken care to secrete something here.’
‘What?’
Veles shrugged and smiled. ‘We won’t find out until we open it, will we? I suggest you get to work.’
Bjarki grunted. Then he began on the pile of stones.
46 From the Dark
Saitada sat in a shaft of light that cut through from a finger-width opening in the side of the upper cave. She watched her image looking back from the blade of the sword.
She was much older. How much? She didn’t know. The unburned side of her face was not pretty any more: her skin was tight on her bones, pale from lack of light, dirty and cut.
Saitada had been a long time in the dark. The witch caves were endless and deep. She had not known at first that her boys had been taken and had remained underground, trawling the blackness with her fingertips, reaching for a hand, the brush of some hair, listening for the cries of her children in the dark, living off the water of streams and food she could beg from the witches’ servants.
For years, Saitada hadn’t known why her children had been taken. But crawling through blind chimneys, emerging from dripping sumps of rock where her mouth had stolen the inch of air between the water and the tunnel ceiling, taking candles from the boy servants and watching the light struggle against the deep dark, she listened and she learned. The witches, who from their lowest caves could hear a hare’s breath on the mountainside, to whom the rock and the ice of the Troll Wall were just a veil through which they saw from sea to sea, did not notice her, and she did not know to think that odd.
The older witches of course did not speak, and the boys knew only that they needed to fear and to serve them. Neither yielded any information about what had happened to Saitada’s children. The girls, however, initiates new to the dark, shivered and trembled and clung to what they had been. Saitada came to them, sat with them, hugged them and calmed them, though she never thought to say anything. The girls needed to talk, to confess their fears as they would have to their mothers. They told her, among other things, of the threat that was coming, of the deaths and the terror of death. They told her too about two boys who would become one wolf to kill the murderous god. One boy’s body would host the spirit of the wolf, the other would be his food, giving his brother the strength he needed. The witch queen had taken the boys and only one would live. Saitada never found it strange that she could understand the girls’ language. She only knew that her babies had gone.
They were always in her mind, their memory like a tumour that ate everything else she had seen, everything she had been. After years alone she was not a person, just a love and a hate encased in flesh - cherishing the thought of her children, loathing the witch queen who had taken them - watching death begin to creep throug
h the caves.
The girls had all died when Saitada’s grief was at its height. She had gone to the deep dark, where she had thought she would die, when five of them were dead, and emerged to find none alive. The boys were all dead too. From one she had taken tinder and lit a candle. She had no idea why she had come back - her own motivations were now a mystery to her - but in a week her purpose became clear. She had come back to watch the witch queen kill her sisters.
Some went in their sleep; some were strangled and some burned. The majority would have died from neglect, with no boys to tend them, but Saitada brought them food from the sacrifices. It wasn’t kindness. She saw the distress the murders caused the witch queen and didn’t want starvation or thirst to spare her a single one. Saitada saw how the deaths drove the queen on to madness and she sought to guide her hand, leaving rope or tinder, stakes or, once, a long pin that she found in some cloth left as a sacrifice. The queen quickly put Saitada’s gifts to use.
Saitada watched for the arrival of the god the girls had talked about but saw nothing. Rock, pool and stream remained the same in the yellow light of a candle stub; the torpid air and dripping damp didn’t change when the flame was spent.
When the witches were all dead, she tried to kill the witch queen herself. She could not go through with it. Twice she pulled the queen from the Pools of the Dead by a rope at her neck; once she took a little knife, pressed it to her breast but then drew back. Were the runes protecting the witch queen? Even Saitada could sense them now, chiming and splashing and fizzing in the blackness as the witch endured her daily sufferings by water and cold. Frustration began to overwhelm Saitada and she spent a long time trying to think how she could strike her enemy down. But every time she moved against her she faltered.
She found his sword in the lowest caves - it thumped against her knee as she stumbled on the uneven floor. She knew what it was the instant she held it - the slim curve in the jewelled scabbard, the keenness of the blade when it was drawn.
He could kill the witch. He could kill anyone. Saitada knew only one thing about him - his name. Authun. It was enough. She took the sword and went up towards the light.
47 Descent
Feileg could not sail so they were forced to travel by land. The landscape now looked entirely different to when he had come north, a wide field of white leading to distant mountains. But he knew well where they should go - a wolf can always find its home - and he headed south under the swirling skies with Adisla behind him. With her wound she could not walk far, but Feileg sat her on one of the reindeer sleighs and led the animal. The Noaidi who had owned it had not appeared to claim it. The wolfman loaded the sled with good reindeer coats, a tent, furs, snow shoes and boots, and took some flints and plenty of tinder. He also took a spear. He didn’t need it to fight but wanted a sign to warn anyone they encountered to look elsewhere if robbery was on their mind.
The Noaidis who had survived were in no mood to argue. By the time Feileg finished piling the stones all but one sorcerer had gone. The man had marked a stone with a rune, put it on the heap and left.
To Feileg the rune was vaguely familiar. He wished he had asked what it meant but he had no language in common with the holy man. Was it a seal to magically hold the beast in place? Or was it something else, a warning maybe?
He thought on it as they headed south for the Troll Wall, as he made up the tent and the fire within it and brought Adisla the things he had caught and killed for her. The wolf is the king of winter, and Feileg was almost happy, bringing in his kills and allowing Adisla to cook them rather than eat the meat raw as had been his habit. It was the life he had glimpsed as he had kissed her by the post where she had cut him free.
Adisla, however, was withdrawn. Her tears had been replaced by silence. Vali’s condition, she was sure, was her fault. There was no logic to her thinking, but she couldn’t shake her conviction that her liaison with someone so far above her social standing, what she had done to her mother, even her capitulation in agreeing to marry Drengi, were all to blame for what had happened to him. She had grown up with a powerful belief in magic, been raised to learn healing and even some divination. Things were linked, she felt. Her mother had said people stand at the edge of an ocean of events that touches unseen islands and shores. She had allowed something bad to grow between her and Vali. Now something far more terrible had grown within him.
But as they rested by their fires and Feileg described the amazing events of his childhood, the hopelessness she felt about her relationship with Vali bore the seed of hope for a future with Feileg. Slowly, she found she could talk to him. She spoke about her youth with Vali and then just about herself and her life with her brothers and, most of all, her mother. The wolfman listened without comment, and when she told him what she had done to Disa, he just sat for a while before saying, ‘I wish I had known such love.’
‘To kill her?’
‘To save her,’ he said. ‘She was fated to die and she knew it. Better quickly, at her daughter’s hand, than after the torments of the Danes. She chose the instrument of her death - you, who she loved. You are no more to blame than if she had used the knife herself.’
‘I wish I could believe it.’
‘Do you think your mother would have wanted this grief for you?’
‘No.’
‘What would she have wanted?’
Adisla looked up into the shining whorls of the night sky. ‘For me to get on with my life, to meet a good man and bear fine sons,’ she said.
Feileg smiled. ‘Then make that your aim,’ he said.
Feileg, she could see, was not a wolf. The shaman had not taken his humanity with his chants and brews. Feileg was a man, plain and simple, someone who had been raised to savagery but who had reclaimed himself from it. He would make a good husband, she was sure, and she would have been proud to be his wife, had the fates put them together before.
The days were short as they travelled through the mountain passes, but when the moon was bright, Feileg pressed on.
‘Do you know where you’re going?’ she asked him.
‘The south,’ he said. ‘The mountains there are like a fold from this sea to the Troll Wall. We will follow the coast as best we can and then use them to steer us to where we want to go.’
Adisla was left breathless by the beauty of the northern winter, of the bleak hills and the blinding plains, though she found the country barren and threatening compared to the softer features of her coastal home. The journey was rough and bumpy, though the sled was warm beneath the furs and she even managed to doze.
They had been travelling for weeks and the snow was thick when the land in the distance seemed to buckle into ridges of black. As they got nearer they saw them, the Troll Peaks, rising up in crests like the gigantic waves of a solid sea. They appeared daunting, though the way to them was easy - the ground frozen solid, rivers turned into roads. Occasionally they came upon a family hut. There were signs of life - or rather lives that had been. No one came to greet them; no dog barked; no child called out. Clothes left in the sun to dry had bleached and rotted before they froze.
Adisla looked at Feileg and shrugged as if to say, ‘What happened here?’
He shrugged back. ‘These hills leak nightmares,’ he said, ‘they always have. Perhaps it all got too much.’
As they moved through the country at the back of the Troll Wall it seemed the leak had become a flood. Everything was abandoned, everything in ruins; not a house was inhabited.
They followed the hills inland, skirting them before climbing up through a narrow valley. In the heavy light of evening wolves howled invisibly from the ridges.
Adisla, who could walk well by now, looked at Feileg in alarm, but the wolfman was calm.
‘They are my brothers,’ he said, ‘and they are welcoming me home.’
He returned their call and Adisla saw them. What she had taken for rocks were animals, now moving down the slope. Feileg smiled and cut the fretting reindeer free of the s
led.
‘The animal has served us well,’ said Adisla.
‘They would have him, tied to the sled or free,’ said Feileg. ‘This way he dies free. It is what he was meant to do.’
There was no way out for the reindeer - wolves ahead and behind. It turned one way and then the other, a pattering run forward, a pattering run back. And then it stopped. In a moment the pack was on it.
‘It didn’t even try to run,’ said Adisla.
‘It knew there was no point. Why die exhausted? It’s bad enough to die without being made to work for it.’
‘What are we doing?’ said Adisla.
‘Working for it,’ said Feileg.
‘You sound like Bragi.’
‘Thank you.’ He hadn’t told her the old man was dead. She had enough to contend with.
The wolves fed, and when they had finished Feileg shouldered the tent and they walked on up the pass. The pack followed behind. The mountain in front of them had seemed big from a distance. Close up it was immense, bigger than anything Adisla had ever imagined, an enormous barren sweep of grey and white rising out of the valley floor and disappearing into cloud at the top.
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