The wolf fed, consuming the witch’s flesh in snaps and gulps. Then it shivered and coughed, shook, and finally lay down.
Adisla took up the Moonsword.
The wolf looked at her and spoke. ‘Do not. I cannot command myself if you do.’
Adisla raised the weapon above her head. It felt unbalanced and unwieldy. Feileg had hit the creature with all his strength, and though he had cut it, he had not killed it. She would not stand a chance.
‘I am ready for death,’ she said.
‘Not death,’ said the creature. Its voice was low and rough, the human words forced through the wolf throat and mouth.
‘Is it you, Vali?’
‘Her death has freed my mind from the bloody swamp. It is me.’
‘You are the worst of marvels,’ she said.
‘I am afflicted, but this was an ending. There are sorcerers. We can find them. There is a way back for me.’
‘At what cost? How many have you killed, my love?’
‘I do not want to kill any more.’
‘A wolf kills, Vali.’
‘No, Adisla, no.’
‘I have seen the truth. Feileg was your brother and you killed him.’
The great animal bowed its head. ‘The wolf killed him.’
‘You are an enemy of the gods. I have seen. This is your purpose.’
‘I will be myself again, Adisla.’
Adisla shook her head, tears cutting bright lines through the dirt on her face. ‘But I will never be me. We have loved outside our station; we have offended the gods. I want to go from you, Vali. I want to die.’
‘If you die, my love is so strong that it will call you back from the halls of the dead.’
‘I will live again, Vali. When the god died, a sharp magic entered me and I am certain that it means rebirth. But I will live again without you. You are hated by the dead god.’
‘I am part of his plan, as I saw on the field of the slain. He needs me to fulfil his destiny. I am his enemy and his helper.’
‘I want no part of that Vali.’
There was a noise from behind her, though she didn’t turn to see its cause.
The wolf bent his head towards Adisla. ‘I love you,’ he said.
‘Then forget me.’ She lifted the Moonsword and stepped forward to strike him.
Vali felt himself shiver. He knew he could not help but respond to a threat, but he fought with all his will not to attack her. He understood who he was now - a god killer, reborn in a thousand lifetimes to hunt down Odin in all his incarnations. What room was there for love in that? What place even for himself against the vast magical forces that laid claim to him? He wanted her but he would kill her if she moved against him. As with so much in his life, he had no choice - the wolf would answer violence with violence returned a thousand times.
The sword was bright in her hand and the sound of anger was in his throat. He tried to frame the words. ‘It isn’t finished. We will live again, and I will never rest until I have found you and felt you love me as you once did.’ But the words didn’t come, just the blood-hungry snarl of the wolf.
Adisla closed her eyes and struck, but the blow didn’t land. Authun was behind her and took the sword from her hand as it came down, stepping in front of her and pushing her back with the same movement.
Vali crouched. He looked at Adisla and knew that his dreams had been crushed by the jaws of the wolf. They had parted and all reason to live had gone from him. He was trapped for ever in an immortal body with no more company than his undying misery, linked more to the death lust of a demented god than to the woman he loved so much.
He saw the cruel sword in the hands of his father, felt the cut, still bleeding, in his side, no matter that all his other wounds had healed. The Norns, he thought, had paused their weaving for him, and it was up to him if he wanted them to start again.
He wanted it all to melt away, to be as it had been. To him Adisla was still the girl by the fjord, lying with him in the grass under the brilliant sun. But that was just a dream now, and he had travelled too far for it ever to be reality again.
He turned his eyes to the warrior. Authun returned his gaze.
At last, Vali forced out a word: ‘Death?’
‘Death,’ said Authun.
The Moonsword flickered in the lamplight; the wolf’s eyes and teeth flashed from the dark.
When it was done, the sword lay on the floor and the wolf was still.
Adisla came forward to look at the corpses, her body shivering and her mind numb. The strange woman with the ruined face was bending over Feileg, stroking his hair. Adisla went to her and looked at him. His blue eyes were open, looking up into nothing. There was a cruel wound in his side where the wolf had torn into his belly. He wasn’t yet cold, but there was no breath in him and she knew for certain he was dead.
She took him in her arms and kissed him. In her mind she felt the shimmering presence of the rune that had seemed to burst with the scents of spring, to patter and babble like the sound of rain by a stream. Rebirth. She tried to send it to him, to make him whole again, but that art took years to learn and its cost was madness.
The woman with the ruined face was looking down at her, and Adisla understood what she said with her eyes: ‘There is a way.’
The woman took up the lamp and left the cave. Adisla lifted Feileg in her arms. The runes seemed to shine inside her as she did so, and he did not feel heavy, nor was the entrance to the cave difficult to pass through. She followed the light up through the silent tunnels to where she could feel fresh air on her face. At the end of a broad cave, where a bright shard of light split the dark, the woman stopped and put her hand on Adisla’s arm. Then she kissed Feileg on the forehead and touched Adisla’s cheek.
Adisla walked on. She smelled wind, rain and the cold coming off the sea.
The shard of light grew. She walked on. At the mouth of the cave she looked out from a ledge near the top of the sheer Troll Wall, the ground far beneath her feet. A vast distance of land and sea lay before her, glorious in green and blue.
She kissed Feileg and held him to her.
‘For hope,’ she said and stepped into the light.
Saitada had followed to the ledge. From somewhere a wolf was howling. She understood what its voice was saying: ‘I am here. Where are you?’
She stood listening for a while. Then she turned back to the caves.
57 Travellers’ Tales
The hunters were three days into the forest looking for the wolves. There was a new pack in the area, they were sure. Sheep had been killed and even an old horse. They had taken their bows and their bait and headed into the trees, looking for signs of the animals. They had found nothing and were beginning to think they had wasted their time.
Then, as the long dusk of summer settled over the trees and the moon hung full in the sky, a traveller had come to their clearing, asking to share their fire. He was a strange-looking man, tall and pale with a shock of hair that was an almost unnatural red. Still, he had a skin of mead with him, and they let him eat with them in return for a few cups.
The stranger was good company and funny too, but as the brief night approached conversation turned to religion.
‘I see you are men of the new faith,’ said the traveller, gesturing to the cross one of the hunters wore at his neck.
‘We are Christ’s,’ said a hunter. ‘You are a man of the old ways, I can see.’
‘I like to get as many gods as I can for my money,’ said the stranger. ‘It seems to me that all the Lords of Asgard give a better bargain for your sacrifices than the one god of the east.’
The men laughed.
‘There are places in this land where you’d lose your tongue for saying that,’ said one.
‘Yes, the meek and merciful god can get in quite a bate when he’s crossed, can’t he?’
‘It’s no sin to defend the word of Christ,’ said another man.
‘Even if that word tells you that such a defenc
e is sin?’ said the traveller. ‘Are you recent converts or born into the faith?’
‘This time five years ago I crawled on my belly before idols, then the way of grace was shown to me,’ said the first hunter.
‘Why did you change?’ said the stranger.
‘I was a slave and the church paid for my freedom,’ he said. ‘Christian men should not be the slaves of pagans. So says the holy father.’
‘And you?’
‘The same,’ said the second hunter.
‘It wasn’t so for me,’ said the third, who was quieter than the other two, and cleverer.
‘What was it?’
‘I felt the old gods were savage,’ he said, ‘and this new one offered a gentler way. He so loved the world that he sent his only son to die for our sins. It seemed a beautiful story, how the god took flesh as a man.’
‘You never saw that with Thor, did you?’ said the first hunter.
‘I don’t know about Thor,’ said the stranger, ‘but it is well known that the old gods often took flesh as men.’
‘How so?’
‘Have you not heard the stories? Of how the gods can split off a hair and grow it as a man, how their incarnations forget their godly origin and live as ordinary people. More of a challenge to be a god and not know it, I think, than to walk secure in your divinity as Jesus did.’
‘Tell us one of these stories,’ said the first hunter. ‘I am in the mood for a tale and far enough away from the priests to not mind hearing one.’
So the stranger told them a story of how the old mad god Odin had a dream one day that he was a witch in the earthly realm. But the dreams of the gods are not like the dreams of men: they take flesh. The witch became powerful in magic and the god became jealous of his earthly self. So he sprinkled prophetic visions on her, like seeds onto the field. Then the great god Loki had a dream too, of a beautiful slave girl who took a hot iron to her face to spite her owner. And Loki fell in love with his dream and came to earth to sire two children with her. One was the Fenris Wolf, who will eat the gods on the final day. The other was just a man. He gave them as gifts to a king and to the witch. A gift from Loki is no gift at all, though, and the wolf ate his brother and the witch before the king killed it with his dying blow, just as the wolf will kill Odin on the final day before it too is killed. In this way it is said that Loki and his children are both Odin’s enemies and his helpers - they smooth the way to his destiny, though that destiny is death.
‘It pleases the gods,’ said the stranger, ‘to see the stories of their fate acted out in the earthly realm. The wolf and Odin have fought down the centuries and will fight down those to come. It’s easy to see where, if you know how to look.’
‘So Judas was Jesus’ helper, was he, by your reckoning?’
‘Judas helped Jesus die for the sins of man, it is said,’ said the traveller. ‘Well, if that was against the will of God it wouldn’t have happened, would it?’
‘It was the will of the devil, working through Judas’ hands,’ said the first hunter.
‘The will of the devil that all sins be washed away?’ said the stranger. ‘Then he is a strange devil indeed.’
The men laughed some more.
‘We are luckier than you, sir,’ said one. ‘We only have to listen to what the priests tell us, not think about it.’
‘If God sends us these wolves, then that’s enough for us,’ said the first hunter.
‘You should ask Loki,’ said the stranger. ‘He is the one who sends wolves.’
‘We don’t pray to idols, sir,’ said the second.
‘No,’ said the traveller. ‘Then perhaps you should pray to your own god that Loki doesn’t send you a wolf anyway, if the fate of the king and the witch are anything to go by.’
‘That sort of wolf we can do without,’ said the first.
The men sat by the fire and drank and talked until late. The stranger, who knew the woods well, told them of a cave a day west, following the north bank of the river.
‘It is a famous wolf den,’ he said, ‘and though hunters take the animals again and again they always seem to return.’
‘We will watch for it, sir.’
The next day the man was gone when the hunters awoke. They had no better plan than to follow his advice. It was nightfall again when they came to the caves, which were set in a small cliff a hundred paces from the river and five men’s heights above it.
The hunters looked around and were pleased to see wolf droppings along with some small evidence of kills. They camped nearby, sure that the wolves were out hunting and knowing that they would not return with men in the area. Nevertheless, the next day they tried the caves. It was a clear blue day and the moon was still visible, bright in the morning sky.
They made the short climb to the mouth of the biggest cave. The first hunter took a stone from the ground and threw it in while the other two stood ready with their bows. There was a noise from inside but neither loosed an arrow into the darkness. It wasn’t impossible that a traveller was sleeping in there, and as good Christians none of the men wanted a murder on his hands. The hunter threw another stone. There was a scuffling sound and the hunter caught a glimpse of something. It was paler than any wolf. A pig maybe?
‘Master wolf, come out, come out wherever you are.’
Nothing stirred. The hunter moved closer and his eyes began to adjust to the dark. He gasped when he saw what was inside the cave. It wasn’t a pig or a wolf, but a boy, about six years old with a shock of dark hair. He was in a terrible state, thin and filthy with eyes that seemed too big for his head.
‘It’s a boy!’ the hunter called over his shoulder.
He took an apple from his bag. The boy shrank back into the cave.
‘It’s for you - go on.’
The boy didn’t move.
‘I’ll have it then. See.’
The hunter bit into the fruit but the boy just retreated further.
The hunters were limited men but not insensitive. They could see that winning the boy’s trust would be no quick job. As Christians, they thought they had a duty to help him - the parable of the good Samaritan had been impressed on them not two Sundays before - and they decided to wait until he learned to accept them. They would, they agreed, treat the boy as they would a nervous animal. So they stayed near but not too near, hunted for birds and small game, cooked them and left the food with water at the cave mouth. None of them could understand how he had lived. Pagans were known to abandon sickly children in the forest but this boy had proved anything but delicate.
Gradually the boy became less wary, and the hunters were able to get closer. The moon was a slim crescent by the time he finally took the hand that was offered him. They decided the best thing to do was to get him back to their village and hand him over to the priest.
It took four days to get out of the forest. The boy was dreadfully restless at night, throwing off the blanket the hunters had given him and scratching and howling in his sleep. The clever hunter felt very sorry for the child and put out his hand to stroke his hair. The child suddenly seized it. He was dreaming, the hunter could see, but his eyes were wide open, staring up at the sickle moon.
‘Adisla,’ he said, ‘I will find you.’
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my wife Claire for all her support during the writing of this book and her correct prediction of its eventual shape. Also to Emily Turner for, as usual, her informed and intelligent comments on the text. Likewise to Anno for the monumental task of reading the huge first draft. Thanks to my dad for, among other things, the early introduction to science fiction and fantasy.
); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share
Wolfsangel Page 45
