A Companion to Wolves

by Elizabeth Bear

  It was one of the most grueling weeks of Njall’s life, worse even than the campaign of his fourteenth summer, and that had been bad enough. The wolfcarls were all on edge, even Randulfr, although he controlled it better than the others—or felt it less. The wolves squabbled among themselves, and the tithe-boys were witness to demonstrations of the brutal and effective nature of trellwolf discipline. Ingrun did not hesitate to use her teeth if she felt she needed to.

  They were lucky; they encountered trolls only twice, and one was half-grown. They did not find any wyverns, and Njall, remembering that hissing twisting nightmare, was not sorry. It made the wolfcarls uneasy, though; Njall heard them muttering to each other, “Where are they?” “They should have smelled us coming two days ago.”

  “There’s always trolls along the river.” The boys kept their mouths shut and jumped when the wolfcarls said frog. Njall couldn’t even begin to guess at the amount of ground they covered; he only knew that by sundown each day his calves and thighs were burning. He wasn’t the only one who found himself awake in the smallest hours of the morning with cramps knotting his leg muscles; he and the Great Leif spent the better part of an hour, their third night out, massaging each other’s legs.

  By the end of the week, Njall knew his tithe-mates better than he had ever expected to and was beginning to be able to think of the wolfcarls as potential brothers, as Randulfr had said. Brandr’s quick, malicious tongue was matched by the quickness of his brain; Svanrikr swaggered about being heall-bred but was no better prepared for the arduous nature of a long patrol than the other boys. Johvatr was nervous of the wolves and stayed nervous, although how anyone could be truly nervous of them after watching Hrolfmarr use his brother Kolli as a pillow Njall did not know. The Great Leif was quiet, steady, observant; he was going to be a massive man when he finished growing, and live up to his byname—he was already half a head taller than the tallest of the wolfcarls. Hlothvinr the Brown was shy and wary, but chattered like a magpie once he was comfortable. Ingrun seemed to think he needed mothering; Randulfr twice had to call her away from washing Hlothvinr’s face with her great pink tongue. But Hlothvinr glowed with delight at the wolf’s attention.

  Njall told himself, in a memory of his mother’s voice, not to count his chickens before they hatched, but he could not help the way his speculations were edging toward certainty. Hlothvinr would be chosen; Leif would be chosen; Brandr would be chosen. He himself wanted to be chosen so badly it was like a perpetual ache in his chest, but, imitating Halfrid again, he reminded himself that pride went before a fall and it would be fitting if he had to stand by and watch Svanrikr bond with Vigdis’ bitch-pup.

  The thought did not make his own mood any sweeter.

  But they came back to the wolfheall to find the tension washed out like mudstains from the laundry that billowed joyfully across the yard. Asny’s mating had gone well, and one look at Ulfgeirr’s ear-to-ear grin told Njall that Nagli had indeed gotten his ashes hauled, although Njall wondered a little at Ulfgeirr’s skinned knuckles and blackened eye, and the swollen bite-mark on Nagli’s cheek. And in the aftermath of Asny’s heat, two of Ingrun’s pups had chosen their brothers. Eitri and Harekr had bonded with two of Sigmundr’s tithe-mates, and it was clear that Authun was going to choose the third, although he was flirting, coyly, and leading poor Fastvaldr a merry chase.

  Njall and Brandr found Sigmundr in the armory, patiently mending torn leathers, with Hroi watching from the open doorway as if to assure himself that the work was done properly. Njall knew the wolfcarls were worried because Hroi had not yet picked a new bond-partner, instead pacing the roundhall and outbuildings as if looking for something he could not find.

  Njall and Brandr sat down and began work themselves. After a long silence, Njall said, “What will you do?”

  “Stay here,” Sigmundr said without surprise or hesitation. “Hrolleif thinks I have another year before I’m too old for a first-bonding.”

  “Will you try for one of Vigdis’ pups, then?” Brandr said and managed to sound casual rather than fiercely jealous.

  Sigmundr smiled a little. “I don’t think so. Maybe one of Asny’s. I thought Eitri and I … .” He sighed, and all three boys looked up in surprise as Hroi echoed the sigh.

  “Hroi?” said Sigmundr, an odd note in his voice.

  The old wolf tilted his head, his ears pricking, his green-gold eyes bright.

  Njall and Brandr watched, hardly daring to breathe, as Sigmundr cleared the leather off his lap, stood up, and advanced a couple paces toward the door. He sat down then, hard, more as if his knees had given way than with any intention.

  Hroi stood up and came across to him, shoving his massive gray-muzzled head into Sigmundr’s hands, demanding plainly to be scratched behind the ears. Sigmundr’s smile dawned slowly, but it was so radiant that Njall had to look away, blinking hard.

  “You asked the wrong question, Njall,” Brandr said into the silence. “It’s not what he’s going to do, it’s what he’s going to be named.”

  The Stone Sigmundr chose to be named Sokkolfr, and Njall came to realize that in many ways Sokkolfr was lucky to be bonded to Hroi. The old wolf was gray-muzzled, it was true, but he was strong and deft and canny to a fault, and he complemented quiet, thoughtful Sokkolfr very well.

  As for Njall—from the time Viradechtis’ eyes opened, there was never any doubt whom she would choose.

  He sat in a circle with the other tithe-boys on the deer-hide rug beside Vigdis’ nesting box and watched Hrolleif lift each pup, say its name—Kothran, Viradechtis, Skefill, Griss—and set it in the middle to crawl to whomever it listed, and when Viradechtis crawled to him, he was lost. Utterly, hopelessly lost, as breath-stolen as a child reaching for the moon. She squinted at him with cloudy blue eyes, and—with a glance at Vigdis for permission—he lifted her to his face. She yipped with bold excitement rather than fear, and tried to suckle the tip of his nose until he laughed so hard he was afraid he’d drop her.

  “Love at first sight,” Grimolfr said, almost sadly; Hrolleif elbowed him hard enough to make him stagger, and came to crouch at Njall’s shoulder.

  “See if she’ll tell you her name,” he said, and laid one hand on Njall’s shoulder.

  It was a comforting touch, and Njall leaned into it. He looked into the pup’s blue eyes and frowned. Her speech was a confused jumble of impressions, milk and mother and Hrolleif’s big warm hands that smelled of oil and leather, warm puppy bodies and Njall’s own warm, gentle hands and his smell, a good smell, an alluring smell—

  She yipped again, a fierce imperative puppy-bark, and licked his nose.

  “I don’t think she knows it yet, Hrolleif”—and it was still an effort to call him that, and not sir—“but she’s hungry.”

  “Pups that age are always hungry,” Hrolleif said. “You’ll get used to it. Ask Vigdis her name.”

  Njall held the puppy close to his chest and looked her mother in the eyes. And Vigdis laughed at him—she was always laughing, that one—and gave him the scent of sun-warmed pine boughs, sharp and clean and full of summer.

  From that moment, Viradechtis was his world, and he was hers. When she wasn’t terrorizing her littermates, she stuck to Njall’s heels, and he had to place her bodily back into the box beside her mother at night before returning to his own bed in the tithe-boys’ dormitory. And even then, half the time Brandr wound up shaking him awake on their shared pallet, because he was reaching about him in his sleep.

  He knew Vigdis was watching him smugly, and if she were a woman and not a wolf he would have said she was gloating over having found him lurking in the shadows of the stair. Hrolleif was watching him as well, with a quizzical expression, trading frequent, headshaking glances with Grimolfr. None of that could affect Njall’s happiness.

  Spring gave way to dawning summer, and when the pups were four months old—just as another batch of tithe-boys was being sought for Asny’s litter—they were allowed to sleep where they wished. Virad
echtis chose to sleep beside Njall, rousting Brand from his place without so much as a by-your-leave. And the tight ache of homesickness in his chest finally lifted for good.

  The next afternoon, although Njall’s duties were still with the tithe-boys, Ulfgeirr came to tell him that his sleeping quarters were being switched to the roundhall, for the sake of Viradechtis and the other boys.

  It wasn’t too strange to sleep in a huge hall full of snoring men and wolves who whined and ran in their sleep. It wasn’t so very different from the boys’ dormitory, although much bigger, and besides, Viradechtis was there beside him, her blunt puppy muzzle buried in Njall’s armpit, her thoughts clearer and sharper to him with every passing day. Even the sounds of sex, whether solitary or companionable, were familiar, and he contributed his share. He missed Alfleda; none of the wolfheall’s thrall-women took his fancy, and he was reluctant to go into the village, afraid that the villagers would react as Alfleda had and scorn him. In any event, with Viradechtis too small to follow him he wasn’t going anywhere, which left him alone with a restless drive that would not be sublimated into weapons practice or patrolling and tracking lessons.

  He’d somehow expected the wolves would speak in words, and of course they didn’t; that had been a child’s fancy and foolishness. What Viradechtis gave him when her gold-velvet eyes met his was a sense of humor so sharp it was almost malicious, coupled to a thousand details of scent, of hearing, of the world moving around her and the pack moving through the world. He was never certain, exactly, when the bond happened—not like Sokkolfr and Hroi—but soon he couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been able to reach out with his heart and feel his wolf-sister’s attention: warm, wry, and deadly sardonic.

  It was an idyll, a precious summer where he threw himself into his wolf and the business of the wolfheall and his friendship with Brandr Quick-Tongue and the Stone Sokkolfr—and the entirely surprising mentorship that grew up between himself and Hrolleif, starting that night in the circle by the birthing den.

  The summer evenings stretched almost to morning, the sky light even after the sun went down. Njall walked with Viradechtis in the half-light, letting her run because it was not fair to the older wolves to bring her like a whirlwind into the roundhall when all they wanted to do was sleep. Sometimes Brandr came with them, although mostly these days Brandr was spending his free time as near to Viradechtis’ littermates as he could get. Sokkolfr and Hroi would walk with them, too, and Njall was grateful to Hroi for teaching Viradechtis.

  “It’s his nature,” Sokkolfr said. “He is very well suited to be the brother of a housecarl.”

  “Is that what you want to be?”

  Sokkolfr was silent for a time. “I don’t know if I would be any good with the tithe-boys,” he said at last. “But I like orderliness.”

  “I think you’d be just fine with the tithe-boys. You wouldn’t do it like Ulfgeirr, but that’s not the same thing as doing it badly.”

  And then Hroi and Viradechtis came back from a long elaborate game of chase, their sides heaving, very pleased with themselves, and Njall said, feeling a great warm glow of happiness spread through him at the words, “Let’s go home.”

  He liked walking with company, but he most frequently went out alone, just he and Viradechtis and his thoughts. On the solstice-eve, he found himself positively glad to escape from other people, for the wolfheall was like a kicked-over anthill with preparations for the solstice-fest, and Njall had been ordered about and snapped at and teased—Not-Jarl, Gunnarson—all day. And he had thinking he wanted to do.

  Grimolfr had said two days before, when Njall was helping him scrape deerhides for leather, “Have you thought about your name yet?”

  “My name? But I’m not … she isn’t … .”

  “Don’t try and tell me you’re not bonded, pup,” Grimolfr said.

  “I thought she had to be older.”

  “Bitches bond earlier—unless they’re froward, as some bitches are. But that’s not your little girl.”

  “No,” Njall agreed helplessly, happily, and half-grown Viradechtis looked up from where she was wrestling with her father; for a second Njall was enveloped in pine-boughs-in-sunlight and knew that that was her way of saying: Mine. Skald and Grimolfr traded a look, and Grimolfr burst out laughing, a thing which Njall had never witnessed before.

  “Well, that’s settled,” the wolfjarl said.

  So Njall had been trying to think of a name. He’d asked Brandr, whose suggestions made his face burn, and Sokkolfr, who said, “It’s your name, Njall.” And out here, just himself and his sister, feeling peace well up and spill over, it occurred to him that the sensible thing to do was ask her.

  She thought the question extremely funny. But she cooperated, enough that he got a strange, momentary, dizzying view of what he looked like through her eyes, precarious and fragile and pale, skin and hair and eyes all pale, like snow, like ice.

  Oh, thought Njall. Isolfr.

  It was, in the end, as simple as that.

  Njall walked back to the wolfheall pensively—although not so pensively that he did not lose a good stretch of time to a game of Viradechtis’ invention—and when he reached the courtyard, he dodged two tithe-boys, five wolfcarls and their brothers, three thralls, and a flock of goats, entered the roundhall, rich with the scent of Jorveig’s cooking, crossed through to the back and opened the door to Grimolfr’s records-room, which was also the wolves’ birthing den. And there, on the deerhide rug—

  He stopped. Stared, pressing one hand instinctively over his mouth to keep from making a sound. Stepped back and closed the door, as quietly as he could.

  And turned and fled.

  He found Brandr in the bathhouse, along with the usual assortment of wolfcarls and tithe-boys, and dragged him into the back corner where they could talk without being overheard.

  “What?” said Brandr. “You’re white as new snow.”

  “I saw … I didn’t mean to …” He swallowed hard. “Hrolleif and Grimolfr …” And because he couldn’t quite bring himself to use any crude word for it, he dropped his voice to a whisper and said, “Mating.”

  Brandr snorted laughter, and then again at the look on Njall’s face. “ What were you, born yesterday? Hrolleif’s lucky Vigdis is konigenwolf, and he only has to lie down for Grimolfr. Some of the other bitches breed to six or seven dogs in a heat.”

  Njall didn’t say, But Hrolleif was on top—

  “You’d better get used to the idea,” Brandr said. “’Cause that’s going to be you in another couple years.”

  “Thank you, Brandr,” Njall said, as witheringly as he could, and set himself with shaking hands to clean away the day’s grime, wondering Can I do that? Could I lie down for that?

  It was in the long lazy hours after supper, while Viradechtis and her littermates and Ingrun’s three, who were still young enough for puppy-games, went tearing around roundhall and courtyard, knocking over wolfcarls when they could and swarming Skald every second lap, that Hrolleif came up to where Njall was sitting, helping Sokkolfr comb through Hroi’s dense coat looking for ticks, and said, “Njall, do you have a moment?”

  “Go on, Njall,” Sokkolfr said. “Hroi and I can manage, can’t we, brother?” And Hroi sighed happily and rested his head on Sokkolfr’s thigh in a way that would send the leg to sleep in a matter of minutes.

  Njall got up, feeling his stomach knot. Viradechtis was there, pressing against him, bumping her broad head up under his hand, and he sank his fingers into her ruff and was comforted.

  He followed Hrolleif through the drowsy cheerful crowd of the werthreat and into the records-room, where Vigdis thumped her tail in greeting. Hrolleif sat down on the bench along the inner wall and motioned Njall to sit next to him. “Vigdis says you saw, earlier.”

  The blush felt like fire. Viradechtis dropped her head across his lap and he looked down, watching his own fingers worry gently at her ears. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

  “Nothin
g to be sorry for,” Hrolleif said. “We were due to have this conversation anyway. Njall—oh. Grimolfr said he spoke to you about choosing your name. Have you?”

  “Yes,” and really it would be easier if he just burst into flames right now. Died of embarrassment.

  Viradechtis disapproved emphatically, nudging her head into his stomach in a way that she knew perfectly well made it hard for him to breathe.

  “That’s why … I was coming to tell Grimolfr …”

  “Ah,” said Hrolleif and courteously did not laugh. Vigdis had no such scruples, but Njall found he didn’t mind her laughter; it was so much like her daughter’s. “Then what is your name to be, Njall Gunnarson?”

  Njall thought, oddly and very clearly, that that was the last time he would ever be identified as his father’s son.

  Everything for the wolfheall.

  “Isolfr,” he said.

  “Isolfr,” Hrolleif repeated thoughtfully, weighing the name in his mouth. “Yes.” He extended one hand, broad, callused, and after a moment’s blank confusion, Isolfr returned his grip. And dared to look up at Hrolleif and return his smile. “We’ll name you tonight then.”

  It was a quick ceremony, no different from the naming of a babe. A sprinkle of water, the shape of Thor’s hammer marked on one’s forehead, and one was born again. A brother to wolves, now, and no longer a wolfless man.

  Pleased, Viradechtis let him breathe again unencumbered by wolf-skull. Hrolleif said, “You’ve got a strong-willed wolf there.”

  “Yes.”

  “She’ll make up her own mind on most things, you’ll find,” Hrolleif said, and traded a loving look with Vigdis. “And you need to be prepared.”

  “Yes,” Isolfr said and swallowed dryly.

  “You’ve heard stories, I take it. So had I, when I became brother to Vigdis. But how much do you know?”