A Companion to Wolves

by Elizabeth Bear

  On the third day of their climb, as if in obedience to the prophecy Isolfr had made in the roundhall years before, it was wide-ranging Kothran who picked up the scent. His howl floated to them like the sound of a reed pipe, and every wolf and every wolfcarl knew what it meant.

  Trolls! Kothran called. Come, come quick! I’ve found the trolls!

  A shiver ran through Wolfmaegth and wolfless men alike. Some three thousand cold, trudging, miserable pilgrims straightened in their boots, shuffled off their packs and reached for their weapons, and became an army again.

  Isolfr raised his voice with the others and charged up the slope on Kothran’s tail. His boots slipped on icy rock; he shed his cloak in the snow beside his pack and scrabbled on hands and knees, other men climbing beside him, trellwolves bounding past like mountain sheep.

  The trellwarren could not have been more obvious if it had been signposted with a crier at the gate. The arched entrance was raggedly gnawed out of stone, but as Isolfr came to a halt before it, surrounded by wolves and men, he was struck by the symmetry and some sense of decoration that seemed to knot the claw-furrows into a pattern that squirmed just outside Isolfr’s ability to define. The stench was worse than the midden-pile at his father’s keep; even in the cold, the trellwarren smelled of snake-shit and wormy meat and the heated reek of a forge.

  “They’re armsmaking,” Grimolfr said, and Isolfr started. He’d been so intent on the trellwarren that he had not felt the wolfjarl come up beside him, close enough to touch. He looked up at Grimolfr, and Grimolfr glanced down at him with a twisted lip. “Smelting bronze,” Grimolfr said. “Othinn help us all.”

  “God of wolves,” Isolfr said, and Grimolfr nodded, passionlessly.

  “God of wolves. It’s butchery now, lad.”

  “Yes,” Isolfr said. “Let’s go.”

  The god of wolves is the god of death. He is the all-Father, the god of wisdom and the god of war. He is the god to whom all are answerable, in the end, and he is the god who paid with his sight and hung on the Tree at Mimir’s feet for nine days and nine nights and counted the cost well paid for the reward.

  He is the god who knows that nothing comes without price.

  Isolfr held the god’s name as a prayer as he hacked into the trellwarren. This time they could not wait for the trolls to come out to them; this was a proper warren, years in the digging, and they could not hope to find and block all its exits. Grimolfr had had a few brutally brief pieces of advice about fighting in an old warren, which for all his experience Isolfr had not done before, and those words rang clear in Isolfr’s head through the acrid stench of troll blood, the bitter copper bite of men’s and wolves’ blood, the dark and smothering heat, the howling confusion of metal against metal, the snarls of wolves, the shouts of men and the strange yammering of trolls:

  Never get separated from your wolf.

  Never turn your back on a hole if you don’t know what lies beyond it.

  And most important:

  Never follow a running troll.

  Men who did, Grimolfr said, were never seen again, neither alive nor dead, and the wolfthreat could not find them.

  Othinn, god of wolves, god of battles—he feinted and slashed, and a troll went staggering back, its face gone in a torrent of black blood. God of memory and thought, god of the old wisdom. The tunnels were uncanny, twisting at angles that seemed wrong, shadows collecting in odd corners, and there was more decoration, here below, that Isolfr did not dare to look at for fear of being enthralled, as it was said the prey of dragons were enthralled by their eyes.

  Viradechtis lunged, sinking her teeth into the upraised arm of a troll before it could bring its hammer down. A sow, Isolfr noticed, her six teats heavy with milk, her tiny red eyes glaring with berserker madness as the arm Viradechtis wasn’t rending came swiping forward, aiming for Isolfr’s eyes. She wore bronze rings in her mane, and they chinked oddly against the blade of his axe as he took her head off.

  When the massive body fell, he saw that she had been guarding a doorway; Viradechtis was staring through it, snarling in a low, terrible, incessant rumble, and Isolfr, having checked that there were no other trolls in this piece of tunnel, stepped forward to see what the trellsow had been guarding.

  He nearly vomited: a nursery, thick with the mingled reek of carrion and troll, a litter of four shrieking spidery black troll kittens rushing at him, their red eyes as mad and hateful as the sow’s. Viradechtis hunted them like rats, breaking their necks with vicious efficiency. Isolfr killed the last of them as it tried to sink its teeth into the leather of his boot. And although he tried not to look, he saw the gnawed sphere of a human skull among the offal of the kittens’ nest. And where would they find such meat in the mountains?

  Back into the tunnel, back into the red smoky light of torches and small fires already burning. Down a slope pitched too steeply and with a twist halfway down that was wrong, terribly wrong although he could not have explained how, and he found himself in a wider hall, filled with men and trolls and wolves. He realized, going to the aid of a wolfcarl who wore Franangford’s device, that the fighters here were all sows, and judging by the smell, and the weapons they carried, and the heavy slabs of muscle that made their blows as devastating as the kick of a draft-horse, they were the metalworkers. He remembered the trellsow they’d found in his second battle with the creatures; he’d never imagined so many in one place before. He’d thought the one they’d killed was a camp follower like the women in the wolfheall compound. But these were not whores or hedge-witches or even women like Jorveig, whom Isolfr had seen deck a drunken wolfcarl when there seemed no other way of getting him out of her kitchen; these were warriors and artisans, and he felt a sudden pain of empathy, realizing that they were defending their home.

  Kallekot, he said to himself, hacking his way forward grimly. Ravndalr, Jorhus. Others and others and Othinn, god of death, god of war, god of carrion and blood. God of the screaming, god of the dying, god who weighs and listens. He found himself fighting shoulder to shoulder with one of the wolfcarls from Kerlaugstrond who had been giving him so much trouble, and there was no hostility between them now, as they and their wolves worked together to wreak the ruin of this trellwarren.

  Othinn, watch for us.

  It took the better part of two days for the army, Wolfmaegth and wolfless men, to clear the warren, and it was butchery—as Grimolfr had said. Their casualties were severe: a band of artisan-boys from Arakensberg’s territory panicked and fled in the face of a concerted rush, and though all of them died for their stupidity, so too did seven wolves and ten wolfcarls. And that was merely the worst of the Wolfmaegth’s losses.

  Frithulf had been badly burned in the fighting with the bronze-workers. “You always were prettier anyway,” he said to Isolfr, and they both knew he had been lucky not to lose an eye—or both of them. But the wound would be slow in healing even if it did not fester, and it would scar badly, a spill of shiny knotted flesh down cheek and jaw and neck. Kothran lay as near to Frithulf as he could get, his head in Frithulf’s lap more often than not, and Isolfr knew, for he could feel it through the pack-sense, how much Kothran’s presence helped with the pain and the sick aftereffects of being so burned. All the wolves with wounded brothers stayed close to them. The army’s wolfsprechends were kept busy preventing dog-wolves from becoming as protective of their brothers as a bitch of her pups, allowing the wolfheofodmenn close enough for the rough doctoring at their command.

  Vethulf Kjaransbrother did a great deal of that doctoring. Although his manner with the wounded men was brusque, his bandaging was meticulous, and he was kind and quiet with injured wolves—something that startled Isolfr, for he would not have thought the red-headed wolfcarl was capable of gentleness. More typically, it was Vethulf who started calling Frithulf “the Half-Burned,” and that byname quickly replaced the old one, though Isolfr and Ulfbjorn were at some pains to make sure that Frithulf never heard it.

  It was one more petty excoriatio
n on top of dozens on top of fatigue and cold and endless responsibility, responsibility deep enough to drown in, and Isolfr surprised himself by retaliating one night, “accidentally” tripping Vethulf, quite spectacularly, while his hands were full of musk-ox dung cakes for the cooking fire. Wolfcarls did not duel; they were forbidden the hide and the holmgang for the sake of the wolves. But Isolfr would not have minded if Vethulf had taken a swipe at him. A fistfight would suit him fine, a couple of good swings and a scuffle to clear the air, nothing dangerous enough to involve the wolves. Just something raw and simple—a chance to black one of those mocking eyes, a chance, however fleeting, to meet Vethulf simply as man to man instead of this endless prickly skirmishing between wolfsprechend-in-waiting and one who would be wolfjarl.

  What he got was Vethulf picking himself up, dusting powdered dung from his hands, and shooting Isolfr a glare that should have started that fire right then. Vethulf-in-the-Fire, indeed. But then he squared his shoulders and turned away without a word, as offended as a splashed cat. Isolfr tried to feel that he’d won a victory, but all he felt was a nauseating kinship to Ulfrikr.

  Isolfr found himself returning to the trellwarren whenever he was not needed, not merely to escape the miasma of pain and unhappiness and muted fear that overhung the camp, but because it troubled him. He did not see beauty in trellish patterns, or in the way they worked metal, or in the terrible angles and proportions of their dwelling place, but he could not deny that he saw purpose. “They intended this,” he said to Viradechtis, running his fingers over a strange design, sinuous and jagged, wreathing an archway in the depths of the warren. “They work metal. They must have some language, mustn’t they?”

  Viradechtis cocked her head. She was uninterested in what trolls did when they were not dying under her claws and teeth, but she listened to Isolfr uncomplainingly as always.

  “Could we talk to them, do you think?” he said, ducking through the archway. “Could we negotiate?”

  That word, Viradechtis knew, having heard it a great deal in the recent tension with Kerlaugstrond. Her answer was emphatic: a vivid, brutal memory of the stench overlying Ravndalr, jumbled with images of the trellherig and other places where they had arrived too late and could only be witnesses to what the trolls had done.

  “Point taken, sister,” Isolfr said, and then he frowned, forgetting his train of thought, peering into a corner well back from the doorway. Viradechtis stayed close as he advanced cautiously into the room—a storeroom, it looked like, if trolls stored anything, but possibly a prison or a shrine or something he did not know enough about trolls to imagine.

  “They didn’t intend that,” he said, and only when he jumped at the echoes of his own voice did he realize he’d spoken out loud.

  There was a hole in the corner, between floor and walls, the sort of hole a giant mouse might chew—but not in solid rock. “Are there stone mice, do you think?” he said to Viradechtis, picturing them briefly, little granite beasts with bright quartz eyes.

  The stench is making me light-headed. He needed to leave soon, he knew, but he stepped just a little closer. Those were worked edges, and not worked by trellclaws or the crude tools the trolls had. He did not—quite—reach out to touch the lip of the hole, but he did ask Viradechtis what she smelled.

  Troll, she reported dryly, and then, cautiously investigating the edges of the hole—which he was relieved, in an odd way, to find unnerved her as much as it did him—oldness, anger. Not-troll.

  But more specific than that, she could not be.

  It was the first warren, but it was not the only one. The second was much like the first, although Isolfr fought beside Sokkolfr and Ulfbjorn this time, because Frithulf Half-Burned had returned with the wounded to the camp among Iskryne’s roots. This was a bigger warren, delved until no air moved at the bottom of its passages, older, and the strange ragged decorations were worked deeper in the rock of the gateways and walls. There were wyverns here, three of them, and it was siege and pitched battle to clear that warren. Despite a half-formed plan, Isolfr did not have the chance to search the deep caverns for stone mice. In fact, he barely made it out of the warren alive, for the trellsows—and it now seemed plain that the females were the artisans—collapsed the deep caverns rather than surrender them. It was Othwulf and Vikingr’s sharp nose that led them out, and Isolfr pretended not to notice that Gunnarr Sturluson was among the fifty men they brought to safety up from the deeps. It was just as well, because Gunnarr Sturluson pretended not to notice Othwulf, or Isolfr either.

  Much could be said of Nithogsfjoll’s jarl, but not that he was a coward. He acquitted himself brilliantly in combat, time and again. Even Grimolfr acknowledged it, his teeth set on edge as he suffered Isolfr to bind a wound that had laid his forearm open almost to the bone. It should have been Hrolleif’s place, to tend the wolfjarl’s injuries, but Hrolleif was not there. And Vethulf was avoiding the entire Nithogsfjollthreat.

  The third warren was abandoned, and Isolfr found more of those mouse-holes gnawed in its deeps. Not big enough for a man, not quite. But big enough for the boy he had been.

  And so the third trellwarren brought them to the fourth, and men and wolves that Isolfr had known and respected—and men that Njall Gunnarson had known, as well—laid down their lives in the cold of the mountains, and the sun climbed high overhead until it made a second, unceasing crown beyond the crown of the Iskryne.

  The solstice was upon them. Grimolfr did not say, but Isolfr knew—from the meetings of the jarls and the wolfheofodmenn, to which he was not invited—that if they did not wish to die in the snows of winter, they would have to turn back soon.

  The gates of the fourth trellwarren were barred.

  The remains of Grimolfr’s army—for all that there was not so much rank among wolfjarls as negotiation, Grimolfr’s generalship had arisen as naturally as a curl of smoke from a heap of ash—drew up before the gates, and wolfcarls exchanged uneasy looks with wolfless men. Not only had there been no gates in the other warrens, but no sign that gates had ever been intended, and these were vast brazen things, worked with twisting designs. They could not have been improvised.

  This was a new thing, and Isolfr did not like it.

  Fortunately, the trolls were not so adept in the art of defense as the Northmen were; there were no arrow-slits to guard the portal, no holes for falling stones or boiling oil. And Gunnarr had the answer, damn him. Without consulting Grimolfr or anyone else, he sent a party to the second trellwarren, and there they pulled timbers from the rubble and brought them back, to be slung between chains to make a battering ram.

  It was a good plan. Even Isolfr could admit it, although he wondered at the tenaciousness of trolls who would haul lumber all the way north from the taiga around Nithogsfjoll, which would be the closest source of trees.

  The doors came down over what would have been a night, had it not been solstice at the top of the world, and the ringing was like hammer-struck bells. No one slept. Isolfr, missing Frithulf more terribly than he could have imagined, diced with Ulfbjorn and Randulfr while Sokkolfr played camp-master for Nithogsfjoll, buying Ulfgeirr and Nagli a precious few hours of sleep. He didn’t care to remember that it had been four years since he left his father’s house. He was a wolfcarl and a man of twenty summers, and that was enough.

  He didn’t care to be reminded of his father’s house at all. When the sun had swung round her post again, lower to the north than the south but never quite dipping low enough to darken the sky, the gates of the trellwarren came down, and men and wolves alike massed before the entryway. It was greater than the other warrens, the main tunnel leading in and down on a long easy slope, to all appearances unguarded. The air that rose from the deeps was warm, and smelled of blood and fire. Isolfr breathed deep despite the stench, soothing his cold-aching lungs. Someone passed up torches; as they cast light into the depths, Isolfr caught the glint of hammered metal. Something squealed like a pig; the cry echoed.

  “They’re dow
n there,” Gunnarr said, squaring his men and those of another jarl into a shield-wall, swords and bucklers before and troll-spears behind. The wolfcarls gave place without protest; the wolfless men were far, far better at taking a charge.

  They didn’t have much time. Something else squealed, and the steady trip-trop of hooved trellfeet on stone broke into a rising rumble, the sound of an avalanche. Behind the shield wall, Isolfr readied his axe and braced himself. There was no guarantee the wall would hold.

  Then the men were tumbling forward, the slope of the cave at their advantage, and they crashed upon the charging trolls as the white sea crashes onto stone.

  Neither line held. Isolfr found himself among trolls, hewing bulging black-green bellies and muscled arms, his axe leaving shining chips in trellhelms and armored shoulders, and carving limbs from bodies and heads from necks. He hacked deeper, harder, his wolf- and werthreatbrothers a wedge behind him, Viradechtis snarling, frothing blood at his left hand.

  He wasn’t sure how they broke through, but they were clear and behind the troll vanguard, surrounded by dark and relative quiet. Sokkolfr came up to him with a torch brandished high; behind them armor rang, men shouted, wolves snarled, and trolls squealed in rage and pain.

  Down the corridor something flashed, a bright fleck of color, a glimmer like firelight on armor or jewelry. Isolfr looked at Sokkolfr, and Sokkolfr shrugged. “Never follow a running troll.”