Vali looked at him. ‘You’ll make room. I want them for my slaves.’
‘Lord, it would mean offloading valuable animals. The boy is sickly and the man’s old and not much good for work.’
Vali could, he supposed, just let them go. The raiders would be long gone before they could help any pursuers. Still, he reminded himself of who he was. He’d spent so long at Adisla’s hearth among farm children that he sometimes forgot.
‘Princes need different work to common men.’
‘Lord, I-’
There was a scream and the old man fell to the ground.
In the firelight Vali saw the gleam of a knife and the red eyes of Bodvar Bjarki, the scarred berserk who had attacked him. Then there was a sudden movement and the boy cried out and fell too.
‘Debate over, prince,’ said the berserk. He could hardly stand. He seemed torpid and sluggish but had still stabbed both men in an instant.
For the first time in Vali’s life he felt genuinely angry, violent even, and as that emotion touched him he felt a chill go through him. This wasn’t the sort of rage that explodes in fury but an insidious, crawling thing, as present and real as the smell of smoke across a summer meadow. Vali was frightened by the intensity of the feeling. He would, he thought, have his revenge. It came to him not as an intention but as a fact, as real and unavoidable as the engulfing night, the endless stars and the cold dark sea. It was the first time in his life he could remember feeling hatred, and the sensation was almost intoxicating.
The raiders were around him, their faces expectant. Vali, though, would not give them what they were asking for — a demand for compensation, a challenge to a duel. Instead he smiled at the berserk and said, ‘I will not forget you.’
Bodvar Bjarki just grunted, huddled into his cloak and made his way onto the ship.
Vali bent to the old man. Dead. Then he went to the boy. He was breathing but Vali could see he was dreadfully pale and close to death. He held him in his arms to give him comfort. The boy looked up. Vali had expected to see blame or hatred. Instead, he saw something else. Understanding, sympathy, pity even. He found it chilling.
The boy looked at Vali and said a word he recognised: ‘God.’
Well, he doesn’t seem to have done you much good, does he? thought Vali, but he said nothing. In a few moments the boy had stopped breathing.
Vali climbed aboard a knarr. He had no intention of spending the journey home with the berserks.
He took an oar without a word, listening to the men around him swapping stories of the raid. Farmer Hrolleifr told how he had faced the enemy’s leader and cut him to the floor. He omitted to say that the man was naked, kneeling and begging for his life at the time. Others told tales of taking on two or three enemies at once, leaving out inconvenient facts such as that their opponents had been unarmed. The most remarkable thing about the stories of the returning warriors was that they seemed to believe them themselves.
He looked over to the drakkar as the ships pulled away from the beach. The one West Man the berserks had saved had been hanged, sacrificed to Odin in thanks for their safe return. As Vali watched the man dangling from the mast, his legs kicking as if in a useless attempt to run away, he made up his mind that he would never seek that god’s help. His followers, he thought, dishonoured him.
‘I hate you, Odin,’ he said, ‘and I will oppose you in all your works.’
For some reason that made him feel better and he bent his back to the oar, losing himself in the rhythm of the rowing, thought banished by effort.
9
Some grow in light and others in darkness. Feileg — the boy the witches had taken — was not raised on the sunlit coast but on the mountaintops with the wild men and the wolves.
The witch queen sensed that the boy she had taken needed to be prepared in a different sort of magic to the one she practised. Her magic was known by the ordinary people as Seid. It was a wholly female art — a magic of the mind. Gullveig had blurred the division between past and future, she had travelled entranced as the shadow of a hare or a wolf to enter the nightmare of a dozing king, but the arts of physical magic were unknown to her. Her trances and meditations would leave her weak for days afterwards, near to death even, and the toll on her was enormous. Her limbs were wasted and her body emaciated. She seemed no more than a rune herself, an arrangement of lines rather than a human figure. As the years went by, the change that other girls knew did not come to her. It would never come. The witch queen accepted the cost of her knowledge was that she would remain in a child’s body her whole life — small, weak and undeveloped. The werewolf could not follow that path. Odin, she knew, would come as a warrior, dispensing death at the end of his spear. Her protector couldn’t be weak, so Gullveig could only do part of what was needed.
To create her werewolf, his body would need to be strengthened and conditioned by the berserks, the ulfhednar who lived as wolves and fought as wolves, gaining unnatural strength and ferocity from their training and their magic. The witch spoke to a berserker chieftain in a dream and the man took the baby, along with a payment of medicines, from a boy servant at the bottom of the Troll Wall.
Until Feileg was seven he lived on the lower slopes of the mountains with a small berserker clan, who cared for him, fed him, taught him trance dances and beat him. On his seventh birthday the berserk chieftain who had taken him from the Wall woke him before dawn and led him back up into the mountains. It was early winter and the going was hard. The berserk took him over the snow fields, waiting for him when he fell, driving him on when he tired, shouting when he tried to use his little spear as a staff, warning him not to abuse something on which his life could depend.
Most of the way the snow was shallow and they didn’t need their snowshoes, but as they got higher it deepened and they had to stop to tie them on. They climbed up through stark lines of spruce and pine that towered out of the fields of white like an army of giants until the trees began to lose their fight with the altitude and grow smaller and thinner, eventually shrinking to the size of shrubs.
In a small valley next to a waterfall turning to ice the berserk stopped.
‘I am to leave you here,’ he said. The berserk was a rough man but even he gave a sad smile. ‘Take care, little Feileg. We will miss you. You have enough to eat to last you until tomorrow. You know how to climb a tree with your rope, and remember the wolves will not want to risk injury. If they come, attack them and make them look for something weaker.’
The child said nothing, but as the berserk turned down the slope, he followed him.
‘You are to stay here,’ said the man. ‘Your time with us is over.’
He turned to go once more, but the child followed him again. The berserk, though rough and given to beating him, was the only father he’d known, his wife his only mother. He wanted to go back to the cooking pot and his brothers and sisters, to help his father at his forge and lie next to his mother in the cold nights, warm and protected.
‘You stay,’ said the berserk. He didn’t have to say what would come next. He’d already asked once more than he normally would. There would be no third request, just the lash of his belt.
Feileg felt frightened and very alone. He clutched his spear and said, ‘One day I will come back and kill you.’
The berserk smiled. ‘It truly is a shame to lose you, Feileg. I believe you will. When you are a man you’ll be a great warrior, and I’ll be old, should I live so long. It will be an honour to die by your hand. Don’t be frightened. Your destiny is already woven and it doesn’t end today.’
He turned again down the slope and in moments he was gone.
Feileg looked about him through the slit in the cloth he had tied around his face to shield his eyes from the glare. It had begun to snow lightly. Above him was a ridge, below him the valley. He saw the footprints that had brought them there but he had hunted for long enough to know that the snow would have already obscured the rest
