was his house, where he had lived until he was seven. He hadn’t known what to make of the feelings the memories stirred inside him and he had gone out into the rain. He had never returned.
At sixteen he awoke in the dusk of the cave mouth and stood up ready to hunt. Kveld Ulf tapped him on the chest and let him know with his eyes that today would be different. He led him across two valleys to where the pack’s oldest wolf had fallen down a gully and lay dying at the bottom. The men descended to sit beside it. The wolf’s eyes were cloudy and its breath shallow. Kveld Ulf looked at Feileg, and Feileg understood that the wolf’s spirit was to join with his own.
For two days the men sat and chanted, beat the drum and shook their rattles. On the third day the wolves came and added their voices to the music. They sat in the galleries of frost and howled out a strange chorus of exultation and lament. Feileg, his head buzzing with tiredness and the noise, took the creature’s head in his lap and stroked its ears as it died.
His body trembled and there was a taste of blood in his mouth. Strange longings coursed through him and, where the world had seemed wide beneath the stars, now it narrowed to a thin stream of hunger raging through his mind. He stripped the skin from his fallen brother with a sharp stone, tore out his entrails, ate his heart and liver. Then he placed the bloody pelt around him, looking out from behind the wolf’s face, as the wolf had done, as the wolf.
After that, Feileg had no story, no progression of events from day to day. He hunted and he fed and he slept and sat howling beneath the stars. He was part of nature, moving beneath the wind and the sun as heedless of his identity as the foam upon the surf.
And then, at midsummer, when the sun never dipped beyond the suggestion of dusk, his double came and his life changed again and for ever.
10
‘What did you say?’ Vali turned to face the person who had spoken. It was Ageirr, one of Forkbeard’s sworn bodyguard, a man of around nineteen, two years older than Vali though not much taller.
It was over three years since the raid — three years in which Vali had gone no further than half a day’s travel from the farms. He had asked Forkbeard to let him go trading, asked him even to allow him to command his own raids, but the king was adamant. Vali would go and fight as a common warrior or not travel at all. So Vali did not go.
There were many reasons for his refusal. One was that he would not take part in needless slaughter when there were so many easier ways of extracting loot. He had calculated the profit that had been thrown away on the raid on what he now knew was a monastery, and had concluded that the price of the slaves he’d lost to Bodvar Bjarki’s brutality alone could have bought him ten head of cattle, before he even started considering how many possible captives had gone free because the berserks hadn’t bothered to surround the island.
Another reason for his reluctance was that he thought his people had things to learn from the West Men. One of their priests — the men with the shaven heads — had visited Eikund when Vali was fifteen. To Vali’s disappointment, Forkbeard had refused to even let him tell his stories. When the man showed him his writing and pointed out how useful it would be in the administration of his kingdom Forkbeard had torn it up in front of him and told him to go while he still had his life. It had been the talk of the village. Vali had learned the man was a member of the cannibalistic religion of Christ, whose followers ate flesh and drank blood.
The main reason he kept away from war, though — hardly acknowledged to himself — was that he wanted to be branded sword-shy. He hoped Forkbeard would not let his daughter marry such a man, which would leave him free to marry Adisla. But so far the king had refused to release him from his obligation. Vali had also got a merchant to carry a message to his father telling him point-blank that he would not marry the girl but there had been no reply. Vali took it as a rebuke and felt foolish. His father could hold him to his duty if he chose, his protestations and refusals were meaningless.
He had to accept he was a prince but, until he was forced to confront the fact and marry Ragna, he would indulge the fantasy that he was a farmer — a free man, as they were called. He gave Adisla’s little brother Manni his seax and only attended training with Bragi to allow the old man to retain his self-respect. Without a valued task, he knew Bragi would wither. Out of gratitude for the kindness Bragi had shown in guiding him through the raid, he tried hard too. When he was beating Bragi’s shield with the stave that stood in for a sword, he let the injustice of his inability to marry Adisla fuel his aggression.
For the rest of the time he helped Adisla and her mother around their farm or worked the flocks with her brothers and spent his evenings chatting in Danish with Barth. He would not go raiding though. That took all his courage. He knew that the gods hate nothing more than a coward, and only the knowledge that he was acting for the right reasons allowed him to keep up the pretence that he was.
The king didn’t call Vali a coward to his face but there were plenty in his bodyguard who murmured the word as the prince passed. Ageirr was one of them. Vali would have preferred to take the insults, looking on them as helping him on the path that he wanted to travel, but he wasn’t made like that and always reacted.
‘I said, what did you say?’
‘Nothing, prince, nothing at all.’
Vali had heard the word but he didn’t want to press Ageirr to repeat it. If he did, Vali would be forced to challenge him to a duel. Ageirr was no keener. He wanted the fun of taunting Vali but didn’t want to push it to a fight. Vali was still Authun’s son and so valuable to King Forkbeard. The penalty for killing the prince, in a legal contest or not, would be severe. And besides, he had seen the way the prince split those staves against Bragi’s helmet. He didn’t want to find out what he could do with a sword.
Vali grunted and turned away.
‘Are you looking forward to the wedding? We’ll have a rare feast that night, I think,’ Aegirr said as he did so.
‘What wedding?’
‘Adisla, the slut from the top farms, is to marry Drengi Half Troll from over the valley. What a union that will be!’
Vali was stunned. He even forgot the insult to Adisla.
‘That is not so,’ he said.
‘I’m afraid that it is,’ said Ageirr. ‘I heard it from her brother this morning. Go and ask if you don’t believe me.’
‘If you’re lying, you’ll answer to me,’ said Vali. Then he ran. He knew that Drengi had asked Adisla to marry him before and been refused. Drengi was a good man, strong and hard-working, but he was known as Half Troll because he was both ugly and not much given to talk. Adisla, thought Vali, could never agree to marry him, could she?
He made Disa’s house at a sprint. Adisla wasn’t there when he arrived, but her mother was sitting outside in the sunlight pulverising some acorns from her store with a large stone.
‘Is it true?’
He saw by her eyes that it was.
‘Why?’
Disa stopped her pounding.
‘You are of a different rank, Vali, and sworn to a princess. My girl is three summers past the age she could have married. It’s right that she should do so.’
‘I love her, Ma. Is it right she should turn her back on that?’
Disa tapped the pounding stone on the edge of her wooden bowl.
‘She hasn’t said yes to him yet, though I think she intends to.’
‘Don’t let her. Make her refuse him.’
She pursed her lips. ‘What life would it be as your concubine, Vali? You can’t marry her so that’s all she can ever be. What if you tire of her?’
