put down the bone he’d been picking at and tried to stop himself from vomiting. He managed it, just.
‘You are pale, lord. Does our meal disagree with you?’ asked Orri.
Vali composed himself. ‘We will continue to my homeland now,’ he said.
‘We have not slept, lord.’
‘I have,’ said Vali. ‘We will go now.’
The two men made no complaint, got up and put the tack on the horses. As they did, Vali fought down the rising sickness inside him and kept up a stream of questions about Hordaland. Was it true that his father kept wolves as pets (he knew this to be false)? Did traders from the east still come to the Horda? Were the girls of the Horda still pretty?’
‘The rumour is, lord, that you only have eyes for that farm girl.’
Vali made himself laugh. He had turned the conversation just the way he wanted it.
‘She is a useful piece in my strategy with Forkbeard. The weaker he thinks my passion for his daughter, the greater will be her dowry.’
‘You are a cunning man, sir,’ said Hogni, laughing. ‘They say no one in the north is your better at king’s table.’
‘No southern man would beat me either,’ said Vali, mindful that such men as these respected bravado. ‘Now bring me my horse.’
Hogni gave up his mount for his prince without question.
Vali looked across at Orri, who was swinging himself into his saddle. He was a lean man, lightly dressed, no armour, only his spear and helmet. Could he outrun him on a strange and potentially unreliable horse? No.
Vali turned to him. ‘This animal stinks. Give me yours, Orri.’
Orri looked oddly at the prince. ‘This one stinks the same, sir.’
‘I want the horse, not a debate. Get down.’
Vali looked into Orri’s eyes and the warrior thought that he glimpsed a little of King Authun in the prince. Orri dismounted, and as he did so Vali brought his own animal’s hindquarters into the flank of Orri’s horse. The beast stepped sideways, knocking Orri to the ground. Vali snatched the reins, put his heels into his own horse’s flanks and shot forward, taking both animals with him. He was clear of the men in an instant, not even bothering to look back as he urged the creatures on.
They shouted after him.
‘You have sentenced us to death, sir!’
‘We cannot return without you.’
‘The Rygir’s fate is sealed.’
‘They are as the dead!’
He didn’t turn, just kept driving on up the valley, the feeling of sickness leaving him as he moved. He had, he thought, a good chance of getting away. He had two horses, was well rested and would be pursued on foot by men needing sleep.
He reached the top of the valley and found himself on a broad ridge above hills that stretched away to distant mountains skirted by trees, a fjord just beneath him. Did he follow the ridge or drop down to the east? He rode a few steps east, then north. Did he feel any more sick going in one direction than another? He couldn’t really tell.
He allowed the horses to slow at the top of the hill and his mind turned back to the house and Ma Disa.
Ansuz was the rune she had carved, the rune in which she had put her faith. Vali visualised the rune in his mind, even moving his hands in the air to mark out its three lines, one vertical, the others on a slant. He tried the rhyme Disa had used.
‘Who I am? I am a man. Where am I? In the hills of the north.’
He only succeeded in making himself feel ridiculous. But something did happen. His horse stumbled. He looked down at it. The animal was in a great sweat. At first he thought he might be in the presence of some supernatural thing — they were said to frighten animals — but the other horse was not sweating nearly as much. He looked around him. The light was subtly different. The ridge was coming into trees. Then he realised he had travelled a great way. The animal desperately needed rest. He dismounted and led the horses to a stream. There was plenty enough grass for pasture, though he had no food himself. Never mind, he thought. The feeling of nausea was faint but surprisingly welcome. It was a lucky coincidence to be off your food if you had none.
A fire was out of the question with pursuers on his back, so he watered the horses, removed the tack, hobbled them and waited. He didn’t attempt to sleep, nor to take his mind off the cold and, beneath that, his nausea and hunger. It was as if he was driven by some instinct that told him suffering was something he could offer the gods. He had never seen the point of sacrifice, of stuffing funeral ships with gold or slaughtering animals and slaves, but here, in tiredness and discomfort, he felt connected to something fundamental inside him. His bodily pain was nothing to what he felt for her. He could endure far worse, he knew, and his love would sustain him.
The next morning he set off again, picturing that rune in his mind. He saw Disa carving it, first on the wood and then on her hand. He saw the blood drip and fall, and where it fell it ran again into the shape of the rune. Then he was aware of the warmth of the horse under him. By the position of the sun he had clearly been riding for hours. It was a peculiar feeling — driving forward with great purpose but not really knowing where he was going. The horses allowed him to travel much more quickly than he would have managed on foot. Vali found himself riding across high passes, dropping down perilous slopes of scree, fording rivers and skirting fjords, but always as a passenger, rather than as someone choosing his way. He seemed to instruct the horses without thinking about it. There were signs he was on the right route — broken and discarded footwear by the side of a trail, the occasional marks of wagon wheels and hooves.
He saw next to no one, just far-off shepherds and the occasional homestead. He took care to sound his horn as he passed, to avoid being mistaken for an outlaw, but did not stop. Only the needs of the animals slowed him down, and though sometimes he drank when they drank, he never ate and rarely slept. Thinking about Disa’s rune seemed to have wakened something deep inside him, but thirst, hunger and tiredness combined to dull his conscious mind.
It was hardly surprising then that he did not hear the approach of the wolfman.
14
Feileg had been watching the rider for days, assessing the man’s strength. Lone horsemen in the inland mountains were never seen, and to the large part of Feileg’s mind that had become wolf this was suspicious. Also, the traveller was not on the trading route. He was two days north of that, in the backcountry, just above the treeline in a narrow dark gorge, following a tiny stream. All animals are wary of things they haven’t seen before and Feileg was no different. But there was something uniquely threatening about the man in the valley.
In other circumstances he would have called across the mountains to Kveld Ulf, but the shape-shifter had been gone for days, as he sometimes was, leaving Feileg to hunt with only three of the pack for company. The wolves, and Feileg, of course, wanted the horses and knew that the easiest way to get them was to wait for the man to sleep. Without Feileg’s help, the wolves would have had to wait for one of the animals to wander off at night, which might not happen.
Stories of wolfmen attacking camps of travellers were sometimes true but it wasn’t something they did by choice and usually only in summer. In the hungry hot months, when the animals ran swiftly and the berries were not yet on the trees, Kveld Ulf and Feileg had to take their food where they could get it.
Native traders wondered why the Whale People of the northern edge managed to travel by land without trouble from the wolfmen and imagined that they had some charm or spell that kept them safe. It was simpler than that. The Whale People lived among bears and stored their food well away from their camps, hanging it in packs from the thinnest possible branches of trees. The wolfmen would only fight if travellers caught them stealing their food and animals. The Whale People sometimes lost their dinners but always kept their lives.
Feileg waited for the rider to sleep, but the rider did not sleep, or at least Feileg could not be sure he was
