sleeping. When the pale grey of the long dusk came down, the man just dismounted and saw to the horses, then sat on the ground, clinging to his sword and rocking back and forth. Feileg saw few people with black hair, fewer still who seemed to care for their animals better than they did themselves and none who never ate, but none of these things accounted for the feeling of disquiet he had when looking down from his hiding place at the figure below him.
Feileg had some remaining idea of magic from his time with the berserks, but having spent so long with Kveld Ulf he no longer saw it as something separate from any other way of being. It was no more incredible that he could send himself into a trance where he would track, move and fight as a wolf than it was that a stream fell down a mountainside or that birth and death came to man and animals — no more incredible than breath, the rising and sinking of the sun and moon, the movement of the tides. To Feileg, creation seemed a rhythm that he connected to in ritual and meditation with rattle and drum. That man, there in the valley, was where the rhythm broke down, he felt. When he looked at him, he shivered. He had the wordless sense that the rider was a stumble in nature’s beat.
The wolfman scented the wind. Nothing to learn there, just the smell of horses and rain coming from the dark mountain behind him. Then he realised what was strange. He wasn’t interested in the rider for his horses or his food; he was curious about him. For some reason he wanted to see him closer. It was the sort of human feeling he had allowed to atrophy and its reawakening left him feeling puzzled and a little miserable. He put it to the back of his mind and concentrated on his hunger.
Vali’s thoughts were elsewhere. He thought of Adisla, imprisoned by Forkbeard; he thought of Disa; mostly he just thought of that rune. Its image and, even more strangely, its sound as Vali imagined it, had been humming through his head for days. The rune seemed to bring with it a music that was related to how people said its name — Ansuz — but was more than that. He remembered the voice of the thing that had spoken through Disa sounding like the drawing and pushing of the surf. That was how the rune sounded.
Then, in an instant, all the human feelings he had ignored on his long ride came back. He was terribly hungry and thirsty, and tired as he had never been before. These feelings seemed important to him, to contain a message. No more nausea. He had arrived where he needed to be. He looked around, his eyes heavy and refusing to focus properly, his mind telling him that the most important task he had was sleep.
Vali pushed his face into a stream and drank. Then he opened his pack. He took out some hunks of salted bread along with some pickled fish. He ate the food quickly, drank again and then settled down. He had not made a proper bed the whole journey. Now he spread a walrus skin on the ground, put his cloak about him and used the pack as a pillow. His tiredness had not quite taken his reason away and he was careful to conceal himself with scrub beneath an overhang, but in the dwindling grey light of the midsummer dusk he could not make his eyes scan for enemies. He was simply too tired and he sank onto the comfort of his bed.
Feileg watched all this from above. Now he felt he could move. When he did, it was with liquid speed, dropping silently down the sides of the gorge to the shadows of the valley floor.
He went forward alone, the wolves watching him from the valley lip. Feileg kept to the same side of the gorge on which Vali was sleeping, slinking low but fast towards his target. The horses were past the sleeping man, and Feileg felt there was a chance he could take them without waking him. It was too big a risk, however. Who knew who was riding to meet the sleeper? Who knew if he was an experienced tracker or even a sorcerer? He would have to die. To Feileg’s keen senses threat oozed from the sleeping man. It hummed like a nest of bees in a cave mouth, seeped into his consciousness like fire on the breeze. There was only one way to make it go away.
The quickest way to kill someone in their sleep depends on how they are lying. If he is on his front then it’s relatively easy to break his neck with an arm around the head and a knee in the back. Feileg had done this two or three times and found that even if the neck didn’t break he still had an effective stranglehold on his prey and could finish him very quickly. If the man was on his side or back then he might stamp him to death. Other times, when silence was necessary, he had power enough in his fingers to crush his throat.
Feileg — perhaps it is better to call him the wolfman because the hormonal surge he felt within him at the prospect of killing made his humanity seem a weak and withered thing — didn’t make a sound as he reached the brush that concealed the sleeping man. The man was on his back and the wolfman decided to creep up on his victim and twist his neck.
There was a growl, low and guttural. The wolfman glanced around to see where it had come from. He hadn’t made the noise himself. It was like nothing natural, and he felt a chill creep down his spine. Every pore seemed open and sweating, his body signalling danger with every sense. The growl came again, even lower, like rock on rock.
Feileg flattened himself to the ground. A third growl, this time like something coming from the lower earth, and a word: ‘Adisla.’ Feileg looked up. The noise was coming from the sleeping man. He was snoring. Feileg’s mind went back to the hut of the berserks where he had been raised. His memories of that time were now just impressions: the dark of the hut, the smell of his mother’s skirts, a glimpse of himself being chased in a game by the girls he considered his sisters. Only one incident stuck out. The man he had called father had snored like thunder, especially when drunk. The children had put feathers on his lips and hooted as he puffed them away. He remembered one of the girls putting one next to her father’s behind to see if that moved when he farted. It had moved and Feileg had thought he would never stop laughing. Looking down at the sleeping Vali, he heard another strange noise, like the babble of a stream. It was, he realised, coming from himself. He was chuckling. He hadn’t done that in a long time.
As he laughed, a glimpse of the meaning of human interaction returned to him, or rather a fleeting delight in inanities, and he felt a sort of fellowship with the snoring man, almost the desire to wake him and tell him how loud, how funny, he sounded. But Feileg had to kill him. The focus — those who didn’t know wolfmen called it rage — that made this easier though had been carried away by his laughter. He looked hard at Vali. Feileg hadn’t seen his own face since he was six and then only rarely. His image of himself had been mainly formed by looking into the shiny surfaces of the sword blades he had taken so he wasn’t immediately struck by his resemblance to the man before him, but something within him made it difficult to murder him outright.
Feileg sat for a while at the man’s feet. He studied him closely. He had — by ritual, the consumption of strange mushrooms, privation and lack of practice — lost the habit of thinking in words. So it was a shapeless, sliding thought that came to him as he looked at Vali’s combed and clipped hair, the fine sword that lay at his side, the rich colour of his woollen coat. He could not have articulated what he felt but this made the sense no less powerful. There was himself, as he could have been, had the fates weaved him a different skein. The man had said a word: Adisla. Feileg instinctively recognised it for what it was — a girl’s name. He did not feel unhappy, or at least he could not identify his emotion as unhappiness, but he did begin to feel uncomfortable about the path that the fates had chosen for him.
He breathed in, smelling something sweet and something rancid. He saw Vali’s pack and felt his saliva rise. He opened it and, without pausing to examine what he found, began to eat. He ate the honey and the stale bread and the cheese. He ate the berserker mushrooms and the long root. He couldn’t abide even the smell of the wolfsbane but the sleeping mixture was sweet and palatable so he sucked it down and pushed his tongue into the pot to get the last drops. Then he ate the mint and drained Vali’s wineskin. He began to feel peaceful, warm and relaxed.
From up the valley the wolves began to howl, but he could not hear them to reply. Disa’s white night potion had made the world soft. Feileg lay down on the grass and slept.
15
Vali really did think he was dreaming. He came to himself with that strange sensation that you sometimes get when waking in unfamiliar surroundings, when reality makes a sudden lurch and you don’t know where you are or how you got there.
At his feet, sleeping face down, was a powerfully built man dressed in little but a wolf pelt. The ruins of the
