To Vali, the panic seemed dimmer this time, smudged by tiredness. His endurance was gone and he breathed in, then felt the clamping of his throat, the involuntary spasm of the muscles as he tried to propel himself to the surface. He tried to relax, to let what had to happen, happen. Then the fear fell away from him, disappearing like a ballast stone dropped from a ship.
‘He’s still,’ said Hogni.
Orri just shook his head and looked down. The rain had set in properly, unrelenting sheets sweeping off the ocean. The whole world seemed made of water, the mire and the hillside that held it just smears of grey against a storm-black sky.
Vali felt the certainty of death, calm and comforting, bringing with it the promise of an end to cares. Death felt like a warm bed he could climb into, like meat to the hungry.
There were entities in his mind — hostile presences, he thought. He felt displaced in his own consciousness, a tenant in his own head. There was a man, his presence felt fragile and he was fighting a woman whose mind seemed as deep and dangerous as the ocean. But the man was winning. He had taken something from the woman. Vali’s normal senses and thoughts could not understand what that thing was. It came to him as a shape, a cut in things, a cut in everything, a jagged slash in the fabric of creation.
Vali was in that tunnel again, the glow of the rocks like light through water, the air cold and heavy. The floor was flooded up to his knees. He looked to his side and saw a strange figure. It was a man in a stiff wolf mask, something constructed of wood and fur. In his hand was a shallow drum.
‘Why am I here?’ Vali’s voice sounded curiously muted.
The man in the mask began to beat the drum. Vali instinctively understood it was intended to summon something, something within him. The light seemed to ripple and he became aware of the shape again. It seemed to tremble from the skin of the drum, to hover, shake and pulse in front of his eyes. Destinies, he knew, were set at birth. The future was a path between mountains and you could not deviate from it. The legend of the Norns, the three women who sit beneath the world tree spinning out the fate of each human, had been impressed upon him since his earliest years. But now something was being offered to him. That shape, that awful, awful shape, something between a knife and a needle, to cut the thread of his life and restitch it, something hooked and sharp yet incorporeal — an idea more than a thing. The strange shape was a disturbance in the world that caused other disturbances. It was a rune. He could not see it now, but the thought of it seemed to float at the edge of his consciousness, like an idea remembered from a dream.
The rhythm of the drum seemed to command Vali and he had the strong urge to lie down in the water of the tunnel. He gave into it, leaning back and stretching out his arms, bending back his legs and sticking his head forward. Vali’s body contorted into the shape that seemed to capture his whole being, his whole destiny. The Wolfsangel. He now seemed just an expression of its meaning.
He understood that he was being offered a choice: this shape or no shape, the rune or death. And then, in his mind, he wasn’t the rune at all. He stood. The rune was the wolfman he had captured in the hills, floating there in the water of the tunnel. And then it was someone else. Adisla. She lay flat, her dress spread out around her, her arms wide and her legs bent in the same posture he had been. He seemed to be floating above her, or she beneath him, as if they were turning.
‘Darling, where are you?’
‘I am-’
‘This is the place.’ It was another voice. He had heard it before, he was sure. Yes, it was how that man in the shield wall had spoken, the strange pale fellow in the hawk-feather cloak. Had he been called by the drumbeat too?
‘What place?’
‘The place where you are lost.’
The drum seemed to shake him, to call forth something inside him. It had set something in motion, like the footstep that starts a landslide. A roar. It was a voice like he had never heard before — a choking, rasping expression of a wild hate.
Suddenly he was on the ground, and where Adisla had been was a huge, slavering wolf, much bigger than he was. The creature was tethered to a rock, lashed by thin cords that cut into its flesh tight as twine on a joint of meat. It struggled and thrashed to stand but couldn’t, like an animal trapped in the moment of its birth, the legs inadequate to its weight. Worse was its mouth, a gaping bloody wound kept open by a dull metal spar that dug into the flesh above and below.
A voice went skittering through his head, dry and quick as pebbles across rock: ‘When the gods knew that Fenrisulfr was fully bound, they took a cord called Thin and tied it to a rock called Scream. When the beast tried to bite the gods they took a certain sword and thrust it into its mouth so its jaws could not close. There the Fenris Wolf will lie between waking agony and tormented sleep until the last days. Then the fetters will break and the gods will be torn.’
The creature strained against its bonds, half rose, collapsed, staggered up and pushed forward again, the huge head gasping towards him. The sound of its torment was like iron on a smith’s stone but magnified a thousand-fold, a scraping, discordant note of anguish.
Vali felt a strong impulse of fear, not the fear of the shield wall or of battle — that can be bargained with, told that it will be listened to if only, just for a heartbeat, it will stand back. This was like the fear of drowning, of being buried alive, when the terror of extinction, of the hand of death blotting out the senses and stopping the breath, clamps down on you. All reason smothered by those constricting coils of panic, you will claw and tear towards anything, anything at all, your mind’s only ambition, your only coherent thought, ‘Not this, not this.’
Vali turned to run but the walls were now close about him. He was trapped in a little pocket of dim light within a smothering dark. The wolf’s agonies were like his own. He felt its yearning for freedom like stifling air sweeping over his face; felt its hatred of the tourniquet-tight bonds, the stabbing pain in his jaws. It was as if he was drowning, not in water but in the anguish of the wolf; as if the creature was consuming him, not with its teeth but with its mind.
He had to get out — to breathe, to live. His blood beat in his ears, or was it the drum? He looked up. The drummer was standing over him, the bone with which he beat the skin now in the shape of the jagged rune.
‘Help me,’ said Vali.
The drummer stopped drumming. Then he threw the rune towards Vali.
‘Become,’ he said. And Vali went wild.
Standing in the mire, Hogni was taken off his feet by a sudden kick of Vali’s legs.
‘He’s broken his bonds!’ shouted Orri to Jodis.
‘Then take up the rope and kill him!’
Hogni pulled tight on the noose, but it was too late. Vali had it in his hands and stood to pull hard on it. Hogni had coiled the rope about his body and was dragged towards the prince through the water, fighting to untangle himself. He was too slow. Vali was on top of him, howling and spitting, biting and punching. Bragi was on the bank and he leaped into the mire towards the fight.
Orri drew his knife and went for Vali’s back but hesitated for a fatal breath. This was the heir of his lord, after all. The prince seemed to sense the threat and turned to break Orri’s neck with a blow.
Jodis screamed as Vali went for Hogni again but now Bragi was on his back. Hogni got Vali’s legs and together the warriors bundled his thrashing body from the mire. Then there were others there, jumping on Vali, pinning him, holding him and choking him. They were Forkbeard’s men, and there, behind them, glowering in his full war gear of byrnie, helm, shield and sword, was Forkbeard.
Vali was hallucinating. He still saw the Rygir in arms but to him they were not understandable as men, just ciphers for pain and murder. It was as if he could taste their suspicion of him, their jealousies and their fears, as if all their emotions hung around them. Their feelings were like a scent he could breathe in; their many and several emotions, from larger hatreds to tiny animosities, were his to sense and name, as real and as many as the cooking smells on a feast day.
He struggled again and felt the noose go tight at his neck. He began to come back to himself, to realise who he was. Then everything vanished, and there was a different kind of blackness, a different cold at his back. He blinked, vomited water and opened his eyes. There was Hogni looking down at him.
He blacked out again for an instant.
‘Get him to his feet. Get this dirty murderer and kinslayer to his feet.’
