‘How much time? How long must I spend in here?’
‘Not long, I think. It is hard to tell. We are working the magic as best we can. He is not easy to find sometimes. Today. Many days. I don’t know.’
Noises drifted down from above: drumming and chanting.
Lieaibolmmai gave Adisla a sad smile. Then he turned and was swallowed by the dark. Adisla heard the sound of the Noaidis heaving him up and then the slither of the other rope as it was pulled in. She was alone in the blackness and the damp.
40
Feileg woke. Around him were the voices of ravens. His fever had gone and his wound was healing. He sat up and looked around. For a heartbeat he didn’t understand what he was seeing. Where there had been a family, a fire and welcoming smiles, now there was only ruin.
Of course, he had been among corpses before, and corpses he had made too, but never anything like this blood swamp. The bodies had been devastated: men were unrecognisable from women, children from animals. How long had he lain there? He looked at the bodies. They were beginning to rot.
The scene did not repulse Feileg or make him retch as it might have someone who had not spent half his life as a wolf, but it did make him shake. Since he had been looking for the girl, humanity had come back to him; suffering had started to mean something. He felt the years that had been denied to these children, the tendernesses and the joys. He thought again of his own mother, the break from his family that had felt like an amputation.
Feileg pondered what to do. He had no idea what these people’s customs were or how they preferred their dead to be treated. The birds were there and he knew that the wolves would come down when the darkness held for long enough to conceal them. It seemed a good way to him, so he just set their stone back on the stump that served for an altar, put the drum beside it and left.
It was not difficult to track Vali. The ground was wet, though not sodden, and the prince’s footprints were clearly visible at points, blood on the grass at others.
Feileg thought of what he had seen on the boat, the tempest made flesh that the prince had become, thought of the sight of him among the dead bodies, feeding. The wolfman, for all the killing he had wrought with hands and teeth, had never eaten human flesh. He never had the need in the winter, when animals were weak and easy prey, nor the opportunity in the summer, when most travellers went by sea. And besides, Kveld Ulf had not taught him to eat men. The shape-shifter knew the diseases that could emerge from cannibalism and the madness that it brings.
Feileg was sure that Vali had attacked the reindeer hunters. Whatever enchantment the prince was under had consumed him. And yet Feileg felt he had no choice but to follow. Vali was looking for Adisla, which meant that Feileg was bound to him. When Feileg freed the girl and she married him, he would ask her to release him from his vow and he would kill Vali.
Feileg followed Vali’s trail east for days, relying on scent, tracks and hunter’s intuition. In a pass through some black mountains, he came across a cave. Vali had stayed there for days, he could tell. The prince had not been his normal fastidious self, and on the ground at the mouth of the cave was human shit. Feileg saw that it was sticky and cloying and it smelled of blood. It confirmed what he already feared.
He didn’t want to sleep there, so he followed Vali’s trail across the pass.
As he continued east, it became colder and the skies more grey than blue. The vegetation turned to scrub, a stunted tundra of dwarf trees and shrubs that seemed to cringe from the wind. Shelter became difficult to find. Feileg ate what he had taken from the ship — he hadn’t been able to bring himself to take the family’s food, even though he had known he would need it. He drank from streams and hid in caves and holes when it rained. Weeks passed and he began to find indications that Vali was not moving as quickly. He was stopping regularly, sometimes in caves, sometimes in the open, but there was a different smell to the mess he was leaving now. Beneath the human scent was something else. Feileg knew it better than any smell in the world. It was wolf.
After days more travel the mountains ended and Feileg was at the edge of a broad plain going down to low hills by the sea. After some scouting, he found a place where the grass was flattened. He followed the trail and saw a mob of ravens ahead of him. They scattered to the sky as he approached, rising like the spirit of the corpse they had been eating. The dead man had been a hunter. His squat bow was nearby. Feileg took it along with the arrows. He hadn’t shot a bow since he was a child, nor used any other weapon, but now he would accept any help he could get. The ravens were watching from a distance. ‘You’ll eat when I’m done here and not before,’ Feileg said. He knelt to the corpse. The skull was sheared in two. No bird had done that.
Half a day’s walk yielded another find. He could see something had rested beneath the lee of a rock and, from the flatness of the grass, that it had been there for some time. Leading away were prints but they were not Vali’s. This was something bigger, still on two legs but with a huge stride. Feileg sniffed at the footprints and the same signature came back: wolf. As he went on, there were other tracks too — reindeer and broad sled marks on the wet grass obscuring all signs of the prince. The clouds hung black over the land. Great petals of snow began to fall, settling cold upon his skin.
With Vali’s trail gone, Feileg simply followed what looked like a path towards the sea. How long had he been on the prince’s trail? The moon had been full twice and when it could be seen was now a silver sliver in the night sky. But it wouldn’t be visible that night. The weather was closing in but there was no prospect of shelter nearby. Over the two months his strength had returned and Feileg kept up a good pace. Then he spotted the island. It was a long flat loaf of rock, like a reflection of the clouds, a white tear into the dark fabric of the sea.
He had no coat, only the wolf pelt, a pair of ragged trousers the Danes at Hemming’s court had given him out of pity, a shirt and a cloak he had taken from the ship. He had something else he could use to protect himself from the cold but hesitated to do so. He had kept them around his neck since he had taken them from a body on the Danish ship but hadn’t yet had the courage to put them on. It felt like a betrayal of Kveld Ulf to even carry them. But he saw the sense now. Most of his life he had simply tied pieces of reindeer fur around his feet in the cold. Now he pulled on the pair of boots. They were a little too big but good enough. He wondered if he should stuff grass inside them to insulate them, as the farmers did.
In his mind he heard Bragi’s voice: ‘Are you going soft on me, son?’ Feileg smiled to himself, the memory keeping him warmer than any of his clothes.
He could smell something on the breeze — reindeer. He stopped and listened. He heard the clicking of their hooves, that distinctive sound reindeer make even on soft grass, and he could tell they were standing. On again, on through the whitening world, running now to keep the cold at bay, hoping to kill a reindeer and crawl inside its carcass for the night for warmth. In the dying light he saw movement and realised that the reindeer were not alone. There were figures of men about them, and the beasts were tied to small flat wooden sleds.
Feileg slowed to a walk. Across on the island he could just about see figures making their way to the top. Some sort of assembly was taking place. He came to a small cliff over a short beach of silver shingle. The sea below him looked angry. From across the water howling and drumming filled his ears. He started to feel very odd, almost as though his limbs weren’t his to command. He walked on to where the reindeer were and saw something like his own reflection. A man beside a sled was wearing a wolf pelt, almost like his own, but white. Another wore a coat of black feathers and had his hair shorn and spiked to resemble a bird. They ignored him, finished tying the legs of their animals and made their way down to the beach. He followed them across to the sea, where they began to push a tiny boat out into the heaving water.
Feileg was acting on impulse now, the howling and the drumming filling his mind. He had to find shelter. The men could find him shelter. Throwing away the hunter’s bow and arrows, he ran forward, helped push the boat out into the water and got in with the two men. They didn’t say a word; just helped him aboard for the short but terrifying trip to the island.
The boat grounded on a tiny beach beneath a cliff and they all climbed. The jabber was intense now, and his companions pulled out their own drums to join in as they ascended. At the top Feileg found himself on a plateau.
