Fifty men in animal masks faced him, all drumming, shrieking, barking and roaring. The sight paralysed him.
Then, as if on a command, a sudden silence. The men parted and a small man in a wolf mask came forward. He was frail and clearly in pain. He approached Feileg, gazed into his face, then turned to his brothers and said something in a strange language.
The drumming took on renewed life and hands grasped Feileg. Charms and icons were shoved into his face, water thrown on him, and then he was being carried across the island. He fought and tore and knocked men to the ground, but the press of numbers was too great, and he was shoved and manhandled, kicked and clubbed across the island. Ropes were produced and thrown over him; when he shook them off others replaced them. The drumming seemed to be draining him of strength, and finally, inevitably, he was bound. By this time there was no need. The drums had entered his head, robbing his limbs of movement.
They dragged him to a cave, a gaping mouth that seemed to transform the hillside into the jaws of some ugly monster. He was mobbed into the hole by the dancing firelight of lamps and long shadows reached out like spider legs as if to inspect him as he descended the slope into darkness. Then, where the floor fell away, the man in the wolf mask came forward, holding a torch in one hand and a bright iron knife in the other.
‘Lord,’ he said in Norse. He bowed his head and turned Feileg to face the dark. In one movement, he slashed the bonds on his arms and pushed him hard in the back.
Feileg tried to turn to strike him but couldn’t seem to make his body respond. He dropped into the dark. It was a heavy fall and he was stunned for a couple of breaths. When he recovered his senses, he could hear someone panting, trying to control themselves but taking in great gulps of air in panic.
‘What are you?’
‘Lady?’ said Feileg.
There was another cry. He was sure it was Adisla. Even through her sobs he was certain it was her voice.
‘Is it you? I swore to protect you, remember? Adisla, is it you?’
‘It is me,’ said the voice.
‘Lady,’ he said, and she came to him, hugging him and saying his name.
Above them the drumming stopped.
Lieaibolmmai turned to his brothers. His voice was weak but he was resolute. ‘We have unbound him now and the spirit will find him. In hunger the wolf will out, and he will do what he needs to do to welcome the god. ’
Now the animal cries and howling struck up again, but in a higher key.
Adisla held Feileg to her in the darkness. ‘Are you going to kill me?’
‘I am going to die for you,’ said Feileg, unpicking the bonds around his ankles.
Above, Lieaibolmmai sat down and took out his drum. It was two months into the final stage of his wolf- summoning chant and the sorcerer was sweating heavily. His magic had been growing stronger by the day since he had battled Jabbmeaaakka, goddess of the underworld, but still he had not been sure the wolf would come. It had taken years to frame the magic correctly to call him, years of toil. Then he had torn something from the goddess, a bright gleaming rune that seemed supple and to grow like a tree. He had thought on the rune in his chanting and had felt the wolf move towards him. Then, just two weeks ago, something had changed, and he had lost the creature, or so he thought. But now he had arrived, and he was just as he had seen him that first day in the mire. His face was exactly as he had seen it in his vision. The sorcerer could begin the transformation now.
It would be the work of another month, maybe more, to get to where they needed to be, but Leiaibolmmai was willing to wait. He had sent instructions to his whole nation, called every man of knowledge from wherever he hunted whales or stalked the reindeer, and now he was to reap his reward. He knew that many of the Noaidis were weak and would not last the course of the magic, that some had untold miles to cross to be there, but he was content. Some would fall away but others would take their places. He and those who began would be able to rest and rejoin the ritual as they saw fit.
He felt physically drained but ready. The battle with the goddess had strengthened him magically. He had ripped her knowledge from her, seen her accomplices die and forced her to hand over their secrets, the screaming runes that he had torn from the grasp of the dead sisters. But the battle had unbalanced him too. The runes buzzed within him, denying him sleep, filling him with odd energies and unwelcome sensations. Lieaibolmmai was a gentle man but not strong enough for those terrible symbols. He felt constantly sick, unsettled and not a little mad.
He thought of a rune like a spear, long and pointed. He concentrated on that — it would give him purpose. It did, though an unaccustomed anger rose up in him too. The runes were unmanageable and vastly dangerous, some raging like torrents of images and sounds that threatened to sweep away his sanity, others with a calm presence disguising deep undertows into madness.
The chanting went on and the nights lengthened. Magnificent smears of colour appeared in the sky, the foxfire that meant the celestial fox spirit had been called to their gathering. Lieaibolmmai knew the omens could not have been better. The fox was the most magical of creatures and had blessed their ceremony by beating his tail until sparks flew across the heavens in shades of glowing green.
He concentrated on the image he had seen of the dark goddess’s lair in his mind, that terrible cliff. He needed to implant that into the mind of the wolf, so that it knew where to go when it emerged transformed from the cave.
For two weeks the chanting never ceased. Feileg and Adisla lost all sense of time in the darkness. There was only the food in the pack and just the tiny stream of water to drink. Adisla, less used than Feileg to physical hardship, began to fade.
Feileg, though his body remained strong, was losing his grip on reality under the relentless chanting. He sweated and coughed as the image of the Troll Wall came into his mind. It was not strange to him as it was to the sorcerers. He had hunted in that area many times, walked the land at the foot of the mountain and looked up at it in awe.
‘Act, and then you will leave this trap. Set out for your destiny,’ he heard a voice say in his head. ‘Kill and be free.’
He felt compelled to do something, to step closer to something, but he couldn’t see what it was, and the feeling made him miserable and uncomfortable. He was like a slave who finds his master screaming instructions at him in an incomprehensible language, wanting to act but not knowing what to do. Adisla felt him trembling. She was weak and terribly hungry.
Outside, up on the surface, in the hollow light of an Arctic dawn, Lieaibolmmai felt beyond tiredness, unnaturally awake. He had broken from the ritual to eat a little, to rest his voice and to try to sleep for the first time in days. He almost didn’t hear the chanting now. The runes were all around him, as if they had lives of their own — hanging in space, fizzing, snapping, hissing, sometimes even sounding with rich musical notes. They had helped him though. He had achieved that higher level where he could feel the animal heart of the wolf in the pit and talk to him, direct him, show him where to go. He had contacted the wolf many times in long and difficult rituals, spoken to him over vast distances and heard him answer as a beast. The man in the pit seemed just a man. And yet it was him, he knew: the runes had shown him his face. He took it for another confusion of the magic, another product of his self-induced insanity.
A howl split the grey air. Lieaibolmmai shivered, not recognising what was strange about it but feeling disquiet anyway. The other Noaidis on the rock glanced at each other. They too thought it had sounded odd. The perspective was wrong, if sound can have a perspective. It sounded far away, hollow, but it was loud too, as if near. No one thought of the simplest explanation: the creature was much bigger than any wolf they had ever heard before.
In the cave Feileg sat up, feeling a cold dread. He knew better than anyone that the cry of the wolf was unnatural.
Lieaibolmmai had a terrible ache in his head but still he smiled. The wolves of the plain were greeting the wolf god’s arrival, he was sure. The howl from the mainland was repeated. It was very loud, thought the sorcerer, very loud indeed. Unease rippled through the Noaidis but excitement too. The howling was just a side effect of the magic. Their defender was coming, they were sure.
Down on the beach a youth was getting out of a boat, calling to them. From his accent Lieaibolmmai recognised him as an eastern Noaidi, typically late for the ceremony. He was glad to have that thought, pleased to be linked to a world of mundanity away from the dreadful presence of those runes.
