There was a shout. It was light. One of the tiny men was yelling and the other had a spear. Their movements seemed very slow and cumbersome to Vali. The man threw the spear. Vali just stepped around it.
The smell of their dread swept over him, urging him on to attack, but he fought the impulse. The dream of the person he had been was in his mind — he could still be that man. He tried to speak, to tell them they had no need to be afraid, but when he did he was shocked. A low rumble filled the cave, like thunder in the hills. He was growling, he realised.
The youth was on his hands and knees, trying to scramble past Vali. The man had picked up a stone and was hurling it at him.
‘Kill a hundred of them for me.’ The words were harsh but an echo of what Adisla had meant came back to him: ‘Return. Be with me again.’ The memory suffocated his anger and he was paralysed. The boy had got past him and was screaming to the man to do the same. He did, diving under Vali to where the reindeer was going wild.
The men released the panicking animal and just ran for it, almost falling down the slope in their haste. Vali went to the cave mouth, sat breathing heavily and watched them flapping over the plain towards the shore. The snow had stopped but it was still difficult to see any distance.
Vali felt shaken. He had had the overwhelming urge to kill them, but he had fought it — fought whatever disease or enchantment was on his mind — and he had won. There was a way back to Adisla.
The men ran for a while and then stopped. They looked back at him and saw that he hadn’t pursued them. They stood talking and, presently, Vali could see they were having an argument, sense their stress on the breeze. Then one walked off towards the sea and that distant island while the other called and caught the reindeer. He took something like a broad dish from a pack on its back, let the animal go and began to walk back towards Vali.
Vali felt nothing as he watched him come, no more than he did when he looked at the sky or the sea. The man approached slowly. He was beating a drum. The rhythm was different to the one Vali had heard that had led him to this place, the one that had vanished as he came to the cave. It was slower and more deliberate, and backed with a forceful chant. Vali smelled fear but also excitement. The man came closer, stopping eventually at the foot of the scree slope that led up to the cave mouth. Here he stood fixing Vali with a stare, banging the drum and making gestures towards him.
It all meant nothing to Vali, who was lost in himself, holding the door to the slaughterhouse of his thoughts hard shut. He knew what he wanted to do — eat this fool in front of him and then chase down his companion and do the same to him. But he wouldn’t. Why not? He had forgotten the reason; he just knew it was important to restrain himself. Vali could hear the drummer’s heartbeat, sense the blood flowing through the cavities of his body, almost taste his presence on the air.
The man’s breath was hot with excitement, his skin basted with fear. He brought the drumming to a climax, hammering out a frenzy of blows on the skin, gave a heavy last strike and threw his drumstick onto the ground in front of Vali, his eyes wide with challenge and expectation. Then his expression changed. His spell had not worked. Vali, now more wolf than wolfman, tore out his heart.
42
Panic swept the rock. The resting Noaidis tried to help those still lost to the power of the drums and chanting. Some woke easily, others not at all and had to be left to death as their brothers sought what little protection the bare island provided.
Lieaibolmmai found himself flat on his face concealed in the dark of the cave entrance, digging in his furs for his little knife. There was a squelching noise like a man walking through a swamp, and he saw the monster put its back paws through the chest of the Noaidi in the bird mask.
The gigantic creature was hideous. Its black wolf’s head with eyes of shining emerald sat on a body that was a twisted stand-off between man and wolf, though three times the size of the biggest man Lieaibolmmai had ever seen. The creature loped on all fours, its back limbs and front left those of a wolf, while its front right, which it used to tear and smash the Noaidis, to pull them into its crushing jaws, was the arm of a freakishly big human.
The sorcerers had been taken completely by surprise. Some were slashing at the creature with their knives, some were throwing rocks, a few were shooting arrows from squat bows, but most were scrambling for the boats that would take them off the island.
Lieaibolmmai cleared his mind. Hadn’t he bound the wolf? He had gone to it in its dreams, called it with his drums, commanded it into the cave and done all the magic as the runes had revealed. He had also heard the girl with the wolf and it was certain they were known and important to each other. And hadn’t the wolf appeared in exactly the form he had seen in his visions? So what was this thing?
He felt himself pissing where he lay. He had to control himself, to think clearly.
Then he understood that he had been deceived. Somehow the goddess had tricked him. He had snared a wolf but not the one he was looking for. And yet he had touched its mind, run with it in the wide dark of the mountains, breathed its joy in the kill. He could not understand it.
Lieaibolmmai was an honest man. He had no delight in the dark magics he had been shown and looked for power only to defend himself rather than for its own sake. He knew what he had to do — to give the girl he had uprooted and the wolfman he had enchanted and damned a chance. He went further into the cave and threw down the ropes.
‘The wolf is here,’ he said into the darkness. ‘Stay until it has finished killing. I will do my best to control it. I will-’
He never finished his sentence. A primordial sense told him that something was behind him, something worse than a neck-break fall. He stepped forward into the darkness.
At the bottom of the shaft Feileg and Adisla heard Lieaibolmmai crash to the ground beside them and then his scream. He had torn his arm from its socket and couldn’t stifle his agony.
Then something else dropped softly down the shaft, some sort of creature.
In the blackness there were retching and coughing noises. The creature hacked, growled and snapped again and again. She heard it snuffle forward, its snout testing the darkness. Adisla was close to collapse. She could concentrate on nothing, think of nothing but the awful scraping sounds coming from the creature’s throat, within which she seemed to hear some words.
‘My love,’ it said. ‘I have found you.’
43
Vali. That name still described what faced Adisla in the black of the pit.
How much change must you go through before you are no longer you? How many planks can you replace on a ship before you have to say that you have a new boat?
Vali’s jaws dripped with the blood of the sorcerers, his mind was full of the scent of their panic, and yet, now that he had found Adisla, a glimpse of who he was came to him, indistinctly, hardly discernible, as a distant shore might appear through haze. This was the girl he had loved since the instant he met her. He fought down his other perceptions — the delicious aroma of anxiety that clung to her, the succulence of her flesh, even her threat. She was not him, and every living thing that was not him now seemed hostile and dangerous.
‘No,’ said Adisla. ‘No.’ She could see nothing in the darkness, nothing at all, but that made the creature more terrible — its rasping voice, the heat of its breath.
‘I have found you, as I vowed,’ said Vali. ‘Come from this place.’
Adisla shied back, reaching for Feileg’s hand.
‘What are you?’ she said.
