This time it was happening faster. Before, the wolf had slunk out of him; now it came raging. The hunger was irresistible. Jehan groaned and screamed as his wasted muscles twitched into movement. His limbs seemed to crack and grate as he squirmed across the cold deck.
He knew what he was going to do, knew what he needed. He was weak, his human thoughts locked below ice. Only the hunger of the wolf, the same hunger that kept him from death, was in his mind now.
He writhed his way forwards until he bumped into something. He could tell it was not part of the structure of the boat, but something softer. He couldn’t make his body roll, so, shivering and shaking, he turned himself round on the floor with his legs. The effort was enormous, and, despite the cold, he was sweating. Now his head was against something that felt like a man’s coat. Groaning, he wriggled his way up the body. An arm. Again, he slithered along the icy deck in increments, his muscles impelling him on and then rebelling into spasms, his joints as solidly locked as the icebound ship. And then, an ungloved hand. The men who had come onto the ship had stripped the oarsmen looking for jewellery. Jehan was next to a half-naked Viking.
He worked his head around until he had a finger in his mouth. He had too much of it, the whole finger, and couldn’t bite down. Jehan pushed back with his lips until only a fold of flesh was in his teeth. The first bite was agony. He could hardly puncture the flesh. His jaw was like an old gate long surrendered to decay and rust. But move it did, and the taste of blood, rich and deep, was in his mouth with the promise of more. He swallowed. Then he bit again.
A flash of his old life came to him: the chapel at evening, the smoke of beeswax candles in the air. And then the memory slipped away, flickering into darkness like a hare into the woods. His old life was gone.
While the monks of Saint-Germain went about their duties between vespers and compline he managed two bites. Between compline and nocturns he ate six. By lauds, as the sun turned the mist to a glowing grey, he had eaten the flesh of the whole hand, his neck freer, his jaw stronger. By prime he had removed most of the flesh of the arm. By terce he had the strength to tear open the belly and eat the lights, the liver and heart. By the time vespers came round again he was sitting up on the boat, the cold freezing the Viking’s blood to his clothes. But the blood in his veins was now warm, the confessor’s thoughts released from their shackles of cold.
Jehan stood up and put his hand to his neck. The stone was missing. He looked down at what he had done. He felt the wolf inside him almost smirk, content to rest a while before feeding some more. Already his teeth felt too big for his head, his mouth more central to his consciousness than his hands. The change he had known before was rushing upon him now. That feeling was in him — a mixture of dread and glee as the human recognised the animal.
Why had God put him through this again? He had regained himself only to lose himself. He had been content to die and to face the mercy of God. Now he was condemned to walk again, prey to the vilest lusts.
He recalled Corinthians: You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons. He looked at the wreckage of the corpse. What was that if not the table of demons? The Lord had shut him out or he had shut himself out. Whatever had happened, there was no heaven after this. So what then? Embrace hell? Never.
The wolf, he realised, had done more than give him the appetites of a beast; it had reduced him spiritually to the status of an animal. His whole life had been shaped by the idea of future reward, of heaven. That idea had been devoured by the wolf, and now he was chained to the present, his past life destroyed, his future unguessable. The instant was all he had, an endless rush of moments. That and Aelis, with whom the present was enough. She had been taken. Captured? Enslaved or murdered? He would find out. So seek her out. The wolf could find her, it had found her before. The idea was a boulder on the edge of a precipice. He only had to touch it to send it irreversibly forward.
The smirking hunger rose in him again, the feeling that hoarded bones like a miser hoards gold.
‘No!’
But he was what he was, and there was no way to fight the wolf. Even now the odour of the cold corpses drifted up at him, calling him to abomination. He felt his chin wet with saliva, his teeth begin to grind.
‘God,’ he said, looking to the sky. ‘Jesus, the test you set me was too hard.’
And then he fell upon the corpses to cool his burning appetite.
The wolf inside him would not let Jehan leave the ship until its hunger was sated. The winter deepened around him, snow was on his back but he felt no cold. No one came to interrupt his feeding. Helgi had forbidden the ship to his people, fearing that he would lose it to firewood if they were allowed near it.
So Jehan remained, icebound, eating.
Still, he heard men out on the river, their hammers breaking the ice to fish, the thick scent of oily wool drifting in on the fog, the smell of the fish themselves.
The transformation was coming fast upon him and he could sense himself growing. He would stretch out his fingers and find that when he folded them again they lay strangely in his palm.
His tongue was a bloody mess where he kept catching it as he chewed, while his back began to hunch and his shoulders’ movement to feel restricted and cramped.
The frozen days burst with odours — it was almost as if he could smell the cold. The fires of Ladoga told their stories: — old wood burning, very dry and musty as from deep in a store, first the smell of roasting meat, later only fish.
The old human stinks drifted in on him — shit and piss, sweat and bad teeth, secretions that seemed to sparkle in his mind telling their own tales of too much drink, of the exertions of work, sex and fever. He ate.
The corpses smelled wonderful to him, fascinating in their trade-off between the odours of life and the tiny decay the cold would allow them. They smelled so different to live men: the fluids of the stomach and bowels stronger, the sweat weaker, the blood full of the scent of iron.
He turned the corpses over, noting the redness of the back and buttocks where the blood had settled after death, marvelling at the mortal detail. Then suddenly his moral self would return, and he would run to the stern of the ship, putting his fingers into his mouth, trying to make himself vomit. But eventually that faded, and he felt no more revulsion that he would have chewing on an apple. The change that worried him most was the delight he seemed to take in feeding. He tried to hold back, to retreat from the euphoria, but he could not. He lay on the deck laughing and grinning, stretching his back again and again. It felt so long and so lithe.
But the confessor was a man of great will. Though he knew he could not fight the wolf, he did his best to cling to himself. Prayers and psalms seemed no use — he was separate from God, a cursed thing that crawled in blood and slime — but he thought of her. He had seen her when he was seven and she had told him, ‘Do not seek me.’ Yet he had looked for her, not with his body but with his will. He had wanted her at his side. Even in his affliction he had called out to her, though he had tried to muffle his inner voice with prayer.
Now he called to her again: ‘Aelis, please. Come to me. Adisla. In my life before I said I would find you and I am here.’
The fog meant nothing to him. His sense of smell and his hearing guided him across the land at night when there was no light. In the day, when the light from the sun was no more than a brightening of the fog’s grey, his eyes could pick out shapes — men fishing on the ice, animals moving across the frozen river — though they did not see him. He roamed, looking for her, but she had gone, it seemed. He couldn’t smell her, couldn’t hear her. On the barrows beyond the town walls he sat and watched for her. He called but she didn’t answer. When he saw the stir his cries caused, the men running to the ramparts with torches; when he smelled their fear and heard their hearts beating quicker than their steps, he went back to the ship, back to the bodies and his feeding and his growing until the remains of the Vikings were all gone.
He awoke one morning when the air was the colour of cloudy steel and spoke.
‘I am hungry,’ he said.
He first took a fisherman at his hole in the ice. The next day he took a guard from the ramparts of the town, leaping up to drag him down to his death on the frozen river.
Then he was hunted, men moving through the fog with torches and dogs. The words on their lips were harsh and he knew they were meant for him: ‘troll-witch, fen dweller, monster, wolf’.
He went deep into the fog and waited until they retreated. The boat was now closed to him, just a place where men waited, a brazier on the ice, spears and axes at their sides.
He watched them in silence, trying to make himself leave, trying to resist the urge to see them as prey.
But then, when the hint of a thaw was on the breeze, people came with a mule. His memory sparked and he saw himself in a river, pulling a fat man from the black waters, remembered Saint-Maurice, the blood, that terrible
