Wolfsangel

by M. D. Lachlan

  He dropped off the table, went to the door and made to open it.

  The men jabbered but didn’t rush him. There was a clang. His seax had been thrown through the window.

  Vali looked at the weapon. He made a gesture of refusal towards it.

  ‘No need for that,’ he said, ‘if you’re sensible. Better a slave than a dead man, I think.’

  One of the men spoke. Vali understood some of the words.

  ‘Inroad from the sea. The hand of -’ and there was that word again ‘- Satan in this.’

  ‘Just a good ship and the blessing of the gods,’ said Vali.

  ‘One god,’ said the man. ‘Christ Jesus.’ He pointed to the embroidery.

  Vali looked at it. It was a strange but beautiful representation of Odin suspended from a tree, a spear piercing his side. It was a depiction, he felt, of the god’s quest for wisdom at the well of Mimir, where he had given up his eye for knowledge. But if these men were Odin’s, where was their fury and their fight? He couldn’t imagine walking into a place holy to the berserks and coming away alive.

  ‘He is on our side, not yours,’ said Vali. ‘Lay down your weapons and submit. I offer you my protection. On oath.’

  The one word seemed to get through. ‘Protection.’

  The men looked at each other. Then they put down the heavy silver and sank to their knees, pressing their hands together and muttering. The banging at the door became even louder. He walked up to the men in front of him.

  One of them held a strange oblong object, like a slab of leather. Vali went to take it from him but the man held on. Vali wondered what it was that he should cling to it more dearly than silver. He went to the table, where there was another of these slabs. He picked it up and looked at it. It was paler on three sides than it was on the fourth. The pale edges seemed to be pressed together in layers. He went to put it back down but, as he did so, it fell open. Inside were lots of papers, like he’d seen Veles Libor carrying. The squiggly writing was all over them, along with some beautiful pictures. Then Vali saw it - these slaves could teach him to write. They valued these papers so they must be able to read them.

  ‘Lord!’

  There was a face at the window.

  ‘Bragi!’

  ‘Yes, lord.’

  ‘How did you get up there?’

  ‘A ladder, lord.’

  Vali laughed. ‘You could’ve saved your head, if we’d thought to look. I’m going to open the doors. Make sure no one, and I mean no one, harms the slaves I’ve taken. They’re my property. Can you make those Odin-blind idiots understand? ’

  ‘I can try, lord.’

  ‘Three knocks when you’re ready.’

  Vali knew the challenge he would face once the doors were open and so, making gestures of calm, he picked up his seax and took the old man with the slab of leather by the arm. He was the least useful as a slave and the most at risk.

  After a short time he heard the three knocks and removed the bar.

  Light flooded the church as the doors opened. Two berserks rushed past him carrying spears and burning brands.

  ‘No!’ said Vali, but it was too late. Two of the slaves were stabbed and fell; one other - the young man of Vali’s age - ran for it, dragging the old man with him.

  ‘No killing!’ shouted Vali. Luckily the men fell into the hands of Bragi and the farmers and were merely smashed to the floor with pommel blows.

  ‘Silver!’ shouted Vali, and that was enough: the rest of the men poured into the church.

  Vali didn’t know what to do to save his captives. Acting on instinct, he pushed them both up the hill at sword point, back towards the longship. It occurred to him to let them go but he was fascinated to learn how to write and saw it as a key to developing and maintaining his kingdom, when he came to rule it. Also Vali had met very few foreigners before and was interested to talk to them. These men, he thought, might have something interesting to teach him.

  As they got back to the top of the hill, he picked up his shield and looked down. Now the church and the little huts were all on fire. Livestock was being rounded up and driven towards them. The men with Vali began to weep. Vali looked at them properly for the first time. They were clearly slaves, he thought, as their rough clothes and shaven heads denoted. Even slaves develop a bond with a place though. Again he noticed how enchanting the island looked: the sparkle of the sun on the ocean, the thick line of smoke stretching out over the sea to the mainland beyond like an enchanted causeway, the fires themselves. In the face of such beauty, it was difficult to remember that it was a scene of destruction.

  He pressed on to the ships and, when he got to them, was the first back apart from five or six guards.

  ‘Good plunder?’ asked one as he arrived.

  Vali just gestured to the slaves with his seax.

  The guard nodded. ‘One of them’s a bit old, but the other one’ll be worth a bit at Kaupangen.’

  He was talking about the big southern market. Vali had heard of it but never visited it. These captives weren’t going there; he had plans for them.

  ‘They’re mine,’ he said.

  The guard shrugged. ‘Depending on the split,’ he said.

  ‘They’re mine,’ said Vali. ‘I’m the one who made the effort to save them, the others are more interested in easy kills than taking prisoners.’ The guard shrugged again and sat down on the shore.

  ‘See what the berserks say,’ he said.

  It was nightfall before everyone returned. Vali sat by the fire and watched as herds of sheep and cows were driven to the ships. There were no slaves. Vali could hardly believe how wasteful the raid had been. All the loot from the church was piled up, along with flagons of wine that didn’t remain untouched for long. Some men even came with bales of hay they had stolen, more than would be needed to feed the animals on the short journey back. Vali was thankful that there were pebbles on the beach at home, otherwise he felt sure they’d be returning with a full haul of those too.

  The berserks had taken no prisoners, though they had a quantity of coin and some silver plates, along with about ten slaughtered geese.

  A change came over these men with the end of the day. They were no longer the baying animals he had seen get off the boat. Instead, they seemed listless, weak even, hardly talking, just crouching by the fires and staring into the flames through red and angry eyes.

  ‘Lord.’

  ‘Yes?’

  It was Bragi’s hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Did you not hear me? We are to put out to sea. This island is linked to the mainland by a causeway that is open at low tide. We should leave. The burning buildings may have drawn attention to us and we risk counter-attack if we stay here.’

  ‘Why burn them then?’ said Vali.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If the fires give away our position then why light them? Surely it would’ve been better to plunder the place in secrecy.’

  ‘The berserks will have their fires,’ said Bragi.

  The animals were loaded onto the ships, thrown in, roped in, hauled in, until the vessels were perilously low in the water. Some of the bigger creatures couldn’t be fitted in and were slaughtered at the beach and tied behind the ships. They would be dragged back, as long as the ropes didn’t break.

  Vali waited with his slaves to take his place in the drakkar.

  The helmsman was counting.

  ‘No room for those two,’ he said.

  Vali looked at him. ‘You’ll make room. I want them for my slaves.’

  ‘Lord, it would mean offloading valuable animals. The boy is sickly and the man’s old and not much good for work.’

  Vali could, he supposed, just let them go. The raiders would be long gone before they could help any pursuers. Still, he reminded himself of who he was. He’d spent so long at Adisla’s hearth among farm children that he sometimes forgot.

  ‘Princes need different work to common men.’

  ‘Lord, I—’

  There was
a scream and the old man fell to the ground.

  In the firelight Vali saw the gleam of a knife and the red eyes of Bodvar Bjarki, the scarred berserk who had attacked him. Then there was a sudden movement and the boy cried out and fell too.

  ‘Debate over, prince,’ said the berserk. He could hardly stand. He seemed torpid and sluggish but had still stabbed both men in an instant.

  For the first time in Vali’s life he felt genuinely angry, violent even, and as that emotion touched him he felt a chill go through him. This wasn’t the sort of rage that explodes in fury but an insidious, crawling thing, as present and real as the smell of smoke across a summer meadow. Vali was frightened by the intensity of the feeling. He would, he thought, have his revenge. It came to him not as an intention but as a fact, as real and unavoidable as the engulfing night, the endless stars and the cold dark sea. It was the first time in his life he could remember feeling hatred, and the sensation was almost intoxicating.

  The raiders were around him, their faces expectant. Vali, though, would not give them what they were asking for - a demand for compensation, a challenge to a duel. Instead he smiled at the berserk and said, ‘I will not forget you.’

  Bodvar Bjarki just grunted, huddled into his cloak and made his way onto the ship.

  Vali bent to the old man. Dead. Then he went to the boy. He was breathing but Vali could see he was dreadfully pale and close to death. He held him in his arms to give him comfort. The boy looked up. Vali had expected to see blame or hatred. Instead, he saw something else. Understanding, sympathy, pity even. He found it chilling.

  The boy looked at Vali and said a word he recognised: ‘God.’

  Well, he doesn’t seem to have done you much good, does he? thought Vali, but he said nothing. In a few moments the boy had stopped breathing.

  Vali climbed aboard a knarr. He had no intention of spending the journey home with the berserks.

  He took an oar without a word, listening to the men around him swapping stories of the raid. Farmer Hrolleifr told how he had faced the enemy’s leader and cut him to the floor. He omitted to say that the man was naked, kneeling and begging for his life at the time. Others told tales of taking on two or three enemies at once, leaving out inconvenient facts such as that their opponents had been unarmed. The most remarkable thing about the stories of the returning warriors was that they seemed to believe them themselves.

  He looked over to the drakkar as the ships pulled away from the beach. The one West Man the berserks had saved had been hanged, sacrificed to Odin in thanks for their safe return. As Vali watched the man dangling from the mast, his legs kicking as if in a useless attempt to run away, he made up his mind that he would never seek that god’s help. His followers, he thought, dishonoured him.

  ‘I hate you, Odin,’ he said, ‘and I will oppose you in all your works.’

  For some reason that made him feel better and he bent his back to the oar, losing himself in the rhythm of the rowing, thought banished by effort.

  9 Varieties of Darkness

  Some grow in light and others in darkness. Feileg - the boy the witches had taken - was not raised on the sunlit coast but on the mountaintops with the wild men and the wolves.

  The witch queen sensed that the boy she had taken needed to be prepared in a different sort of magic to the one she practised. Her magic was known by the ordinary people as Seid. It was a wholly female art - a magic of the mind. Gullveig had blurred the division between past and future, she had travelled entranced as the shadow of a hare or a wolf to enter the nightmare of a dozing king, but the arts of physical magic were unknown to her. Her trances and meditations would leave her weak for days afterwards, near to death even, and the toll on her was enormous. Her limbs were wasted and her body emaciated. She seemed no more than a rune herself, an arrangement of lines rather than a human figure. As the years went by, the change that other girls knew did not come to her. It would never come. The witch queen accepted the cost of her knowledge was that she would remain in a child’s body her whole life - small, weak and undeveloped. The werewolf could not follow that path. Odin, she knew, would come as a warrior, dispensing death at the end of his spear. Her protector couldn’t be weak, so Gullveig could only do part of what was needed.

  To create her werewolf, his body would need to be strengthened and conditioned by the berserks, the ulfhednar who lived as wolves and fought as wolves, gaining unnatural strength and ferocity from their training and their magic. The witch spoke to a berserker chieftain in a dream and the man took the baby, along with a payment of medicines, from a boy servant at the bottom of the Troll Wall.

  Until Feileg was seven he lived on the lower slopes of the mountains with a small berserker clan, who cared for him, fed him, taught him trance dances and beat him. On his seventh birthday the berserk chieftain who had taken him from the Wall woke him before dawn and led him back up into the mountains. It was early winter and the going was hard. The berserk took him over the snow fields, waiting for him when he fell, driving him on when he tired, shouting when he tried to use his little spear as a staff, warning him not to abuse something on which his life could depend.

  Most of the way the snow was shallow and they didn’t need their snowshoes, but as they got higher it deepened and they had to stop to tie them on. They climbed up through stark lines of spruce and pine that towered out of the fields of white like an army of giants until the trees began to lose their fight with the altitude and grow smaller and thinner, eventually shrinking to the size of shrubs.

  In a small valley next to a waterfall turning to ice the berserk stopped.

  ‘I am to leave you here,’ he said. The berserk was a rough man but even he gave a sad smile. ‘Take care, little Feileg. We will miss you. You have enough to eat to last you until tomorrow. You know how to climb a tree with your rope, and remember the wolves will not want to risk injury. If they come, attack them and make them look for something weaker.’

  The child said nothing, but as the berserk turned down the slope, he followed him.

  ‘You are to stay here,’ said the man. ‘Your time with us is over.’

  He turned to go once more, but the child followed him again. The berserk, though rough and given to beating him, was the only father he’d known, his wife his only mother. He wanted to go back to the cooking pot and his brothers and sisters, to help his father at his forge and lie next to his mother in the cold nights, warm and protected.

  ‘You stay,’ said the berserk. He didn’t have to say what would come next. He’d already asked once more than he normally would. There would be no third request, just the lash of his belt.

  Feileg felt frightened and very alone. He clutched his spear and said, ‘One day I will come back and kill you.’

  The berserk smiled. ‘It truly is a shame to lose you, Feileg. I believe you will. When you are a man you’ll be a great warrior, and I’ll be old, should I live so long. It will be an honour to die by your hand. Don’t be frightened. Your destiny is already woven and it doesn’t end today.’

  He turned again down the slope and in moments he was gone.

  Feileg looked about him through the slit in the cloth he had tied around his face to shield his eyes from the glare. It had begun to snow lightly. Above him was a ridge, below him the valley. He saw the footprints that had brought them there but he had hunted for long enough to know that the snow would have already obscured the rest of the way home.

  He didn’t know what to do, so he just stood wondering why he been brought to such a desolate place and what he had done to offend the people he considered his family. Presently his feet began to feel cold and he decided it would be good to find shelter. The days were short and already the sun was low in the sky.

  Feileg had never been treated as a child and so had never thought as a child. He had hunted almost from when he could walk and had been expected to sharpen weapons, cook food, make fires and clean himself from the moment he had been able to understand what to do. Raised to self-relianc
e, he came up with a plan. He would do what his father did when caught by a blizzard - dig a pit beneath a tree, build a platform of branches within the pit and sleep there. The next day he would head down and see if he could find someone who would take him, maybe even sneak home and tell his mother he was sorry and beg to be taken back.

  He went back down the slope and found a suitable tree near a small cliff that he thought would provide wind protection. He had been scraping away with a rock for about half an hour when he heard the howling. A single wolf, somewhere above the trees, towards the sinking sun, he thought, but it was difficult to tell in the mountains. He checked his spear was near and carried on digging. An answering call came from down the valley. He carried on digging. A third call, this time closer. He looked up to see a large white wolf, much bigger than he was, sitting on the ridge above him. The animal was just visible against a large rock. A heartbeat later it had moved, vanishing into the snow. Feileg kept digging. Life with the berserks had taught him never to think too much on consequences. He needed a shelter; it was getting late; he had to dig. If the wolves came for him, he would die. If he was outside without a shelter, he would die. Climb the tree and die, so dig and hope the wolves do not come.