A Companion to Wolves

by Elizabeth Bear

  There were clean clothes when they were done, and then back to the hall for supper. The food was again plentiful and well-cooked, and even nerves could not prevent Njall from eating heartily. Brandr sat beside him again and told him the names of the werthreat and their trellwolves, at least as many of them as he knew. Njall listened with half an ear, but mostly watched the trellwolves, red and gray and dark brindle, eyes golden, amber, orange—there were even three or four wolves whose eyes were almost green. He wondered if those wolves all had the same father and asked Brandr, “Is Vigdis the only bitch in the wolfheall?”

  Brandr snorted into his ale. “It’s your own wolfheall—you’ve only lived nigh it your whole life.”

  Njall hunched a shoulder uncomfortably. “My father doesn’t like it spoken of.”

  Brandr’s eyebrows went up, but he said only, “Well, Vigdis isn’t the only bitch in the wolfheall. She’s just the konigenwolf—the top bitch.”

  “Oh,” said Njall, and couldn’t help his eyes going from Hrolleif to Grimolfr. Happily, Brandr didn’t notice. He said, “There’s three or four other bitches, I think. I know the pups who came out with us today were whelped by Ingrun,” and he nodded down the table to a young man, blond and ruddy-faced and laughing at something his trencher-mate had said. “Randulfr’s sister. We’re lucky we’re getting a shot at Vigdis’ pups.”

  Njall watched a moment, to see if he could tell which of the wolves near Randulfr was Ingrun. And yes, a tawny-gray wolf, gnawing on a deer-rib, looked up at Randulfr just as he leaned back from the table to pass her a tidbit. Brandr prattled on beside him. Njall looked at Hrolleif, and then at Vigdis and Skald, and knew that Brandr was right.

  They set out across the snow at moonrise, well-armed and outfitted as became warriors, all afoot, including Hrolleif and Grimolfr, because even battle-hardened horses would not stand before a wyvern. They divided into three parties and cast out: Njall’s group included Ulfmaer and Hrolleif and traveled north and east toward the rising moon, over snow so cold it creaked under their boots.

  Each man had a wolf beside him except Hrolleif—Vigdis being too gravid to hunt—and the four unbonded boys. Besides Njall, there were Brandr Quick-Tongue, Svanrikr—whom Brandr called Un-Wise, but not where Svanrikr could hear him—and the Stone Sigmundr—and one of the three adolescent wolves, Eitri, although Njall noticed that the men and grown wolves kept the boys and pup in the center of the group, and Eitri did not look at Sigmundr the way Hroi looked at Ulfmaer.

  The trees they moved through were still gaunt, although the tips of their branches swelled with the promise of spring and life. After a little, it struck Njall that they passed through the dark with very little conversation—the wolves wove among the men, ranging out and back, and the men cast out among the trees but seemed to find each other effortlessly. Njall fingered the edge of the axe slung across his chest, his feet slipping slightly in his too-new boots, and realized that he was moving with the rest, as much a part of the pattern as a goose flying in a wedge. He could smell the night around him—the snow and the dark and the sap running up branches, the first green tang of spring. He could smell Sigmundr beside him, smell the wolves and the men, each individually, smell Brandr’s sour fear and his determination, smell his own confidence—for, unlike the other young men, he was a jarl’s son and this was not his first time in battle—and he thought if he closed his eyes and concentrated, he might be able to pick out the scent of the moonlight on snow. Moving, all moving, like a great, coordinated dance, and he bit his lip to keep from laughing in delight.

  He glanced around, wildly aware of the sound of his own heartbeat, and found Ulfmaer at his elbow. “You feel it,” Ulfmaer whispered, barely more than the motion of his lips, and Njall nodded, yes.

  “It’s the pack,” Ulfmaer said, his eyes glimmering excitement in the sharp blue moonlight, where everything laid hard-edged shadows. “You have the pack-sense already. Aye, lad, you’ll bond, and well—”

  His head came up, as if linked to Hroi’s, and Njall smelled it the same moment—a sharp, bitter odor, wood-smoke and oil of terebinth, and that musk as of serpents that had underlaid Skald’s name. Ulfmaer stepped back and put his shoulder to Njall.

  “The scouts have cornered it. Time for that axe,” the housecarl said, unnecessarily, as—somewhere in the darkness—a trellwolf howled.

  The leather axe-bindings were sticky on Njall’s palms when he shoved his hands out the slits in his mittens and gripped the weapon. His father preferred the shield-wall—a shocking weight of charging men with their bucklers interlocked, swords at the ready, a rank of spears behind—but Njall had learned axe too, and he believed Ulfmaer when the old man said that swords were no good for troll-necks. Troll-necks needed hewing.

  Njall had heard stories of this as well, of course. Villages raided, the men strung up with their guts in puddles on the ground and left to watch as the women, still alive and screaming, were eaten—although nothing like that had happened in his lifetime. The wolfheallan stood between men and the cold North, a thin determined line, and Njall had never seen a troll, much less a wyvern, and had never spoken to anyone who had seen one—before today. He tightened his grip, and the wolfcarls and their wolves moved forward, toward another eager hunting cry.

  Two wolves stood guard before a cliff face and a thicket, crouched low, obviously well back from their quarry and waiting for the rest of the pack. Njall had seen wood wolves, trellwolves’ smaller cousins, hunt elk, and dogs bring deer to a stand; this was no different from hunting deer behind his father’s rangy coarse-furred deerhounds, except that arrows would not pierce trellhide, or a wyvern’s scales. This was killing that had to be done at hand, with jaws and axes.

  The stories had not prepared him for the long quick shape that slid out of the darkness as they approached, snow hissing against its belly scales as against the runners of a sleigh, small wings paddling the air frantically as its head swayed and snapped on a long neck, lithe and ungainly as a goose and with the same beady, evil-tempered eyes. Njall’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, and a quarter-moon shone bright on all that snow. He saw the wyvern clearly, and he saw the stumplike humanish shape beside it.

  “Only one?” he asked Ulfmaer stupidly.

  Ulfmaer grunted. “One’s enough. Come on, lad, it’s on our side,” and stamped forward with Hroi on his left hand and his axe unlimbered in his right.

  Njall hesitated. He glanced over his shoulder, saw the Stone Sigmundr start forward in his footsteps and Brandr Quick-Tongue drawn back, away from the sally, by a wolfcarl whose name Njall didn’t know. “Sometimes they circle,” the wolfcarl said, and Njall understood the wisdom of it; some would fight, and the others would watch, so that the cliff against which the wolves had cornered the troll did not become the cliff against which the wolfcarls were brought to bay.

  Hefting his axe, he went to cover Ulfmaer’s flank, and felt Sigmundr and the two wolfcarls whose brothers still crouched, grinning death up at the troll, start forward.

  Five men, three wolves, one troll and one wyvern. And the only thing that saved them was the pack-sense, the knowledge of where the wolf-brothers would be, smiling, snarling, dancing their dance a half-step faster than the snakelike pattern of the wyvern’s flat-iron head. They wove before it, harried it, leaped one another stiff-kneed and came down in unexpected places, decoyed it away from the cliff while the other four men faced the troll and Njall stalked, waiting for the wyvern to overreach itself, to turn its back from the wall, to give him a chance to move inside that weaving net of teeth.

  He heard bronze clank on steel and knew the others had engaged the troll—the gross creature with its stony, knotted hide wielded a bronze axe twice the size of Njall’s—but his whole attention was for the wyvern, its pale silhouette dangerously indistinct in snow and moonlight, its mouth snapping after the trellwolves as full of teeth as a lamprey’s.

  It did not seem overly impressed with Njall. Among the smallest of the pack, after all, and he
didn’t dart in, snapping, and dart out again while sharp teeth snicked shut on cold air and the mist of panting breath. He just crouched, coiled, waiting, ready to spring, and did not take his eyes off the wyvern even when he heard an impossibly fast passage of arms beyond, heard the troll ululate in agony and a wolfcarl shout in pain. The sickening snap was not branches—

  Njall did not shift his gaze. He saw Hroi crouch, heard him yowl more like a cat than a wolf, saw him throw himself at the wyvern’s throat. And Njall knew in his bones, the pattern of pack, that Hroi’s attack was the distraction, and that his own place—

  He charged, biting back a shout, and felt a trellwolf running at his side, shoulder to his hip where he could know its presence without having to look. Njall threw himself forward, boots slipping on snow and the slick dead grass and leaves beneath, and swung his axe high and boldly with all the force of his shoulder and his mass behind it. At his side the wolf leaped, and Hroi snarled and lunged at the wyvern’s head this time.

  Njall’s axe hit hard, bit scale just in front of the wyvern’s haunch, slipped down and sideways. He turned the cut into a looping curve, kept the momentum, brought the blade up and around again and back into the same place, just as the trellwolf’s jaws closed on the wyvern’s hamstring. The thing could not shriek; snakes have no voice. But the little wings beat as if it could fly and it hissed like a steaming kettle forgotten over the fire. The troll shouted once more, and there was a sound of metal on bone and of bone breaking and the blood was hot, musty and serpent-sharp over Njall’s hands, his arms, salty and thin across his face, in his mouth, and the wolves were snarling, and he hacked again and again as Hroi got the wyvern’s neck between his jaws and dragged its head away from Njall’s back, and this time the hot gush of blood across his arms brought slick, wrist-thick ropes of intestine with it.

  If Hroi hadn’t grabbed Njall’s arm, in jaws that could snap a bull’s leg like a brittle reed, and hauled him safely clear, Njall would have still been under it when it came down, because he didn’t think to stop hacking.

  Ulfmaer died two hours after they travoised him to the Nithogsfjoll wolfheall, surprising no one. The blood staining his beard had been red, bright with froth; the snapped ribs had driven into his lungs. Hroi lay beside the body in its place against the wall of the roundhall. The old wolf’s chin rested in the groove between Ulfmaer’s thigh and groin, Ulfmaer’s fingers softly curling across the mammoth skull. Hroi’s green-gold eyes were watchful; he would not bear the body touched. Not on that night. Not until the morning.

  The pack gave him his mourning in private, and took theirs into the snow, around a bonfire built on the flagstones. Njall held warmed ale in a horn and barely touched it; he’d seen death before, of course, and death in battle was kinder than the death of age and illness and blindness and fouling oneself in senility, so he knew his sorrow for pure selfishness at having lost his family and his new teacher and guardian, all in one day.

  He didn’t speak to them, but he was grateful when Sigmundr and Brandr came and sat on either side of him, and leaned their shoulders against his for warmth. Sigmundr didn’t talk much—just helped him stare into the fire. Brandr told the dirtiest jokes he’d ever heard, under his breath, in a monotone, until even Sigmundr couldn’t quite keep his lips from cracking into a smile.

  “How many boys were tithed with you, Sigmundr?” Njall asked, finally, when Brandr paused for breath.

  The older boy sipped his mulled wine and shook his head. “Nine,” he said, his eyes on Eitri and one of his brothers, where they lay staring into the fire.

  “But there are four of you—” Brandr, who stopped himself short, and left Njall infinitely grateful that Brandr had been just a little bit faster to be stupid this time.

  He felt Sigmundr shrug. “We have been unlucky. Ulfmaer said that it’s a bad tithe when they lose one boy before bonding, a very bad tithe when they lose three.”

  Njall didn’t speak, but the other two boys must have felt him shiver, because both of them pressed close. He was grateful, actually, that they were not put to bed and expected to sleep that night, because a great loneliness welled up in him when he looked across the fire at the drinking men and thought of his sister and parents warm in their beds, of the boys in the dormitory. Homesick, cub? he thought scornfully, and knuckled his eyes. He didn’t think Brandr noticed.

  The men were still drinking and the wolves were still whining when Skald emerged from the warmth of the round-hall to bring Hrolleif and Grimolfr within.

  Vigdis’ cubs—two gray dog-pups, a cream-colored dog-pup, and a bitch-pup brindled black and red like the fabled Tyger—were all born hearty and hale by dawn. “A bitch,” Brandr said with a bitten lip when Hrolleif brought the boys in to meet the blind, snuffling velvet grubs, and glanced sideways at Svanrikr. “I wonder who she’ll choose.”

  Svanrikr shrugged. Njall looked into Vigdis’ laughing, self-satisfied eyes and said loyally, “She’s the prettiest.”

  “It’s good you think so,” Svanrikr Un-Wise snickered, tilting his head so Njall could just hear him. “So’re you.”

  Njall didn’t dare hit him. The wolves were watching.

  TWO

  Life in the tithe-boys’ dormitory of the wolfheall was not so different from life in the boys’ dormitory of the keep, although no one looked askance at how much they ate or told them it was time they started behaving like men. The werthreat knew they were men and simply expected that they would behave accordingly. It was the wolves they waited for, not their manhood.

  The new housecarl, Ulfgeirr, and his brother Nagli were both redheads: Nagli’s pale tawny-red coat striking next to Ulfgeirr’s long copper-red braids. Ulfgeirr put up with a good deal of teasing on the subject with perfect equanimity, although he was quick enough to anger over matters pertaining to the peace and safety of the roundhall. He was also, as Brandr found out and reported gleefully to the other boys, the lover of the wolfheall cook. “They would marry, if the werthreat could allow it. Jorveig is heall-bred and understands about—”

  He closed his mouth abruptly as Ulfgeirr came over to them. “I could wish, Brandr Quick-Tongue,” he said, “that your hands worked as swiftly as your mouth.”

  Brandr crimsoned and fell silent for nearly a quarter hour.

  With Vigdis’ litter suckling and squeaking and learning how to use their legs, everyone began to watch the adolescent wolves very carefully. They would bond soon, and Njall noticed the way that Sigmundr and his tithe-mates were taking elaborate pains to be near Eitri and Authun and Harekr—not touching unless invited, but yearning. Njall found he could not watch them, and wondered if the same look was in his eyes when he went to visit Vigdis’ pups. And the young wolves watched the boys in return, but did not choose.

  It was two weeks after the birth of Vigdis’ pups that Ulfgeirr told Njall and the five other young men of his tithing that they would be going out on a long patrol with Randulfr and Ingrun and a handful of other wolfcarls and wolves. He seemed tight, on edge—unlike his usual easygoing self.

  “When do we leave?” Njall said, because somebody had to say something. He had not intentionally taken command of the group of tithe-boys, but habits bred since birth were hard to break, and the others were grateful, even if heall-bred Svanrikr grumbled about it.

  “Tonight,” Ulfgeirr answered, in a tone that brooked no argument. “Jorveig will have packs for you. Expect to be gone three days at least, perhaps a week.”

  “Yes, sir,” Njall said and kicked Brandr’s ankle to keep him from adding his contribution. Ulfgeirr was tetchy enough.

  Jorveig the cook, a big, rawboned woman with a grip like a blacksmith’s, was clearly worried when they went to the kitchen at sundown to get their packs. Njall had witnessed three fistfights that afternoon, and all the wolfcarls seemed distracted, snappish. The wolves were no better, snarling and pacing. Njall dared to ask her, “What’s going on?”

  “Ulfgeirr didn’t say?”

  “Just that we�
�re going out on patrol. For a week.”

  She tsk’d impatiently and adjusted Hlothvinr’s jerkin with brusque fingers. “I’ll have to speak to him about that. There’s no reason for you not to know, no matter how badly Nagli wants to get his ashes hauled. Asny’s coming into heat.”

  “Oh,” said Njall, not usefully.

  “So the housecarl and the wolfjarl together make sure that Asny’s kin and Ingrun and Kolgrimna are at a safe distance. You mind your manners, boys, and do what the wolfcarls tell you.”

  They agreed, raggedly, and walked down to the gate where Randulfr and Ingrun were waiting for them. The other wolfcarls had gone on ahead, Randulfr told them. “It’s harder for them to think, this close to Asny, and we don’t want bloodshed.”

  “Yes, sir,” Njall said and did not ask, What about you?, no matter how badly he wanted to.

  Randulfr laughed. “I’m not sir to you, lad. Tell me your names again.”

  “I’m Njall.” He pointed to the other boys, one by one. “That’s Brandr Quick-Tongue, Hlothvinr the Brown, Svanrikr Un-Wise”—Njall pretended not to notice when Svanrikr, not fond of the byname, glowered—“the Great Leif, and Johvatr the Younger.”

  The wolfcarl made a tolerant face. “And you are Njall the Not-Jarl, I see,” he teased, and when Njall blushed he patted him on the arm. “I’m Randulfr. Not sir. I hope soon I’ll be your brother in the werthreat. And this is Ingrun.” He glanced down at the tawny bitch beside him, and she looked up, first at Randulfr with bright love shining in her eyes, and then at Njall. He smelled her name: moss in a stream of ice-melt water. Then she looked past him at the other boys. Njall noticed, because he’d been learning to watch for it, that Brandr, Hlothvinr, and Leif clearly “got” Ingrun’s name. Johvatr didn’t. Svanrikr knew how to look as if he did, but Njall wasn’t sure if he was faking or not.

  Randulfr and Ingrun shared another look, and Njall wished he knew what they were saying to each other. Then Randulfr turned and with a wave at the boys to keep up started away from the wolfheall and into the wild wood.