She had not expected so genuine an explanation. She felt honoured, as if allowed admittance into a special place from which she had previously been excluded. Her questions, however innocent, often offended him. Now surprised and gratified, she did not risk asking anything at all. She said simply, “I see.”
“You do not see,” he said at once. “How can you? You still speak of a sea beast, though I carry his anima within my own, and have shown you beneath the ocean, and brought you into my own orca heart.”
She swallowed hard. For one absurd moment she thought she might cry. Instead she sat straight and stiff, stared into her lap and said, “You’re very hard to talk to. Each time you speak nicely and explain things, I’m really happy. Then suddenly you get annoyed and everything’s spoiled and icy again. I try and work out what to say so I won’t upset you and then it always turns out to be the wrong thing. Besides,” she sniffed again, “I’m awfully hungry and it hurts.”
“Yes,” he said, looking back down at her again, “I’m well aware of that. I was trying to keep your mind off it. You’re fairly easily distracted. Let’s see if I can influence you another way.”
“You mean that was all a game?” Skarga glared back at him. “You were manipulating my mind?”
He laughed. “It’s remarkably easy,” he assured her. “After having to listen to your thoughts rambling about for so long, they’re easy enough to calculate. But it’s no game since I’m aware you think yourself close to starving. I simply moved your thoughts away from your hunger. It’s unfortunate there wasn’t time to grab human food from the tunnels before they caved.”
“You haven’t eaten either,” muttered Skarga. “You must be just as hungry.”
“Yes, I’m hungry,” he said, “but I can go a long time without food if I have to. I’ll stop the sled soon and send the dogs out hunting again, but this time I won’t leave until they get back. It’ll delay us, but I see no options.”
“I think I’m hungry enough to eat raw meat now,” Skarga said. “If there is any.”
He smiled again. “Don’t worry, I’ll catch us something. I’ll cook it for you too. There’re more caves ahead, with enough shelter for me to make fire. In the meantime, consider this a game. Tell me, in all the detail you can remember, about the last meal you ate. In my halls, I suppose, before the break-in.”
She stared at him. “That would be torture.”
“On the contrary,” he laughed. “You remember, and keep talking. I can take you back. How long, for instance, does it take on the spit, to roast a pig?”
She swallowed hard. “How big? How old is it?”
“Not so large, but fat enough. Less than a full season perhaps, still a suckling. And it’s all for us to share with no one else.” He was silent a moment. Immediately she imagined him creeping into her mind. “Don’t think about me, think about the feast,” he said at once. “It’s off the spit now and opened, laid out flat, belly down, the pieces spread on the rise of the hearth where the stones are baking hot. There’s a gloss on the carcass, from the sweating and the melting of the pork fat. It’s gleaming in the firelight, a rich golden, as if it’s painted with honey. The steam’s rising, pale and damp. The meat’s so tender it falls from the bone. Still pink inside, still full of its mother’s milk.” His voice lowered, the wind was absorbed into the harmony, she was inhaled deep into its magic. She swam within the rich melodic voice of the bard. “Take a piece with your fingers. Rip it. Those large chunks, dark crusted on the outside, pale in the middle. Remember. Live it. Lick your fingers, lick your lips. The flavour tingles. The grease is too hot and it burns but it’s too succulent to leave until it cools. The meat is melting against your teeth. The grease is dripping from your fingers, suck them quickly. If the juice falls, the snow will melt and the sled won’t run.”
She knew he was travelling her thoughts. He did not disguise it and she felt him move, as if opening avenues. She took the meat and ate it, and licked her fingers, and adored it. “I can smell it,” she whispered.
“Feel it against your tongue,” he said. “Press your tongue onto it and all around it. Your mouth is full. Hot and tingling against the back of your gums, behind your teeth, between your teeth, every part of your mouth is alive with the taste of it. The pigskin’s blistered and cracks into little pieces in your mouth. It crackles with taste, bursts with it, salty as brine, sweet as honey. Bite it. Crush it. Relish it. Don’t loose any. That’s where the white fat is stored, just under the skin, where flavour and scent meet and merge.”
“It’s wonderful,” Skarga breathed.
“Finish it all,” Thoddun commanded. “The flakes left on the hearth around the carcass, pink meat turning dark in the heat, don’t leave any. Remember the taste of it, over and over. But it’s not a memory, it’s all there, still in your mouth. Smell it. Breathe it. Even when you’re full, keep eating. It’ll take the hunger pains away.”
She ate and ate and when, finally, there was nothing left she closed her eyes. Her lips were hot and thick with pig grease, her mouth stinging with satisfaction. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve, which was, in itself, the pleasure of defiance. She was utterly comfortable and she could stay awake no longer. For a tiny moment she was sure that the sleep also came from him and that she no longer even belonged to herself, but it didn’t matter and she was quite thawed and very well fed and deliciously complacent. She leaned her head sideways onto Thoddun’s shoulder, feeling the slope and rise of his muscles and the warmth of his skin beneath his shirt. She knew that without touching, he had put her there, resting her where she could sleep. Her head slumped a little lower. Through the gently rising stuff of tunic and shirt, from the slight swell of his breast above the rolling muscles of his ribs, she felt the little hardness of his nipple under her cheek. Blissfully comfortable, she almost turned and kissed it. For a moment she jerked awake, resisting the impulse, and thought she heard his small chuckle from somewhere just above her hair. She smiled and drifted immediately into slumber. She did not dream.
CHAPTER THREE
When she woke she was already under cover. Curled on the hard rock, the bearskin had been wrapped over her and the wolf pelt folded beneath. A small fire danced beside her toes, just the golden red of three little flames in the darkness. The satisfaction of the fantasy feast had left her, and her belly cramped with real hunger. Her ankle throbbed and her head hurt. She sat up with some difficulty.
Thoddun was slumped back against the far rocks, one leg outstretched, eyes closed. She thought he was asleep but her awakening aroused him. “No,” he said softly into the darkness. “I’m not sleeping. But I am not perhaps – entirely – awake.”
“Are you unwell?” she said, worried. He seemed, to her, to be sunk in weariness or pain.
He shifted, sitting a little straighter, one hand pushing back the hair from his forehead. “Not in the sense you mean, child,” he said. “But sometimes, when the call is strong, it can be difficult to resist the Change. I am less one but not yet the other. I need to hunt. When the dogs return, I’ll leave them to guard you.” Skarga remembered Bram in Grimr’s hall. She wondered how safe the dogs would be. Thoddun interrupted her thoughts. “Safer than I am,” he said. “As long as they’ve eaten which is why I sent them hunting first. And they’ll be under my orders.”
“Thank you,” she said, “for everything. And for creating the dream-food and the sleep.”
“And now you feel terrible,” he nodded. “I know. But my small powers have run out and you’ll have to cope by yourself until I’m able to hunt. I fed your mind, but that only satisfies for a limited time, and you need real food. I can’t risk leaving you on your own again, and I can’t be sure what I’ll be able to catch for you anyway. Just fish probably. You can never tell how far the freeze has stretched this deep into winter, but I can break through the thinner floes. The dogs should be back soon if they catch something.”
Skarga was feeling guilty. She was the inconvenience he called her. “I’m sorry
you have to go out into the cold,” she said. “I suppose it’s still snowing.”
He laughed then, and the sound of it echoed up into the narrow ravine above her head. “My dear child, this cold ice land is my element.” It was the bard’s voice, rich and melodic, as he threw off the lassitude and was restlessly man again. “Yes, it’s still snowing, and the wind is marvellous across the drifts, blustering in from the great open seas. It’s a world of staggering beauty, huge and wild and glorious. I itch to be out there. In here, or up behind the bars of the sled, I’m trapped. Here in my own land, the urge to Shift is very strong. I yearn to be running free.”
Skarga gazed earnestly at him. “Do it then,” she said. “Change. Don’t resist it if resisting hurts. I don’t mind, honestly. I’m not frightened.”
He smiled at her and she thought the smile warmer than usual, reaching the blue glitter of his eyes and softening them. “No, child,” he said. “It would be dangerous. I’m too hungry, and you’re too small.” He looked away, the brief elation lost, slumping down a little deeper into the shadows. “When the dogs return – I can wait until then. Instead let me tell you the answers to some of your questions. There’s a mass of them in your mind, especially those you haven’t dared ask. It will help distract me. Pick one.”
She tried to think of anything other than hunger. Finally she said, risking his annoyance, the thing that was uppermost in her mind. “You started telling me about how the change happens,” she said. “I want to understand. If that doesn’t make it harder at the moment of course, because you want to.” She paused, waiting for his annoyance, which did not fire. So she added, “It’s a wonderful magic. I wish I could feel something of the same. But it isn’t always easy, is it?”
He leaned back and closed his eyes again. “Very well.” He spoke softly into the darkness, as though desperately tired, reluctant, or simply retracing a distant memory. “From birth, or a little later,” he murmured, “we feel something. It beckons, but takes us nowhere. It worms into the mind and under the skin but refuses to give its name. In dreams it suddenly blazes out, vast winged dreams of salvation and promises of heart’s ease, but then we wake to find the world small and dull again, and utterly rejecting. We long for what is indescribable to us, and which seems ever more shameful. We are repudiated by something we cannot even see, or hear, or touch, but which we desire with all our inner force, yet hate the thing we love because it eludes us and we cannot understand it. Gradually we discover certain powers, and are quickly accused of being cursed. The powers flare only in anger, or in love, and seem uncontrollable. That is what your Egil has been suffering in ignorance.
“I was luckier” Thoddun continued. “I knew. My parents were both transanima, but despising them, it was never something I welcomed for myself. My body wanted the Change but my mind did not. In the world of humans, the Shift seems a hideous deformity and deeply shameful. For me, it meant something else as well and repulsed me entirely. But when the full ability to Shift came, and I was about twelve years old, I understood and was enchanted by it. Some always deny it. Any of the werepeople strong enough to reject all alteration indefinitely, are ultimately destroyed. When I fully discovered my own powers, I welcomed and developed them. Now I search for others like myself, and lead my crew, and all those who wish to join my halls in the north.”
“How does it happen?” she whispered.
He opened his eyes and smiled again. “Already you delve my secrets. Do I tell you what I have never told any human in my life, and never thought to?”
“Please,” she whispered. She had quite forgotten her hunger.
“Then I think,” he answered softly, “you should come here.”
For one instant a little cold hard fear slunk into the bottom of her mind, but it was gone at once. She wondered whether she should crawl to him, or remind him that she couldn’t walk, when there was a faint sound like the scraping of pebbles and Thoddun rose quickly and strode away from her, out into the far dark entrance to the cave where she could no longer see him. The disappointment was so strong that she felt as though he had punched her.
The dogs had come back. They bounded in, nosing each other out of the way, tails wagging, jostling to get to Thoddun first. They smelled of blood and raw meat and wet snow. Their shaggy coats were spangled like star dust in the dancing shadows from the fire. Their muzzles were wet and bloodied. They had eaten well.
Thoddun spoke to them and they slunk down, paws outstretched, panting and gazing up at him. Thoddun returned to Skarga. “You’ll be safe now,” he said, immediately impatient. “I must go.”
Within a breath he was gone and Skarga scrunched her knees up to her chin and burst into tears. Her injured ankle stabbed spitefully and she cried even more, and the dogs looked at her with disdain and stopped wagging their tails. Fat blue tongues hanging out, breathing warmth into the cave’s chill, they surrounded her. In a few moments three were snuffling, then gruff snoring, and were asleep by her feet. One, lying low but alert, continued to watch her and stayed close, sour panting against her legs. Their fur was as thick as a snow drift, not soft like bear fur, but fluff deep and a little coarse with the scratch of wolf stubble. The lead dog rose and trotted to the cave’s opening where it sat with the wind and snow in its face, and waited, guarding the entrance.
Skarga had slept long and deep and dreamlessly and could not sleep again though she closed her eyes and squeezed her mind against thoughts of hunger. The watchful attention of the dog that guarded her seemed strangely intrusive, although intended as a comfort. The fire, more accommodating, was compact and low though the fuel seemed little enough to inspire any flame, just a clump of damp twigs that spat and smelled of soot and salt. Three other stumps of wood lay behind, ready to keep the fire alight, but the little blaze fizzed with an unnatural patience and Skarga thought it would need no help from her. It was Thoddun’s power that had ignited what should be too wet to burn. Then it occurred to her that at least, now alone, she had her thoughts to herself. There was no spy in her head.
When Thoddun returned he came with a great armful of fish. She knew he was coming long before she could see him because of the dogs. The first barking echoed back from the cave’s entrance as the dominant animal scented its master’s approach. At once the other dogs woke, jumping up, excited, anticipating, immediately alert, rubbing cheek to leg, hopeful wagging of tails, all pushing cheerfully to the front of the cave. Skarga had time to wipe her nose on her cuff, dry her eyes and untangle some of her hair. She looked, therefore, like someone who had never cried in her life, and who had been waiting in serene complacency, untroubled, patient and relaxed.
Thoddun strode in, threw the fish to a pile beside the fire and said, “You’ve been crying.”
“Of course I haven’t,” glowered Skarga, “and if I have, it was only because of my ankle. And being hungry.”
He laughed. “Was I gone long then? I don’t keep much sense of time in these places.” The dogs were all around him, a bounce of happy hounds, rubbing, yapping, tails high and vigorous. Thoddun sat cross legged, pulled a long thin knife blade from the inside of his boot, and began to slit the fish, scraping out their bellies with his fingers. Then he threw each into the ashes of the fire. In the fizz of dark and light, the fish scales floated in a dispersion of rainbows and the sharp tang of the sea. The flames slunk down, the heat spreading outwards. The fresh smell of brine turned to sweet flesh. The fish cooked quickly.
Thoddun turned his attention to the dogs, lifting each muzzle, breathing gently into their nostrils, murmuring to them in the usual indecipherable words. When they had settled and stretched on the rocks with eyes closed, Thoddun went again to the entrance and wiped his hands clean in the snow. Skarga watched him narrowly and guessed him content. He moved briskly and appeared both fed and rested. When he came back to her, he brought handfuls of snow which melted quickly in the cave’s warmth. He nodded and smiled and she drank from his hands. “The fish should be ready,” he said. “Tak
e as much as you can eat. I doubt you’ll want to leave any, but if you do the dogs will finish it off.”
She leaned forward, pulling at the first flank of shredding white. The skin was blackened and had begun to blister. Beneath it the flesh was falling away from the spine. She ate immediately. It burned her fingers but she didn’t care and licked them, careful to drop nothing. She pulled out each delicate white needle, sucked it clean and threw them back into the fire. It was fish not pork, but it was the dream coming true. Mouth full, she looked across at Thoddun. “You must eat too.”
He was watching her, smiling. “I’ve eaten.”
“But this is wonderful. Can’t you eat more?” She discarded the little scorched fins but pushed the ribbons of dark wafered skin into her mouth.
He was watching intently, as if judging her reaction to his words before speaking, then shook his head. “When I hunt, I prefer my fish – unspoiled.”
“Oh.” She went on eating. There was nothing left for the dogs. Two were still alert and hopeful, the others slept. “If you need to go out again – or anything – I do understand. You’ll say I don’t understand a thing, but as much as I can, I do. And I feel so much better now.”
He laughed. “I feel better myself. And while I think of it, I can’t always read your thoughts and usually I’m more concerned with my own, so if you need to piss, either crawl to the back of the cave or damn well ask me and I’ll carry you. Now, if you’re not tired, I don’t mind talking.”
She wiped her fingers on her skirts. “I’d like to talk,” she said.
Thoddun tossed the rest of the wood onto the flames and the fire flared. The shadows leapt. “Very well. We’ll try a question each,” he said, looking at her through the distortion of the flicker. “I know you have a headful, but I’ll go first. I want to know what you’re planning for your brother.”
Stars and a Wind- The Complete Trilogy Page 33