He took her back into his arms, squashed hard against his chest. “Yes, I know that, my love,” he said softly. “Lashing’s a more common practise amongst humans. But tonight’s executions will involve Shifting and they’ll be bloody. I’m insisting on your brother watching. It would be better if you didn’t.”
He brought her food and drink and when Karr reappeared, left her and strode over to talk to his men. Karr said, “They’re sweet little things, humans, aren’t they? I mean, they’ve no talents and can’t do anything much, but they muddle along, trying their best. They must need a whole load of protecting.” Thoddun shoved a chunk of hot venison into his mouth. “Never expected to see you with one of them, though,” smiled Karr. “Well, never actually thought about it. But you don’t seem the type.”
Thoddun raised one eyebrow. “Too selfish? Inconsiderate? Unimaginative?”
Karr’s smile widened. “Liked your freedom too much. Made use of humans of course, but you certainly never cared for them.”
“True enough,” said Thoddun. “Fate’s a better archer than expected. But if you’re so enraptured by humans, take one. There are four caged here. Help yourself.”
“Four men,” Karr pointed out. “No use for anything except breakfast. I’ll find myself a female in the human town perhaps.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve not tried one yet.” Thoddun grinned. “Before bringing you back for tutoring a few years ago, I remember finding you amongst a forest of girls, all ready and able.”
“I was only interested in Shifting,” said Karr, “and then as the bear of course – but well – now I’m wondering what I’ve been missing.”
Thoddun shook his head. “I promise you, bears are a lot less trouble.”
After the long silence, Skarga woke to Thoddun’s voice, little more than a murmur. He was tired and there was blood on his britches. “He’s still alive,” Thoddun said. “But I had him watch the executions. I allowed the two wolves to Shift, so did Karr, and I wanted him to see that.”
Skarga rubbed her eyes, peering through the little flickers of firelight. “What did he do?”
“He fainted,” said Thoddun.
Within the cave’s echoes, she could hear the soft grumbles of sleeping men, the low hissing rumble of a bear pacing and the loud guttural snores of the man closest. A candle stub had fallen. The wax was still warm and liquid against the curb of the hearth, its scent lardy. Little spitting tongues of scarlet wandered the scattered ashes, reflected in Thoddun’s eyes, turning blue to crimson. “You’re tired,” she mumbled. “I thought you’d go out. I thought you’d want to Shift too.”
He smiled into her neck, one arm across her belly, the other holding her closer. “Yes, the bear calls. But I wanted you more than him.”
His skin was damp beneath her hands. “You smell of blood. And sweat. And tiredness. And something else.”
Thoddun said, “Are you practising?” He chuckled softly. “Such deep sweet perfumes. And the something else is arousal. Do you dislike it?”
She whispered, “I’m trying not to.”
“It’s the smell of adventure,” he smiled. “Come here. I’ve a lot to teach you about adventure.” Thoddun took her and rolled her so she curved away, his knees tucked beneath hers, his hardness beneath her buttocks. With the flat of his hand, he pressed her groin tight down against him. “The thrill of the waiting world, for instance.” He whispered to her, tickling the back of her neck. “I’m an arctic creature three times over, but the man in me loves the sweet sunshine too, and the wild flowers, and the perfumes of contentment. When this war is over, I’ll take you wandering. Into the south and under the sunshine. You may even learn to love the oceans.”
She was feeling hotter already. “Only as the orca under the sea. And I know the wonder of the eagle in the open skies. But what do you see as a man?”
His hands drifted across her, tucking over her breasts, pressing beneath her tunic. “That’s simple, my love.” His breath hung suspended, warm in her hair. “Moonlight rippled on water,” he murmured. “Sun on the shallows with the foam tipped in rainbows. Nipples of refracted star light across the wet sand. Forests singing with life, beetle and butterfly, ant and bee. The smell of the trees and the bark baked hot and flaking, moss clinging beneath in soft secret stripes. Snow glitter cut into a thousand shades of blue. Hills placid in a thousand shades of green.” He had pulled his own bearskin around them both, and beneath it his hands, firmer and now more purposeful, slid under her tight hitched hems, slipping past the tangled material, tugging down the woollen stockings from their garters, and climbing the warm flesh of her legs. “And you, all valleys in cream and milk and your hair smelling of the salt winds. Your hands, small and delicate as shells, creeping along my back, lighting fires in my throat and my groin. Your mouth damp on my cheek. The glossy silk between your thighs, as moist as I’ve made you. My power to arouse, to awaken, to satisfy. All the aching promise of you under my hands.”
“I’d forgotten,” she breathed, “that you’re also a bard.”
He laughed very quietly. “As well as a monster?” His fingers had travelled and were searching their way inside her.
“A Fourfold skald, and no monster,” she whispered. “Is every part a poet? I don’t know. I’m only getting to know the man.”
“I shall show you all the rest one day, my love,” he whispered back, “if you permit it, and have the courage to understand it. Perhaps in the summer, when time gives us time.”
They slept the long warmth of the night and rose to a darkness as impenetrable. Thoddun promised Skarga a full day of calm, rest and company, and though he was often busy and spent more time with his men, he came to her often, to talk and eat together.
She did not see the short dawn and she did not see Banke, but she asked if he had been fed. Thoddun smiled. Having decided to keep Banke alive, they had fed him. But with the pack ice in first melt and being far from the coast, the hunting was not easy. They did not give the best rations to their prisoners.
“Will he,” she asked, hoping very much that he would not, “travel with us? When we go south again, to my father’s hall?”
“He’ll be taken through the tunnels,” said Thoddun. “These caves form one of the tunnel entrances, the same underground diggings where you came, and which then collapsed. They lead to my castle with numerous avenues and entrances. They lead north. And they lead south.”
“They’ve been repaired?”
“Some. But they never passed close to Ogot’s vik. I’ve sent sorties down ahead to make a new passage. Not wide enough for a whole army, but it’s the way your brother will go. Karr will take him. You and I will travel on by sled, keeping track of the spies and scouts, and then we’ll meet up with the others north of the township. Finally we all join Lodver and my land army, which already marches deep into the south, with Flokki and the sea fleet, Safn and the air forces, and Karr below.”
Four eagles had been sent to spy out the land and each returned to report. They confirmed what Thoddun already knew. Ogot had not yet set out but parties of wolves were abroad, scouting, waiting for opportunities. There were still five living werewolves originally exiled from the castle, and others which had travelled south with Mandegga to rouse the town. An independent pack had aligned themselves to those more powerful and there was also a small mixed troop, despised by the transanima, of common arctic wolves led by six of the werepeople. The transanima did not accept those of their own kind who formed mixed packs, part Aesir, part animal, but advantage was taken in times of war and prejudice was hidden.
Within the caves, reindeer hunted from the tundra herds or bartered from the Sámi, roasted slow on the spits. Some men slept. Others woke. Some ate before crawling to their beds, others took the same meat to break-fast, preparing for the long day.
“Now the sun rises higher and more visible each noon,” Thoddun said, “and each day of light unites us. But few of us are pack animals and we don’t easily follow our companion�
��s lead. We don’t march in regiments like the peoples of the east, and we don’t sleep to order or shit on cue. If we feast together, it’s the smell of the meat which calls us, not the need to do as our neighbours do.”
“But they all obey you. They follow you.”
“A compliance hard won. But I’ll enforce my will sometimes,” he said. “Mostly I lead by a ramshackle adherence to law. My men understand me. They respect me. I know them. Some are awkward, some timid, most are habitually belligerent, often violent. I am none of those things. I rule by the law of personality.”
They had gone out into the night to breathe freedom and watch the stars dance. Thoddun stood close, his arm around her. They listened to the wind whine low over boulders and through crevices, and they listened to the howling of the wolves. One pack to the west, towards the coast. Another answered, eastwards where the sun would rise. “There are more of them now,” Thoddun said softly, “than have ever come to the castle or known my leadership. There are many from the south, and from deep in the Rus. There are also those who run with the wild beasts, becoming more wolf than man, losing the will of the transanima.”
A man who wakes the intimacy of your body, Skarga decided, should not easily be offended by your words. “Isn’t that the secret dream, the great temptation?” she dared to say. “Becoming the creature in your heart forever? Doesn’t that ever tempt you?”
He smiled and his arm around her tightened, enclosing her into his shadow. “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps it’s because we know the risks, and refuse the temptation, that we resent those who yield to it and choose the beast over the man.”
“Is there ever,” she whispered, “when you’re out there as him, whoever he is, when you just don’t want to - come back?”
“Oh yes,” he said softly. “The temptations are many. And sometimes we resist a little more, and sometimes a little less. It’s the man who governs in most of us, and the man who always fights to return. I choose mind over blood, and always will. But with the wild ones, it’s the channel which is stronger, and the man remains weak. I’m not like that, my sweet, whatever temptations I allow to creep into my heart. And with you to come back to, the wilderness fades more easily. You won’t lose me, little gosling. You’ll never find yourself with only a bird in your nest.”
From the angle of his embrace, she peeped up at him. Then beyond the square of his shoulder, once again she saw the sudden rolling, spinning luminescence and myriad sheets of green transposed across the stars. She caught her breath. “Listen. It’s singing,” she whispered. “The sky lights make music. I hadn’t realised. I didn’t hear it when I saw the colours before. Now it’s so beautiful and so loud.”
He frowned, surprising her. “What do you hear?” he said abruptly. “Tell me.”
His sudden intensity disturbed her. “Why? Don’t you hear it too? First it’s like thunder, only very, very far away. Then the echoes tingle, and prickle on my neck.”
He held her from him, both hands hard on her shoulders, looking down at her. The spinning greens spangled across his hair in tiny arrows of reflection. There was green at the back of his bright blue eyes. “Is that all? Is there anything else? Listen carefully.”
“I don’t have to listen carefully,” she said. “It’s loud and it’s clear. It’s like the chanting of the transanima – like your songs without words. Not quite the same perhaps, because it crackles, and swishes like silk being crumpled. But I’ve heard those same melodies in your halls. Surely you hear it too.”
“I do.” He stared at her. “I hear it just as you’ve described.” His hands gripped so tight that she gasped and lost her breath. “But you see, little cub, you shouldn’t be hearing anything. It’s the song of the transanima. It’s the greatest source of the Shift. And you should not hear it at all.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Banke was packed into the boat. There were five boats for five humans and ten guards. The six remaining captive transanima had been hauled up from their cages and sentenced to death. The executions had not yet been instigated, and the prisoners waited. The humans were dealt with first.
The underground river was sluggish on the flat, but as the ground sloped away and down, the waters began to froth and race. Although the surface ice travelled on overland, the speeding rivulet of underground melt turned south to warmer valleys. It crossed and recrossed the deep tunnels traversing the permafrost which also journeyed south, passing close to Ogot’s vik on the way to the mountain pastures where Grimr still lived in the land of his fathers. Where the glacial stream ran, the tunnels had been widened, beamed, shored and long used.
“As queen, you should be present,” said Thoddun. “So come with me to see them off.”
The five tiny boats each carrying three passengers, two guards rowing with one prisoner, were set into the current. Skarga stood on the low banks beside Thoddun. Defined by torchlight, golden faced and bulbous, Banke’s squat, heavy muscled body quivered in unreleased temper, terror and disbelief. He began to roar.
Skarga watched while they stuffed rags into his round open mouth to shut him up. She wondered if he would be able to breathe, his nose being too squashed for air. He was hog tied, ankles shackled, wrists fast bound behind him. The same rope looped his neck, followed down through the leg irons and pulled him taught, with no sleeve free to wipe the tears of fury or the dribble of misery. His ankles bled and his wrists oozed raw.
Underground was warmer, but it was not warm. A tessellated fringe of stalactites hung over the water, decorating the mouth of the cave beyond. It was where Banke had been kept prisoner, iron cage suspended above the river. Now the cage held only the six remaining wolf-weres. They watched in silence as the boats rowed out midstream
Skarga knew and disliked her father’s three jarls who had accompanied Banke. They had all voted for her punishments in the past. When Ogot had said his daughter deserved a whipping, they had eagerly agreed. Now she watched them bound and slung into the boats. In the last little skiff was the archer and his younger brother. She had always disliked them as well. Ollaf the archer had kicked her as a child, and bullied her as she grew. He had terrorised all the children, the female slaves, and his own wife too. Now he had neither bow nor fingers with which to pull the string. No bear likes to be shot. A transanima bear will take revenge on any archer, a nibble of dexterous fingers making a serviceable snack. Skarga saw the stumps of Ollaf’s fingers bleeding and ragged. She found she was biting her tongue, finding it hard to concentrate.
Thoddun’s voice was muffled by the beat of the oars. “The tunnels run narrow,” he explained. “Karr will also go that way eventually, with a few troops. They’ll follow the boats, and take the prisoners onto the underground sleds once the water runs solid. But I must stay above ground, accessible to the spies, the scouts and the messengers.”
Finally Banke’s boat was just a small speck washed into the sudden rush of tumbling waters beyond the cave. Skarga whispered, “This is so – closed – and dark. I don’t like it down here. I like it better just you and me under the sky.”
“I like it better too. I’m no burrowing worm. I’m a creature of sky and ice and the orca loves the open ocean, not these trickles of cavern melt.”
But the knowledge of Banke and the other men imprisoned with contempt troubled Skarga. She imagined their pain. Behind her, the torch bearers waited. She wondered how much they despised her as a human too. “I know you love solitary journeys,” she took a deep, cold breath, knowing she could not obscure her thoughts. “Doesn’t it spoil everything, if I’m along as baggage?”
The boats had gone. Thoddun took Skarga’s arm. He led her briskly up the steps into the dark passage and pushed her against the cold stone wall. His face was deep in shadow and she saw only the glint of his eyes. “Seeking reassurance, little gosling? Or hunting compliments? You know what sort of baggage you are.”
“Sometimes I need reassurance. Banke and the others, they’ve become nothing more than baggage. Humanity is tre
ated as so contemptible. Your people despise us.”
“I don’t couple with those I despise,” he said. His voice was soft and very low. “Why do you pity those men? Men who’d ordered you flogged in the past. I read that in their minds when they saw you, and in yours as you watched them bound. Did you wish them free?”
“No. I hate them all. I hate Banke too. What did you see in his mind, when they took him away?”
“Fear. Panic. Confusion. Hating me. Hating you.”
She shrank back against the chill stone. She felt the menace in his voice. “So all humanity is stupid. Untrustworthy. But I’m human too. And you’re not really so different. You don’t pity anyone. You use people. You use me.”
He stared back through the darkness. “Is it pity you expect from me?”
His grip was bruising her arms. He would know he was hurting her. She stared up at him looming over her, his darkness enclosing hers. She saw the sharp similarity to his brother’s face within his own. She saw Grimr’s cold stare, the thin mouth and the relentless elegance of his arrogance. “No,” she whispered. “But sometimes you patronise me. You condescend. I’m useful in bed but the rest of the time you just think I’m stupid. Is it because I’m despicably human? Or just because I’m female? Like some nameless bear whose smell you follow out on the tundra, who you’ll protect for a little while in exchange for mating rights, and then leave once she’s pregnant and too much trouble to look after anymore.”
His eyes blinked, the startling blue extinguished beneath low hooded lids. “Do you criticise my habits, or those of the ice bear you know nothing about?”
She wished desperately that she’d never spoken, never felt the need to beg for reassurance, never felt the sudden tug of sympathy for her brother. “Both. You expect me to hate my father’s men because they ordered me whipped. I do. But you whipped your own wife too.”
He shook back the long bright hair from his face. He still spoke very softly. “If you could see into my mind, human child, you would see what I can only suggest in words.” His face was so close to her own that his breath scorched her forehead. “You will not fight me, not now, nor in the future. I am too strong for you, and antagonising me will only hurt us both. You are prey and I am predator. But I don’t want to break you. I want you strong. Don’t make me weaken what strength you have.”
Stars and a Wind- The Complete Trilogy Page 61