“She’ll stay,” murmured Safn, complacent with the woman so smothered in his embrace that she seemed more bundle than human. “I quite like her.”
“Well, you’ll not keep her to yourself,” said Halfdan, standing over them both and spilling mead on Safn’s grin. “Share fair, like any good friend.”
“Tomorrow,” suggested Safn.
“Now,” insisted Halfdan. “There’s only four of them, for sweet Fricco’s sake. Why couldn’t those fucking idiots have brought a few more women with them? Did they manage to please a whole army with just four scrawny females?”
“It was a small army, and she isn’t scrawny,” said Safn, satisfying himself with a quick glance beneath. “She’s quite buxom. And I got her first.”
Halfdan stomped back to the ale barrel. He sat on the edge of the dimming hearth with his refilled cup and glowered. A moose stepped on his boot and he cursed. He wondered if it was worth going down to the cave to Shift. Some of the bears were Shifting now, but his channel needed water. He cursed again. Then he saw another of the women. She had emerged from someone’s embrace and had noticed one of the boys. Halfdan got up again and went over to interfere.
Egil grinned. “Yes, I remember.”
“You was just a skinny little slave brat,” said Gert, adjusting her tunic and hems. “I wasn’t much more then o’course. A slave too, you know, but taken by a good family. I had hopes of better. Maybe finding a husband.”
Egil was still grinning. “Funny seeing you again, here in the middle of all this. It must seem – a bit strange – to you, that is.”
“Fucking strange?” giggled Gert, who was pink and shiny from fire, recent exertion and a great deal of ale. “More than fucking strange. What are you lot anyways? They said monsters when we was back home, but you’re alright. Nice enough. Just – well – I suppose monsters is the right word after all.”
Egil was indignant. “I’m transanima. So was Odin. You don’t call him a monster.”
Gert giggled a little more. “Trying to tell me you’re a god? Come off it.”
Egil sniggered, also distinctly pink. “If you wait till tomorrow, with daylight and a clear head, I’ll show you.”
“There’s things I could show you too,” offered Gert happily. “But maybe I shouldn’t ought. You’re just a little boy.”
Egil glowered. “Come on then. I’ll prove I’m not little at all.”
“But the first time, eh?”
“Perhaps.” He stiffened his shoulders. “Just maybe. So let’s go to my bed in the smaller dormitory, where it’s private.”
“Make a nice change,” Gert admitted, “’stead of all this push and shove. Sounds quite romantic.”
Halfdan watched them leave, sighed, and shrugged. He went back to the ale barrel and refilled his cup.
Knut stepped through the shattered gap in the door and crossed to the bed. The chamber’s high arrow slit faced east. The sun had climbed above the mountains and shone through the window enclosure. It shafted wide across the furs on the ice floor and angled sharply away from the buttress sheltering the bed from draughts. Grimr lay curled, facing away from the room and the light, sobbing onto his knees. Knut had never known his father to scream, to cry, or to admit failure and misery. He wondered momentarily whether this was someone else, and whether the transanima Shift might also include other men, and so one man altering into quite another. He tiptoed, laying the bowl of cold food beside the bed. He whispered, “Father, are you well?”
Grimr’s sobbing became a whimper. Knut knelt and reached out one hand. He did not touch his uncle, his hand trembled and hovered close without contact. He could hear his thoughts, and recoiled at once. Within the shadows, Grimr raised himself a little, his body uncurling, his head still bent. Knut thought he heard him sniffing.
Knut murmured, “I’ve brought food, father.”
Grimr’s voice was muffled, his face down against the pillows. He raised his haunches further, knees tucked beneath him, head buried down. “Get away from me.”
“You need help. I’ll get Thoddun.”
Grimr snarled. He lifted his head and stared red eyed at the boy. “Yes, I’m hungry, little fool. But not for dead meat.”
Knut blundered backwards and ran. There was no door to lock behind him. He pushed through the wooden splinters and raced into the long corridor. He could not hear footsteps behind him. He could not hear wolf paws. He did not know his way but he didn’t stop running. The darkness enclosed him. Knut had never been afraid of the dark but now the shadows held whispered threats and unknown menace. He had never really known what it meant to be transanima. Now he was frightened even of himself. He was also lost. The corridors led constantly downwards, angled against the deep rocks which even the axes of the ancients had not been able to hew apart. The ways followed only as the land permitted and on into the deeps. He heard the gurgling of underground waters; melt from the mountains and inland glaciers searching for the sea. There would be the outlet for the pounding falls that formed the wall of Thoddun’s bed chamber. There would be caverns, streams and rivers; the accumulated seepage of the ice castle.
Knut ran on, because running back might mean greater danger. The darkness increased. Before, from the windows, he had seen the last of the rising sun caressing the mountain tops in the east before streaming up into a pale green day. But now he smelled stale flood water and old brine, crusted salt on ancient rime, and mildewed rock from before the void. And he saw nothing at all. The darkness was greater than he had ever known.
The damp chill quickened him but suffocation slowed him. He trudged on, feeling his way. The passages continued, endlessly winding, endlessly narrow. Enclosed alleys, uneven floors with sudden holes that tripped and jarred him, the drip of icy water down his neck from above. Soft caresses against his face from breezes, draughts and swinging loops of archaic dust; relics of long decayed insects and the remains of a forgotten antiquity. Sudden touch but everything utterly invisible.
When he again discovered light, it was unexpected. It beckoned, like hope, from a distance. Some far space at the end of the corridor had trapped the shy sun, and the echoes of it gleamed. Knut shuffled towards it, but his boots were now ankle deep in sluggish water. As he approached the light, he found himself wading through a tidal ebb. The departing water left weed and broken shells and the white groping tentacles of long dead things. One frozen opening led to another chamber and Knut, creeping slow, continued down. The light now illuminated more rock than ice and the veins of long forgotten colours. He decided, controlling panic, that he must have come through the cellars. When Thoddun himself had been thrown in the dungeons, Knut had watched him flood the cells with his fire melting the dark holes in the ice. Reading his thoughts, he also knew Thoddun had later flooded the cellars above, widening the entrances for the creatures that travelled through the ocean. This was where the great armies had entered. But all tides ebbed and the deep places were no longer fully flooded.
Now Knut turned at last and tried to go back. He no longer feared Grimr’s wild unaccustomed lunacy, nor believed himself chased. He was more frightened of wandering eternally alone. He turned three times, unsure of direction. There was the pale gilding of silver light on ice and water and slithering shadows on rock, but nothing guided him. Beneath the slurping water there were no visible footprints tracing the way he had come and each rock face was the same as any other. Then he turned a fourth time and stood and stared.
Something stared back at him. A great column of ice supported a shelf. Seepage dripped in minute stalactites, falling sometimes with a brittle snap, or a soft tumble into pools of water. The direct light was poor, shading secrets, but where refraction caught the ice it dazzled suddenly, creating a force contained nowhere else. It was in the light that Knut saw the people. On the high pedestal and held entirely within crystal, a woman lay. Her skin was coarse, her flesh shrunken, eyes closed and mouth trapped in an ancient grimace. She had been laid in death with great honour, with weap
ons and a studded shield at her side. Her hands were clasped on her breast and the folds of her clothes arranged with care, but time and ice had sallowed her and the clothes had lost all colour. The years had turned her blossom to brown leather and in parts her skin was wizened and black with mould. She remained forever frozen within the ice as a beetle remains trapped within amber.
Below her grave was a column of thicker crystal, distorted by the sudden freezing of flowing water. A man was held fast within. He appeared standing and rigid, his face wild and fierce, gazing out from his prison.
Knut stood in the shallow slop of water, surrounded by the gentle music of the falling stalactites all around. He stared at the long dead face which stared back at him. Its eyes were open in blue startling brilliance. The mouth was firm closed. The hair had not lost either its colour or its thick curls, wheaten to the shoulders and a long moustache framing thin lips. The forehead was high, the cheekbones wide, the neck thick and the jaw challenging. The man was long dead but his animation remained.
Thoddun said, “So you’ve found your great grandfather.”
Knut whirled around. “I don’t understand.”
Thoddun smiled. His own eyes had the same brilliance and his hair the same gloss and colour. He looked like the dead man’s son. Thoddun said, “I am his grandson. My father lies buried in your own valley, by Grimr’s hand. You’ve seen the place.”
Knut shook his head, clearing his thoughts. He whispered, “Why is he here?”
“He built this castle,” Thoddun said. “He died here before I discovered my inheritance. I’ve only enlarged what he started. This is how he asked to be buried, and it is all I’ve ever seen of him. His wife was my grandmother, and was human. She lies above him, supported by his bulk, as I imagine she always was.”
Knut crept into Thoddun’s embrace. “I’m not sure I want to be transanima,” he murmured. “It’s sad. And frightening.”
“Not for you,” Thoddun said. “And not for me. In every race there are the sun kissed and the shadow darkened. You and I are children of the light. But now we must deal with Grimr.”
“Have you read my mind?” Knut asked. “And his? Do you understand what happened?”
Thoddun led his son back up the endless passages, a quicker way, knowing the wider corridors and how to climb fast from one level to the next. “Yes, little cub,” said Thoddun. “And I’m partly to blame. Now I have to put it right.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
“Of course,” said Thoddun. “Don’t you hear him? His mind’s still screaming. Now we need to be quiet. I don’t want to frighten him.”
“Frighten him?” Knut was now hanging to his father’s sleeve.
“He’s already terrified,” Thoddun said, “as you would be. Even as I would be.”
It was in Thoddun’s bed chamber that they found Grimr. He had crawled there for comfort, but found more emptiness. He lay curled, not on the bed but in the darkest corner, where he had pulled wolf pelts as mattress and blankets both. The daylight entered through the spangled diffusion of the waterfall but did not fully penetrate the furthest angles of the room. Grimr had closed the door behind him, hiding his secrets and his misery. As Thoddun pushed open the door, he left Knut in the narrow entrance between wood and hanging furs, and went in alone.
Grimr heard him but did not look up. His mind said, “You’ve come to gloat.”
Thoddun sat beside him, cross legged on the ice, and put his hand to Grimr’s head. He could feel where the small ears pushed their soft points through the sweat damp hair, to where the tiny bristles of fur grew between, and down into the first furrows of the man’s brow. Thoddun stroked back the hair, and the first stubble of the fur, and spoke very softly. “Breathe deep, my dear. It is not all lost.”
Grimr’s shoulders remained rigid. He muttered, “I tried. I tried too soon.”
“I believe so,” Thoddun murmured. “But the cub can still be brought further into life, if you relinquish it first, and Shift back. You cannot wear a channel so barely alive. It is too small for you and too vulnerable. You will kill it entirely.”
Grimr’s breath seemed to choke him. “I can’t Shift back. I don’t know how. And such misery, such pain. The Shift was vile. And now there’s so little – to abandon. But I can hardly breathe.”
“You should never have tried to Shift yet, and not without me. The wolf is far too young, and cannot yet breathe alone.”
Grimr turned, and then, as Thoddun began the first charmed notes of the chant, he rolled into his brother’s arms. Thoddun held him, rocking him a little, and continued to sing. Without hesitation or interruption to his chanting, he searched Grimr’s face. The eyes were wolf slanted within a muzzled skull, brown iris over the man’s blue, but dull behind bloodied tears. The half-grown ears flicked, sprouting soft furry tufts around pink satin linings. Grimr’s nose had elongated but remained a man’s, gasping for breath through snorting nostrils. His mouth twisted in pain over small pointed teeth. A grey shadow, not yet fur, discoloured his skin but faded back to normal above the silken collar of his shirt. Beneath his clothes the outline of his body seemed oddly deformed, the hips high arched into haunches. His fingers were clawed.
Thoddun’s chanting became increasingly imperative over the mournfully repetitive melody. Then, although it seemed the music continued, Thoddun began to speak. “Bring the rhythm of your breathing to the rhythm of the chant, as mine is,” he said softly. “Now, listen, and breathe with me. Slow your thoughts. Become heavy. Feel your legs stretch. Hear your own heartbeat as a patter of my rhythm, not belonging to you but controlled by the chant. If you allow it, and follow it, and welcome it, the chant will enter deep into your centre, and carry the whole force of your life into it. We are creatures of a nature more natural, and that is what must govern you now. You must become quiet again, relinquishing the heat and speed of the wolf, becoming man’s sluggard. Feel your flesh respond, here, and here, from toes, through the groin, up through the belly to the lungs and heart. Finally, from there to the head and into all your thoughts. So you must Shift back. Your wolf cannot yet support full life, and the strain of Shifting will kill him. You must nurture him within your mind and body for a long time before you can demand the Shift. Your heart is his cradle. He will wait. He is waiting only for you, as you wait only for him. But you cannot wear him yet. Let go.”
Grimr groaned in pain. Immediately Thoddun sent a silent call to Knut. “You’ve heard enough to understand, and to know I’m able to help. You should leave now. I’ll come to find you later.” He turned back to his brother. Grimr’s frantic heartbeat and breathing had calmed. Thoddun continued speaking very softly. “Visualise the wolf back in its pocket within your deepest self. Caress it, nurse it, and then leave it warm inside. Retreat from its hold on you. You must come back to the knowledge of the man.”
Grimr’s voice steadied. “I feel nothing. My body’s numb. If the wolf leaves, I shall be left dead. And if I am dead, he dies too.”
“That isn’t the way of the Shift,” Thoddun said. “Listen to me. From childhood, the transanima learn utter surrender. You and I were taught that too, forced to surrender to our father. But when we grow to first maturity, that knowledge of surrender and the faith to let go entirely, leads directly to the Shift. It also leads to the Shift back. You must let go of the wolf, to become the man. Too fast, and it feels like death. But it is not death, only simple surrender.”
“I swore never to surrender to anything again,” Grimr said. “Not since childhood. I fight for control. I control all men, including myself.”
“You first learn control, and then must have the strength to relinquish it,” Thoddun said. “Men cling to control only through fear.”
Grimr turned and snarled. The canine slant of his eyes and the stubble of bristles across the muzzle deepened. “Fool. I conquered fear when I killed our parents.”
Thoddun shook his head. “No. It was fear you surrendered to then. But that doesn’t matt
er now. Concentrate on the Shift back. It’s always the hardest, and untrained, can bring a terrible sadness, a loss too bitter to bear. Only with long experience can the transanima Shift-back in speed without black dread. Now, follow my words. Breathe slow, and even, and deep. The Shift begins in the mind and moves down, but the Shift-back must crawl upwards from your toes. Bathe in it, remembering the man who wears your heart, moving back into his safe familiarity. Up through each muscle, warming the blood vessels, soothing the mind, and carry again man’s thoughts.”
Grimr pulled away, shaking his head. “I don’t want the man. I loathe the man. What if I only want the wolf?”
“Then you’ll die by your own hand,” said Thoddun without emotion. He smoothed his hands over the buds of wolf cub ears, and they shrank beneath his fingers, disappearing into the human skull. “Repudiate the man? Then it’s the fear of what you are that’ll kill you.”
Grimr said, “Everything’s pain. You told me the Shift was pure joy. You lied.”
“You must first have a channel full grown and fully able to house your Shift.” Thoddun moved away, pushing Grimr aside. He looked down on him. “You understand everything I say but you argue like a child, even knowing your own ignorance. If you can’t accept my power, at least accept my experience. I’ve given first breath to a channel dead from birth. I’ve given you hope. If you abuse that, you take your own life. Do it. You’ll save me the trouble.”
Stars and a Wind- The Complete Trilogy Page 83