They kept the plunder in their dens high in the mountains. It meant nothing to Feileg — you couldn’t eat it and it wouldn’t keep you warm — but Kveld Ulf knew that the fine walrus ivory combs, the gold arm rings and good swords would one day be useful to the boy. He would be going back to the witches, and it would not hurt to have some gifts for the witch queen. Kveld Ulf knew from his own dealings with the witches that a gift of some sort could distract the sisters long enough for them to remember that he wasn’t an intruder and they had, in fact, sent for him.
By the age of fifteen Feileg saw as a wolf and thought as a wolf, his body hard, his teeth a weapon. The mountain winds tearing through his mind, past-less and future-less, he lived caught in the moment with no more thought than a snowflake on the breeze. That summer the hunting was thin, and he found himself down in the foothills, ghosting around the farmsteads to try to take a duck or a pig. He was wary of being discovered because the farms were a tight network. One blow on a horn could very quickly bring twenty or thirty armed men.
That was when he had come to the ruin. It was a small longhouse, the roof broken in by the weather. It was raining and he decided to seek shelter there. He went inside. Scavengers — animal and human — had taken everything of value, but there were some signs of the former occupants — a broken distaff on the floor, a worn-out shoe, even a small rickety stool. There was better shelter at the back of the house but he decided to stay near the centre, next to where the smoke vent would have been. He didn’t know why but instinct made him pick up the stool and sit on it — something he hadn’t done in nearly ten years. And then he saw them in his mind: his sisters by the fire, his father, massive and silent on the bench at the back of the room, drinking, his mother patching clothes. It was his house, where he had lived until he was seven. He hadn’t known what to make of the feelings the memories stirred inside him and he had gone out into the rain. He had never returned.
At sixteen he awoke in the dusk of the cave mouth and stood up ready to hunt. Kveld Ulf tapped him on the chest and let him know with his eyes that today would be different. He led him across two valleys to where the pack’s oldest wolf had fallen down a gully and lay dying at the bottom. The men descended to sit beside it. The wolf’s eyes were cloudy and its breath shallow. Kveld Ulf looked at Feileg, and Feileg understood that the wolf’s spirit was to join with his own.
For two days the men sat and chanted, beat the drum and shook their rattles. On the third day the wolves came and added their voices to the music. They sat in the galleries of frost and howled out a strange chorus of exultation and lament. Feileg, his head buzzing with tiredness and the noise, took the creature’s head in his lap and stroked its ears as it died.
His body trembled and there was a taste of blood in his mouth. Strange longings coursed through him and, where the world had seemed wide beneath the stars, now it narrowed to a thin stream of hunger raging through his mind. He stripped the skin from his fallen brother with a sharp stone, tore out his entrails, ate his heart and liver. Then he placed the bloody pelt around him, looking out from behind the wolf’s face, as the wolf had done, as the wolf.
After that, Feileg had no story, no progression of events from day to day. He hunted and he fed and he slept and sat howling beneath the stars. He was part of nature, moving beneath the wind and the sun as heedless of his identity as the foam upon the surf.
And then, at midsummer, when the sun never dipped beyond the suggestion of dusk, his double came and his life changed again and for ever.
10
‘What did you say?’ Vali turned to face the person who had spoken. It was Ageirr, one of Forkbeard’s sworn bodyguard, a man of around nineteen, two years older than Vali though not much taller.
It was over three years since the raid — three years in which Vali had gone no further than half a day’s travel from the farms. He had asked Forkbeard to let him go trading, asked him even to allow him to command his own raids, but the king was adamant. Vali would go and fight as a common warrior or not travel at all. So Vali did not go.
There were many reasons for his refusal. One was that he would not take part in needless slaughter when there were so many easier ways of extracting loot. He had calculated the profit that had been thrown away on the raid on what he now knew was a monastery, and had concluded that the price of the slaves he’d lost to Bodvar Bjarki’s brutality alone could have bought him ten head of cattle, before he even started considering how many possible captives had gone free because the berserks hadn’t bothered to surround the island.
Another reason for his reluctance was that he thought his people had things to learn from the West Men. One of their priests — the men with the shaven heads — had visited Eikund when Vali was fifteen. To Vali’s disappointment, Forkbeard had refused to even let him tell his stories. When the man showed him his writing and pointed out how useful it would be in the administration of his kingdom Forkbeard had torn it up in front of him and told him to go while he still had his life. It had been the talk of the village. Vali had learned the man was a member of the cannibalistic religion of Christ, whose followers ate flesh and drank blood.
The main reason he kept away from war, though — hardly acknowledged to himself — was that he wanted to be branded sword-shy. He hoped Forkbeard would not let his daughter marry such a man, which would leave him free to marry Adisla. But so far the king had refused to release him from his obligation. Vali had also got a merchant to carry a message to his father telling him point-blank that he would not marry the girl but there had been no reply. Vali took it as a rebuke and felt foolish. His father could hold him to his duty if he chose, his protestations and refusals were meaningless.
He had to accept he was a prince but, until he was forced to confront the fact and marry Ragna, he would indulge the fantasy that he was a farmer — a free man, as they were called. He gave Adisla’s little brother Manni his seax and only attended training with Bragi to allow the old man to retain his self-respect. Without a valued task, he knew Bragi would wither. Out of gratitude for the kindness Bragi had shown in guiding him through the raid, he tried hard too. When he was beating Bragi’s shield with the stave that stood in for a sword, he let the injustice of his inability to marry Adisla fuel his aggression.
For the rest of the time he helped Adisla and her mother around their farm or worked the flocks with her brothers and spent his evenings chatting in Danish with Barth. He would not go raiding though. That took all his courage. He knew that the gods hate nothing more than a coward, and only the knowledge that he was acting for the right reasons allowed him to keep up the pretence that he was.
The king didn’t call Vali a coward to his face but there were plenty in his bodyguard who murmured the word as the prince passed. Ageirr was one of them. Vali would have preferred to take the insults, looking on them as helping him on the path that he wanted to travel, but he wasn’t made like that and always reacted.
‘I said, what did you say?’
‘Nothing, prince, nothing at all.’
Vali had heard the word but he didn’t want to press Ageirr to repeat it. If he did, Vali would be forced to challenge him to a duel. Ageirr was no keener. He wanted the fun of taunting Vali but didn’t want to push it to a fight. Vali was still Authun’s son and so valuable to King Forkbeard. The penalty for killing the prince, in a legal contest or not, would be severe. And besides, he had seen the way the prince split those staves against Bragi’s helmet. He didn’t want to find out what he could do with a sword.