Adisla thought of what she had done to her mother, of the grief that had dogged her every day since the raid and her apparently remote chance of ever returning to a normal life. Then she went down with the Noaidis. Remarkably, Lieaibolmmai came with her.
At a point where the passage narrowed and dropped so much that she had to bend her head to continue, it fell away into a shaft. There was a flat boulder leaning against the wall, a great slab. Underneath it were some wooden wedges. Adisla looked at it and shivered. They were going to seal her in.
Lieaibolmmai caught her look. ‘Only a precaution,’ he said. ‘If he is human, as we expect him to be, there will be no need for it.’
Adisla wondered what he meant but decided she would rather not know the answer and said nothing more.
A Noaidi showed her how to wrap a rope around herself in order to climb down. There was no light as she descended, just darkness and the smell of wet rocks. She went down about the height of five men and found herself on an uneven floor. Lieaibolmmai was lowered, limp as a hanged man. He untied himself and sat panting for a while. Then he gently pushed her forward through the dark.
She felt her way, a hand on the ceiling, another on the wall, her feet testing for further drops. It seemed that they went a long way forward. Then she felt the passage open out and Lieaibolmmai told her to stop. He struck a flint, set some tinder burning and lit a whale oil lamp. A wolf’s head loomed at her from the dark, its teeth bared and its eyes angry. She screamed but quickly realised it was only a carving, though very disquieting. The sickly light showed the cave around her smeared with runes, a tiny stream of water filtering into a pool at the back. He pushed the flint and tinder into her hands, set down a pack beside her and took off his thick reindeer coat.
‘For your comfort,’ he said.
‘What happens here?’ said Adisla.
‘Magic is like speaking,’ said Lieaibolmmai. ‘Let us see what we are required to say.’
‘What am I waiting for?’
‘You will see in good time.’
‘How much time? How long must I spend in here?’
‘Not long, I think. It is hard to tell. We are working the magic as best we can. He is not easy to find sometimes. Today. Many days. I don’t know.’
Noises drifted down from above: drumming and chanting.
Lieaibolmmai gave Adisla a sad smile. Then he turned and was swallowed by the dark. Adisla heard the sound of the Noaidis heaving him up and then the slither of the other rope as it was pulled in. She was alone in the blackness and the damp.
40
Feileg woke. Around him were the voices of ravens. His fever had gone and his wound was healing. He sat up and looked around. For a heartbeat he didn’t understand what he was seeing. Where there had been a family, a fire and welcoming smiles, now there was only ruin.
Of course, he had been among corpses before, and corpses he had made too, but never anything like this blood swamp. The bodies had been devastated: men were unrecognisable from women, children from animals. How long had he lain there? He looked at the bodies. They were beginning to rot.
The scene did not repulse Feileg or make him retch as it might have someone who had not spent half his life as a wolf, but it did make him shake. Since he had been looking for the girl, humanity had come back to him; suffering had started to mean something. He felt the years that had been denied to these children, the tendernesses and the joys. He thought again of his own mother, the break from his family that had felt like an amputation.
Feileg pondered what to do. He had no idea what these people’s customs were or how they preferred their dead to be treated. The birds were there and he knew that the wolves would come down when the darkness held for long enough to conceal them. It seemed a good way to him, so he just set their stone back on the stump that served for an altar, put the drum beside it and left.
It was not difficult to track Vali. The ground was wet, though not sodden, and the prince’s footprints were clearly visible at points, blood on the grass at others.
Feileg thought of what he had seen on the boat, the tempest made flesh that the prince had become, thought of the sight of him among the dead bodies, feeding. The wolfman, for all the killing he had wrought with hands and teeth, had never eaten human flesh. He never had the need in the winter, when animals were weak and easy prey, nor the opportunity in the summer, when most travellers went by sea. And besides, Kveld Ulf had not taught him to eat men. The shape-shifter knew the diseases that could emerge from cannibalism and the madness that it brings.
Feileg was sure that Vali had attacked the reindeer hunters. Whatever enchantment the prince was under had consumed him. And yet Feileg felt he had no choice but to follow. Vali was looking for Adisla, which meant that Feileg was bound to him. When Feileg freed the girl and she married him, he would ask her to release him from his vow and he would kill Vali.
Feileg followed Vali’s trail east for days, relying on scent, tracks and hunter’s intuition. In a pass through some black mountains, he came across a cave. Vali had stayed there for days, he could tell. The prince had not been his normal fastidious self, and on the ground at the mouth of the cave was human shit. Feileg saw that it was sticky and cloying and it smelled of blood. It confirmed what he already feared.
He didn’t want to sleep there, so he followed Vali’s trail across the pass.
As he continued east, it became colder and the skies more grey than blue. The vegetation turned to scrub, a stunted tundra of dwarf trees and shrubs that seemed to cringe from the wind. Shelter became difficult to find. Feileg ate what he had taken from the ship — he hadn’t been able to bring himself to take the family’s food, even though he had known he would need it. He drank from streams and hid in caves and holes when it rained. Weeks passed and he began to find indications that Vali was not moving as quickly. He was stopping regularly, sometimes in caves, sometimes in the open, but there was a different smell to the mess he was leaving now. Beneath the human scent was something else. Feileg knew it better than any smell in the world. It was wolf.
After days more travel the mountains ended and Feileg was at the edge of a broad plain going down to low hills by the sea. After some scouting, he found a place where the grass was flattened. He followed the trail and saw a mob of ravens ahead of him. They scattered to the sky as he approached, rising like the spirit of the corpse they had been eating. The dead man had been a hunter. His squat bow was nearby. Feileg took it along with the arrows. He hadn’t shot a bow since he was a child, nor used any other weapon, but now he would accept any help he could get. The ravens were watching from a distance. ‘You’ll eat when I’m done here and not before,’ Feileg said. He knelt to the corpse. The skull was sheared in two. No bird had done that.
Half a day’s walk yielded another find. He could see something had rested beneath the lee of a rock and, from the flatness of the grass, that it had been there for some time. Leading away were prints but they were not Vali’s. This was something bigger, still on two legs but with a huge stride. Feileg sniffed at the footprints and the same signature came back: wolf. As he went on, there were other tracks too — reindeer and broad sled marks on the wet grass obscuring all signs of the prince. The clouds hung black over the land. Great petals of snow began to fall, settling cold upon his skin.
With Vali’s trail gone, Feileg simply followed what looked like a path towards the sea. How long had he been on the prince’s trail? The moon had been full twice and when it could be seen was now a silver sliver in the night sky. But it wouldn’t be visible that night. The weather was closing in but there was no prospect of shelter nearby. Over the two months his strength had returned and Feileg kept up a good pace. Then he spotted the island. It was a long flat loaf of rock, like a reflection of the clouds, a white tear into the dark fabric of the sea.