The chanting went on and the nights lengthened. Magnificent smears of colour appeared in the sky, the foxfire that meant the celestial fox spirit had been called to their gathering. Lieaibolmmai knew the omens could not have been better. The fox was the most magical of creatures and had blessed their ceremony by beating his tail until sparks flew across the heavens in shades of glowing green.
He concentrated on the image he had seen of the dark goddess’s lair in his mind, that terrible cliff. He needed to implant that into the mind of the wolf, so that it knew where to go when it emerged transformed from the cave.
For two weeks the chanting never ceased. Feileg and Adisla lost all sense of time in the darkness. There was only the food in the pack and just the tiny stream of water to drink. Adisla, less used than Feileg to physical hardship, began to fade.
Feileg, though his body remained strong, was losing his grip on reality under the relentless chanting. He sweated and coughed as the image of the Troll Wall came into his mind. It was not strange to him as it was to the sorcerers. He had hunted in that area many times, walked the land at the foot of the mountain and looked up at it in awe.
‘Act, and then you will leave this trap. Set out for your destiny,’ he heard a voice say in his head. ‘Kill and be free.’
He felt compelled to do something, to step closer to something, but he couldn’t see what it was, and the feeling made him miserable and uncomfortable. He was like a slave who finds his master screaming instructions at him in an incomprehensible language, wanting to act but not knowing what to do. Adisla felt him trembling. She was weak and terribly hungry.
Outside, up on the surface, in the hollow light of an Arctic dawn, Lieaibolmmai felt beyond tiredness, unnaturally awake. He had broken from the ritual to eat a little, to rest his voice and to try to sleep for the first time in days. He almost didn’t hear the chanting now. The runes were all around him, as if they had lives of their own — hanging in space, fizzing, snapping, hissing, sometimes even sounding with rich musical notes. They had helped him though. He had achieved that higher level where he could feel the animal heart of the wolf in the pit and talk to him, direct him, show him where to go. He had contacted the wolf many times in long and difficult rituals, spoken to him over vast distances and heard him answer as a beast. The man in the pit seemed just a man. And yet it was him, he knew: the runes had shown him his face. He took it for another confusion of the magic, another product of his self-induced insanity.
A howl split the grey air. Lieaibolmmai shivered, not recognising what was strange about it but feeling disquiet anyway. The other Noaidis on the rock glanced at each other. They too thought it had sounded odd. The perspective was wrong, if sound can have a perspective. It sounded far away, hollow, but it was loud too, as if near. No one thought of the simplest explanation: the creature was much bigger than any wolf they had ever heard before.
In the cave Feileg sat up, feeling a cold dread. He knew better than anyone that the cry of the wolf was unnatural.
Lieaibolmmai had a terrible ache in his head but still he smiled. The wolves of the plain were greeting the wolf god’s arrival, he was sure. The howl from the mainland was repeated. It was very loud, thought the sorcerer, very loud indeed. Unease rippled through the Noaidis but excitement too. The howling was just a side effect of the magic. Their defender was coming, they were sure.
Down on the beach a youth was getting out of a boat, calling to them. From his accent Lieaibolmmai recognised him as an eastern Noaidi, typically late for the ceremony. He was glad to have that thought, pleased to be linked to a world of mundanity away from the dreadful presence of those runes.
‘The wolf! The wolf is coming! The wolf is here!’ the young man was shouting.
Lieaibolmmai huddled into the fire. Did the boy really sense the wolf, or was he just trying to make up for in enthusiasm what he lacked in timeliness?
‘Pick up your drum and join in, brother,’ a man next to Lieaibolmmai called down, his voice hoarse from chanting.
‘A black wolf with eyes of foxfire! He is there, out on the plain! He is there!’
‘He is within,’ said Lieaibolmmai.
A gust of air chilled his shoulder. He turned to look at the Noaidi next to him, surprised to see that, though momentarily the man was still standing, he didn’t have a head.
41
Vali was lost, really lost. The drums no longer called to him. He could still hear them in his mind but he felt no desire to follow them any more. The beat was more urgent. He understood its demands. It wanted him to step forward inside himself, to become what he could. He found it easy to ignore. He had killed some things and that had helped him grow, he recalled. And when he had grown, the drums had lost their power. He was stepping forward all right, but under the impulse of his own magic, urgent and compelling as a tidal surge.
As his body rippled with vigour, his mind contracted. He had difficulty following any chain of reasoning. Images of his life were there and gone again like mountains under fleeting cloud. A yearning, an adolescent itch for action, was upon him, though he couldn’t think what he wanted to do. He didn’t sleep for days, and it seemed to him that he didn’t quite fit in his skin. His heart would beat fast for no reason and he feared he would die, then a smirking calm would descend and he would start to feel unaccountably pleased with himself.
He looked at his body and it seemed to him a very fine thing. His hands were strong and large, his muscles huge and pronounced, and his teeth felt like shining knives in his head.
He was aware that he had forgotten a great deal. He couldn’t remember how he had come to the cave. For a moment or two he would recall why it was important that he found out how he had come to lie naked underground far away from anything he recognised, but then it would slip from his mind and all curiosity about his condition would disappear. He had no difficulty, though, recalling the deep savour of the meat that moves and then is still, the prey that had surrendered its power to him, and it seemed that, as he digested the flesh of his victims, the memories, or rather the sentiments and attitudes of those he had consumed, were digested too.
Vali spent a while playing with rocks on the floor of the cave, knocking one into another as if he was a child; he sat with endless patience, watching the snow fall as a woman waiting for a hunter to return might; he pictured the man he had surprised in the valley, saw the shaking hands trying to nock an arrow to the bowstring. The memory of the archer’s fear was delicious, recalled like the scent of baking bread.
When Vali slept his dreams were full of Adisla but they were full of the wolf too. It was bound, agonisingly bound, the fetters digging into its flesh and that awful sword holding open its mouth. Vali had one of those strange feelings that only make sense in dreams and blink away with the morning light. He was dreaming about the wolf, he knew, but it seemed to him that the wolf was dreaming about him too, or rather was simply dreaming him. He felt he didn’t exist outside of the god’s mind and the boundaries between himself and the wolf were insubstantial things, as nothing to their shared communion of pain. He felt its constriction as his own, a crushed, tied, pinioned sensation that would suddenly relent and snap into release and contentment. When he awoke, his limbs were longer and his teeth bigger.
He didn’t know how long he lay in that cave — weeks or months — but it was cold when clarity finally came to him, in that moment between hunger and satiety. It was as if, his appetites in balance, his mind was free to think.
He went outside and looked around. Snow was falling, the sky was heavy and the light was flat. It was dusk. The air was full of scents. Over the hills behind him a bear was moving — late to its hibernation, he could tell — and down on the plain people were gathering. In the far distance was the sea, purple and blue, and in the sea an island. Men were going to it, he could smell them moving across the plain. Their odours of sweat and grime were powerful and alluring. Reindeer were with them, one or more geldings, their piss and shit unpungent.