M. Lachlan: Wolfsangel

He touched a byrnie and a shield. Both were dull with age but very finely made and in good repair. The woman shook her head. She meant, he thought, that he would not need them for the battle he was to face. Something though — intuition or just the desire to die as he had lived, in war gear — came over him. In all his lonely meditations and nightmares of regret, some simple warrior’s habits had proved unshakeable. In an uncertain situation he would take whatever advantage he could. He put on the byrnie, found a gilded iron helmet to fit him and took up a splendid shield that bore the sign not of the wolf but of the raven. Odin’s sign.

Saitada set her candle on the floor, sat on the most comfortable stone she could find and watched him dress. She said that word again under her breath: ‘Death.’

There was movement in the mouth of a tunnel. Authun’s sword was out, liquid in the candlelight. There was another movement in a tunnel to his left. Then she was in front of him, not three paces away. It was a girl, a wasted and haggard child, dressed in a long and bloody white shift. In her hand was a broken spear shaft, the end burned in a fire until it was a wicked tapering shard, a blackened needle.

Authun had only ever seen her face twice before and then only in glimpses. But he recognised her — she was thinner and madder and starved and white but he recognised her. The necklace at her throat burned with all the colours of war. She was the witch queen.

‘Lady?’ said Authun.

‘Death,’ said Saitada, pointing to the child.

The candle went out. There was a noise from somewhere deep in the caves. It spoke to Authun’s body rather than his mind, pulling the skin into bumps on his arms and neck, drying his mouth and making his heart pump. It was fear given sound — the howl of a wolf.

The witch spoke. Her voice was hardly audible, cracked and weak. ‘Odin?’

Saitada struck a flint, and Authun saw in the flash that the queen was gone. Saitada struck again but could not make the tinder catch.

‘Odin?’

Saitada struck a third time and the witch was on him, driving the spear towards his head, but Authun caught it in one hand. The witch had no strength in her child’s arms. Authun reversed the thrust and smashed the butt of the spear into her eye. She shrieked and it was dark again.

Authun couldn’t understand why she had thought to attack him this way. She could boil a sleeping man’s brains five days’ travel away, why fight him like this? Then he thought of the amulet at his neck. Protection against magic was, after all, what they were for.

‘Get me light, girl! Strike that flint!’

Then something hit him like an avalanche.

Feileg had cursed himself for his inability to dive into the tunnel. It wasn’t a matter of bravery; he simply couldn’t do it, like he couldn’t fly. His limbs wouldn’t obey his commands: his attempts to push himself down into the pool only met with choking frustration.

Adisla had gone and his mind was in a terrible confusion. All he wanted had been his in the fleeting moment of her kiss. He wished that she could have just walked with him off that mountain and gone to his home in the hills instead of plunging into the pool. She had gone to meet the witches, to rescue the prince. He had no other course of action. He loved her, so he had to help her.

He waited for her to come back. It got dark. When it became light, he tried again. Useless. His body would not do as he told it.

He searched the mountain for an entrance in increasing desperation. In a bowl of rock above a dizzying drop there was a cave that looked promising — long and narrow with sacrifices at the mouth — but when he went inside there was the smell of humans but no sign of an entrance. Besides, the ceiling looked dangerously split. He thought it might fall at any instant, so he went back outside. He ran all over the mountain, looking for anything that resembled a way in. There was no alternative, he decided, he would have to try the Wall. He knew the entrances there were easier to spot but also that they were almost impossible to get to.

He climbed to the top of the great cliff, up to a knife-edge ridge on which strange tall outcrops of rocks like the fingers of a monstrous hand stretching for the sky loomed above him. These were the trolls that gave the Wall its name — rumoured to have been turned to stone looking at the beauty of the sunrise. He looked out over the land. He was so high up that it would take him, he thought, twenty heartbeats to hit the ground if he fell. Clouds drifted by beneath him. The route he had followed to reach this point was threatening enough; the overhang below him was almost unimaginable. But he had to try. He lowered himself, kicking his legs into the vast space below him, his feet feeling for a shelf, a hold. But, as in the pool, his body took over and he pulled himself up. He sat in the freezing wind on the edge of the Wall, hating himself for his cowardice. Then he saw something down on the plain.

There were two travellers far below. He would have ignored them, but then he heard something he had never heard before. It was a howl of pain, a thin blade of sound that seemed to quiver, not in the air but in his head. He knew who it was — Adisla, calling to him to help her. He saw a vision of that jagged rune on the sorcerer’s stone and felt a pull like a rip tide impelling him on. Feileg, to whom the language of the wolves was as plain as speaking, knew what the howl had said: ‘I am in agony.’

He had to get to her. Perhaps the travellers below would know an entrance to the caves. It was an idea born of desperation rather than good sense.

He watched them move around the Wall, and when he was sure of their route along a ravine he set off to meet them. Then doubts crept in. How long had he haunted these lands as a wolf, smashing and tearing and taking what he wanted? His experiences since the prince had captured him had made him forget who he was. These people would see him as a wild animal and very likely flee. He decided to follow them at a distance and watch for a time before approaching. Still, he would have to be quick. He descended the mountain in swift silent leaps.

He followed them from the top of the ravine around to the back of the mountain. At first he thought they were beggars. The woman was dressed in rags and the man no better. Only the curved sword that the man carried in his hands said that they were people of a different station altogether. Feileg, who had no real appreciation of gold or jewellery, was still dazzled by the magnificence of the scabbard, catching the winter sun in white flashes.

He decided to wait until night, take the man’s sword while he was sleeping, then he could bargain it back for information. But they did not stop to make camp, travelling on as the sun weakened to a smoky dusk. Eventually they came to the long cave that Feileg had already inspected. He followed them inside using all his hunter’s stealth and watched as the woman piled flat slabs one on top of another. Then she reached up with a stick and fished something from the crack in the cave’s ceiling. It was a knotted rope and she began to climb it.

Feileg felt like running forward, pulling her out of the way and climbing the rope into the dark, but had noticed the bearing of the white-haired man. He was old but he was strong. The wolfman was confident he could take him in a fight but saw no point. And the woman? Feileg knew the sisters never left the darkness so she wasn’t a witch. However, she seemed to know the caves and might lead him where he needed to go.

So he watched. The man held a candle while she climbed, then she lit another at the top and he went up. The rope was then pulled up and the light faded. Feileg gave it as little time as he dared, grabbed the stick and leaped up onto the pile of rocks. He poked around above him with the stick until he snagged the rope and tugged it free. Then he pulled himself up into the dark. Something else was under his hand. It was a pole and he guessed it would be used to knock over the pile of rocks and cover the tracks of anyone entering the cave. He left it where it was.