The Tempering of Men

  “Around this side,” Kari said. Brokkolfr followed him and found that at the tallest side of the rock, it encountered a tree, nearly as massive, and in the place where thick, gnarled roots and mossy rock met, there was a hole big enough for a man, leading down into the darkness.

  “You don’t mean…”

  Hrafn whined uneasily.

  “I told you the wolves hate it,” Kari said, sitting on the root that framed the hole.

  “We’ll need torches,” Brokkolfr said.

  “Got ’em,” Kari said and pulled a tar-treated stick halfway out of his jerkin. “But there’s a bit first where we can’t use them.” He grinned at Brokkolfr’s expression. “Trust me. I’ve been here a dozen times. And anyway, I’m going first.”

  “All right,” Brokkolfr said.

  Hrafn whined again as Kari slid into the hole; then the wolf lay down against the rock and put his head on his paws. Brokkolfr scruffled Amma’s ears and said, perhaps foolishly, to Hrafn, “Take care of her.” Then he carefully copied Kari’s example, sitting on the root and sliding down into the earth.

  The drop was farther than he’d expected, although it really was more of a slide than a straight drop. At the bottom, there was only just enough light for him to see Kari’s shape, and the warmth of Kari’s hand briefly clasping his upper arm was a welcome reassurance.

  “This is the only hard part,” Kari said. “We have to crawl on our bellies like worms—but it’s not more than two body lengths, and after that there’s plenty of room. And I’ll be able to light the torch.”

  “This had better be worth it,” Brokkolfr said, trying to joke and not sure he was doing a very good job.

  “It is,” Kari said. “Look, I’ll go first and light the torch. Then you’ll at least have something to crawl to.”

  There was a thread of tension in Kari’s voice that Brokkolfr had not noticed before. Or perhaps it was his own tension looking for company. The uncertainty made him reluctant to speak, and in another moment it was too late. Brokkolfr half-saw, half-felt as Kari knelt down. He knelt down, too, learning with his hands the size of the opening Kari expected him to crawl through.

  “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you’ll fit,” Kari said. “Aldulfr was bigger than either of us.” And with that, he lay on his stomach and slid under the overhanging rock.

  Brokkolfr waited, counting his breaths—and forcing himself to keep them slow and steady. He had not reached ten tens when Kari called, “I’m through!”

  He did sound nervous, but this was a foolish position for a conversation.

  As Brokkolfr waited, listening to Kari rummage with flint and steel—each sound amplified, echoing, the sharp crack like the irregular beat of a giant’s heart—his eyes adjusted to the dimness. He still could see only shadows, but when somewhere ahead a spark flared in scraped birch bark and Kari raised it to breathe across, even the filtered brilliance was dazzling. The flare died, and Brokkolfr squinched his eyes shut, wincing.

  Ten breaths more and the rock of the passage was scraped with the dimmest yellow glow. It grew stronger as he watched, and then steadied, and if he wasn’t going to humiliate himself, it was time to move.

  He lowered himself carefully, not sure whether he was glad of the light or not, for it showed him just how narrow the crack was. But Kari had done it; Brokkolfr touched the rock, craned back for a glimpse of tree roots and faraway sky—for luck—and slid forward, arms outstretched.

  It was moist in the belly of the earth. Cool at first, but though Brokkolfr expected increasing chill as they left the sun’s filtered light behind, the air instead seemed to warm. It moved, too, a breeze strong enough to shift the hair at his nape where it curled too short for his braids.

  Even though the rock above only brushed his back at intervals, he felt its presence like a Jotun’s hand, a fatherly pressure to keep an infant flat in the cradle. The rock under his hands and belly was glossy, polished by the passage of many creeping men before him. He found that reassuring, for as they had crawled in, surely they had also crawled out again. He wriggled forward doggedly, focusing his attention on the light ahead. Although it felt like a slow eternity, he knew it was not very long at all before he was able to heave up onto his knees, and then to his feet, and Kari said, “Well done.”

  Brokkolfr looked at him; the torchlight showed sweat on his temples and upper lip. “Are you all right?”

  “This was easier,” Kari admitted. “Before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before the war. Before the troll warrens. When you’ve seen men die in them, men and wolves, because the trolls know how to pin them into spaces where they can’t swing an axe—” He stopped speaking abruptly, and Brokkolfr was standing close enough that he saw Kari’s throat work. Brokkolfr remembered the troll-sapped and undermined floors of Othinnsaesc caving under his feet, and glanced away. “I wasn’t going to let the trolls have this, too. And I wanted to … share it.” He gave Brokkolfr a shy glance; he’d brought himself back from the memories of the war. Then, briskly, before either one of them could be embarrassed: “So, come on. Let me show you.”

  He stood, or half-stood, his back curving under the domed roof of the cavern. He lit a second torch from the first—he had already tucked away flint, steel, and kindling—and handed it to Brokkolfr. The light revealed oily streaks across the ceiling, the layered soot of many torches. Icicles of guano were evidence of bat habitation, though no bats were currently roosting.

  Kari, still half-stooped like a svartalf, struck boldly out down a floor less smoothed by slithering bodies but still marked by the passage of many boots. The walls grew wet as they descended, the air ever warmer and less sweet, until Brokkolfr could detect a distinct, unmistakable reek as of spoiled eggs.

  Here the cave melted into a fantasia of flowstone. The walls might have been beeswax, candles dripped for centuries down giant sconces, except they were as dry and chalky as weathered bone, and when Brokkolfr brushed a hand across the surface it was rough rock. Soon, though, it glistened with wet, and then he could see the colors that streaked it like some frozen aurora.

  “How does this happen?” he asked Kari, not really expecting an answer—but then again, the wildling knew surprising things.

  “There are stories,” Kari said. He moved confidently but cautiously, placing each foot as if on ice, testing it before shifting his weight over.

  Brokkolfr, not wishing to fall and slide who knew how far down to whatever waited at the bottom of the passage, imitated him. “I take it you don’t believe them?”

  “There’s one that Thor and a Jotun named Frost-cock fought here, and melted the stone. There’s another about a svartalf forging the aurora into garments for Sigyn, and staining the stones that were melted by the heat of her forge.”

  He paused for a moment, and Brokkolfr paused with him, admiring both the stones and the stories. Ahead, a fringe of stone icicles like ragged wyvern teeth decorated the arched ceiling, glittering rose-white and translucent as petals in the torchlight.

  “But it doesn’t look all that different to me from the stones you get around hot springs. Or all that different from icicles. I think the stone is dissolved in the water, like sugar—you know water can do that, you’ve seen how rivers make their beds by melting the stone away—and when the water evaporates the stone is left behind.”

  Brokkolfr had seen candy-making, the beetroot juice evaporated in the sun, cracked into sticky crystals, and the crystals, pressed into brown loaves. He’d seen wax soften, run, and harden again.

  He could imagine stone doing the same.

  He nodded, then pointed at the hanging icicles.

  “The cave has teeth.”

  “That’s not all it has,” Kari said, moving forward again. “Duck when you go under. They’re brittle.”

  Brokkolfr had no desire in this life to destroy any more beautiful things. He crouched down, careful of the torch, and sidled through the cluster of stone fangs without touching them.
The texture of the floor underneath suggested that Kari was right: each fang was matched by a complementary dimpled protrusion, and in one place upper and lower fangs had merged to form an orange-streaked column.

  A scatter of water droplets, perhaps disturbed by the hot draft from the torches, fell upon them as they scuttled under. On the other side, though, the ceiling arched away, and the echoes of their footsteps—and the receding border of the torchlight—told Brokkolfr that they were entering a much wider space.

  The sulfur smell was stronger now, the heat almost oppressive. “Here,” Kari said, pausing, and thrust his torch up high.

  As Brokkolfr imitated the gesture, a draft caught the flames and let them flare. Light spilled across a cavernous space, a vastness wrought of stone jewels and tapestries, grander than any thane’s hall. Grand as any dream of Othinn’s Valholl, Brokkolfr thought, or Freya’s Sessrumnir, where she received her tithe of the worthy dead.

  Drapes of white and colored stone swathed the walls, ruched and gathered like the fabric of a queen’s gown. Pillows and clouds and billows of white and gold and orange stone heaped like batts of wool everywhere Brokkolfr’s eye traveled, and from the ceiling overhead depended a forest of white stone reeds slender as a young woman’s white hands.

  The whole was reflected in a pool of still water so broad Brokkolfr could not see the far edge of it, a mirror smoother than any that might have been wrought of rare and precious glass and silvered across the back, to show that white-skinned woman’s face. The water, Brokkolfr came to understand with a flash of comprehension heady as wine, was warm.

  “A hot cave,” he said. “It’s a hot cave.”

  Kari turned to him and grinned. “Very nice to come thaw your toes in the midwinter.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Brokkolfr said, doing it no justice at all.

  Kari nodded. “You have heard of such places?”

  “A svartalf—” Brokkolfr shrugged. “In the troll war. I spoke with one of their smiths one night, on sentry duty. He said it was the hot caves that had allowed them to live in the Iskryne, and kept a valley warm enough to grow crops and see them through the winters.…”

  Brokkolfr felt his voice trail off. It seemed as if he was sharing too much, bragging on a tenuous relationship—and one he was tempted to hoard, as if in exposing it to the light he could rob it of potency. Halite hadn’t been friendly at first, but all sorts of confidences tended to creep out in the darkest hours of the long winter night. They’d wound up talking more than Brokkolfr had expected—or intended—and a good deal of family history had been shared on both sides.

  Halite, he’d learned, was young for a smith, and uncertain. As uncertain, in his own way, as Brokkolfr. It was the first time he’d seen one of the svartalfar as a person instead of a story.

  But Kari—he stopped himself just in time from shaking his head in awe, thus inviting questions—Kari had traveled with Isolfr to the Iskryne itself, and there killed a trellqueen and returned with the mastersmith Tin, a svaftalf hero as great to her people as Isolfr was to his. Whatever Brokkolfr could say about svartalfar would seem like pretension to Kari.

  “It’s beautiful,” Brokkolfr said. “Thank you for showing me this.”

  Kari smiled again in clear pleasure, a pleasant flicker that made Brokkolfr wonder where was all the weariness of his wildling life, his village destroyed, his threat scattered.

  Hidden? Vanquished. Or simply put aside so that this moment could be, as he had said, shared? They were not close enough that Brokkolfr could ask. But someday they might be.

  “You’re welcome,” Kari said.

  * * *

  Vethulf looked up from his inspection of a trade-offering from Franangfordtown to see Randulfr standing before him, wolfless and hand-twisting in his nervousness. Vethulf was immediately nervous himself. Randulfr was several years older than he, and moreover, Randulfr was a Nithogsfjoll man, on friendly terms with both Skjaldwulf and Isolfr. If he was seeking out Vethulf, it was for a reason, and his nervousness said it was not a good one.

  “Randulfr,” Vethulf said as neutrally as he could. One of the things he had learned from Skjaldwulf was not to borrow trouble—not to make a bad situation worse by getting upset before he knew everything.

  “Vethulf,” Randulfr said with an awkward bob of the head. “You remember my brother Fargrimr, don’t you?”

  Fargrimr the sworn-son, born Randulfr’s sister. No, Vethulf wasn’t going to forget him in a hurry. “Aye,” he said, still wary.

  “Today I went to Franangford for … well, never mind that part. But I met a man—a thane of Siglufjordhur, I knew him before I was chosen—who was trying to find the way here to give me a message.”

  From Fargrimr or about Fargrimr was the next question. Vethulf raised his eyebrows and made a gesture not unlike a man turning a well-capstan.

  “Fargrimr sent him,” Randulfr said. “To ask for help.”

  “Help?” Vethulf said. “What sort of help does a jarl’s son ask from a wolfcarl?”

  “It’s the southlanders.”

  “Fargrimr has gone viking?”

  “No!” Randulfr said, half-laughing. “It’s not to his taste, and our father would skin him alive besides. No, it’s the southlanders. They’ve, um, gone viking.”

  Vethulf could feel his patience slipping, like a knot in old rope. It showed, too, either on his face or in the pack-sense, for Randulfr said, “Siglufjordhur is all but beseiged. Fargrimr sends to ask me to come home.”

  “To die in the halls of your ancestors?”

  “To help,” Randulfr said. “Siglufjordhur suffered greatly at Othinnsaesc, as I’m sure you remember.” Vethulf raised a hand in acknowledgment and apology. He’d earned that jab—and he did indeed remember. Almost half the men Siglufjordhur brought to Othinnsaesc did not go home again; cool blond Fargrimr had led them into the thickest and most bloody areas of fighting again and again, and not a man of them had faltered, even as their shield-brothers died at their sides.

  Randulfr nodded and continued more mildly, “He asks me to bring Ingrun—apparently the southlanders have stories about the great demon wolves of the north, and Fargrimr thinks that if they see that Siglufjordhur has one, they will become less willing to attack. And he adds that any of my friends who wish to come will be welcome. There are—women widowed, he says.”

  Well, of course they will be, Vethulf thought, but this time he managed to keep a rein on his tongue and even swallowed a couple other sharp comments. Instead, he said, “You don’t need permission to leave.”

  “No,” Randulfr said. “But I thought, when Fargrimr asked for just Ingrun and me, that I could do better than that. And if I wish to form a threat to travel south, I would rather do so with the goodwill of my wolfjarls.”

  “Huh,” said Vethulf. “Skjaldwulf has this crazy plan about traveling south with the godsman, you know.” He put the stack of hides aside and got up, heaving a grumbling Kjaran off his feet. “Come on. Let’s go talk to Skjaldwulf.”

  SIX

  The Franangfordthreat traveled light and they traveled quick. Skjaldwulf had to hide his amusement at the apparent wonder with which the wolfless men—Freyvithr and Adalbrikt, the messenger from Randulfr’s brother—greeted the speed at which preparations were completed once the decision was made to move.

  Two days after Randulfr’s mumbled and awkward conversation with Vethulf (for so Skjaldwulf’s co-wolfjarl had recounted it) the gray of morning twilight, moist and loud of birds, rich with smells, found a small collection of wolves and men gathered among the tents and rubble of Franangford’s ongoing construction. In one group, burdened chiefly with weapons of the hunt and of self-protection (and a few bundles of food and furs, in case the spring turned bitter), stood Adalbrikt and Freyvithr Godsman. Around them gathered black Mar and his brother Skjaldwulf; the gray-tawny bitch Ingrun and her brother Randulfr; Viradechtis’ fleet, diminutive littermate Kothran and his brother, fire-scarred Frithulf; Afi and Geirulfr, a wolf and h
is brother who had followed Kjaran from Arakensberg; and Dyrver and Ulfhoss, a silver-brindle yearling from Thorsbaer and his young, wiry brother.

  In the other group, representing the less than three dozen remaining wolves-and-men of Franangford’s depleted threat, stood slope-shouldered Kjaran and Vethulf, his red braids whipping in a sharp wind; Viradechtis surrounded by her half-grown cubs, shedding her winter coat in streamers and rags; Isolfr ice-pale and ice-calm behind the troll-clawed scars that rendered his face so impassive; young Sokkolfr and old Hroi, the steady housecarls; massive Glaedir, who had been Mar’s rival for Viradechtis, and his brother, Randulfr’s lover, Eyjolfr; Dagmaer, the heallbred woman who was the yearling wolfcarl’s lover and one of Franangford’s better herbwives and spinners; and a few others, obviously attached to one wolfcarl or another, of whom Skjaldwulf still knew little other than their faces and their names.

  Seven men, five wolves, and three ponies would head south to Siglufjordhur and thence to Hergilsberg and Freyvithr’s monastery, a journey that might take two summers to complete, there and back again. So few, and yet really more than could be spared.

  Unless they could all be spared. If the world did not need them anymore—if the great deeds of the previous winter would be the last great deeds sung of the wolfcarls and their brothers—then it didn’t matter how many went and how many stayed.

  But Skjaldwulf would not accept that just yet.

  Skjaldwulf stepped forward, clasped Isolfr’s upraised fist, and pressed their forearms together. Isolfr thumped Skjaldwulf’s back with his free hand. Skjaldwulf could have leaned into it but instead moved aside for his own safety as Mar, Viradechtis, Kjaran, and their pups circled one another, sniffing and nipping. Wolves greeted one another, but they did not leave-take; the little pack within the pack was merely playing. Vethulf came forward next, and when Skjaldwulf would have clasped fists there as well, Vethulf surprised him with a hug and a sharp, fisted tug in his hair. A pale gaze burned into Skjaldwulf’s eyes as he stepped back. He nodded. There was nothing here that needed words.