Night Wolf by James L. Nelson

Author:James L. Nelson [Nelson, James L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Sea Adventure, Sea Stories, Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, Thrillers, Historical, Historical Fiction, Norse, Norse & Icelandic, Irish
ISBN: 9781534879683
Publisher: Fore Topsail Press
Published: 2016-06-25T21:00:00+00:00

Twenty-One

The unwise man is awake all night,

and ponders everything over;

when morning comes he is weary in mind,

and all is a burden as ever.

Hávamál

The chaos of the evening was over, and the dark hours of night had settled on Vík-ló when they pounded on Aghen’s door. He was not surprised. Nor was he afraid.

Aghen had not been asleep. He doubted anyone in all of Vík-ló had been asleep. Patrols of armed, torch-bearing men were flocking through the streets and along the wall and down by the river. They had been shouting to one another all night, warnings that proved to be false alarms, admonitions to check here or there. Every once in a while the voice of Ottar Bloodax came howling through the dark, loud, demanding, sounding the way a bull might sound if a bull could issue frantic and barely comprehensible orders.

After the first man, Thorlaug Gyduson, had been found dead by the wall, his throat torn out by a wolf, the longphort was thrown into an uproar. That night, and for the next few nights, Ottar’s men lined the earthen wall and paraded through the streets, looking out for the renegade beast. It seemed to Aghen an excess of excitement.

It was a strange thing, to be sure, having a man killed by a wolf right there in the longphort, but such a thing was not impossible. Even for those who did not know how it had happened, which was everyone save for Aghen, it should not have caused so much consternation. But that, apparently, was not how Ottar felt, and Ottar’s rage spread like a drop of blood on white linen until all of Vík-ló felt it.

It did not last very long. A few nights after Thorlaug’s death, and with no further signs of the creature, the men of Vík-ló began to relax. The walls were not manned so heavily, the patrols not so ubiquitous. Ottar, according to Oddi, was less frantic than he had been.

And then Thorstein Kodransson was found dead, the second victim of the wolf.

Like Thorlaug, Thorstein was part of Ottar’s household guard. Thorstein, however, had been with Ottar longer, had sailed from Norway with him, apparently had known him since childhood.

According to Oddi, Ottar had gone mad on hearing the news, flinging anything that came to hand across the hall, smashing furniture, ordering his men to man the walls, patrol the grounds, to find and kill the wolf, or see that it had no chance of getting into the longphort again.

The banks of the river were searched, the walls lined with men. Every inch of the earthworks were scoured for some gap, some imperfection where a wolf might get in and out unseen. Nothing was found, nor was there any sign of the wolf—none at all—save for the dead man, his face white, his eyes staring blankly up toward the sky, his body resting on a great circle of blood like a carpet on which he had fallen.

“All those men, and they found no sign

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