The Wolf Girl

The people of Kattegat rightly knew to fear the wolf girl. Thora's appearances in the town were rare, but they were not unheard of. She was like the birds that flew south for winter, although it was to Kattegat that she flocked, when the winds, the snow, and the night drove her down from the north.

She was not an ugly girl, but plain - wild and unkempt. Large dark eyes peered out from under a few loose strands of mud-brown hair, the rest of her hair pulled back by braids from her face. She, like some others who practiced the art of magic in the wild, appeared to use face paint for her rituals. The wild berries that she did use were difficult to fully wipe away; her pale face carried their imprint across her nose and down her waxen cheeks. She looked almost amusing in that respect - as a child, caught playing among her mother's beauty products. Yet there was little amusement when it came to Thora. Her very presence brought with it an air of sour misery. She did not smile, but glowered, from beneath the wolf skin that she seemed to wear at all times, the wolf's long-dead eyes staring blankly from above her own.

She had to be young, because Ivar could not recall seeing her beyond three winters ago and her skin remained smooth. She was no woodland crone, yet she had already harnessed a reputation among the simple townsfolk of Kattegat as a woman who could be turned to when things needed to be done. Magically, that is.

No crone, but a witch all the same. Ivar had heard the slave girls whisper excitedly of her return only that morning, the foolish girls already listing the problems they would have her solve. She did not accept money apparently, but took trades all the same, and Ivar wondered where the slave girls would find the goods a witch would want. He would need to warn his mother to check their hall. He detested the thought of the slaves stealing from them for their own needs.

Ivar's curiosity was peaked when he heard just what the slaves sought to remedy. They whispered among themselves in their basic Dane tongue, the only language they shared, about unwanted bellies, unwanted lovers, unwanting lovers and pimples on their backs. Ivar thought them fools, yet, all the same, he had ordered them to tell him all they knew of the girl. The slaves had not realised he was there - he could shuffle around quietly when he wanted to - and had been hesitant to say, but he had forced it out of them anyway, with half-meant threats.

He had made them set out a chair for him on the porch beside his mother's hall, where he could hold a good view of the town and its market. He had sat there for hours, growing bored and restless, huddled under furs, growing irritated whenever anyone dared to ask him what he was doing. Damned Sigurd had hung around longest to annoy him, but Ubbe had dragged him off before things could turn too ugly. Now, Ivar was alone and the wolf girl stood not too far away, carrying the pelts she had gathered on a small wooden trolley.

She did not browse the market like the other people there, but pulled her cart through the crowds, parting them easily with her sombre presence and strange look. She took her pelts to the furrer, the man who Ivar's mother bought her furs from, and he spent a short while examining them, before handing her a heavy-looking purse. The girl seemed disdainful of the money; she handed it away almost immediately, to the man who sold the produce that a hunter could not gather in the woods - wheat and oats and other such stuff. He piled her little wagon high and, without a second cursory glance at the stalls, the wolf girl left the market.

Ivar was desperate to speak to her. He had gone so far as to wonder whether he could ask the slave girls to take him with them, but he had put that thought away quickly. There was no way they would agree and they were bound to tell his mother. His mother had already made herself clear on the subject.

"No," she had said, when he had first raised the idea with her, "I will not have you cavorting with wood witches and wild girls."

But Ivar was desperate: for someone, for something, for anything to heal the wizened things the gods had so cruelly bestowed upon him in the place of legs.

It was a joke, the cruellest of all jokes, that, while he lacked the strength and feeling in his legs to move them without aid, he could feel his legs enough to be pained by them constantly - a throbbing cramp that did not desist with time or with any remedies his mother sought. Massage helped at times, as did water, but they were solutions that did not last.

It was all very well for his mother to refuse him, but he knew that she herself had consulted wild people in the past about his legs. A wild man in particular, the wanderer, Harbard. Ivar could not put a face to the man, but his brothers remembered him, and they were quick to bring his name up if they wanted the means to upset their mother.

Harbard had left Kattegat many years before, before even Ivar's father had, and no one had heard of him since. There were other men Aslaug consulted, and women. They, like Harbard, were wanderers and shamans and healers, blowing into Kattegat from all directions. They would prod and poke at Ivar, make him taste strange and often pungent herbs, say strange words over his legs, and then leave without having made any improvement.

The girl was a stray hope, but, as has been said, Ivar was desperate.

He watched her from afar, wheeling her goods from market. She was small, smaller than most of the tall Danes that frequented the market, but her wolf head-dress added some inches to her height. Even among the sea of heads, he could see the two little grey ears pricked up, the nose rising and falling as if sniffing with each step.

She left Kattegat every spring, almost as soon as the snows melted and the ice thawed. She spent summer to the north, where the summer days were eternal and the sun shone continually. She hunted there, alone, capturing and skinning her prey and preserving their coats to sell in the winter. Ivar knew all this because his brothers likewise hunted. They rarely brought him along on their trips, but he knew of their cabin to the north, where they caught and skinned whatever they could catch.

He had heard of how that summer the three Ragnarssons had come across the wolf girl while hunting. How she had panicked, like a doe caught off-guard by a change in the wind, and had bolted. But before she had fled back to her lonely sanctuary, she had stopped and held Ubbe's gaze. Ubbe had told him of it, when Ivar had first started talking about the wolf girl and his plans to meet her. Ubbe had told him of the fear he had seen in her eyes, those large dark eyes, from beneath the wolf's head.

The very thought of it, the very image he had fashioned in his mind, brought a strange stirring to the part between Ivar's legs.

He shook the thought then from his head, realising with a sinking feeling to his gut that he had lost sight of the wolf's head in the crowd. He cursed aloud then and pulled himself down from his chair, dragging his body across the rough wood of the porch, but it was all in vain. The girl had gone and Ivar had missed his opportunity.