Sorcerer's Luck (22 page)

“How's the translating going?” I said.

“Maybe I'm getting somewhere. Maybe not.” He snarled like an animal and turned toward the
refrigerator. “I'll cook dinner.”

At that moment the ravens came, a big flock of them, cawing and flapping as they
swirled around the house. I watched them from the kitchen window as they settled in the backyard,
some on the lawn, some among the purple leaves of the Japanese maple. The
largest raven sat on the stone retaining wall and cocked its head to one side.
I felt certain that it was watching me watch it.

“Tor!” I called out. “Come look at this.”

He joined me at the window. The ravens in the yard rose up, flapping and shrieking, and
flew around the house again in a wide circuit. A few at a time they returned
and settled down, most of them on the lawn this time, except for that one large
bird, which took up its perch on the stone wall.

“A good omen!” he said.

“Good? Ravens? Don't they eat dead things? I mean, like carrion?”

“Hey, it's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.” He grinned at me. “They're Odin's
birds.” He paused, thinking. “That leftover roast chicken in the fridge. It's
been there too long anyway.”

Tor got out the chicken carcass and shredded the remaining flesh into a bowl. When he took
the bowl outside, I stayed at the window. As soon as he walked into the back
yard, the ravens flew, squawking in excitement. He started scattering the
chicken onto the lawn. The birds swooped down and landed into a rough
semi-circle at the edge of the yard, waiting. He finished distributing the
flesh and left. They hopped forward and began to feed. They squabbled among
themselves, cawing, occasionally pecking at each other over a particularly good
piece, I supposed, but when the largest raven hopped forward, no one interfered
with its choice of morsel.

Tor came back upstairs and stood at the window to watch.

“That big one?” he said. “She must be the matriarch. The female ravens are bigger than
the males.”

I realized that I'd half-expected him to think that the large raven was Odin himself in
bird form. Maybe I'd been thinking it.

“I didn't know they travelled in flocks,” I said.

“They usually don't. It's got to be an omen.”

Once they'd finished feeding, the birds rose and flew off. They headed east and disappeared
into the darkening sky.

After dinner Tor went down to the library room to find some dictionaries he needed
for his work on the rune riddles. I thought about watching a movie on my
laptop, but I would have had to put the charge on Tor's card, where he'd see it
and bitch. Instead I decided to do some drawing. I fiddled around with some
sketchy bits of landscape, got some unsatisfying scribbles, and remembered the
ravens.

I had a clear picture in my mind of the birds sitting in the backyard while the
matriarch watched from the stone wall. I got the ravens down on paper, but not
the view from the kitchen window. As I drew, the backyard changed. The birds
seemed to be sitting on the crest of a hill. Instead of the Japanese maple, a
dead, twisted live oak tree stood to one side of the scene. The ravens were
watching not Tor with the bowl of food but something hanging on a stick.

Or a thing impaled on a stick. Under my unwilling fingers the image developed beyond my
power to control it: a wolf's head impaled on a long pole, stuck in the ground
and positioned so that the head seemed to look downhill.

“Yuck!” I said aloud.

I was tempted to tear out the sheet and wad it up. What stopped me was my memory of a
passage in one of the old sagas, where Egil the Hunchback killed a mare and
stuck her head on a pole in order to drive the king and queen of Sweden out of the country.
I carried the sketchbook downstairs to show Tor. I found him
sitting on the floor in the library in front of a shelf full of thick
leather-bound books.

“Would you look at this?” I said. “Maybe I'm just being silly, but I think it could be
important. It just kind of came to me.”

He took the sketchbook, stared at the drawing, and swore under his breath.

“The nidhing pole,” he said, “but I've never heard about a vitki using a dog or wolf
before. That doesn't make it any less ugly. Maybe uglier.”

“Uh, is that its name? I remember reading about it.”

“Nidh is the Norse word. It means scorn. It's an ancient way of insulting and shaming an
enemy, but if you're a nasty son of a bitch like Egil, you can use it as a
curse. You cut off a horse's head and jam it onto a high pole so that it looks
in your enemy's direction. Then you invoke the goddess Hel to follow the
horse's gaze and pour out black evil upon the enemy and his family. It's a real
powerful spell, and nothing anyone should mess around with unless they've been
seriously wronged. Like, someone murdered a member of your family—that kind of
wrong.”

“Nils feels wronged over a lot less than that.”

“He sure does.” Tor handed me back the sketchbook and scrambled up. “And he's the one
who turns into a wolf. Huh. I told you those ravens were an omen.”

“Do you think Nils is working the curse on you?”

“I don't know yet. I'll have to see if I can figure out where it is. We'll have to go
look.”

“Oh, squicky!” A second thought made me catch my breath. “And dangerous.”

“Maybe. I'll take the guys along, the guys you met. We have a pact. When I really need
them, they come with me to the place where I need them. And I'll do the same
for any of them.”

“Your warband.”

He laughed and nodded. “I guess you could call them that. We look out for each other.”

But you lead, I thought to myself. I'm willing to bet on it.

Tor called his guy friends immediately, then spent the rest of the evening casting the
rune staves and studying the results. I did more drawings of the same scene
from different angles in the hopes of giving us landmarks. Eventually the
drawings and the runecasts came together in Tor's mind.

“Up in the Claremont Hills in the nature preserve,” he told me. “On the high ridge so the
head can look all the way down at us.” He smiled with a grim twist to his
mouth. “Near Grizzly Peak Boulevard. Appropriate.”

Early the next morning Billy and JJ arrived in Billy's white Land Rover. Aaron, JJ told
me, had an important development meeting at his job. His “help person” had
already made arrangements to be there with him, which made changing the meeting
time impossible.

“He's got Asperger's really bad, then,” I said.

“Some people would call him autistic,” Billy said. “We don't, us guys, I mean. He
just can't deal with people sometimes, like in business meetings.”

“Those are hard enough for anyone to deal with,” JJ said. “I don't see how anyone stays
awake.”

“Sheer willpower!” Billy grinned at him. “Well, let's go see what the Evil Uncle's
shit on now. Don't you worry, Maya. Tor will clean it up.”

It finall dawned on me that when his friends called him the “wizard,” they weren't just
making a joke. They believed in his sorcery. And in mine—Billy studied the
drawings I'd made with his eyes narrowed in genuine concentration. Watching his
belief made my stomach twist. Tor quirked an eyebrow in my direction. I could
practically hear him thinking,
you've got talent for this.

“I might know where this thing is,” Billy said. “I hike up there, and that tree's a
pretty spectacular ruin. The oak blight epidemic killed it. What do you bet
that's the place?”

“You could fool me.” JJ flashed him a grin. “I'm a city boy, myself.”

We all piled into the Land Rover, Tor in the front with Billy, JJ and me in back. Tor
kept my drawings in his lap, but he stared straight out the windshield the
entire time. The set of his shoulders made me think he might be casting some
kind of spell, scrying for danger, probably. Billy drove way too fast for my
taste. He swore at slow drivers on the freeway, changed lanes, muttered
profanities. I tried to ignore the driving. Tor never moved or said a word.

Some miles before we reached the Caldecott Tunnel, Billy turned off the freeway onto a side road.
At first it led through a residential area, but the higher we climbed, the
sparser the houses became. Once we drove into the Preserve itself, the road
petered out to a dirt track. The Land Rover bounced and jounced around while JJ
swore under his breath and I clutched at the seat and the arm rest on my side.
Tor stayed so still and focused that he seemed to be riding on a private
cushion of air.

The particular dirt track we were following ended in a grove of live oaks. Billy
parked the Land Rover facing downhill. “In case we need to make a fast getaway,”
he said.

“Probably we won't,” Tor said. “I'll try not to start any fires.”

None of us laughed. We all got out, and I spent a moment tucking my slim-leg jeans into my
hiking boots. Ticks were the big summer hazard up in the dry grass of the
hills. Billy and JJ treated their own ankles the same. Tor merely stared uphill
as he stood a little apart from us with my drawings rolled in one hand. I
remembered the flies at our backyard picnic and figured that the ticks would
leave him alone.

It was quiet up in the hills under the midday sun. Now and then I heard a insect buzz,
and the long grass, pale gold and dead here at the end of summer, rustled as we
tramped through it. The noise of the freeway and the vast urban spread of the
Bay Area lay a long way downhill in a sea of silence. We'd only gone about
twenty yards up when I began to sweat, the cold clammy sweat of spent élan. I waffled,
wondering if I should interrupt Tor's concentration, but he turned around,
smiled at me, and sent a wave of élan my way. I pretended to be out of breath
so I could gasp as I captured and swallowed it.

“Rest break,” Tor said. “Maya's not used to this.”

“Neither am I,” JJ said with a grin. “Not that I expect any sympathy.”

It took me a bare two minutes to absorb all of the élan. I felt it flow through my body in
a sweet tide that restored the strength in my legs. As we started trudging up
the steep slope ahead, the ravens returned. Cawing to one another, the flock
swirled out of the eastern sky and flew around us in a wide circle.

“Whoa!” JJ said to me. “This is like your pictures.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure is.”

Tor tipped his head back and cawed in return. Unlike most people's clumsy attempt at bird
calls, he sounded like a raven. They understood him and took off, heading
south-east, but slowly, flapping around us, settling only to rise up again,
until they could be sure Tor followed. The rest of us didn't matter. That was
obvious from the way the matriarch looked only at him before she called to the
flock. We clambered up through the high grass and outcrops of rock, past a
scattering of trees, and finally saw ahead the twisted oak of my drawing. With
one last outburst of shriek and caw, the ravens settled on the branches, black
and shiny among the rust-colored clusters of dead leaves.

Just on the downhill side of the tree stood the ten-foot high scorning pole, jammed into
the ground and topped with the head of a Husky or Malamute dog. The dog's body,
a dark blot on the pale grass, lay nearby.

“Maya, get back!” Tor snapped. “You don't want to look at this.”

Too late. I'd already seen that Nils had bound her paws together with wire, slashed her
sides, and rammed something sharp and metal up her female parts. Black blood
crusted her fur, which meant she'd been alive for the torment. I nearly
vomited, turned my back, and staggered a few steps away. JJ and Billy walked
over to join Tor.

“Shit!” Billy said. “He didn't just kill her. The slimy bastard! Jesus!”

“Yeah,” Tor said. “Well, she's running free in the other world now.” He raised his hands
above his head. “May someone call her home!” His voice rang over the silent
hillside.

In the profound silence I felt a presence, an answer though not in words. I shuddered.
JJ returned to stand beside me. He wiped his sweaty forehead on his sleeve and
took a deep breath. “I don't even know what to say,” he said. “What kind of
twisted nutcase would do that to an animal?”

“A twisted nutcase, yeah. I hope he rots in hell.”

From behind us I heard Tor speaking in a language that I didn't recognize—much like
Icelandic, but the cadence rolled and dipped in a different way. JJ cocked his
head to one side and nodded in recognition. “Old Norse,” he murmured. “He uses
that to invoke the ancestors.”

Tor called out one sharp word. Billy said, “One two three!” I heard them grunt. Curiosity
got the better of me, and I glanced over my shoulder just as they pulled the
pole free of the earth. Even with two of them holding it, the heavy pole
swayed, unbalanced by the dead thing at the tip. Tor muttered something and
shook the pole. The head came loose and dropped beside the body with a
sickening little thud. I watched the ravens rather than think about the dog's
slow death. In the tree branches the shiny black birds shrieked and cawed. Some
sprang up and flew, swooping low to return and settle.

 “What I don't get is, where are all the flies?” Billy said.

“Nils cast an aversion spell,” Tor said. “Huh. That's why the ravens came to fetch me.
I'll dispel it, and then they can take what's rightfully theirs.”

They laid the pole down in the grass. Tor raised his hands again and spoke, in Icelandic
this time. As we were leaving, I glanced back and saw the ravens settling
around the dog's corpse to return her substance to the cycle of life.