Free Allan and the Ice Gods by H. Rider Haggard

loved for both
    its warmth and its stimulating properties. This herb, however, grew
    only in the autumn and it had never occurred to them to store it and
    use it dry. Therefore, their use of the first intoxicant was limited
    of necessity, which was perhaps as well.
    Having drunk, he closed the skins that hung over the hut entrance,
    pinning them together with a bone that passed through loops in the
    hide, and sat down again upon his log.
    “What said the gods?” asked Aaka quickly. “Did they answer your
    prayer?”
    “Woman, they did. At sunrise a rock fell from the crest of the ice
    field and crushed my offering so that the ice took it to itself.”
    “What offering?”
    “The head of a wolf that I slew as I went up the valley.”
    Aaka brooded awhile, then said:
    “My heart tells me that the omen is good. Henga is that wolf, and as
    you slew the wolf, so shall you slay Henga. Did I hear that its hide
    is to be a cloak for Foh? If so, the omen is good also, since one day
    the rule of Henga shall descend to Foh. At least, if you kill Henga,
    Foh shall live and not die as Fo-a died.”
    An expression of joy spread over Wi’s face as he listened.
    “Your words give me strength,” he said, “and now I go out to summon
    the People and to tell them that I am about to challenge Henga to
    fight to the death.”
    “Go,” she said, “and hear me, my man. Fight you without fear, for if
    my rede be wrong and Henga the Mighty should kill you, what of it?
    Soon we die, all of us, for the most part slowly by hunger or
    otherwise, but death at the hands of Henga will be swift. And if you
    die, then we shall die soon, very soon. Pag will see to it, and so we
    shall be together again.”
    “Together again! Together where, Wife?” he asked, staring at her
    curiously.
    A kind of veil seemed to fall over Aaka’s face, that is, her
    expression changed entirely, for it grew blank and wooden, secret
    also, like to the faces of all her sisters of the tribe.
    “I don’t know,” she answered roughly. “Together in the light or
    together in the dark, or together with the Ice-gods—who can tell? At
    least together somewhere. You shake your head. You have been talking
    to that hater of the gods and changeling, Pag, who really is a wolf,
    not a man, and hunts with the wolves at night, which is why he is
    always so fat in winter when others starve.”
    Here Wi laughed incredulously, saying:
    “If so, he is a wolf that loves us; I would that we had more such
    wolves.”
    “Oh! you mock, as all men do. But we women see further, and we are
    sure that Pag is a wolf by night, if a dwarf by day. For, if any try
    to injure him, are they not taken by wolves? Did not wolves eat his
    father, and were not the leaders of those women who caused him to be
    driven forth to starve when there was such scarcity that even the
    wolves fled far away, afterward taken by wolves, they or their
    children?”
    Then, as though she thought she had said too much, Aaka added:
    “Yet all this may be but a tale spread from mouth to mouth, because we
    women hate Pag who mocks us. At least he believes in naught, and would
    teach you to do the same, and already you begin to walk in his
    footsteps. Yet, if you hold that we live no more after our breath
    leaves us, tell me one thing. Why, when you buried Fo-a yonder, did
    you set with her in the hole her necklace of shells and the stone ball
    that she played with and the tame bird she had, after you killed it,
    and her winter cloak, and the doll you made for her of pinewood last
    year? Of what good would these things be to her bones? Was it not
    because you thought that they and the little stone ax might be of use
    to her elsewhere, as the dried fish and the water might serve to feed
    her?”
    Here she ceased, and stared at him.
    “Sorrow makes you mad,” said Wi, very gently, for he was moved by her
    words, “as it makes me mad, but in another fashion. For the rest, I do
    not know why I did thus; perhaps it was