Viper's Daughter

by Michelle Paver

  Her mother’s great skill had been to make people believe her lies. Well, not this time. Renn would not be turned from her purpose. Whatever was trying to hurt Torak – be it a demon or something else – she would find it and make it stop. And if that meant going to the Edge of the World, that was what she would do.

  She had an idea. Spreading her long hair on a rock, she took her knife and cut it short. She tied Torak’s headband round her temples. There. Now her face in the lake was nothing like her mother’s.

  Hair holds part of your world-soul, so you mustn’t let it fall into the wrong hands. Renn tied hers around a stone and lobbed it into the Sea. It would come to no harm there, and it might make amends to the Sea Mother for her gear and the deerhide canoe.

  A sleek grey head poked out of the water and shook its extravagant whiskers. Renn smiled. ‘I’m glad you’re all right. Sorry I killed you in my dream.’

  The seal rolled over and floated on its back. In its front flippers it held a scarlet crab which it proceeded to munch. Renn hoped this meant the Sea Mother had forgiven her for the canoe.

  The Sea-eagle ‘tattoo’ on her hand had faded a bit, so she renewed it with lichen, then rubbed more ash on her ‘mourning marks’.

  Her disguise didn’t feel quite as wrong as it had before. She still had her raven feathers under the others, and her medicine pouch was raven skin (it’s against clan law to kill your clan-creature, but she’d found a dead one in the Forest). In the pouch was the tiny bag she’d sewn before she left, which held tufts of underfur from Wolf and Darkfur and a milk tooth from each of the cubs. On a thong at her neck hung the duckbone whistle which Torak had whittled for her last summer. When she blew it she heard no sound, but Wolf could hear it, and so could Rip and Rek.

  Renn blew it.

  At first she caught nothing but the hiss of wind in marsh grass. Then a powerful swish of wings – and Rip lit down and greeted her with a bow and a throaty gurgle. Rek perched on her shoulder and ran a lock of her hair gently through her bill. The raven was no longer disconcerted by her disguise.

  ‘Greetings, little guardians,’ Renn said with a bow. ‘Glad you’ve realized I’m still me. Please don’t stay away again.’

  The fog arrived without warning, creeping up on her as she paddled north. Within moments it was so thick she couldn’t see the end of the canoe.

  When it thinned, she was startled to see how far she’d drifted from the coast. She tried to turn, but the current wouldn’t let her. It was a flat, pale green, nothing like the choppy blue water she’d just left, and it was trying to drag her out to Sea.

  ‘Don’t fight it!’ called a voice. ‘Turn level with the shore and keep going, you’ll be all right!’

  Renn did as he said.

  Through the shifting whiteness she made out a hunter in a long grey skinboat. ‘Not far to go, you’re nearly clear!’ he shouted.

  He was right. Feeling a bit foolish, she shouted her thanks. The Whale Clan had taught her about riptides. ‘I can’t believe I forgot what to do!’

  Grinning, he paddled closer and threw back his hood. ‘You probably don’t get many riptides in the Forest.’

  He was about her own age and quite extraordinarily handsome. His fair hair hung in many braids about his shoulders, and his light-blue eyes were striking in his wind-burnt face. His clan-tattoos were two fine black lines from the corners of his mouth to his jaw, and he maintained a respectful distance as he held up his palm in friendship. ‘I’m Naiginn of the Narwal Clan. I can tell by your speech that you’re from the Far South. What name do you carry?’

  Renn hesitated. ‘I’m Rheu of the Sea-eagles.’

  To her relief it no longer felt wrong. Her name-soul was secure. Inside, she was still Renn of the Raven Clan.

  Torak swerved to avoid a lump of black ice and Wolf nearly fell overboard. Torak growled at him to sit, but Wolf ignored him. His eyes were bulging and he was panting in alarm.

  To reassure him, Torak stretched and yawned. It didn’t work. It had taken a lot to persuade Wolf into the canoe and he still hated it. He was scared of the Sea and he kept hearing giant fish howling in the deep.

  Fin-Kedinn had warned Torak about whales. ‘In summer they swim close to the shore to scratch their bellies. And if you see seabirds screaming above a patch of Sea, stay clear, it means whales are feeding beneath.’

  Twice a whale had surfaced so close they’d nearly capsized, and a while ago the wind had done its best to smash them against an iceberg. It was a warning. The Far North was telling them to go back to the Forest.

  As the sun didn’t set in this strange land, Torak had lost track of the days. He was gripped by the fear that he would never find Renn. He couldn’t imagine being without her. Even when they were with others, they had only to exchange a glance across the fire to feel the bond between them. What if that never happened again?

  He was also sharply aware that while she had prepared for her journey, he had not. He needed warm, seaworthy clothes and a skinboat made of whale bone and seal hide that wouldn’t anger the Sea Mother, but so far he hadn’t met anyone to make the trade. He knew people lived here: the Ptarmigans, the Narwal and Walrus Clans, his friends the White Foxes. Where were they all?

  To make matters worse, his waterskin was empty, and though the cliffs scowling down at him were veined with waterfalls, he couldn’t find anywhere to land.

  From a sea-cave ahead came a weird, booming roar – although from what Torak could make out, there was nothing inside but boulders. What sort of land was this where even boulders roared?

  Wolf’s ears were flat against his skull, his tail clamped between his legs. Uff, he warned.

  Three of what Torak had thought were boulders lumbered into the Sea and swam towards them, spouting spray. They swam fast. A huffing snort off the prow and a head bobbed up. The creature was covered in warts and from its pouchy upper lip jutted two sturdy yellow tusks as long as Torak’s forearm. Its dark eyes were harder than pebbles.

  Fin-Kedinn had warned him about walruses too. ‘They don’t eat people but if you get too close they’ll kill.’

  ‘I’m not hunting you,’ Torak told the walrus. With a grunt it dived, displaying a mottled bulk twice the size of the canoe as it sank out of sight.

  Its companions had also vanished. Uneasily, Torak and Wolf peered into the dark-green water. The walruses could be anywhere.

  He hadn’t paddled far when they bobbed up again, some distance behind. Rearing above the waves, they stared at Torak until he’d paddled well past their cave.

  By now he was desperately thirsty and Wolf’s flanks were heaving. They came to a stream crashing down a cliff with a strip of shore beneath, but as Torak paddled towards it, Wolf growled. His hackles were stiff and he was gazing intently at the clifftop. Torak craned his neck and locked eyes with the biggest ice bear he’d ever seen.

  She stood high above, her long claws gripping the edge. Her chest and muzzle were stained yellow with blubber, her nose criss-crossed with scars. Her flat black stare never left Torak as she tasted his scent with her dark-grey tongue.

  Clumsily, he paddled backwards. The ice bear shifted from paw to paw, seeking a way down to this temptingly easy prey.

  Two fluffy white cubs appeared either side of her and peered curiously at Torak. Their mother swung her long neck. Obediently they backed out of sight.

  Snuffing, licking the air, the bear extended one massive forepaw and clawed for a foothold. Pebbles skittered and bounced. She drew back with a hiss. Too steep. Torak sped off before she changed her mind.

  His hands on the paddle were slippery with sweat. He had encountered ice bears before, and he knew the raging power of their blood-hunger. To an ice bear, all other creatures are prey.

  And summer was their leanest time. In winter they hunted seals hauled out on the frozen Sea – but now there was no sea ice, which meant fewer seals and hungrier bears.

  As Torak paddled north, white patches dotting the land took on a sinister
significance. Was that driftwood on the shore, or a sleeping bear? Was that ice on the fells? Was it?

  Passing a headland, he saw a bear amble into the Sea. He slowed, straining to see which way it swam. Only the very top of its head showed, and the slightest wave hid it from view. He thought he spotted it swimming south, but as he dug in his paddle the sun came out and every glinting wave became a bear.

  He was glancing over his shoulder for the tenth time when a shuddering jolt nearly pitched him overboard. Too late he saw the black iceberg lurking under the waves.

  The canoe crumpled like an eggshell and the Sea rushed in.

  Torak huddled naked in a cave above the shore, teeth chattering uncontrollably as he hacked a strip off his sleeping-sack for a foot-binding. Wolf was leaning against his back to warm him up, while in front he was scorchingly close to the blaze he’d woken from a pile of driftwood.

  He was lucky. The Sea Mother had spat him into the shallows, taking the canoe and his boots but sparing his life. He still had his weapons, gear and the pouch of earthblood. He was going to need it more than ever.

  His jerkin and leggings hung from stakes, dripping onto the flames. When he put them on they were still damp, so he tied them off at elbows and knees with a spare bowstring and stuffed them full of grass. It was scratchy and crawling with insects, but it would keep him alive.

  No one in the Far North travels overland in summer, and no one wears eelskin clothes. Too bad. He hadn’t met anyone to make a trade and he didn’t have time to stop and make better gear for himself.

  The wind nearly knocked him over as he made his way onto the fells, ripping the warmth from his flesh and making his skull ache. Wolf slitted his eyes but didn’t feel the cold: already his underfur was thicker, his pelt as fluffy as if it was winter.

  The ground turned marshy and the wind went off to maul someone else. Midges swarmed. Wolf bounded across the bog and sat furiously scratching while Torak jumped grimly from tussock to tussock. He sank into sticky black mud, yanked his foot free. It came away without his foot-binding. Same with the other.

  Sweaty and midge-bitten, he finally reached firmer ground – and the wind came roaring back. This was hopeless, he was still within arrowshot of the shore. The whole of this horrible treeless land was against him: wind, Sea, walruses, ice bears, the earth itself.

  For the first time since leaving the Forest, he was angry with Renn. They had shared everything together. At times they’d laughed so much they’d cried. At others they’d spoken of their fathers and how deeply they missed them. How could she do this?

  A shadow slid over him. He gasped. The wind was so strong he could barely stand, and yet the great white owl hovered perfectly still.

  In the past, Torak had been forced to kill a snow owl. Seeing one now made him feel guilty. He was glad when it glided away across the fells.

  Wolf had run ahead and was nowhere in sight. Torak felt eyes on him and turned.

  Two skinboats were rocking in the shallows. Each was manned by four boys about his own age, in parkas and leggings of stained grey hide. All had the flat round wind-darkened faces of the people of the Far North and all were scowling at him.

  Warily he raised a hand in greeting. One boy jabbered something that sounded like a clatter of stones. The others sniggered.

  Torak realized he must look ridiculous with his clothes stuffed full of grass: like the clumsy turf men the ice clans raise to honour the wind. ‘My name’s Torak,’ he called. ‘Can you understand me?’

  The boy who’d spoken squared his shoulders. Even from a distance he stank of rancid blubber. His face was shiny with it, his eyes permanently slitted against the wind. His clan-tattoos were two black lines from mouth to chin, like a grimace. ‘Orvo.’ He struck his chest with his fist. ‘Narwal Clan. What are you?’

  Torak didn’t feel like explaining about being clanless so he said he was from the Forest in the south. ‘I have earthblood to trade for clothes and a skinboat. Can you help?’

  The boy called Orvo stared as if he’d asked for the moon. ‘You want a skinboat?’

  ‘I said I’ll trade.’

  ‘Narwals don’t trade skinboats.’

  ‘All right. Maybe someone else will. If not, I’ll walk.’

  Orvo spoke to the others in his own speech and they burst out laughing. ‘Walk?’ jeered Orvo. ‘Walking’s for women and Softbellies!’

  Torak looked at him. ‘What’s a Softbelly?’

  ‘You, from the Far South! Get in the boat.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s the rule: strangers go to the Boat Leader. He’s my uncle,’ he added proudly. ‘Don’t worry, Softbelly, he won’t hurt you. He’ll just send you back south. You’re not tough enough for the Far North.’

  The Narwal boys took Torak’s weapons and hustled him into Orvo’s skinboat. As they headed north, Torak spotted Wolf following on land. The Narwals didn’t notice.

  They passed a bay where a gaggle of younger boys toiled up and down, dragging what appeared to be rocks roped to their waists. ‘Walrus skulls,’ muttered Orvo. ‘When they’re older they’ll drag a boulder, then a whale skull.’

  ‘Why?’ said Torak.

  ‘It’s the rule.’

  Torak asked how come he spoke Southern, and Orvo said it was a rule that someone had to, to trade with other clans. The Narwals had lots of rules. Boys must be raised by their uncles instead of their fathers, because uncles punished more harshly. When the first frosts came they had to sleep in the open, and stand at the edge of the Great Crag to conquer fear. ‘And when my father’s father got too old to hunt,’ he boasted, ‘I had to watch the elders strangle him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To make me strong. The weak die, the tough survive. Softbellies like you wouldn’t last long.’

  ‘Why do you call us that?’

  ‘Because you’re weak. You can’t even eat our food.’

  ‘How do you know? I’ve never tried it.’

  Orvo bared his teeth. ‘You will!’

  Torak’s silence seemed to annoy him. ‘Don’t you have rules in this “Forest” of yours?’

  ‘Not as many as you. What’s the point?’

  ‘It keeps us alive! Hunting whales is dangerous! Six men in a boat must act as one! Don’t your people hunt whales?’

  ‘There aren’t any in the Forest.’

  Orvo snorted. ‘Must be a poor place.’

  ‘It’s where your driftwood comes from.’

  ‘No, it isn’t, driftwood comes from the Sea.’

  ‘Yes, but before that it was trees.’

  Another snort. ‘What are these “trees”? I don’t believe in them! Driftwood is giant kelp from the Sea!’

  Torak gave up.

  They rounded a headland into a swirl of woodsmoke and the stench of middens, and he saw hundreds of shelters strung along the coast. This was where all the people had been: they were gathered for a clan meet.

  Orvo said that as Narwals and Walruses were ‘Sea hunters’, they got the best campsites on the ridge by the river. The Ptarmigans, who hunted reindeer and hare, took the boggy ground, while Softbellies like the Kelps had to camp near the dungheaps. Torak asked if there was anyone from the White Fox Clan, but they were putting into the shallows and there was no more time for talk.

  The noise was overwhelming. Men haggling over piles of eider ducks and blocks of mashed, dried berries. Women scrutinizing hides for holes, sniffing skins full of whale oil, prodding sides of smoked reindeer. The boys jostled Torak past racks of wind-dried cod and he came face to face with the strangest fish he’d ever seen. As big as a man and weirdly flattened, both its bulging eyes were on the same side of its head.

  ‘Halibut,’ said Orvo. ‘Don’t you have them in your “Forest”?’

  Torak ignored that.

  The Narwal campsite was at the far end of the clan meet, and weirdly silent. No talk, no laughter. Even the dogs were subdued. Above the shore towered five pairs of whales’ jawbones, each suppor
ting a skinboat that could take six men. A boy ground charcoal with blubber, an old man painted a walrus on a boat, probably for hunting luck. He was missing three fingers; Torak guessed from frostbite.

  On the shore, bare-chested Narwal men butchered a walrus while women toiled over the skin. The walrus had the thickest hide of any creature Torak had encountered. The women had laboriously split it through its thickness, stopping just before the other end and opening it out, to double it in size. They were scraping it clean with flakes of black flint, and would cure it by rubbing in the creature’s mashed brains, piled nearby.

  Torak saw another woman standing in a rawhide vat of urine, kneading a seal hide with her bare feet. Her companions were making rope, cutting hide in spiral strips and chewing to render it pliable. All the women had cropped hair, long maggot-eaten robes and grim expressions. At Orvo’s approach they shuffled fearfully out of his way.

  A girl with a withered arm wasn’t quick enough and Orvo would have struck her if Torak hadn’t grabbed his shoulder. ‘She didn’t do anything!’ he protested.

  Angrily Orvo shook him off. ‘A half-man gets out of the way, that’s the rule!’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A half-man, a female!’

  The girl looked about ten summers old. She resembled an anxious squirrel, with pouchy cheeks and prominent teeth half-hidden by a bone disc that hung from her pierced upper lip. She stared at Torak as if she couldn’t believe he’d tried to help her. She was still staring as he followed Orvo to the Narwals’ shelter.

  This was a massive tent of split walrus hides criss-crossed with ropes lashed to boulders. Above the entrance was fixed a tusk as straight as a spear; Torak guessed it was that of a narwal.

  ‘This shelter’s only a summer one,’ muttered Orvo. ‘The camp of our ancestors at Waigo is much bigger.’

  Torak had never heard of any clan naming a campsite. He was thinking how odd that was when he saw what was planted on a stake by the shelter: the bloody, fly-blackened head of a wolf.