Viper's Daughter

by Michelle Paver

  Pain sank its teeth into Wolf’s rump and his hind leg began to shake. Again he snapped at the Long Claw, again he couldn’t pull it out.

  The Bright Soft Cold was no longer falling from the Up. Above the voices of the wind and the Bright Beast, Wolf heard the taillesses shouting. They were many, many lopes away. Wolf started limping towards them.

  He hadn’t gone far when he heard his pack-brother barking. But Tall Tailless wasn’t calling for help. Stay away, pack-brother! he barked urgently. This prey is mine!

  Torak had seemed full of resolve when he was barking at Wolf, but now as he turned back to Renn his shoulders slumped and he looked utterly defeated. ‘Do as Naiginn says!’ he told her again. ‘It’s over for me, but he needs you, he’ll keep you alive!’

  She couldn’t believe it. Torak would never give up.

  She didn’t believe it. She saw the slingstones on the ground at his side. Through the last flakes of drifting snow their eyes met – and she understood. He couldn’t see Naiginn hiding among the rocks, he needed to get him into the open, to have a clear shot.

  Thirty paces to her left, across a rippling expanse of charred rock, Naiginn crouched on a boulder with an arrow aimed at Torak.

  ‘Don’t shoot!’ Renn shouted. ‘I will obey, I’m coming to you right now!’

  She had to get him down from there, into the open. Cudgelling her brains, she started towards him.

  A short distance to her right, a crack zigzagged across a rocky mound. The mound seemed to judder and swell, as if something were fighting to get out.

  Suddenly Renn knew what to do.

  ‘I will obey!’ Renn shouted to Naiginn – but to Torak’s horror, instead of heading for Naiginn’s hiding-place, she ran onto a low mound that was cracking and shaking to life.

  ‘Get off, it’s going to blow up!’ shouted Torak, frantically waving his good arm.

  ‘Get away from there!’ shrieked Naiginn.

  ‘Make me!’ Renn yelled back. ‘I’m your last chance of freedom! If I die you’ll be trapped for ever! Come and get me!’

  The sun was a huge red globe in the smoky black sky, turning her hair to flame, flashing fire off the third eye on her brow. At any moment the Otherworld might erupt, yet she stood her ground to decoy Naiginn into the open.

  Jumping down from the boulders, he ran towards her. The mound heaved. Still Renn stood firm – but Naiginn drew back in terror of the Otherworld beneath.

  Torak seized his chance. Rising to his feet, he whirled the slingstones once, and threw with all his strength. Naiginn didn’t see, his gaze was fixed on Renn. As she leapt off the mound the Otherworld broke through, crimson flames shooting high. A spark caught the slingstones in mid-air, they burst into flames. Naiginn screamed as the blazing missiles whipped round his throat. ‘You put a leash on her!’ roared Torak. ‘I’ve done the same to you!’

  Still screaming, Naiginn staggered through the smoke. Torak lost sight of him as the mound ruptured, spurting liquid fire like a severed vein. Hotter than the sun, it blazed glaring orange, spattering rocks, turning black smoke red.

  ‘Renn! Where are you? Renn!’ With his good arm Torak shielded his eyes, but the heat was beating him back.

  Through the crimson smoke he caught the distant bellow of a mammut – then Naiginn’s screams, abruptly cut off – but no Renn.

  Torak’s knees buckled.

  As he struggled upright he saw Wolf limping out of the smoke and Renn running towards him over the rocks.

  Now what? thought Renn.

  Flames lit the night sky. The ice mountain was juddering, chunks crashing off it, the ground shaking beneath her feet. They had to get away before this end of the Island broke apart. But how? Torak was ashen-faced, Wolf had an arrow in his rump. The wind off the ice was freezing, and Renn was soaked from the cave and cold beyond shivering.

  ‘It’s not cold that kills, it’s wet,’ scolded Inuktiluk.

  Inuktiluk? How did he get here? Sounds faded in and out. She couldn’t keep her eyes open.

  Torak was shaking her. ‘Renn!’

  ‘Go ’way,’ she mumbled. ‘I need to lie down.’

  ‘If you fall asleep now you’ll never wake up!’

  She scowled. ‘Who’s that?’

  A girl was running towards them through the smoke: small, with a withered arm and a determined expression.

  Wolf was swinging his tail and limping towards her. Torak was waving his good arm. ‘Shamik! Where’s your boat?’

  Never in his life had Torak experienced anything like it.

  Snowflakes were settling on his face and on his clothes on the riverbank – and yet he was floating in blissful heat. He could feel the steaming water unravelling his knotted muscles, washing away the pain in his shoulder…

  ‘Stay in a long time,’ Shamik had told him. ‘It’ll be easier to pull your arm back in place.’

  She’d taken charge with surprising firmness and led them to Marupai’s skinboat on the shore. Skilfully she’d removed the arrow from Wolf’s rump, then they’d piled into the boat and she’d paddled away from the burning chaos of the Island.

  Torak had gazed in fascination at billowing black clouds ablaze with orange fire. Beside him Wolf had sat very still, and in his eyes Torak had seen a crimson light and tiny demons twisting like cinders. Then Wolf had rubbed his muzzle against Torak’s cheek, and they’d watched the Island at the Edge of the World slipping away into the smoke.

  Shamik had found a smaller island and put in for the night. She’d pitched camp in a cave and woken a driftwood fire, helped Renn out of her wet clothes and into a sleeping-sack, and brought Torak to this steaming river that smelt faintly of bloodstone.

  Upstream the water was too hot to touch, and dead trout floated belly up – but this pool was perfect, overhung with ferns and mint that made a fragrant pillow for his head. Drowsily he watched Shamik gathering ready-boiled fish for nightmeal. Wolf was on the shore, wade-herding live ones.

  Slitting his eyes, Torak watched snowflakes spiralling towards him through the deep blue dusk. To the north the sky glowed red. His clothes on the bank were sprinkled with black ash. He thought of the mammut’s bellow and Naiginn’s last cry.

  Marupai had also died on the Island. ‘He went to help Naiginn,’ Shamik had told them. ‘I saw an ice spur fall on him. He knew he was going to die. When we went ashore he made me put Death Marks on him; and he gave me his map and his flute.’

  Torak hoped the old man’s souls were at peace. Blinded by love for a woman who’d wrecked his life, he had died believing that Naiginn was his son, the bravest hunter in the Far North. As for Shamik, it was hard to know what she thought of her newfound freedom.

  ‘Wake up,’ Renn said quietly in his ear. She was kneeling in the ferns, wearing his parka.

  ‘I thought you were asleep,’ he said.

  She smiled. ‘I came to find you before you drowned.’ He got out of the pool and she helped him rub himself dry with snow and put on his leggings; then she told him to lie on a flat-topped boulder she’d spread with ferns.

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Just do as I say. Lie face down with your bad arm over the edge.’

  Too drowsy to argue, he obeyed, and before he knew it she’d gripped his arm and yanked it back in place with a click and an eye-watering stab of pain. ‘There,’ she said.

  ‘You could’ve warned me.’

  ‘You’d have tensed up. Come on, let’s get some sleep.’

  At the cave they found Wolf sprawled by the fire, so full of fish he merely thumped his tail. Shamik had dragged in armfuls of dryish seaweed and piled rocks behind the fire to throw the heat inside. Torak and Renn dug themselves a nest, but Shamik insisted they take her sleeping-sack, which she’d opened out for them, while she curled up in the shadows at the back.

  ‘How’s your shoulder?’ Renn mumbled against Torak’s chest.

  ‘Not too bad.’

  ‘You smell different.’

  ‘So do you.’
He blew a speck of ash off her hair. Firelight danced on the roof of the cave. We’re safe, he told himself. But as he tumbled into sleep he thought, We’re still at the Edge of the World. How do we find our way back?

  The snow blew away in the night, but autumn had arrived. A hard frost had transformed the island from green to amber, with splashes of red like gouts of blood.

  It turned out that Shamik could read Marupai’s knot map, and with a strong wind behind them it didn’t take long to reach Waigo. Wolf scarcely limped as he bounded off to the fells.

  The Sea had thrown a huge shoal of tiny silver fish onto the shore below the Narwal settlement, and the whole clan was knee-deep in the bounty, raking it into seal-hide sacks. Because Torak and Renn arrived soon after the fish, the elders assumed they’d brought the good luck and treated them with honour. Orvo, who’d returned from the clan meet, helped translate. The elders seemed unmoved when Torak told them Marupai was dead, and asked no questions when he said Naiginn had gone hunting.

  Next morning the Narwals equipped them for the journey south with boots, sleeping-sacks, smoked walrus and weapons for Torak – although they ignored Renn’s plea for leggings and a bow.

  ‘You should give your mate a good beating,’ Orvo told Torak indignantly. ‘Whoever heard of a half-man with a bow?’

  Renn laughed. ‘Doesn’t matter, I’ll steal Torak’s.’

  Torak grinned. Orvo looked astonished; then slightly wistful.

  He walked with them to the skinboat. Torak’s arm was back in its sling as his shoulder still hurt, and climbing in, he clenched his teeth. Orvo noticed. ‘For a Softbelly you’re not so soft,’ he said with grudging respect. ‘May the guardian swim with you.’

  Torak smiled wryly. ‘And also with you, my friend.’

  There was just room in the boat for the four of them: Torak, Wolf, Renn and Shamik. The Narwals had ‘given’ her to Torak, but when he’d told her she was free she’d been confused. ‘You don’t want me to come?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘You saved our lives,’ said Renn.

  ‘But in the Forest we don’t own people.’ Torak wasn’t sure if Shamik understood.

  They set off down the coast, Renn and Shamik paddling, Torak grumbling at being unable to help. Wolf was restless, twice nearly capsizing them by turning round and refusing to sit.

  Nights lengthened fast as they headed south. Dawns glowed a strange vivid purple, sunsets turned the sky to blood. One morning they woke to find the fells blanketed in snow.

  The bird cliffs were deserted. Huge flocks of ducks and geese were gathering in the bays before flying south. Soon the World Spirit would change from a man with the antlers of a stag to a woman with bare red willow branches for hair. She would stride the land, breathing snow and hail, freezing lakes and stilling rivers and waterfalls with a touch of her hand.

  The shallows were slushy with ice, and Torak saw his own concern in Renn’s eyes. Once the Sea froze, they’d have to abandon the boat and trudge overland for days.

  They passed the Three Peaks and spent a fraught morning dodging icebergs at the mouth of the ice river. Soon afterwards Wolf jumped to his feet, nearly capsizing them again. Torak growled, but Wolf’s ears were pricked and his tail was high.

  ‘What is it?’ said Renn.

  Torak broke into a grin. ‘I think our journey just got easier. Look!’

  He pointed at the shore, where a beaming Inuktiluk and his son were pulling up their dog sleds and shouting their names.

  Inuktiluk put Shamik and the skinboat on his son’s sled, and Torak and Renn went with him. Wolf had disappeared, overjoyed at feeling snow beneath his paws.

  Nestled in reindeer skins, Torak and Renn listened to the patter of the dogs’ paws and the scrape of whale-jaw runners. A snow owl flew past and Torak met its fierce yellow eyes. He had an odd sense that the guardian of the Far North wanted something.

  Much later, lights glowed golden in the blue dusk and they slewed to a halt before the humped shelters of the White Fox Clan. After beating the frost from their clothes, they crawled into an orange fug of burning blubber and a noisy welcome. They were soon asleep in a warm eiderdown nest.

  Torak woke to find Renn gone. She was sitting with Tanugeak by the blubber lamp. ‘Come,’ whispered Inuktiluk in his ear.

  ‘I’ve told them about Nai— the ice demon,’ Renn said quietly as Torak sat beside her. She’d corrected herself just in time; clan law forbids naming the dead for five summers.

  Inuktiluk was shaking his head. ‘If anyone else had told me, I wouldn’t have believed it.’

  ‘Nor I,’ murmured Tanugeak. To Renn: ‘But why do you feel to blame?’

  ‘Because he tricked me! This whole journey has been for nothing!’

  ‘Who can say what will flow from it?’ the White Fox Mage said calmly. ‘Torak, it’s time to take off that sling. It’ll hurt, but you need to start moving your arm. Renn tells me you spirit walked in an eagle. Tomorrow I’ll do a rite to appease the north wind.’

  To everyone’s surprise, Renn said she would do it instead.

  Tanugeak looked at her. ‘At the clan meet you told me you hadn’t done Magecraft for two summers. What’s changed?’

  Renn flushed. ‘Me.’

  Tanugeak’s plump face dimpled. ‘Then it wasn’t for nothing, was it?’ From under her cloak she drew Marupai’s knot map and his flute. ‘Shamik gave me these. Renn, you take the flute. It’s mammut bone, keep it safe. Torak, you take the map. Think carefully what to do with it.’

  Torak fingered the knotted mammut hair. He remembered the wise eyes of the lead mammut; her trunk gently stroking her fallen kin. He said, ‘Renn had a vision of hunters killing them.’

  ‘Our ancestors were greedy,’ said Inuktiluk. ‘They broke faith with the prey. It was a great evil.’

  ‘I’m the last spirit walker,’ Torak said thoughtfully. ‘The mammuts on the Island are the last of their kind. I can’t read this map, but Shamik can. Does that mean the Narwals can too?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Inuktiluk. ‘And the Walruses and Ptarmigans, and some of us White Foxes.’

  ‘Then while it exists,’ said Torak, ‘others could find the Island. They could hunt the mammuts.’ He paused. ‘If all the mammuts were gone, the fight against evil would be harder.’

  Renn gasped. ‘The last part of the riddle! Save the past by burning the present.’

  He nodded. As he fed the map to the blubber lamp, the mammut hair crackled and smoked. ‘Let them live out their lives in peace, untroubled by men.’

  Renn kissed his jaw.

  ‘What was that for?’

  ‘For being the opposite of the ice demon.’

  He snorted. ‘Who was the handsomest man you ever saw.’

  ‘Who never knew or cared how another living creature felt.’

  Later as he drifted to sleep, he wondered if destroying the map was what the snow owl had wanted. Next morning he found a white wing-feather in the snow. Renn tied it to the back of his parka. ‘A good sign,’ she said.

  They spent two days at the White Fox camp. Renn appeased the north wind by giving it Torak’s greenstone wrist-guard, which she incised with his Forest sign and smeared with a few drops of his blood. Inuktiluk gave Torak a new wrist-guard of polished antler shaped like an eagle with outspread wings, and Renn a bow and a quiverful of arrows. Tanugeak gave her the longed-for parka and leggings, then astonished Shamik by giving her a set too. Renn fed their Narwal robes to the dogs.

  That night the snow froze hard. This made a better surface for the sled-dogs, and Inuktiluk chuckled. ‘The Far North wants you gone, my friends!’

  The sleds sped off in the violet dawn, and on the third day they had come so far south that the Sea was clear, so they said goodbye to Inuktiluk and the dogs and continued in the skinboat, with Wolf following on land.

  It had been the end of the Cloudberry Moon when they’d left the Forest, and though it felt longer, Torak and Renn had been surprised to learn from
the White Foxes that they’d only been away for a little over a moon. The Moon of Green Ashseed had been and gone while they were in the Far North, although the White Foxes knew it by a different name.

  Pausing with her paddle across her knees, Renn said, ‘I can’t understand how it can be the start of winter in the Far North, but the beginning of autumn in the Forest.’

  ‘I know,’ said Torak. ‘When we get there it’ll be the Moon of Roaring Stags.’

  ‘What’s a stag?’ said Shamik.

  ‘Like a reindeer,’ said Renn. ‘But bigger and not as shaggy.’

  Shamik’s face creased with worry: all these strange Forest creatures she didn’t know.

  ‘Dark will help you,’ said Torak. ‘He had to learn its ways too. He’d never seen horses or badgers—’

  ‘Or hazelnuts,’ said Renn. ‘And honey! Wait till you taste honey!’

  The snow was turning patchy, the fells dotted with green firs, crimson willows and yellow birch. As they paddled towards a headland, a south wind carried the scent of pines. Torak heard Rip and Rek cawing excitedly. The ravens were sky-dancing beak to tail. Torak saw a white flash flying with them.

  Shamik’s eyes widened. ‘That raven’s white!’

  ‘It’s Ark!’ cried Renn.

  With a whoop Torak threw up his axe and caught it one-handed. Then the skinboat cleared the headland and there was the Forest welcoming them home with wide green arms. Torak felt it filling his spirit like spring-water and he laughed aloud, drinking in the sight of dark pines and amber beeches, golden larches and scarlet rowans. He heard his pack-brother’s delirious yelps echoing from the hills, then he spotted Fin-Kedinn and Dark hailing them from the shore, and behind them Wolf was hurtling through the trees – and a noisy torrent of happy wolves was plunging down the slope to greet him.

  ‘What’s wrong with Shamik?’ Renn asked Dark as she oiled her new bow.

  ‘Oh, some boys tricked her into sitting on a wood-ants’ nest. They did that to me when I was new.’