by Tim Stead
She stepped into the hut, pushing aside the thin curtain that served as a door, and saw the wolf lying on the floor, its tongue lolling, panting in the heat. This was not a place for such an animal. In the heat of the southern isles its thick coat was an instrument of torture. She fetched a jug of water and a bowl made of a broken sea shell and filled it, placing it with reach of the beast. She spread the leaves beside it and put the meat on them. The wolf rose and sniffed at the food. The two pounds of meat that she had bought vanished in less than a minute, and the animal stood and stared at her as though willing her to produce more. When she did not it lapped at the water in the bowl, gave her another reproachful stare and circled back down to the floor, its eyes pointing to the door.
So much for her duty.
She sat on the bed and closed her eyes. She was not tired, but if she went out of the hut there would be people, people like Salis who wanted to engage her in conversation, to sound her out and pry at her secrets. She preferred privacy. Instead of going about the island she tried to remember what it had been like here when she was a child.
She had never come to this island, of course. Children were not permitted here. But the Green Isles were blessed with many similar islands. The taller islands were in the north where winds were cooler, and their slopes teemed with life. The soils there were good for growing, and there it was that most of the nation’s crops were grown. This far south the land was poorer. It was sandy and washed in salt, and only palms and hardy grasses thrived here. This was where her people fished. The reefs that fringed many of the southern isles were alive with fish.
Her father had been a fisherman. He owned his boat, owned a small house that he had built himself, and paid two men to work for him. He was prosperous, hard working, kind; a father that any daughter would be proud of. She was happy. She loved her mother and Passala her sister. But her memories were vague and clouded with later imaginings. Eight hundred years is a long time to remember. There was one image that she held, clear as a starry night. Her father jumping off his boat into the surf, the sun shining, the smell of salt and fish and sweat, the smile on his face as she ran beside her sister into his strong, brown arms, the sandy feel of his beard on her face, his smell. Her mother had been behind her, and Narala knew that she was smiling, indulgent, happy. That was all; just a brief moment that she played over and over in her head like a sacred chant. It was her image of perfect happiness.
Those were not peaceful days, though. In that distant time slavers had sailed the isles, Telans as she knew them now, fierce men with long swords and long boats driven by white sails who had come down the coast to attack villages, kill men and women, and seize the children.
The trade was long dead. It had faded away even before the Great War, but she had been a victim, her parents and sister too. She remembered nothing of the day she was taken. She only knew that it must have happened, and her years of slavery were just a blur of misery. Narak had rescued her. She learned later that he had asked for her as a gift, and men rarely denied Narak what he asked for. He knew this, and rarely asked for anything, but he had asked for her.
She remembered nothing until he set her free. Before freedom was darkness, but that day was another bright memory. She had been his for less than a week, and he had asked nothing of her, simply travelled south through Telan lands until he came to the sea, the western sea where she could see the dark, cloud hatted peaks of the Green Isles, her home. He bought a small boat. He told her to get into it.
“You are free to go,” he said.
She had not believed, not at first. It was some cruel trick, she was sure, but he gave her a piece of gold and a ring with a wolf’s head sigil and told her again that she was free, that if she ever wanted to serve him, not as a slave but a free woman, she could seek him out and there would be a place for her at Wolfguard. Show the ring, he said, and people will know.
She had gone. She knew boats and had not forgotten her father’s art.
She did not believe, not truly, until she was out of bowshot, out of hearing, out of sight. Narak stood alone on the beach and watched her sail away, not waving, not calling out, but standing silently, his arms at his sides until he was a speck on the great southern shore of Terras with the mountains of the Dragon’s Back rising up beside him. That was how she still thought of Narak: alone, silent, honest.
It took eleven days for her to make her way home. She stopped at islands and exchanged small pieces of her gold for clothes and food, sleeping in the boat, launching every morning to ride the breezes past isle after isle, barely seeing the bright water, the sun, the occasional rain and thunder.
But home was gone. She ran her boat up onto the beach on the island where she had lived, ran through the palms and grasses to the familiar streets of her village, but the house where she had lived was gone, and a new house stood on the spot. The people who lived there were strangers to her, could tell her nothing of her father and mother, nothing of her pretty sister.
It was the same at the neighbours’ houses, and the rest of the tiny street. The whole village was a stranger, as though a great hand had swept up all she knew and replaced it with something similar yet completely changed. The well was still there, and she sat by the well and wept until a familiar voice spoke to her.
“Narala?”
She looked and saw that it was Gorondo, one of the men who had worked for her father in his boat. He was older and wore a scar on the left side of his head that split his hair and broke the line of his chin; a great scar indeed. She flew into his arms, the one piece of her past that had endured.
Gorondo told her the story of the raid. Her father was dead, her mother was dead, her sister taken. Most of the houses had burned and the village had been rebuilt by others, keen to fish the wealth of the reefs that ringed the island. Only a handful of villagers had survived and remained to help rebuild.
Narala could have stayed. She had a boat, she had gold, and she was young and pretty. She would have done well in the new village, but she could not bear to be there. Everything she knew had been ripped apart and buried in the thin, sandy soil of the island. There was only one thing that remained: her sister. She decided that she would find her sister.
She stayed no more than a day, one night in Gorondo’s house with his wife and son, and she could not be away quickly enough in the morning. She had nothing to pack, no ties, and so she walked down to her boat in dawn’s light and raised the small sail and headed north again.
Illusions no longer troubled her. She knew that she could not find Passala on her own. She had only a small piece of gold, a boat, a knife. She sailed north because of what Narak had said to her. She had seen the way that men looked at Narak, how they stepped out of his way, strived to please him. She would serve Narak, and as a servant she would have more power than she could ever have on her own. She would squeeze the men of Telas until they bled the knowledge that she desired. She would find the slavers. She would find Passala.
She landed, sold the boat, and made her way north. Sometimes men challenged her, wanted to steal her freedom, but mostly the ring was enough to put them off. Mostly.
She came to the town of Hegral Cross. It was a small town on a crossroads with a dilapidated tavern, a temple and a few dozen houses. She bought a room and a meal in the tavern, dispelled their prejudice with a show of the ring. It was a poor meal, and a cold room, but she did not mind. A lot of things had ceased to matter since her family had been taken from her. She was learning the ways of Telas, dressed after their fashion now, spoke the language that she had learned as a slave, but she could not change her skin.
In the morning she walked out of the village on the king’s road leading north. Narak and Wolfguard were in the north, she had been told. She walked at a steady pace, leaving behind tilled fields and passing into a thin forest of winter stripped trees, and there she passed by three men. They were felling trees close to the road and two wagons stood by them, stacked with thin tree trunks, the sort they used for b
uilding in these parts.
When they saw her, the three moved to block her passage; standing in the road so that she would have to step off it to pass them. She stopped before them and showed the ring.
“I serve Wolf Narak,” she said. In the past it had been enough, but this time it was not. There was one older man and two younger, and while the old man stepped aside the youths did not.
“Anyone can say that,” one of them said. “And anyone can have a wolf ring made.”
“Leave her alone,” the old man said.
“Are you afraid of a ring, old man?” the youth said. “We can have some fun with this one. She is an Isler, and not a proper woman.”
“I do not fear the ring, boy. I fear what stands behind it.” The old man had moved between her and the young men, as though to defend her. One of them seized his arm, pulled him to one side and pushed him so that he fell at the side of the road.
“You sit there old man, or we’ll beat you too.”
The one who had done all the talking reached out and grabbed her arm, but she slapped his hand away and drew the blade she carried. It was a knife, but long enough to kill a man. Her fear was that she did not know how to use it. The youth reached for her again and easily avoided her point when she stabbed at his arm. He laughed.
The other one moved up to one side. He was bigger than the talkative one, looked slow witted but very strong.
“You invite disaster on us all,” the old man cried from the roadside, but he did not rise, and the younger men ignored him.
The big one reached for her, and this time her knife scored flesh, and she saw blood, but it was as though he barely noticed the wound. One hand grabbed her upper arm and the other struck her in the face. She lost the knife. The talkative youth laughed again.
“Hold her there, Telo,” he said, and he reached for her. She twisted away, almost broke the big one’s grip, but he was too strong, and wrestled her back to face his companion. She tried to kick him, but he was too quick.
Something snarled behind them; the sort of noise that made your hair stand on end.
The hands released her. The talkative bastard leaped away. It was a wolf, a huge grey wolf that stood in the road where a few moments ago there had been nothing. It stood there for a moment, staring at the two young men, lips curled back over bright white teeth. They ran, both of them, clattering into the under story of shrubs and bushes in the forest, fear giving them an impressive turn of speed, and then they were gone, just a few distant sounds. Now there was just the old man, sitting on his backside on the side of the road frozen like a statue with his eyes on the wolf, and the wolf, of course. She felt the prickle of fear as much as the old man. It was a powerful beast, large and in its prime. But the wolf walked to her side and licked at her hand. It looked up at her as if to say… but she had no idea what it meant to say; something friendly perhaps, something comforting.
“Thank you,” she said. For certain the wolf didn’t behave like a wolf. It looked at the old man, blinked, licked its chops and sat down beside her like a tame dog.
“Truly you walk with the wolf,” the old man said.
Narala was amazed. There was clearly more to the wolf ring that she had guessed. Somehow Narak had been watching her, or had set a wolf to do so, and the wolf had seen her peril and intervened.
When she carried on walking on the king’s road the wolf came with her, no longer concealed, but walking at her side, an unquestionable sign of Narak’s favour. Narala could not help herself. She started talking to it. She had been alone for weeks; first sailing south to her home, then north again, and lately walking north along quiet roads, shunned by the pale skinned people of Telas. Now that she had a travelling companion, though it was a wolf, she talked to it like a friend.
The wolf, of course, did not reply, but more than one she caught it looking up at her as she spoke, trotting slowly along in its tireless way. At night it would vanish, slinking into the woods of fields, coming back to her side hours later. She guessed it went to hunt.
For two days they went on like that. She talked and the wolf listened. A lot of the time she talked nonsense, just to hear her own voice. Sometime she confided her desire for revenge, sometimes she talked of her home in the Green Isles, and sometimes she just talked- the weather, the trees, the road – anything was meat enough.
They came to a crossroads. People had told her about it. North led to the great forest, and that way lay the road to Wolfguard. To the east there was the Green Road, and beyond that the kingdom of Berash. West was Telas Alt, the capital.
By now the roads were busy. The thin traffic of the south had swollen as she moved north. Carters dominated the roads, moving in long, slow, dusty trains that moved only a fraction faster than she walked. It took each of them an age to pass her if they travelled the same way, and all the time she tasted the road, blinked to keep the fine dust from her eyes. The wolf attracted a lot of attention, but nobody troubled her. Indeed, nobody approached her at all.
She took the road north, but had only taken a few paces when she felt its absence. The wolf was no longer beside her. She stopped and looked back. It stood at the crossroads, looking at her. It was three paces down the road to Telas Alt, on the road to the west.
“Do I leave you here?” she called to it.
The wolf took a few more steps to the west and stopped again, looked back.
“I need to go north,” she said. “To Wolfguard.” But the wolf stood and stared until she became certain that it wished her to go west, to the capital. She was uneasy about that. Country towns she could cope with, and villages were quickly passed and forgotten, but Telas Alt was a city. Those few people who had spoken to her on the road had described it as the city of cities, a place where raw humanity gathered in thousands and tens of thousands, so many houses clustered together that it took hours to walk through it all.
She did not want to go there. There were no cities in the Isles, and she did not want to feel that much hostility battering at her from every side. The one certain thing that she had learned was that Telans did not welcome people of her skin colour among them. They tolerated her because of the wolf.
Despite her misgivings she gave in, walked back and headed west with the wolf once more at her side. She trusted the wolf.
Telas Alt, of course, was quite a way down the road, and they walked for three days along an increasingly busy highway until she caught her first sight of the city. They were still miles distant, but she could smell something unmistakably unnatural in the air, an olfactory miasma that could only be the city. In the distance she could see that the sky was dirty. She had never seen anything like it. It both horrified and fascinated her. So many people lived here that they changed the world around them.
From this distance she could see nothing of the town, but the great fortress that was the manifestation of the king’s power stood above it all like a dead tree stump on a desolate plain. It took all her courage to walk towards it, joining the thickening flow of carts, riders and those others on foot as they all pushed towards Telas Alt. There was some unspoken rule, it seemed, because the carts stayed on the right side of the road so that there was room for the equal numbers moving away from the city. Riders did the same, and everyone on foot just had to take their chances in the traffic.
The houses started before the city. Farms seemed smaller, their buildings closer to the road. It already felt like a town before they came to the gate, and the wall. The wall shocked her. She had never seen a city before, never mind a city wall. She found its huge, heavy presence menacing, but no more so than the guards on the gate. There were four of them, uniformed, armoured and armed. Something else – she had never seen soldiers before. Most people passed through the gate unmolested, but two of the men moved to block her path. In the crowd they did not see the wolf that walked at her side.
“You’re a long way from home,” one of them said.
“Yes,” she agreed.
“Yes? Is that all? What’s
your business here?”
She showed him the ring, pointed to the wolf. “You will have to ask him,” she said. “He brought me here.”
The guard stepped back one pace. The wolf looked at him.
“The Wolf, eh? Well, I’d best let you be about it then,” he said.
“Thank you.”
She walked past them into the city. She was aware that the man who had questioned her was talking to his comrades, but she was too distracted to pay them any heed. The city swallowed her whole.
As soon as she stepped beyond the gates all trace of the natural world was swept away. The smells, the sights, the noises were all man made. Here and there she saw a green flash of moss, a tuft of grass in a dirty gutter, a sparrow peering down from a slate roof, but they were overwhelmed invaders in this artificial world. She walked slowly beside the wolf, and it led her down cobbled streets, along paved roads, through dim alleys, and everywhere the endless variety of the artifice astonished her. In her home everyone had made their houses the same way, the boats looked the same beneath the paint, pots, pans, knives and fishhooks were all broadly similar, comfortingly familiar. Here it was as though men had strived everywhere to build to a different line, to try a new shape of window, a new kind of door. The people themselves were a blaze of colour, a catalogue of different styles. In five minutes she had seen more shapes of hat than she had ever guessed could exist.
