‘What did you say?’ said Renn, sitting up and banging her head on the ceiling.
‘Nothing.’
‘Yes you did, you were talking to yourself.’
‘I was talking to myself? You were chatting to your entire clan!’
‘I was not,’ she retorted indignantly.
‘You were,’ he said with a grin. She was waking up at last. He’d never been so glad to be having an argument.
Somehow, between them, they managed to make a fire. Fire needs warmth as well as air, so they used some of their firewood to make a little platform to keep the rest off the snow – and this time, instead of fumbling with his strike-fire, Torak remembered the fire-roll in his pack. At first the fire in the birch-bark roll refused to wake up, even when he blew on it coaxingly, and Renn fed it morsels of tinder warmed in her hands. Eventually it flared, rewarding their efforts with a small but cheering blaze.
With dripping hair and chattering teeth, they huddled over it, moaning as it thawed their hands and blistered their faces. But the flames gave them comfort greater than heat. Every night of their lives they’d gone to sleep to that crackling hiss and that bittersweet tang of woodsmoke. The fire was a little piece of the Forest.
Torak found his last roll of dried deer meat and shared it between the three of them. Renn gave him the waterskin. He hadn’t known he was thirsty, but as he took a long drink, he felt strength returning.
‘How did you find me?’ Renn asked.
‘I didn’t,’ he replied. ‘Wolf did. I don’t know how.’
She considered that. ‘I think I do.’ She showed him the grouse-bone whistle.
Torak thought of her blowing that silent whistle in the dark. He wondered what it had been like, all alone. At least he’d had Wolf.
He told her about the Red Deer corpse, and finding the third part of the Nanuak. He didn’t mention the awful moment when he’d considered not trying to find her. He felt too ashamed.
‘A stone lamp,’ murmured Renn. ‘I wouldn’t have thought of that.’
‘Do you want to see it?’
She shook her head. After a while she said, ‘If it had been me, I’d have thought twice about leaving the snow cave. You were risking the Nanuak.’
Torak was silent. Then he said, ‘I did think twice. I thought about staying, and not going to look for you.’
She went quiet. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’d have done the same.’
Torak didn’t know if he felt better or worse for telling her. ‘But what would you have done?’ he asked. ‘Would you have stayed? Or gone to look for me?’
Renn wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Then she flashed him her sharp-toothed grin. ‘Who knows? But maybe – it was another kind of test? Not whether you could find the third piece of the Nanuak. But whether you could risk it for a friend.’
Torak awoke to a hushed blue glow. He didn’t know where he was.
‘Storm’s over,’ said Renn. ‘And I’ve got a crick in my neck.’
So had Torak. Huddled in his sleeping-sack, he turned to face her.
Her eyes were no longer swollen, but her face was red and peeling. When she smiled, it obviously hurt. ‘Ow!’ she croaked. ‘We survived!’
He grinned back, then wished he hadn’t. His face felt as if it had been scrubbed with sand. He probably looked just like Renn. ‘Now all we’ve got to do is get off the ice river,’ he said.
Wolf was whining to be let out. Torak groped for his axe and hacked a hole. Light streamed in, and Wolf shot out. Torak crawled after him.
He emerged into a glittering world of snow hills and wind-carved ridges. The sky was intensely blue, as if it had been washed clean. The stillness was absolute. The ice river had gone back to sleep.
Without warning, Wolf pounced on him, knocking him into a snowdrift. Before he could get up, Wolf leapt onto his chest, grinning and wagging his tail. Laughing, Torak lunged for him, but Wolf dodged out of his reach, then spun round in mid-air and bowed down with his tail curled over his back. Let’s play!
Torak went down on his forearms. Come on then!
Wolf launched himself at Torak, and together they rolled over and over, Wolf play-biting and tearing at Torak’s hair, and Torak muzzle-grabbing and tugging at his scruff. Finally, Torak tossed a snowball high, and Wolf made one of his amazing twisting leaps and snapped it up, landing in a snowdrift, and surfacing with a neat pile of snow on top of his nose.
As Torak struggled breathlessly to his feet, he heard Renn making her way out of the snow cave. ‘I hope,’ she yawned, ‘it’s not too far to the Forest. What happened to your cape?’
He was about to tell her that the storm had ripped it away, when he turned – and forgot about the cape.
East beyond the snow cave – beyond the ice river itself – the High Mountains were terrifyingly close.
For many days the fog had hidden them; then yesterday the ice cliffs had loomed so close that nothing could be seen beyond them. Now, in the clear, cold light, the Mountains ate up the sky.
Torak reeled. For the first time in his life, they weren’t just a distant darkness on the eastern horizon. He stood at their very roots: craning his neck at vast, swooping ice-faces, at black peaks that pierced the clouds. He felt their power and menace. They were the abode of spirits. Not of men.
Somewhere among them, he thought, lies the Mountain of the World Spirit. The Mountain I swore to find.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The red eye was rising. Torak had only a few days to find the Mountain.
Even if he found it, what then? What did he actually have to do with the Nanuak? How would he ever destroy the bear?
Renn crunched through the snow to stand beside him. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to get off the ice river, back to the Forest.’
At that moment, Wolf gave a start, and ran to the top of a snow ridge, turning his ears towards the foothills.
‘What is it?’ whispered Renn. ‘What’s he heard?’
Then Torak heard it too: voices far away in the Mountains, weaving together in the wild, ever-changing song of the wolf pack.
Wolf flung back his head, pointed his muzzle to the sky, and howled. I’m here! I’m here!
Torak was astonished. Why was he howling to a strange pack? Lone wolves don’t do that. They try to avoid strange wolves.
With a whine, he asked Wolf to come to him – but Wolf stayed where he was: eyes slitted, black lips curled over his teeth as he poured out his song. Torak noticed that he was looking much less puppyish. His legs were longer, and he was growing a mantle of thick black fur around his shoulders. Even his howl was losing its cub-like wobble.
‘What’s he telling them?’ asked Renn.
Torak swallowed. ‘He’s telling them where he is.’
‘And what are they saying?’
Torak listened, never taking his eyes off Wolf. ‘They’re talking to two of their pack: scouts who’ve gone down onto the fells to seek reindeer. It sounds-,’ he paused. ‘Yes, they’ve found a small herd. The scouts are telling the others where it is, and that they should howl with their muzzles in the snow.’
‘Why? What for?’
‘It’s a trick wolves do sometimes, so the reindeer think they’re further away than they really are.’
Renn looked uneasy. ‘You can tell all that?’
He shrugged.
She dug at the snow with her heel. ‘I don’t like it when you talk wolf. It feels strange.’
‘I don’t like it when Wolf talks to other wolves,’ said Torak. ‘That feels strange, too.’
Renn asked him what he meant, but he didn’t reply. It was too painful to put into words. He was beginning to realise that although he knew wolf talk, he was not, and never would be, truly wolf. In some ways, he would always be apart from the cub.
Wolf stopped howling, and trotted down from the ridge. Torak knelt and put his arm around him. He felt the fine light bones beneath the dense winter fur; the fierce beat of a loyal heart. As he bent to
take in the cub’s sweet-grass scent, Wolf licked his cheek, then gently pressed his forehead against Torak’s own.
Torak shut his eyes tight. Never leave me, he wanted to tell Wolf. But he didn’t know how to say it.
They started north.
It was an exhausting trudge. The storm had packed the snow into frozen ridges, with thigh-deep troughs in between. Mindful of ice holes, they prodded the snow in front of them with arrows, which slowed them down even more. Always they felt the Mountains watching them, waiting to see if they would fail.
By noon they’d made little progress, and were still within sight of the snow cave. Then they encountered a new obstacle: a wall of ice. It was too steep to climb, and too hard to cut through. Another of the ice river’s savage jokes.
Renn said she’d investigate while Torak waited with the cub. He was glad of the rest: the ravenskin pouch was weighing him down. ‘Watch out for ice holes,’ he warned, watching anxiously as she peered into a crack between two of the tallest fangs of ice.
‘It looks as if there might be a way through,’ she called. Unslinging her pack, she squeezed in, then disappeared.
Torak was about to go after her when she stuck out her head. ‘Oh Torak, come and see! We’ve done it! We’ve done it!’
Wolf leapt after her. Torak took off his pack and followed them in. He hated edging through the crack – it reminded him of the cave – but when he got to the other side, he gasped.
He was looking down at a torrent of jumbled ice like a frozen waterfall. Below it stretched a long slope of snowy boulders, and beyond that, scarcely a pebble’s throw away, and shimmering in its white winter mantle, lay the Forest.
‘I never thought I’d see it again,’ said Renn fervently.
Wolf raised his muzzle to catch the smells, then glanced back at Torak and wagged his tail.
Torak couldn’t speak. He hadn’t known how much it had hurt – actually hurt – to be out of the Forest. They’d only spent three nights away, but it felt like moons.
By mid-afternoon, they’d clambered off the last ice ridge and started zigzagging down the slope. The shadows were turning violet. Pine trees beckoned with snow-heavy boughs. It was a huge relief to get in among them, out of sight of the Mountains. But the stillness was unnerving.
‘It can’t be the bear,’ whispered Renn. ‘There was no sign of it on the ice river. And if it had gone round by the valleys, it would’ve taken days.’
Torak glanced at Wolf. His ears were back, but his hackles were down. ‘I don’t think it’s close,’ he said. ‘But it isn’t far, either.’
‘Look at this,’ said Renn, pointing at the snow beneath a juniper tree. ‘Bird tracks.’
Torak stooped to examine them. ‘A raven. Walking, not hopping. That means it wasn’t frightened. And there was a squirrel here, too.’ He pointed to a scattering of cones at the base of a pine tree, each one gnawed to the core like an apple. ‘And hare tracks. Quite fresh. I can still see some fur marks.’
‘If they’re fresh, that’s a good sign,’ said Renn.
‘Mm.’ Torak peered into the gloom. ‘But that isn’t.’
The auroch lay on his side like a great brown boulder. In life he’d stood taller than the tallest man, and the span of his gleaming black horns had been almost as wide. But the bear had slashed open his belly, leaving him in a churned-up mess of crimson snow.
Torak gazed down at the great ruined beast, and felt a surge of anger. Despite their size, aurochs are gentle creatures who only use their horns to fight for mates, or defend their young. This blunt-nosed bull had not deserved such a brutal death.
His carcass hadn’t even fed the other creatures of the Forest. No foxes or pine martens had gone near it; no ravens had feasted here. Nothing would touch the prey of the bear.
‘Uff,’ said Wolf, running about in circles with his hackles up.
Stay back, warned Torak. The light was fading, but he could still make out the bear tracks, and he didn’t want Wolf touching them.
‘It doesn’t look like a fresh kill,’ said Renn. ‘That’s something, isn’t it?’
Torak studied the carcass, careful to avoid touching the tracks. He prodded it with a stick, then nodded. ‘Frozen solid. A day or so at least.’
Behind him, Wolf growled.
Torak wondered why he was so agitated, when the kill wasn’t fresh.
‘Somehow,’ said Renn, ‘I thought we’d be safer now that we’re back in the Forest. I thought –’
But Torak never found out what she thought. Suddenly the snow beneath the trees erupted, and several tall, white-clad figures surrounded them.
Too late, Torak realised that Wolf had not been growling at the auroch – but at these silent assailants. Look behind you, Torak. He’d forgotten. Again.
Drawing his knife in one hand and his axe in the other, he edged towards Renn, who’d already nocked an arrow to her bow. Wolf sped into the shadows. Back to back, Torak and Renn faced a bristling circle of arrows.
The tallest of the white-clad figures stepped forward and threw back his hood. In the dusk, his dark-red hair looked almost black. ‘Got you at last,’ said Hord.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Why are you doing this?’ cried Renn. ‘He’s trying to help us! You can’t treat him like an outcast!’
‘Watch me,’ said Hord, dragging Torak through the snow.
Torak fought to stay on his feet, but it wasn’t easy with his hands tied behind his back. There was no hope of escape: he was surrounded by Oslak and four sturdy Raven men.
‘Faster!’ urged Hord. ‘We’ve got to reach camp before dark!’ ‘But he’s the Listener!’ said Renn. ‘I can prove it!’ She pointed at the ravenskin pouch at Torak’s waist. ‘He found all three pieces of the Nanuak!’
‘Did he,’ muttered Hord. Without breaking stride, he drew his knife and cut the pouch from Torak’s belt. ‘Well now it’s mine.’
‘What are you doing?’ cried Renn. ‘Give it back!’
‘Hold your tongue!’ snapped Hord.
‘Why should I? Who says you can –’
Hord slapped her. It was a hard blow across the face, and she went flying, landing in a heap.
Oslak growled a protest but Hord warned him back. He was breathing hard as he watched Renn sitting up. ‘You’re no longer my sister,’ he spat. ‘We thought you were dead when we found your quiver in the stream. Fin-Kedinn didn’t speak for three days, but I didn’t grieve. I was glad. You betrayed your clan, and you shamed me. I wish you were dead.’
Renn put a trembling hand to her lip. It was bleeding. A red weal was coming up on her cheek.
‘You shouldn’t have hit her,’ said Torak.
Hord turned on him. ‘Keep out of this!’
Torak looked hard at Hord – and was shocked by the change in him. Instead of the stocky young man he’d fought less than a moon ago, he was facing a gaunt shadow. Hord’s eyes were raw from sleeplessness, and the hand that clutched the Nanuak had no fingernails: just oozing sores. Something was eating him up from inside.
‘Stop staring at me,’ he snarled.
‘Hord,’ said Oslak, ‘we’ve got to keep moving. The bear . . .’
Hord wheeled round, his eyes straining to pierce the darkness. ‘The bear, the bear,’ he muttered, as if the very thought hurt.
‘Come, Renn.’ Oslak leaned down and offered his hand. ‘We’ll soon have a poultice on that. Camp’s not far.’
Renn ignored him, and got unaided to her feet.
Glancing up the trail, Torak caught an orange flicker in the deepening dusk. Nearer, in the shadows beneath a young spruce, a pair of amber eyes.
His heart turned over. If Hord saw Wolf, there was no knowing what he might do . . .
Luckily, Renn had everyone’s attention. ‘Is my brother Clan Leader now?’ she demanded. ‘Do you follow him instead of Fin-Kedinn?’
The men hung their heads.
‘It’s not that simple,’ said Oslak. ‘The bear attacked three days ago. It k
illed –’ his voice cracked. ‘It killed two of us.’
The blood drained from Renn’s face. She drew closer to Oslak, whose brow and cheekbones were marked with grey river clay.
Torak didn’t know what the marks meant, but when Renn saw them she gasped. ‘No,’ she whispered, touching Oslak’s hand.
The big man nodded and turned away.
‘What about Fin-Kedinn?’ Renn said shrilly. ‘Is he –’
‘Badly wounded,’ said Hord. ‘If he dies, I will be Leader. I’ll make sure of it.’
Renn clapped her hands to her mouth and raced off towards the camp.
‘Renn!’ shouted Oslak. ‘Come back!’
‘Let her go,’ said Hord.
When she’d gone, Torak felt utterly alone. He didn’t even know the names of the other Raven men. ‘Oslak,’ he begged, ‘make Hord give me back the Nanuak! It’s our only hope. You know that.’
Oslak started to speak, but Hord cut in. ‘Your part in this is finished,’ he told Torak. ‘I will take the Nanuak to the Mountain! I will offer the blood of the Listener to save my people!’
Wolf was so frightened that he wanted to howl. How could he help his pack-brother? Why was everything so chewed up?
As he followed the full-grown taillesses through the Bright Soft Cold, he struggled against the hunger gnawing his belly, and the muzzle-watering smell of the lemmings just a pounce away. He fought against the Pull that was now so strong that he felt it all the time, and the fear of the demon he scented on the wind. He turned his ears from the distant howls of the stranger pack: the pack that didn’t sound like strangers any more, but faraway kin . . .
He had to ignore it all. His pack-brother was in danger. Wolf sensed his pain and fear. He sensed, too, the anger of the full-growns, and their fear. They were scared of Tall Tailless.
The wind changed, and Wolf caught a wave of scents from the great Den of the taillesses. Sounds and smells overwhelmed him. Bad, bad, bad! His courage failed. Whimpering, he shot under a fallen tree.
Chronicles of Ancient Darkness Page 16
