Chronicles of Ancient Darkness

by Michelle Paver

  ‘Yolun insisted I used this bowl,’ said Renn. ‘He said wolves are special, because they make strong music. There,’ she told Wolf, ‘I hope you like it!’

  When they’d moved off a polite distance to give Wolf eating space, he went to sniff the bowl. Then he started to eat. He liked it. In a remarkably short time, he was licking the sides clean of the last remaining smears.

  ‘What were the black bits?’ said Torak.

  ‘Dried lingonberries,’ said Renn.

  For a moment, Torak forgot about the Soul-Eaters – and laughed.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Torak’s world is the world of six thousand years ago: after the Ice Age, but before the spread of farming to his part of north-west Europe, when the land was one vast Forest.

  The people of Torak’s world looked pretty much like you or me, but their way of life was very different. They didn’t have writing, metals or the wheel, but they didn’t need them. They were superb survivors. They knew all about the animals, trees, plants and rocks of the Forest. When they wanted something, they knew where to find it, or how to make it.

  They lived in small clans, and many of them moved around a lot: some staying in camp for just a few days, like the Wolf Clan; others staying for a whole moon or a season, like the Raven and Willow Clans; while others stayed put all year round, like the Seal Clan. Thus some of the clans have moved since the events in Soul Eater, as you’ll see from the amended map.

  When I was researching Outcast, I spent time around Lake Storsjön in northern Sweden. There I was lucky enough to hear elk bellowing as I wandered the springtime forest, and to find a whole clearing and dam system made by beavers. I also got muzzle to muzzle with some elk (called moose in north America) at an elk refuge, including some adorable five-day-old calves and a mournful yearling who’d just been abandoned by his truly enormous mother.

  The inspiration for the stone carvings at the healing spring came from the hugely evocative rock carvings at Glösa, near Storsjön, which are believed to have been made by people who lived in Torak’s time. While there, I was also able to view some superb reproductions of Stone Age clothes, musical instruments, weapons and an elkhide canoe.

  To get closer to wolf cubs, I got to know some very young ones at the UK Wolf Conservation Trust, where I bottle-fed them, played with them and – more imporantly – watched them at play among themselves, as well as observing their startlingly rapid development, in just a few months, from tiny bundles of fluff to large, extremely boisterous wolves.

  To get the feel of snakes, I met some at Longleat, where I handled a very beautiful cornsnake and two regal, curious and extremely strong royal pythons. I hadn’t understood just how beautiful and fascinating snakes can be until I held one, and felt the flicker of her tongue on my face as she inspected me.

  I want to thank everyone at the UK Wolf Conservation Trust for letting me make friends with the cubs while they were growing up; Sune Häggmark of Orrviken for sharing his extensive knowledge of elk and for letting me get close to his rescued elk and elk calves; the friendly and enormously helpful people at the Tourist Information Centres at Krokom and Östersund, who made it possible for me to reach Glösa, then showed me round on a cold, rainy, but highly atmospheric day; Mr Derrick Coyle, the Yeoman Ravenmaster of the Tower of London, for sharing his extensive knowledge and experience of some very special ravens; and Darren Beasley and Kim Tucker of Longleat, for introducing me to some amazingly beautiful and fascinating snakes.

  As always, I want to thank my agent, Peter Cox, for his unfailing enthusiasm and support; and my wonderful editor and publisher, Fiona Kennedy, for her imagination, commitment and understanding.

  Michelle Paver

  2007

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I want to thank everyone at the UK Wolf Conservation Trust for letting me make friends with the cubs while they were growing up; Sune Häggmark of Orrviken for sharing his extensive knowledge of elk and for letting me get close to his rescued elk and elk calves; the friendly and enormously helpful people at the Tourist Information Centres at Krokom and Östersund, who made it possible for me to reach Glösa, then showed me round on a cold, rainy, but highly atmospheric day; Mr Derrick Coyle, the Yeoman Ravenmaster of the Tower of London, for sharing his extensive knowledge and experience of some very special ravens; and Darren Beasley and Kim Tucker of Longleat, for introducing me to some amazingly beautiful and fascinating snakes.

  As always, I want to thank my agent, Peter Cox, for his unfailing enthusiasm and support; and my wonderful editor and publisher, Fiona Kennedy, for her imagination, commitment and understanding.

  Michelle Paver

  London

  Contents

  Cover

  Map

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  ONE

  Sometimes there’s no warning. Nothing at all.

  Your skinboat is flying like a cormorant over the waves, your paddle sending silver capelin darting through the kelp, and everything’s just right: the choppy Sea, the sun in your eyes, the cold wind at your back. Then a rock rears out of the water, bigger than a whale, and you’re heading straight for it, you’re going to smash . . .

  Torak threw himself sideways and stabbed hard with his paddle. His skinboat lurched – nearly flipped over – and hissed past the rock with a finger to spare.

  Streaming wet and coughing up seawater, he struggled to regain his balance.

  ‘You all right?’ shouted Bale, circling back.

  ‘Didn’t see the rock,’ muttered Torak, feeling stupid.

  Bale grinned. ‘Couple of beginners in camp. You want to go and join them?’

  ‘You first!’ retorted Torak, slapping the water with his paddle and drenching Bale. ‘Race you past the Crag!’

  The Seal boy gave a whoop and they were off: freezing, wet, exhilarated. High overhead, Torak spotted two black specks. He whistled, and Rip and Rek hurtled down to fly alongside him, their wingtips nearly touching the waves. Torak swerved to avoid a slab of ice and the ravens swerved with him, sunlight glinting purple and green on their glossy black feathers. They edged ahead. Torak raced to keep up. His muscles burned. Salt stung his cheeks. He laughed aloud. This was almost as good as flying.

  Bale – two summers older and the best skinboater in the islands – pulled ahead, disappearing into the shadow of the looming headland called the Crag. The Sea turned rougher as they left the bay, and a wave smacked head-on into Torak’s boat, nearly upending him.

  When he’d got it under control, he was facing the wrong way. The Bay of Seals looked beautiful in the sun, and for a moment he forgot the race. Spray misted the waterfall at the southern end, and gulls wheeled about
the cliffs. On the beach, smoke curled from the Seal Clan’s humped shelters, and the long racks of salt-rimed cod glittered like frost. He saw Fin-Kedinn, his dark-red hair a fiery beacon among the fairer Seals; and there was Renn, giving an archery lesson to a gaggle of admiring children. Torak grinned. Seals were better with a harpoon than a bow and arrow, and Renn was not a patient teacher.

  Bale yelled at him to catch up, so he turned and applied himself to his paddle.

  Once past the Crag, they realized they were famished, and put in at a small bay, where they woke up a fire of driftwood and seaweed. Before eating, Bale threw a morsel of dried cod into the shallows for the Sea Mother and his clan guardian, while Torak, who didn’t have a guardian, stuck a chunk of elk-blood sausage in a juniper bush as an offering to the Forest. It felt a bit odd, as the Forest was a day’s skinboating to the east, but it would have felt even odder not to have done it.

  After that, Bale shared the rest of the dried cod – sweet, chewy and surprisingly un-fishy – and Torak pulled clumps of mussels from the rocks. These they ate raw, prising off a half-shell and using it to scrape out the deliciously rich, slippery orange meat. Then Bale helped finish the elk sausage. Like the rest of his clan, he’d become more relaxed about mixing the Forest with the Sea, which made things easier for everyone.

  Still hungry, they decided to make a stew. Torak filled his cooking-skin with water from a stream, hung it from sticks beside the fire, and added pebbles which had been heating in the embers. Bale tossed in handfuls of purple sea moss he’d found in a rockpool, and a pile of shellworms he’d dug from the sand, and Torak threw in a bunch of sea kale, because he wanted something green to remind him of the Forest.

  As they waited for it to cook, Torak squatted near the fire, scorching the feeling back into his fingers. Bale made a spoon by wedging half a mussel shell in a piece of kelp stem, and binding it with seal sinew from his sewing pouch.

  ‘Good fishing to you!’ called a voice from the Sea, making them jump.

  It was a Cormorant fisherman in a skinboat. His walrus-hide net bulged with herring.

  ‘And good fishing to you!’ Bale returned the greeting common among the Sea clans.

  As he paddled into the shallows, the man peered at Torak, taking in the fine black tattoos on his cheeks. ‘Who’s your friend from the Forest?’ he asked Bale. ‘Are those tattoos – Wolf Clan?’

  Torak opened his mouth to reply, but Bale got in first. ‘He’s my kinsman. Fin-Kedinn’s foster son. He hunts with the Ravens.’

  ‘And I’m not Wolf Clan,’ said Torak. ‘I’m clanless.’ His stare told the man to make of that what he would.

  The man’s hand went to the clan-creature feathers on his shoulder. ‘I’ve heard of you. You’re the one they cast out.’

  Without thinking, Torak touched his forehead, where his headband concealed the outcast tattoo. Fin-Kedinn had altered the tattoo so it no longer meant outcast; but not even the Raven Leader could alter the memory.

  ‘The clans took him back,’ said Bale.

  ‘So they say,’ said the man. ‘Well. Good fishing, then.’ He spoke only to Bale, giving Torak a doubtful glance before paddling away.

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ said Bale after a moment’s silence.

  Torak didn’t reply.

  ‘Here.’ Bale tossed him the spoon. ‘You left yours in camp. And cheer up! He’s a Cormorant. What do they know?’

  Torak’s lip curled. ‘About as much as a Seal.’

  Bale lunged for him and they wrestled, laughing, rolling over the pebbles until Torak got Bale in an armlock and made him beg for mercy.

  They ate in silence, spitting out scraps for Rip and Rek. Then Torak lay on his side and roasted, and Bale fed the fire with driftwood. The Seal boy didn’t notice Rip approaching from behind at a stiff-legged walk. Both ravens were fascinated by Bale’s long fair hair, which he wore threaded with blue slate beads and the tiny bones of capelin.

  Rip took one of the bones in his powerful bill and tugged. Bale yelped. Rip let go and cowered with half-spread wings: an innocent raven unjustly accused. Bale laughed and tossed him a piece of shellworm.

  Torak smiled. It was good to be with Bale again. He was like a brother; or how Torak imagined a brother would be. They enjoyed the same things, laughed at the same jokes. But they were different. Bale was nearly seventeen summers old, and soon he would find a mate and build his own shelter. As the Seals never moved camp, this meant that apart from trading trips to the Forest, he would live out his days on the narrow beach of the Bay of Seals.

  Never to move camp. Even thinking of it made Torak breathless and cramped. And yet – to have such certainty. Your whole life unrolling like a well-tanned seal pelt. Sometimes he wondered how that must feel.

  Bale sensed the change in him and asked if he was missing the Forest.

  Torak shrugged.

  ‘And Wolf?’

  ‘Always.’ Wolf had flatly refused to get in a boat, so they’d been forced to leave him behind. Soon back, Torak had told his pack-brother in wolf talk. But he wasn’t sure if Wolf had understood.

  Thinking of Wolf made him restless. ‘It’s getting late,’ he said. ‘We need to be on the Crag by dusk.’

  That was why he and Renn and Fin-Kedinn had come. The disturbances on the island had started again after the winter, and they suspected it was the Soul-Eaters, searching for the last piece of the fire-opal which had lain hidden since the death of the Seal Mage. For the past half-moon, they’d taken turns to keep watch. Tonight it was the turn of Torak and Bale.

  Bale looked preoccupied as he scoured the cooking-skin with sand. He opened his mouth to say something, then shook his head and frowned.

  It wasn’t like him to hesitate, so it must be important. Torak twisted a frond of oarweed in his fingers and waited.

  ‘When you go back to the Forest,’ said Bale without meeting his eyes, ‘I’m going to ask Renn to stay here. With me. I want to know what you think about that.’

  Torak went very still.

  ‘Torak?’

  Torak placed the oarweed on the fire and watched the flames around it turn purple. He felt as if he’d reached the edge of a cliff without knowing it was there. ‘Renn can do what she likes,’ he said at last.

  ‘But you. What do you think?’

  Torak sprang to his feet. Anger made his skin prickle and his heart bump unpleasantly in his chest. He stared down at Bale, who was handsome, older, and part of a clan. He knew that if he stayed, they would fight, and this time it would be for real. ‘I’m off,’ he said.

  ‘Back to camp?’ said Bale, studiedly calm.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then where?’

  ‘Just off.’

  ‘What about keeping watch?’

  ‘You do it.’

  ‘Torak. Don’t be – ’

  ‘I said, you do it!’

  ‘Right. Right.’ Bale stared at the fire.

  Torak turned on his heel and ran to his boat.

  He headed up the north coast, away from the Bay of Seals. His anger had gone, leaving a cold, churning confusion. He longed for Wolf. But Wolf was far away.

  He found another inlet and put in. He carried the skinboat into the straggling trees on the lower slopes, needing the smell of birch and rowan, even if they were stunted and saltblown compared with those of the Forest. He couldn’t return to the Bay of Seals, not tonight. He would stay here.

  He had no pack or sleeping-sack, but since being cast out, he always carried what he needed wherever he went: axe, knife, tinder pouch. Propping the skinboat upside-down on shoresticks, he stacked branches and last autumn’s bracken against the sides to make a shelter. Then he woke a driftwood fire and piled rocks behind it to throw back the heat. There was plenty of dry bracken and seaweed for bedding, and he’d be warm enough in his reindeer-hide parka and leggings. If not, too bad.

  It was a clear night at the end of the Birchblood Moon – the Seals called it the Moon of the Cod Run – and from the shal
lows came the clink of a lonely little ice floe bumping against the rocks. Beyond the firelight, Rip and Rek slept huddled together in the fork of a rowan, their beaks tucked under their wings.

  Torak lay watching the flames. It was nine moons since he’d been outcast, but it still felt strange to be in the open and not hiding his fire.

  He should go back.

  But he couldn’t face Bale. Or Fin-Kedinn. Or Renn.

  As he hunched deeper into his parka, something dug into his side. It was Bale’s spoon; he must have shoved it into his belt before he left. He turned it in his fingers. It was carefully made, the sinew wound tight, the loose end neatly tucked in.

  He blew out a long breath. He would go back in the morning and say sorry. Bale would understand. He was good that way, he never sulked.

  Torak slept badly. In his dreams he heard an owl calling, and Renn telling him something he didn’t understand.

  Some time after middle-night, he woke. It was the time of the moon’s dark, when it had been eaten by the sky bear, and only a glimmer of starlight rocked on the quiet Sea. He needed to get going: put in at the Bay of Seals, climb the Crag, find Bale.

  Feeling groggy and unrested, he dismantled the shelter and poured water on the fire to put it to sleep. Rip and Rek reluctantly stretched their wings and fluffed up their head-feathers to show their dislike of such an early start; but when Torak carried his boat into the shallows and set off, he heard the strong, steady whisper of raven wings.

  In the east, the sun was a scarlet knife-slash between Sea and sky, but the Bay of Seals was in shadow, the Crag looming against the stars. The gulls were roosting, the seal-hide shelters silent. Only the waterfall broke the stillness, and the stealthy lapping of the Sea, and the cod creaking on the racks.

  Torak came ashore at the north end of the bay. Shells crunched beneath his boots, and he breathed the bitter tang of banked-up fires. On the racks, the cod watched him with dead, salt-crusted eyes.

  Rek gave an eager cark – she’d spotted carrion – and both ravens flew to the rocks at the foot of the Crag.