The Sight

by David Clement-Davies

  Larka looked hard at the bird and she felt the strangeness of talking to another Lera.

  ‘Yet the Sight is no dream, Larka,’ cried Skart suddenly, ‘it is a real power and you have already used it to see the future. Now it will grow rapidly in you.’

  Larka was shaking her head helplessly.

  ‘Sometimes I wish I could just wake up,’ she said cheerlessly, ‘and be back in the den with my brother.’

  ‘Wake up?’ said Skart, nodding his feathery head thoughtfully. ‘Most of the thoughtless Lera believe that their suns are simply split into two, Larka, between sleeping and waking. But my sort believe that there is more to life than those simple states; Larka, there is also knowing.’

  Larka wondered what Skart could mean.

  ‘I saw that fleece,’ she muttered. ‘What is it, Skart?’ The eagle smiled.

  ‘Just a sheep skin, Larka. There’s nothing really magical about it. Though Man seems to prize the yellow metal above everything else.’

  ‘Man,’ growled Larka angrily, thinking suddenly of the child again, ‘I don’t want to know about Man and I don’t want to learn anything anyway.’

  ‘I think you’ll find,’ said the eagle gently, ‘that you’ve been learning all along, without even knowing it, whether you want to or not. But sometimes all of us need teachers.’ But Skart was suddenly looking past Larka and, as she turned, she saw two wolves walking slowly up the slopes towards them. The older was a male, with along grey muzzle deeply whitened around the snout, while the younger she- wolf at his side looked nervous as she spied Larka. She pushed straight past her into the clearing, growling protectively and lying down beside the baby, curling her bushy tail across its belly.

  The old grey wolf came to a stop right in front of Larka by the mossed rock.

  ‘So, you’re here at last,’ he growled. ‘You took your time.’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you she would pick up the scent, Tsarr?’ said Skart. ‘Her name is Larka.’

  ‘Tsarr,’ whispered Larka. ‘Then you all know who I am?’

  Larka had lost everybody she loved, but Lera were all around her again, and Lera that knew of the Sight.

  ‘Oh yes,’ growled Tsarr quietly, ‘it’s the legend, Larka. Besides, Skart here has been watching your adventures for a long while now and he doesn’t miss much. Skart’s eyes can spot the tiniest spider from far above the clouds.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he talk to me before?’ growled Larka, suddenly feeling a bitterness again for all that had happened to her. ‘If he’d helped us before perhaps Kar…’

  ‘Don’t be ungrateful,’ snapped Skart. ‘I saved your life, didn’t I? Before you were far too young, Larka. Your eye wasn’t open yet and I didn’t want to frighten you away. Though if I’d realized quite how much you know already, perhaps I might have come even sooner. But anyway, I needed to wait.’

  ‘Wait for what?’ said Larka sullenly.

  ‘Wait for you to ask for help, of course.’

  Larka felt as though she had been stroked by some unseen hand.

  ‘But come, Larka,’ cried Tsarr suddenly, turning his muzzle towards the strange clearing. ‘It is high time that you met the source of so much trouble.’

  As Larka followed them nervously into the clearing, the baby was still asleep, curled up outside its den, and one of the fingers on its little paws was thrust into its mouth. It shivered as it lay there, but Jarla’s body had given it warmth. Larka growled menacingly as she padded up and nodded her head to the she-wolf nestling the human to her belly.

  ‘This is Jarla,’ said Tsarr, ‘she has been suckling the creature for us.’

  ‘And never has a creature suckled so long,’ growled Jarla, shaking her head in wonder.

  ‘I asked her to help us,’ growled Tsarr quietly, ‘after the Balkar took her own cubs...’

  Tsarr paused and Jarla’s eyes were full of bitterness. Larka stepped closer and, as she looked down at the baby, she shivered.

  ‘It’s not natural to be so near to such a thing,’ Larka growled. ‘I feel... feel so strange.’

  ‘So did we both,’ whispered Jarla sympathetically, ‘at first.’

  Larka sniffed at the human nervously, but she felt a sense of recognition too, for she had seen a child once before. Yet as she caught its scent again, a hunger stirred inside her. Suddenly the baby’s eyelids opened and looked up at her. Larka blanched at the creature’s striking, clear blue eyes.

  Larka felt almost ashamed as it looked at her, for she could hardly hold its gaze, but the child made some peculiar sucking noises and then it reached out its little hand to touch Jarla’s coat. The human was barely a tail’s length from Larka now. Her tail rose and her claws dug into the ground. Its hide was so thin she could almost smell the blood beneath its skin.

  ‘Be careful, Larka,’ whispered Skart. ‘To master the Sight, first you have to learn to master yourself. To control your instincts.’

  Larka held back her hunger. The human’s face was so close to Larka’s muzzle now that she could have taken its head off in one snap. But suddenly it turned to Jarla. It nudged at her belly and began to suckle greedily, just as Larka had once done in the den.

  Larka snarled at the sight.

  ‘No,’ she cried, ‘stop it. We should kill it, or at least leave it to perish in the snow.’

  Jarla gave an angry growl.

  ‘Peace, Jarla,’ whispered Tsarr.

  The she-wolf dropped her muzzle over the baby’s body.

  ‘We should have nothing to do with Man,’ said Larka bitterly. ‘Can’t you see what they do? What they did to Khaz and Kar? What they nearly did to me?’

  ‘At first I thought we should kill it too,’ growled Tsarr quietly. ‘But even if the Varg decides to have nothing to do with Man, Larka, Man may have something to do with us.’

  ‘But it is the oldest law, Tsarr,’ growled Larka.

  As she said it Tsarr looked sad and suddenly very old. A strange nostalgia was stirring in him.

  ‘I was taught the law too, Larka,’ he said quietly. ‘But there are even older laws than the laws made by the Varg in these parts, frightened of the humans and their wars, of legends and superstitions. Laws that are written into storytelling itself.’

  Larka suddenly recalled what Tsinga had said of deeper laws.

  ‘In the beginning the tales tell of a very different relationship with man, Larka, when wolf and Man lived together in peace. Besides, after I stole the child, I found I didn’t really have the heart to kill it.’

  ‘Why not, Tsarr?’

  ‘Perhaps because I know the bitterness of survival.’

  There was a tenderness in the old Varg’s voice that touched Larka to her guts and she thought, too, of her own narrow escape. But as she looked down again the baby brought back memories of Kar.

  ‘I hate it, Tsarr,’ she growled.

  ‘No, Larka,’ cried Tsarr immediately, ‘you mustn’t hate. The Sight has a dark and a light side, like all things, and hate will call to the darkness in you. Call to Morgra.’

  ‘But the humans murdered my friends,’ hissed Larka, wondering suddenly if Morgra really was trying to call to her. ‘They have always hunted us, always tried to make us their slaves.’

  ‘They are Putnar too, the greatest of the Putnar,’ said Tsarr. ‘And perhaps it is their destiny to master the world.’ Larka looked down with surprise at the baby, and its eyes seemed to hold a deep mystery. Some dark potential that made her think of the soldiers she had seen in the mountains. What would this thing become if it was allowed to grow, she wondered fearfully.

  ‘It’s marked, isn’t it?’ she growled.

  ‘Yes, Larka,’ answered Tsarr, ‘that was the secret Tsinga entrusted to me and why Morgra never found it herself below the Stone Den. Look.’

  Tsarr tipped his nose and muzzled away the hide that was covering the child’s belly. Above its little stomach was a ribbon of hair that looked like wolf fur threading in a thin, straight line right down its belly.
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  The child began to cry, but the old wolf leant forwards again and touched the baby very gently in the middle of the forehead with the tip of his muzzle. It seemed to calm the child immediately.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ growled Larka.

  ‘It is just a baby, Larka and understands little now but fear and hunger,’ answered Tsarr quietly. ‘But some believe that is where the humans really see from. That there is a third eye, far stronger than any ordinary eyes.’

  Larka felt as if she had stepped into another dream as Tsarr turned away from the child and began to tell her of their journey. It had been easy to pick the baby up by the cloth bound around its middle and spirit it away from the village, while the humans were busy celebrating its birth; a birth that the pack had witnessed, without ever even knowing it, as they lay by the boulder above the den.

  They had hidden the child not far from where Larka’s pack had found their Meeting Place, but one night they had overheard wolves from the rebel pack stalking the mountain too and learned that Slavka, their leader, was hunting for the child also. So they had been forced to move on with the infant, escaping yet another enemy.

  During their flight they sheltered in the abandoned castle that the wolf pack had stumbled on. At first, after one kill, Jarla had not understood what Tsarr had been trying to tell her about making a hole in the hide through which its head might push, but she had understood the need to cover up its furless skin. So the young she-wolf had sat there, gnawing away, until her teeth had cut an opening in the hide and together Jarla and Tsarr had managed to lift it in their muzzles over its head.

  They had felt the need to bind it somehow, as Tsarr had once seen the entrances to the humans’ dens bound tight shut with rope, and Jarla had brought some vine from the wood in her mouth. They had managed to get it round the cub’s middle, but there was nothing they could do with their snouts to lock it together. At last it had begun to play with the vine in its strange paws and, by luck as much as anything, had wound the rope together.

  Time and again Skart had returned to watch Larka, for only he could travel with speed above the trees. As she looked into the eagle’s yellow-black eyes she felt greatly relieved, for at least it was he and not Wolfbane, or the Searchers that she had sensed in the forest. But Larka still trembled, too, as she remembered the wolves who had appeared and then vanished again in the snow.

  ‘Now you have found your way to us, Larka,’ said Tsarr as he finished his tale, ‘you must learn to wield the Sight and help us to fight Morgra. There are rumours that Wolfbane has returned.’

  ‘Wolfbane is just a story,’ growled Larka.

  ‘Which Morgra could use to control the animals,’ nodded Tsarr, ‘and if they follow the Evil One’s ways, does it really matter if it’s true or not? Besides, the ancient verse says only that he must be dreamt of by the Varg, not that the Evil One must really come.’

  Larka shook her head.

  ‘Is this my destiny, then?’ she whispered bitterly. ‘Is there no one else to fight Morgra?’

  ‘The rebels are gathering,’ said the eagle beside them, ‘but that only makes me fear all the more.’

  ‘Why, Skart?’

  ‘Because they would kill the child for one, and because the untamed are being tamed, Larka, as the verse warns. The wild spirit of the wolf is being tamed throughout the land beyond the forests.’

  ‘But what are you going to do with this creature?’ growled Larka.

  Tsarr’s wolf eyes flickered suddenly and for a moment he looked at Skart almost guiltily. Larka remembered what Brassa had told the pack of their quarrel all those years before, their quarrel about what the Sight was really for.

  Tsarr was about to speak when Skart interrupted him.

  ‘You must decide, Larka,’ he said, ‘but in the meantime you must help us to protect it.’

  As soon as Skart used the word Larka’s eyes blazed like the forge. She swung round to face the eagle.

  ‘Protect it?’ cried Larka in disgust. ‘Why should I protect it, Skart? Why should I help this creature? Humans are nothing but killers, with no respect for the wolf. And I do not want this Vision. The vision of the Man Varg. A power that will enslave all the Lera, for ever.’

  There was such an anger in Larka that her whole body began shaking almost uncontrollably. In that moment Larka hardly knew what to do but suddenly, powerless with rage, she turned and sprang away through the clearing.

  ‘No, Tsarr,’ screeched Skart, as the wolf rose to follow her. ‘She’ll return. Remember the legend. Larka and the infant already have a connection. She saw this place in the water. And the legend, Tsarr, think of the legend.’

  There was a desperate fury in Larka as she ran past the rock. That whole sun she kept on the move, but by evening her tread had slowed. Time and again Larka thought back to the human. The she-wolf wanted to take revenge for Kar and Khaz. To take revenge for everything that had happened to her. She wanted to tear into its throat and drink its blood.

  But as Larka prowled through the wood, although she knew she hated the humans, she could not stop dwelling on the strange destiny unfolding around her. She remembered again what Tsinga had said about not being able to escape a legend, and, as she looked around her at the snows glistening malevolently about her, she thought fearfully of Wolfbane’s winter.

  Larka lay down to sleep. Her tail was hurting again and as she looked round she saw that the skin where the fur had been singed away was raw. That night her dreams were full of the shadows of the village and Kar and the human cub’s strange eyes. The next sun when Larka tried to hunt, something kept nagging at her, as though that voice were calling her back.

  ‘I cannot escape, can I?’ Larka kept saying to herself desperately. ‘I can never escape.’

  Larka suddenly remembered what poor Kar had cried out as the flames consumed him.

  ‘Very well, then, Kar, my friend,’ she whispered coldly, ‘for life itself.’

  It was mid-afternoon when Larka returned to the stream to find Skart standing on the rock. The Steppe eagle’s back was to her as she padded up. He was standing on one leg and his head kept jabbing forwards in curious little jerks. Larka’s hackles rose.

  Skart’s feathers looked so tempting as she caught his scent Larka suddenly imagined herself snapping him up. The she- wolf prowled round the side of Skart. The eagle was holding a dead chick in one talon, and in that moment his beak cracked into it like a shell. Skart snapped his mouth shut, but a few desultory feathers remained, poking from his beak.

  ‘So you really are Putnar,’ thought Larka gravely, and the wolf suddenly realized how much she preferred this bird to the ravens.

  ‘Skart,’ she whispered as he saw her, ‘I don’t know what I think about this human yet, or what we should do with it. But will you teach me, at least? Teach me more of the Sight?’ Skart nodded approvingly as Larka lay down by the rock, but he was thinking how much she knew already. For now, the eagle said he would concentrate on the power to look through a bird’s eyes. But as soon as he spoke of it, Larka described bitterly what had happened to her when she had killed the rabbit, and after that the feelings that consumed her whenever she started to hunt.

  ‘It’s strange,’ Skart murmured immediately, opening his great wings almost fearfully. ‘I’ve never heard of it happening with other Lera before, Larka. You have already looked into the water too. It’s as though the laws of the Sight are bending in some way.’

  Larka pawed the ground nervously.

  ‘What do I have to do, Skart?’

  ‘When you arrived here you sensed me before you even turned, Larka. That is part of the Sight, the sense beyond your physical eyes.’

  Larka began to growl.

  ‘But before you can control it properly,’ said Skart immediately, ‘you must use my eyes, and to do that you must look at me differently. You must see the truth of what I am.’

  ‘The truth?’

  ‘Perhaps you think I am just a bird, Larka, but in this fea
thered body do I not have thoughts and feelings and desires just like you? I am energy, Larka, as you are.’

  Suddenly Skart swivelled his beak round, and in a single jabbing movement he plucked a feather from his wing and let it flutter to the ground in front of her.

  ‘It will help you to sense me, Larka. Now try and empty your mind, and imagine what it is like to be a bird. To see as I see.’

  Larka did as she was told but her head was so filled with all that had gone before that after a while nothing had happened at all.

  ‘You’re not trying, Larka,’ said Skart irritably. ‘Concentrate. Use your instincts to tell you what I am, nothing more. Draw on the living power of nature all around you too. Then look at me, but try to see beyond your eyes. Through your forehead if you like. Try to empty your mind completely and draw the energy that surrounds us all up through your paws. Feel it bubbling up through the pads of your feet. Then try to enter my body with your thoughts.’

  Larka tried again and, as she let her mind empty and scented the feather, Larka felt a tingling in her paws and her whole body grew hot. There was a sudden blinding flash of black and the she-wolf gasped as she found herself looking out at her own body lying in the grass. Her head had slumped on her paws and her eyes closed. As Skart turned his own head, Larka was amazed to see the stream and the clearing, Tsarr and Jarla and the human revolving before her. Larka was seeing through Skart’s eyes.

  Larka was trembling all over and she was quite exhausted by the effort, but the feeling was strangely exhilarating too. It felt different to her experience on the hunt, more directed and in control. She could see more clearly and, most importantly she felt no fear. Instead, the she-wolf experienced a feeling of liberation, as though something in her was opening. Larka opened her own eyes, and suddenly she was in her body again as Skart let out a screech.

  ‘There, Larka,’ cried the eagle, delighted. But Larka seemed deeply troubled as she lay beside the bird.

  ‘Skart. What is the Sight?’ she asked quietly. Skart cocked his head as he looked at her.