Fell (The Sight 2) (29 page)

Ovidu and Cascu were looking at their father in absolute amazement, while the listening Helgra villagers had begun to murmur. Fell raised his head, and his ears twitched.

“I’ve never told you of it, Ovidu,” muttered Ilyan, “for although it may soon be time to pass on our ways to my eldest son, I thought it a sad thing, now Castelu has turned against us. But Romana has Helgra blood in her veins, like Alina. Not as much as Saxon, but enough to give them a special place in my heart, for Romana honours our ways. As did her husband, Dragomir.”

“A special place, Father?” said Ovidu bitterly. “The woman who stands at Vladeran’s side, to destroy her own people? To destroy the land itself. And nature.”

“No,” said Ilyan angrily, “I tell you again, I’ve never believed it of the Lady Romana.”

Alina swung her head, and her heart was beating like a war drum.

“She was hurt badly when Dragomir died and led astray, but her heart is good,” said Ilyan. “This evil comes from Vladeran alone, and Alina’s tale of kidnap and murder at Vladeran’s hands proves it to us. I think it was easy for Vladeran to turn her heart, after her husband’s death.”

Alina was trembling furiously, wrestling with the memory of Romana’s unkind treatment of her, yet wanting with all her heart to believe what Ilyan was now saying of her own mother. The mother she so wanted and needed to love. But she didn’t believe it.

“And now a great thing happens!” cried the elder happily. “A miracle. The lost heir to Castelu, the sister of the boy taken by wolves, returns, with the Helgra mark on her arm, and brings a wild wolf to honour us. There’s hope in my old heart again. I’ve witnessed something I thought these blind old eyes would never see.”

Cascu and Ovidu were blinking in wonder. Cascu’s eyes were flickering strangely, but Ovidu suddenly grinned.

“These are strange tidings indeed, and we would learn more of them,” he said. “But now you look hungry and tired from your journey. Would you honour the Helgra by dining at our tables this very night?”

Catalin looked up hopefully, and then he frowned.

“But you told us that your village was poor,” he said, “and that you’ve no food.”

Ovidu smiled a little slyly.

“These are dangerous, evil times, lad,” he whispered, clasping his father’s arm, “where men’s hearts must sometimes be closed and mysterious to survive. We’ve learnt to hide what little food we have from Vladeran’s jackals. Each homestead shall bring what they possess, and those barrels of wine and mead we have hidden in the winter earth shall be dug from their graves. We shall light tapers in the great hall, and our boys and girls shall sing once more the songs of the Helgra, in pride and honour. Cascu, see it is done.”

As Alina WovenWord stood there, amongst her own once more, she was trembling furiously at the miracle of it, but inside she felt suddenly that the world was filled with magic indeed.

THE FEAST THEY MADE FOR THE TRAVELLING storytellers that night was rare, for in the halls of the Helgra, Alina of Castelu and Catalin Fierar sat between Ovidu and his blind father Ilyan, at the head of a huge oak table, groaning with roasted chickens and boars on wooden platters, and beakers of blood red wine, passed from hand to helping hand. It was the vision Alina had seen in the bucket in the forge so long ago.

It was not of the splendour of Helgra times of old, perhaps, but the Helgra men and women who sat there looked with marvelling eyes at the sumptuous banquet. Few of them begrudged the price of their hidden stores, or worried at the cost in times to come. Instead they kept looking at the handsome young strangers in the flaring torchlight, wondering what the arrival of the lost heir of Castelu meant for their beleaguered people, and how a girl who bore the mark of a Helgra woman could carry a sword so bravely and be served by a wolf.

“Tell me more of Vladeran, Ilyan,” said Alina softly at the banquet table. “And my mother, Romana. Of their marriage.”

Alina’s voice was pained, and the blind old elder shook his head and pulled the wolf cloak tighter about him.

“Don’t be too hard on your mother for marrying Vladeran, my child,” he whispered. “Children can be too hard on their parents, until they learn themselves how hard life can be. She loved your father, Dragomir, dearly, but when he died, I think it broke her poor heart. It’s why, perhaps, she became so distant with you, for you reminded her too much of him.”

Alina’s piercing hazel eyes were full of memories of Romana’s scolding looks and cruel words, and of the child’s longing for the love they had once shared so deeply. She reddened. Perhaps they were childish thoughts now, as childish as thoughts of fairies or goblins.

“Vladeran is persuasive,” said Ilyan gravely, “and Romana must have felt a deep sorrow and loneliness. So Vladeran wooed her and she bore him a son. It was in these very halls that you watched over Elu that night, after his birth, when he was snatched away by wolves. And now you come amongst the Helgra again. It’s a strange destiny indeed.”

Only Alina Sculcuvant knew just how strange.

“It was only really after Elu’s reappearance that day that our persecution began.”

“Why?” asked Alina.

“Vladeran grew obsessed with his son’s return on the wolf’s back, and with Helgra knowledge of the wolf and the wild. I think he sought to master it. Perhaps he believed we had something to do with Elu’s disappearance.”

His return on
Fell’s
back, thought Alina.

“Vladeran sought out our wise men, and asked them all they knew of the Varg, while some say that he even learnt ancient Helgra arts of how to commune with Varg spirits from beyond. Arts I have long suppressed. I cannot believe any of my people should have taught him.”

Ilyan suddenly looked very sad.

“Then Vladeran fell on us like a man-eater,” he whispered, “and set to destroying our power and independence. He didn’t trust us and was jealous of our knowledge of the wolf. He has spread nothing but hatred and evil in the lands of Castelu, and nothing but death and humiliation for my people. How different from the days when Romana and Dragomir walked amongst us, your parents, with kindness and with love, to listen to our tales, and bring us gifts of food. They cared for my people and our ways. For nature.”

“Unlike Lord Vladeran,” growled Ovidu. “He claims to be of the Order of the Griffin, sworn to defend the downtrodden and protect the earth. The earth! He scorches our crops, and poisons our rivers with the bodies of rotting cattle. It shall bring him no good in the end, I swear it.”

Ovidu took another swig of ale and shook his head, as Catalin remembered the foul taste of the river, and Alina thought about her destiny and the survival of nature.

“But if it’s true what you say of my mother, why didn’t she stop him?” asked Alina fearfully.

Ilyan’s blind eyes flickered with doubt. “That I don’t know,” he answered. “Perhaps she knows nothing of it.”

“What of King Stefan?” said Catalin suddenly. “Father always said he has justice in his heart.”

Ovidu had dropped his eyes thoughtfully.

“Stefan has some affection for us, although they say he has a hard, cold head too, and little time for our ways or beliefs. But I do not think he’d approve it if he knew what Lord Vladeran has being doing to his subjects, Magyar or no.”

“And now Vladeran has tried to murder the heir to Castelu,” muttered Ilyan. “And a Helgra woman. Perhaps we should turn to him.”

“Yes, yes, indeed, Father. But the King is busy in the lands beyond the forests,” said Ovidu, “fighting the Turk, even as he tries to unite his own warring peoples, Slav and Vlak, Magyar and Saxon.”

Alina was still thinking of Dragomir and Romana, though, and how Ilyan had said that they had loved the Helgra. What had turned her mother’s heart?

“My parents. They did not fear your dark fame then?” she asked. Ilyan tilted his blind old head and grinned.

“Our dark fame, you say, storyteller? We are forced to tell tales to make others fear us, Alina of the Helgra, and so make strangers leave us in peace.”

The clever elder suddenly reached out his wrinkled hand and clasped the young woman’s.

“It’s a miracle that you should return though, and bring a wolf amongst us,” he whispered warmly. “And such a wolf. We try to carry that spirit with us, Alina, if we have to go into battle, as we once did so proudly, and wear their skins if we find a carcass in the wild, but we’re not foolish enough to believe that real wolves could live amongst us like our dogs. Not even yours.”

Alina realised that perhaps the old man was saying something important about nature and the wild. That it was not the same as this civilised gathering.

“We know too that their path is wild nature’s path, unadorned by the needs and cares and fears of man,” whispered Ilyan. “Untroubled by our thoughts and our stories.”

Alina smiled.

“But as we listen to their songs, we know that there’s pain in that wild path too, and that we are men first. We’ve even killed their kind, Alina, when their packs have threatened our animals in the heart of winter, if that threat is real, or when their older and weaker kind have turned into man-eaters.”

Alina looked at Ilyan in surprise, but she accepted this grave truth.

“Yet if we have to do such a thing, it is never with gladness,” added Ilyan warmly, sensing the young woman’s concern. “And then we raise torches and sing our own lament. Sing the song of the Helgra. Your mother would sing it to you as a little girl.”

Ovidu looked up, and his eyes, heavy with wine, were glittering like dewy petals. He rose to his feet beside Catalin and swayed a little, but there was a huge smile on his face.

“The Song!” he cried drunkenly. “Let one amongst us sing the Song of the Helgra once again. To remind us all of the days when poets and bards lit our lives with hope and love and courage.”

Ovidu raised his hands to a youth who had been serving them, a tall, beautiful boy with flowing black hair. He stepped forwards, and Ovidu rapped his fist on the table to silence the gathering. Then, before Alina, Catalin, and the assembled Helgra, the youth began to sing.

The boy stopped his haunting melody, half spoken and half hummed in the glowing tapers, and the two young storytellers watched the shadows flicker across those upturned Helgra faces, changing their aspects from things in part a little demonic, to faces at once tender and utterly beautiful. Alina WovenWord felt the tears come to her hazel eyes, as she heard that song that now she remembered as the lullaby of her dreams, and smiled softly at Catalin. She felt as if she had a family at last.

Yet there was another feeling there too. The feeling that she had been here before. Not in the Helgra village, for that she had, but eating at this table. It was the vision she had seen of herself in the forge. The future. But if it was, then the terrible prison awaited her, too.

All the while Fell sat alone outside, under the wooden awning that was the Helgra meeting place when the summer suns shone down, and none dared approach the black wolf, except the girls who were sent to serve him. Nervously they would totter forwards, with arms outstretched, place their platters of meat before the wolf, and run away. Fell delighted in giving short growls, or suddenly flashing his piercing eyes to frighten them a little, for he sensed that he was in no danger from these Helgra.

Never before or since has a wolf had a meal like that, and for a time Fell was not sad he had stayed, although he felt a dreadful guilt about Huttser. Fell lay there though, like some ancient king served by humans, as if the wolf had lain down with the lamb, and sniffed at the platters, suddenly snapping at a whole chicken, or taking a juicy haunch of boar down his hungry throat. He ate at his ease, cleaning his muzzle with his long, pink tongue at his leisure, until his belly was so full and fat that Fell thought he might burst open, while a million stars looked down, and sparkled at the incomprehensible miracle of being.

One of the Helgra had left him a bowl of ale too, as the song resounded in the hall, and the wolf lapped at it, tasting the pleasant bitterness of hops and feeling the strange effect it had on his thoughts. So strange that he got up suddenly and wobbled a little, then started to spin around, snapping at something in front of him that kept eluding his jaws. Like a young cub again, the drunken wolf was chasing his own tail.