The Sight (19 page)

‘No time, Palla,’ panted Bran.  ‘You must get away, all of you.  The Night Hunters.  They tried to make me tell where you were but I wouldn’t, Palla, I wouldn’t betray you.  I sent them west instead.’

‘Tell us what happened, Bran,’ growled Huttser softly.

As Bran relayed his story in harsh, broken breaths the Dragga and the Drappa bowed their heads.

‘Morgra,’ snarled Huttser.

‘So it got me too in the end,’ whispered Bran bitterly, the life beginning to ebb from his sad eyes.  ‘Morgra’s curse.’

‘Hush, Bran,’ said Palla tenderly, but the same fear was flooding the Drappa’s mind.

‘Huttser,’ whispered Bran suddenly, his voice so weak and strained they could hardly hear him at all, ‘tell me, Huttser.  What will I see when I...  will Wolfbane be there? In the darkness, waiting for me.’

‘No, my friend.’ Huttser shivered.  ‘Now you go to run with Fenris through the clouds for ever.  Tor will be waiting too.’

Bran’s torn body relaxed a little.

‘And, Bran,’ said Huttser guiltily, stroking him with his paw, ‘I’m sorry.  For what I said at the rapids.  Forgive me, my friend.’

Bran began to shudder violently, and now it was he who could hardly hear the Dragga.  Bloody spittle dribbled from his mouth and curdled with the virgin snow.  The two wolves stood over the Sikla and in that moment their hatred for Morgra was as raw as fresh meat.

‘Palla,’ whispered Bran suddenly, ‘will you tell the children...’

‘What, Bran?’ said Palla, straining to hear his fading voice.

‘That I’m not a coward.’

‘Yes,’ answered Palla sadly.  ‘We shall tell them.’

‘And, Palla.  Promise me.  That you’ll all escape.’

‘Yes, Bran, we will...’

‘Palla,’ gasped Bran suddenly, ‘tell Larka.  Tell her a secret from me.’

‘What, Bran?’

Bran could hardly speak now.

‘Tell her that it’s not so terrible to...’

Palla was straining forward to hear the dying Sikla and as Bran whispered the secret in her ear, Palla’s eyes opened with surprise.  But Bran shuddered for a final time and the death rattle hissed out of his broken body.  The Sikla was dead too.

 ‘She is winning, Huttser,’ growled Palla bitterly, throwing back her muzzle.  ‘Morgra’s words will hunt us all down.  If the Balkar don’t get us first.’

‘Stop it, Palla.  We are truly a family now and nothing will break us apart.  Morgra will not win, and we will escape.  The eastern boundary is only two suns away.  We will do as Brassa said.  We will survive.’

Palla lifted her muzzle and howled.  As he watched her and the wind carried her cry down the valley, Huttser shivered and grew angry with his mate, for he knew that the elements were carrying her call straight towards the Night Hunters.

‘We’ve got to get under cover,’ snarled Huttser through the snow.  The little pack had come to a particularly deep drift and, though the wide pads on their paws helped to hold them up, the snow was so fresh that the freezing wolves were sinking deeper and deeper as they went.  The blizzard had started again and now it was getting even stronger.  After what Tsinga had said of Wolfbane, they all remembered Brassa’s words, long ago.  About a terrible winter that would shroud the earth, Wolfbane’s winter.

Their progress was desperately slow and the children’s coats, although thickening for winter, were soaked to the skin.  The air was bitterly cold too and the wolves shivered terribly.  But there was more than cold in their trembling progress, there was terror.  The children had been horrified by Bran’s death.  That morning they had heard wolves nearby, and Palla spotted them later that sun, in the far distance, moving after them like shadows through the blizzard.

‘It’ll be worse the higher we get,’ growled Palla, trying to spy the peaks above them through the snow, and shivering as the wind bristled along her back and made her ears tremble.

‘Kar,’ whispered Larka behind her in the angry wind, ‘do you think it’s Morgra trying to stop us escaping?’

Kar trembled at her side, but he had no answer for his friend.

‘Larka,’ said Fell suddenly, ‘if Morgra can affect the elements, then perhaps you can too.  Why don’t you try to stop the storm?’

Larka looked angrily at her brother, but as they pressed on through the storm she kept closing her eyes and trying to concentrate.  If anything the storm seemed to intensify.

‘Keep an eye out for a cave, all of you,’ called Huttser, ‘and stick together.’

They didn’t find a cave, but as the wolves rose higher and the storm grew worse, Kar suddenly saw a shape looming at them through the snow.  The pack crept forward and froze in their tracks.

The wind had dropped suddenly and with it the blizzard had almost died.  There, on the flat ground before them, stood a kind of castle.  It was much smaller than the Stone Den had seemed on the mountaintop and all about it there were piles of rubble.  It was fronted by a high arch and a wooden door, splintered and cracked, that was creaking mournfully on its hinges.  The wolves knew by instinct as much as sight that it was deserted.

But the castle was made sinister by the shapes they saw ahead of them.  The top of the arch was crowned with animals that glared down at them from the snowy rock.  There were birds seized in the very moment of taking flight, and snakes twisting and curling round the rock.  There were two snarling heads at each side of the arch, which they instantly recognized as wolves, and weird, grimacing faces that looked like humans.  At either side of the archway stood two great stone dragons and in the middle of this frozen menagerie was a pair of wide black wings over the very centre of the entrance, that looked like a cross between a bird and a squirrel.  It was a bat.

‘It’s like my dream,’ whispered Larka in amazement, ‘like the dream I had by the river.  Do you think the Grasht live here too?’

‘What do we do, Huttser?’ growled Palla.

‘Investigate,’ said Huttser immediately.  ‘If we don’t get out of this cold, Man can have us anyway.’

The air seemed to freeze solid around them as Huttser led them on.  The wolf pack passed under the entrance and the children almost ducked, half expecting those stone Lera to launch themselves at them.  But they relaxed as they entered the courtyard.  It was deserted.  There was nothing inside but piles of stones covered in snow and a few bits of rotting wood.  Above all, the air had that lingering stillness of desertion about it, a tepid, empty quality, as though time itself had abandoned it.  But the wolves felt the welcome rise in temperature immediately and to one corner of the courtyard they saw a wooden lean-to that offered perfect shelter.

‘Come on,’ growled Huttser.

In the sky, the snow was getting thicker again.  But as they crept under the lean-to Huttser began to growl.  On the ground, where the snow was sprinkled thinly, there were wolf skats.

‘Night Hunters?’ growled Palla.

Huttser gave no answer but when the wolves began to investigate they realized that the skats were fairly old.  There had been two wolves here, a male and a female.  But Palla suddenly noticed that Larka was standing at the edge of the lean-to, trembling and sniffing the ground.

‘What is it, Larka?’

At first Larka didn’t answer but suddenly she recognized the scent from the edges of the Gypsy camp.

‘Man,’ she answered gloomily, ‘Man has been here too.  Perhaps it’s...’

They settled and, though they were all cold and hungry, they were greatly relieved to be out of the blizzard.  They all wondered if Tsarr and Skart and the human child had really been this way too and suddenly Larka thought of what Tsinga had said.

‘Perhaps the child will find you.’

But Larka had no desire either to find or be found by a human child, to have anything to do with Man or the legend.  The howling wind came to them through the courtyard like voices from the dead.

‘Palla,’ whispered Kar as they lay there, overawed by the weather and the strange little castle.  ‘Can things really come back from the dead – like these Searchers?’

‘I don’t know, Kar,’ growled Palla, ‘I don’t believe it.’

But as Palla watched them all and saw their mounting terror at this talk of the dead she too felt an anger stirring in her.

‘Come, children,’ she growled suddenly.  ‘I know a happy story about things coming back from the dead.  A story about a bird, a yellow oriel.’

The children looked up hopefully.

‘It lived in a land on the other side of the world and, because of its beautiful feathers and the magic that it carried in its wings, it was loved by all who beheld it.  The bird had the power to cure the sick with its song and to touch hearts wherever it flew.  But there was a wolf who so loved this bird that he determined to capture it and keep it all for himself.  One sun when the oriel was sleeping happily in a bush the wolf managed to seize it in his jaws, though he held it carefully like a cub, and carried it off to a cave near a human den.  The wolf lay down outside the cave, guarding the oriel day and night and he would growl at it and order it to sing to him, for in truth the wolf’s own heart was desperately sick.

‘But the oriel loved nothing more in the world than its own freedom, and the power and beauty of its song was held not in the bird alone but in the joy of the free air and the glory of the changing skies.  The oriel would try to sing to the wolf, for it cared for all things, but in the cave its song began to grow fainter and fainter.  It grew sick itself, and at last the oriel died.

‘When the wolf saw the bird lying dead in the cave, stiff and lifeless and not even worth a meal he lifted his head angrily.

‘‘‘It’s just as I thought,’’ he cried bitterly.  ‘‘The oriel was a liar.  There is no magic in the world.’’’

Palla was looking carefully at the cubs now.

‘So the wolf picked up the oriel and carried it down to the human den where he saw the grey embers of their fire.  He threw the bird scornfully into the ashes and turned away.  But as the bird lay there, the grey embers stirred about it and started to eat up its feathers and its body.  The fire burst into life, delighted at its unexpected breakfast, and the flames rose higher and higher.  The fire seemed to have destroyed the oriel, but suddenly from the flames rose a shape, even larger and more magnificent than before.  Into the skies rose the giant oriel, and now its wings were a glittering, shining gold and its song was louder than ever before, for it had found its freedom again and so its love and its hope.  But the wolf never even saw the golden bird,’ finished Palla, a little sadly, ‘for it had never even turned back to look.’

The children looked a little more cheerful though, for they had all liked this story of the bird.

‘Mother,’ whispered Larka, ‘we’ll be safe here tonight, won’t we?’

‘Yes, Larka.  Not even the Night Hunters can follow us in this.’

Fell growled softly at the thought of the Balkar, but he had never fought another wolf before and his eyes suddenly grew large with worry.

‘You needn’t be frightened, Fell,’ said Palla, as she saw it in her son.

‘I’m not frightened,’ growled Fell immediately.  ‘I’m a wolf.  Putnar.  Are we hunters or not? Even Bran...’

Larka felt another desperate pang of guilt.  She was already beginning to blame herself for his death too.

‘I’m frightened, Palla,’ whispered Kar beside Fell.

‘I know,’ said Palla kindly, looking even more closely at Fell, ‘even Huttser and I are frightened sometimes.’

Fell growled again and he was suddenly tempted by a strange thought.  He thought in that moment what a fine thing it would be to wield a power over all the Lera and never to be frightened again.  But as the others stared at him he felt strangely embarrassed too.

‘Your mother is right, Fell,’ said Huttser.  ‘Fear is an instinct, like hunger or anger.  We need it in the wild to help us survive and it is nothing to be ashamed of.  It tells us whether we should fight or flee.’

‘But, Father,’ said Fell suddenly, ‘the curse.  It spoke of fear.  Warned us of fear.’

‘Giving in to fear is not the same as feeling it, Fell,’ growled Huttser, ‘and listening to it too.  To learn to control fear and to face it, that’s the thing.  But to know when to run too.’

Fell felt confused, for it seemed to him suddenly that by leaving their boundaries they were not facing it at all.  Huttser could see this in his son and he was worried.  Even without the curse and the legend, or the Balkar so close behind them, Huttser knew how many dangers lay out there in the wild for a wolf.  He only prayed to Fenris that they had taught the children enough in the den and at the Meeting Place, to prepare them for the adult world.

‘But you have nothing to worry about,’ Huttser went on suddenly, ‘we are with you.  Your mother and I will protect you, whatever happens.  And we will always love you.’

There was something caught and almost guilty in Huttser’s voice, for his words came like a promise that somewhere he knew he could not keep.  One day he knew, as surely as the others had gone, that they would not be there to protect their children.  If it did not come naturally, they themselves would force their own children from the pack to confront their future.  As Huttser’s parents had done.  As their parents had done before them.  Yet even as he thought of his parents, Huttser pushed the memories from his mind.  For now at least his words were true and if it came to it he would prove it with his own life.

‘Yes, Fell,’ whispered Kar suddenly, ‘and remember the Pact.’

Larka looked at her father lovingly, while Kar thought sadly of Skop and felt a strange stirring in him for Huttser and Palla, a mixture of need and resentment.  Fell laid his head on his paws and for a moment he remembered again the terrible anger he had felt towards his father that sun he had grabbed his neck.  But now he needed to be comforted and he let the warmth of safety spread like a fire through his limbs.

Huttser went on talking softly to the young wolves in the night, and his growling voice seemed to surround Fell and block out the sound of the storm.  Fell was telling himself to be strong, to be fearless and grown up, but even as he did so he wanted to relax, to sleep safe by his parents’ side.  He closed his eyes and let those words thrill through his mind.