The Sight (54 page)

Yet still something stirred in Larka.  Freedom.  The freedom of Wolfbane as he was hurled from the heavens for his rebellion, the freedom of Man, or of living animals, the freedom of the untamed wolf.

‘A story,’ she cried, ‘is it just a story?’

The little family stood paralysed as they watched.  It went suddenly, the whole bridge.  And as it went Larka sprang.

As her paws reached out for the ledge and they all looked on, it was as though time itself had frozen.  As a minute particle seen through the slits of a screen can seem to be going in two directions at the same time, Larka might have fallen or reached the ledge.

It was as though her future was nothing but the choice of those who watched, their choice and so, their responsibility.  As though they had been given the free will to reach back into the ancient past and to sacrifice Sita herself once more, or to stop that terrible act before it ever happened and escape a legend.  So the wolves would not need to resurrect Sita in their stories and pretend there is no death and no suffering.  Because love takes responsibility and in all experience, too, there is a pact between the seer and the seen, the listener and the storyteller, the judge and the judged.

But between Larka and the ledge, between a story and freedom, between the past and the present, stepped reality.  What really happens.  And, as the family watched, horror woke in their minds.  A horror nearly as terrible as that blast of energy.  Larka missed and down they both fell, Larka and Morgra together, spinning towards oblivion.  Their bodies broke together on the vicious rocks.  Kar felt his heart following Larka into the ravine, and a part of the wolf died with her.

‘Please,’ he cried, ‘the pact.’

Fell’s eyes grew black and angry and bright with pain, and Huttser and Palla’s minds began to howl.  The bridge crashed on top of them, the ravine was now an uncrossable gulf, the air a void of empty silence, stirred only by the sobbing of a tiny human heart.

There they stood and looked down helplessly.  Above them in the giant sky the birds rose like a great soul, released from torment and lifting into the firmament and, as they scattered across the skies, the moon was as full as ever.  Its light, as pure and brilliant as eternity, shone down as though reflected by that vision of the little sun in the cloud, shone down with neither pity nor sadness on the wolves.

Beyond the chasm, in the grass where old Tsarr lay dead, a statue was lying at his side.  The giant statue of a she-wolf and her human cubs – Romulus and Remus, Fren and Barl, too.  It had split apart, broken by the moving earth itself, and the images of the children had shattered.  But the she- wolf lay intact in the grass and, across the void, a real child was stirring.

‘Mine is an unchanging love, Higher than the heights above, Deeper than the depths beneath, Free and faithful, strong as death.’ William Cowper, ‘Lovest Thou Me?’ Olney Hymns

Kar woke suddenly and shivered.  From the agony of his dream he saw Skart’s yellow-black eyes gazing into the distance.  The eagle ruffled his feathers guiltily now as he saw Fell padding slowly out of the trees.  Huttser and Palla lay in the grass too, with the little human between them, below the mountain that concealed Harja.  The wolves lifted their heads as they too caught sight of their son.  The son that had been brought back from the dead.  As the black wolf drew nearer in the sunlight he addressed Skart wearily.

‘What was it all for, Skart?’

‘To warn us,’ answered Skart.  ‘And teach us.’

‘To teach us what, Skart? Fear and suffering? Loss? Will that make us better? Doesn’t the Varg suffer enough in the world?’

The black wolf turned and walked slowly towards Kar and his own parents, huddled around the human child.  Palla growled softly, but there was an emptiness, too, in her look.  It was four suns since they had seen Larka die on the bridge and come down from Harja.

They had known immediately that Morgra’s power was broken, even before she and Larka fell.  As the spectres vanished, it was as though the Balkar had woken from a terrible nightmare.  Huttser and the rebels had wandered among them, and the Night Hunters had looked about them helplessly.  But as they gazed back at the rebels the wolves had all shared the same guilty sadness.  Larka’s terrible vision had united them.  Brak had led them away and, in the mountains, the news of Morgra’s death was already being carried on the howls of the rebel pack.  No, no longer the rebels.  On the howls of Gart and Rar and all the free wolves.

‘Fell,’ said Palla quietly, ‘what now.  Where shall we go?’ Fell looked down at little Bran.

‘We must return it to its mother.  To its own kind.’

‘Back to the pack boundaries?’ Huttser whispered.  ‘At least there is nothing to fear there any more.’

‘No,’ said Fell quietly, ‘not even the Stone Den.  But what is there to hope for either, with Larka gone? I hate to think of her.  Up there, pecked at by the scavengers.’

‘Fell,’ growled Huttser, ‘it is only her body, and the Lera must live.’

As Fell thought of the flying scavengers lifting into the air he shuddered, but he remembered then what Huttser had once said of Brassa and now, suddenly, he understood.

‘The pact,’ whispered Kar bitterly, ‘we failed her.’

‘Kar.  We have each other.  We have the future.’

Palla’s eyes held a grave strength in them.  Beyond her own pain.

‘And she gave you back to me, Fell.’

‘Did she?’ said Fell wistfully, ‘Yes.  But I would not have had her die for me.’

For many suns they stayed in the shadow of the mountain, unable to abandon the scene of Larka’s death.  Their wound was far deeper than any cut.  The only solace for Huttser and Palla was the sight of Fell, sitting in the grass or talking with Kar.  He had a strange quality about him.  Slightly distant; thoughtful and brooding.  But he was constantly asking them questions about their journey, and they could see that more and more memories were waking in his mind.  Yet they knew too, instinctively, that he had been somewhere they could never travel.

Of the Sight, Fell said little, though he did remember what had happened to him after the ice.  He was almost dead when the river had swept him to the bank where a fallen tree had shattered the surface.  There the Night Hunters had found him and, after feeding him, had taken him to Morgra.  She had known immediately the gift that burnt inside him and she had had the Balkar scouts who had discovered him murdered.  But that is all that Fell told them, for whenever he talked of Morgra the hackles on his neck rose.

With sorrow in their hearts, at last the wolves left Larka’s body to the mountain and Skart flew above them.  Bran rode on Fell’s back as they journeyed south, crossing the mighty Carpathians and dropping back out of the clouds.  They came to strange, wooded valleys where the humans’ castles rose around them like sleeping giants and saw fierce, crenelated stones touching the skies.

They walked again in the shadow of walled fortresses and of brightly painted towns where coloured towers rose over the forests and dark wooden churches squatted  eerily among the leaves.  They saw too, everywhere, the evidence of war. Fires that would burn in the night and, in the distance, men riding through the mists on horseback.

The Lera watched them warily as they went, for the wolves felt like soldiers of the future who, returning home from the killing fields of a terrible war, where lives had been cut down like poppies, would seem strange and fearful to those that had sent them out to protect what they thought was good.  Strange and fearful because they had been wounded, and so were thought the enemies of life.

They came to the Gathering Place in the Valley of Kosov and then to Kar’s cave, where Palla said a silent farewell to Skop’s bones.  They came to the human dens were Kar had scavenged the pig and, as they journeyed together, Larka’s loss ate at each of their hearts.  Morgra was gone and the curse lifted, new packs were forming in the mountains and yet they felt strangely cheated.  But of all of them, Kar was the most deeply wounded.

One evening as they were passing through the forests, Palla stopped.  She had seen two wolves in the far distance, weaving silently through the pines, travelling south-east.  She raised her tail and nodded gladly as the wolves disappeared.  It was Keeka and Karma.

Only a few suns later, Fell began to snarl.  The others had smelt it too.  Ahead they could see a wide valley, filled with the humans’ burning air.  The fires flickered along an avenue of poplars, but it wasn’t this that had roused the wolves’ throats.  In between the trees, impaled on long stakes, they saw bodies.  Hundreds of them; dead humans.  The wooden poles had pierced the humans’ hearts and the blood still dripped on the ground.

‘It’s like the pit,’ gasped Kar bitterly, ‘they are devils.’ Huttser noticed the skin of the humans.  It was darker than Bran’s, for these Draggas did not come from the land beyond the forests.  They were Turks who had swept up from the southern lands and met the fury and cruelty of a human who would give his name to a terrible myth.  The story of one that walked for ever with the dead, feeding on the blood of his own in a lonely castle high on a mountaintop: the Impaler – Dracula.

But their real battles were as terrible as any dark tales of vampires.  The humans had fought for land and power driven by other stories that burnt in their minds, stories quite as powerful as their shining swords – of a prophet who brought truth to the people of the book, and of a god impaled on a cross.

On the wolves padded, and as they went the smell of blood came stronger and stronger to their nostrils.  But none of the wolves felt hungry.  Instead they felt tired and sickened.  It was as though all they had been through and seen had carried them suddenly beyond their own natures.

So what was left of the legendary family passed away from Man and his wars.  Wars that would stretch like a river of blood through history, touching Transylvania and the region of the Balkans, and lighting flames that would flare up again and again.  Yet flames that might one day send a light into darkness, too, and only in the remembering of it all, open all men’s eyes.

The wolves reached the river where Fell had broken through the ice, and the Varg stood staring gravely into its rushing waters.  But this time they plashed through its vigorous current, holding Bran up above the surface, to the far shore and climbed dripping and safe on to the bank.  They skirted Tsinga’s valley, too, and reached the graveyard where Kar and Larka had fallen in.

‘It was all meant to be, wasn’t it?’ growled Kar angrily, as the family looked down sadly into the earth.  ‘You could never escape the legend, Larka, could you? As you never escaped the grave you fell into so long ago.’

But as the family looked down and remembered Larka, they knew another secret, that nothing that was alive could escape.

It was late autumn when they came in sight of the den where their journey together had begun.  The willow tree had grown low across the cave mouth, and the boulder on the hill above the den, where they had banished Morgra, had been dislodged from the slope and blocked the entrance.  Palla noticed a chink at its side and the boulder looked precarious, for it had landed on a bed of rubble.

As Palla pushed with her strong muzzle, it rolled away.  But as soon as it did so the wolves heard a low, spitting snarl.  A family of red foxes had taken up residence and the mother was guarding her cubs.  Palla backed out of the den and they padded away from the cave.  But somewhere in her heart Palla was glad that the place where Larka had been born was giving shelter to new life.

Beyond the den the wolves stopped and looked up.  There, high above the forest, stood the huge castle.  On the mountainside it still had a quality that seemed strange and mournful in the fading sun.  But it had lost its terror for the wolves, too, and its mystery and now, as they thought of all they had come through, all they had seen and lost, its once fearful walls looked empty and simply sad.

The wolves crept closer to the village in the night and, as they came through the trees, they saw the humans’ burning air.  Kar hovered in the trees with Huttser and Palla as Fell crept forward with Bran on his back.  As the black wolf approached the human den she slunk to the ground and Bran slid from his shoulders.  The child’s eyes were frank and trusting as Fell looked down at him and licked his forehead.

‘Goodbye,’ he whispered.

Bran’s little hands reached out and clutched for the wolf’s black fur.

 ‘No,’ growled Fell, remembering what Skart had told him of Jarla, ‘you must be with your own.  And Larka made a promise.’

Bran began to wail as Fell padded away and suddenly Fell turned back.  Even as the wolf watched the child’s eyes looked angry and it showed its teeth.  Then to Fell’s amazement it gave a little snarl.

‘Very well,’ Fell called, ‘you have lived with the wolf so we will make a pact you and I.  The pact of the Putnar.  I shall run free and wild and send my calls to you in the night as you search out your truths.  And in my cries I shall remind you of the beauty and the pain of life.  In them you shall hear the icy winds stroking my fur and the snows falling silently on the distant mountains, falling on the animals in the secret places of loss and ignorance, of suffering and fear.  And you shall remember to keep the pathways of your senses open to what life is, and what it can be.’

The child gazed up at Fell.

‘But since it is your success that shall control the world, you must think for the Lera too.  For it is from the Lera that you come.  So you must promise too, as Putnar, to protect the wilderness from your own power.  For you draw on the wilderness, as the Sight draws on the energy that dwells in all.  Promise.  To protect life itself.’

Fell turned and vanished into the trees.

As the humans heard the wolves’ calls they came from the village carrying clubs and flaming torches and when they saw Bran sitting there in the dust they were filled with fear.  But suddenly a figure pushed through them.  She was tall, and great locks of curly black hair tumbled down her back.  She hovered there, uncertain.  The child had grown but her instincts knew it.  Almost unable to believe her eyes, to believe that it had been restored to her, she suddenly rushed forward and, as she bundled him up into her arms, the sobs shook through her beautiful body.