‘No,’ growled Palla, ‘don’t fight it. Trust the water. Let it carry you to safety.’
Neither Kipcha nor Bran could hear Palla above the thunder of the gorge, but their own exhaustion came to their rescue now, for they could no longer fight the river’s fury. As the wolves struggled less, only able to paddle as they kept their heads above the surface, the water, finding its own way through this gauntlet of stone, swept them left and right, past rock after rock.
‘They’re still all right,’ sighed Huttser as the rapids began to ease.
‘But look,’ trembled Palla.
Beyond, a sudden water chute led straight to the second falls. They could hear its booming voice on the wind already and Kipcha and Bran were beginning to spin again, moving out straight towards it.
‘Fight,’ cried Palla, ‘now is the time. It’s now or never.’ Bran heard her and began to struggle again. His efforts had some effect and steadily the sodden wolf began to move towards the shore. But Kipcha just spun helplessly towards the second drop.
‘Kipcha,’ cried Huttser desperately.
Kipcha was beyond fighting. The river was irresistible and Kipcha’s spirits had failed her. At first she had struggled out of sheer instinct, but as the rapids had slackened and she felt herself floating on the surface, a strange feeling came over her. Guilt consumed her for what she had secretly thought of doing to Larka. With guilt came exhaustion and despair. But as the feelings washed through her, Kipcha suddenly felt the pain that had haunted her since Khaz’s death lifting from her. She no longer wanted to fight.
‘Khaz,’ she moaned faintly, as she vanished over the second drop, ‘Khaz.’
Bran had pulled himself on to the bank and the wolves leapt past him to the edge and looked down.
‘No!’ cried Huttser in agony. ‘Sister!’
The she-wolf had been thrown out towards the giant boulder they had seen from the hill, and now her sodden body lay broken across the vicious rock. The boulder’s granite side was stained with her blood. Huttser stood dumbfounded as Bran, dripping and exhausted, slunk up between them. The Sikla peered down and, when he saw her, Bran began to whimper.
‘First Brassa,’ he trembled, ‘Now Kipcha too. The curse is breaking the pack. One by one.’
Huttser turned and snarled furiously.
‘You dare!’ he cried. ‘You did this, Bran. You. It was your fault.’
‘Not me, Huttser,’ pleaded Bran. ‘Morgra.’
Huttser sprang at him and Bran dropped on his front paws, whimpering pitifully. Larka and Kar looked terrified for the Sikla, but Fell suddenly found the sight disgusting and he snorted.
‘Please,’ implored Larka, ‘please don’t...’
‘Huttser, stop it.’
Palla had sprung between them and the she-wolf’s anger held Huttser in check. He growled at Palla, but her eyes held his gaze.
‘You mustn’t give Morgra what she wants, Huttser. We must stick together. Not fight.’
‘But this... this coward. This Sikla.’
‘No, Huttser,’ said Palla more softly. ‘It wasn’t Bran’s fault. The vines broke.’
The strength in Palla’s eyes seemed to calm Huttser.
‘But, Palla,’ he whispered bitterly, ‘she was my sister.’
‘I know, Huttser, and I am sorry. But we need each other more than ever now. We must think of the pack, and of Larka. But your sister, Huttser,’ added Palla sadly, ‘at least... at least she didn’t drown. The fall made her end a swift one.’
Huttser stood there helplessly, but at last the Dragga nodded.
‘Get up, Bran,’ he growled.
The wolves stood above the gorge, hardly able to speak, the adults staring at the children as the sightless water thundered about them. Huttser looked at the sliver of green in Fell’s eye and then into Larka’s strong face. He did not understand the strange gift that had been given to his daughter, nor Brassa’s words about the legend or a family to fight the evil. But if Tor and Fenris themselves were hunting them, it would be his teeth that they would feel first, before a single tuft of fur on their coats was harmed.
‘Huttser,’ said Palla gently, lifting her tail. ‘We have each other. What stronger pack could there be? But we must hurry.’
Huttser paused, then for the first time, he nodded in real assent. With that there was a sudden screech through the trees. High above the gorge a buzzard had landed on a branch overhanging the rapids and begun to call. Its piercing, hungry cries shook the dying canopy and in the distance another bird answered it.
‘They are calling for us to help them open the carcass,’ whispered Palla sadly.
Larka shivered as she thought again of the first power of the Sight. Huttser looked bitterly at his sister for the final time. At last he turned away, but as he did so none of the pack knew the secret that Kipcha had carried with her to her death. That Khaz’s cubs had been stirring inside her. As Huttser led the dwindling pack from the rapids, another bird was watching them from the secrecy of the trees and its eyes were not fixed on Kipcha at all, they were looking at Bran. It was Kraar.
5 - The Vale of Shadows
‘Eyeless in Gaza; at the mill with slaves.’ John Milton, Samson Agonistes
It was already night when the wolf pack, utterly distraught at Kipcha’s death, stopped suddenly. In the valley below them lay a series of wooden structures, grouped loosely together, and from their sides the orange light was flickering faintly in the darkness.
‘Man,’ Huttser growled.
‘It must be the human camp Brassa spoke of,’ said Palla, ‘her valley can’t be far now.’
‘Father,’ said Fell, ‘does the Man Varg live down there?’
‘Hush, Fell,’ growled Huttser. ‘Don’t be silly.’
Kar cocked his ears with interest, for he had never seen a human before, let alone been so close to a village.
‘We’ll have to skirt it, Huttser,’ whispered Palla.
The wolves crept stealthily down through the trees, their eyes glinting in the shadows as they padded through the fading grass and passed like wraiths by the human dwellings. They held their fear in the silence of their paws. The pack skirted the village safely and vanished into the forest beyond, but as they went they came to a clearing and Palla suddenly began to snarl.
There the pack saw an extraordinary shape. It was a kind of den, but it was much larger than the ones in the village had been, and of the strangest proportions. It was long and narrow and the wooden ceiling sloped on either side to a thin ridge. On the top of the roof at the front was a wooden branch, with a second branch running across its middle. It was a cross.
‘What is it, Mother?’ asked Larka.
‘A den, I suppose.’
Palla was only partly right, for though the villagers often visited the church, they never slept in its walls, except when they nodded off during one of the daily sermons. Instead they came to talk to their god and think and pray or look at the strange carvings on its sides and smell the incense that the priest would burn on Sundays. They valued the place and feared it too, for it was far older than any of the villagers could remember.
Even to the humans it looked like an upturned ship that had sailed to them across some fathomless sea, and in truth it was like a kind of earthbound ship. For the people who had built it had always lived in fear and made their place of worship so they could lift the whole structure on to logs and roll it away in times of danger, fleeing the incessant warfare that haunted the land of Transylvania. Indeed, as Huttser had seen in the valley, war was already coming once more to the forests and the plains. Soon, the people and their overlords would rise again to defend their lands and their churches and the beliefs too, that hovered about this place.
For this was a time before the coming of Stephen the Great, the Hungarian King and a fabled defender of Christendom, when a new threat had arisen like a spectre in the East. Even now the Ottoman Turks, who adhered to nothing of the Christians’ beliefs, pressed hard at the haunc
hes of Eastern Europe and belief fought belief, as power wrestled power.
When the humans came to use the stave church they would open the door and windows and light candles inside and flood it with their questions and their sorrows and their hopes, with their need to believe. But now it lay in darkness and the door was firmly bolted. As the wolves crept past it they saw none of the human’s burning air through its windows and soon they were reassured by the silence that hung about its mysterious shape. But as they passed the church’s door Bran gasped.
‘Look, Huttser.’
There, hanging from a metal spike, was a wolf carcass. Palla shook her head as she looked at the paws, nailed flat on either side of the door and the sad, hanging head.
She caught the fearful scent of death that came from the wolf skin.
‘The human child,’ said Huttser gravely, ‘perhaps this is part of their revenge.’
‘No,’ growled Palla, curling up her snout angrily. ‘I have seen this before, Huttser, long before any child was stolen. The humans wear us like a skin on their backs.’
The wolf pack pressed on. But they suddenly heard voices coming from the other side of the church. Huttser froze and swung round his muzzle to silence the others.
‘Which way now?’ growled a wolf loudly. His voice was hoarse and tired. It was a male and from the sound of him, a very large one.
‘We’ll try to the South this time. There are old rumours of it there.’
‘How far, for Fenris’s sake?’ asked the first wolf angrily.
‘Why ask such stupid questions?’ came the reply. ‘It was lost long ago.’
‘But what does Morgra really want there?’
Huttser lifted his head. ‘Balkar,’ he thought as he listened. ‘They must be Night Hunters.’
‘It’s where the altar lies,’ came the voice. ‘Only there can the final power of the Man Varg come.’
‘The altar,’ whispered Palla, looking fearfully towards the children.
‘But do you think the citadel really exists, then?’ came the second voice. ‘Harja.’
The adults’ eyes opened wider. The mythical citadel of Harja was a place all the wolves knew of; a place of enchantment and mystery and one wrapped in fable. There was a story that though, like the Stone Den on the mountaintop, it had been built by Man, it was the place where the Varg had once entered heaven. But they never knew before that it was linked to the Sight.
But the citadel that the wolves knew from their stories as Harja was no myth, to wolf or man. It was a real place that had been built nearly fifteen hundred years before by the Romans, who called the citadel Alba Mutandis. For the Romans had once wrestled bitterly to conquer the land beyond the forest, sending wheat and gold, collected from the rivers in the fleeces of lambs, back to their leaders in the west. Their soldiers had established outposts in the great mountains and the wide flat plains of Transylvania. First they had conquered the lower reaches of the Danube river and then turned north towards the high mountains where Alba Mutandis lay.
The Romans had fought their battles and lived their lives and, though their empire had long passed out of the river of history, their culture had left stones in the moving waters of life far sturdier even than the statues that decked their citadels. For Transylvania, the land beyond the forests, would one day be called Roumanie or Romania, after the city that had given birth to their culture, the city of ancient Rome, and their language still lived on in the voices of its peoples.
‘Yes, I believe it,’ growled the Night Hunter beyond the church, ‘and when the other Balkar packs find the child we shall take it there. For only there can the Man Varg bring forth the final power. Only there can the Sight be made flesh. With blood at the altar, the Vision shall come.’
‘Come on, then,’ said the first Balkar suddenly, ‘let’s get on.’
Huttser drew further into the shadows and his pack with him but the Night Hunters passed away, completely unaware of how close they had just come to another of Morgra’s goals.
The moon was rising as the pack crept from the shadows again, wondering nervously about what they had just heard, and came to a patch of open ground beyond the stave church, bordered by yew trees. Here, they began to see shapes that filled them with even more apprehension. There were stones, flat and covered in moss or ivy, standing upright in the earth. The grass was very overgrown and here and there the wolves saw other shapes poking out of the ground; thin branches with a second branch across their upper sections like the ones on the church. They were almost the colour of old wood, but they glinted strangely in the moonlight.
‘What are they, Huttser?’ growled Palla, as they crept forward.
‘I don’t know, Palla,’ answered Huttser, sniffing the ground. ‘But can you smell it?’
Larka began to growl. The she-wolf had come across a bone, next to one of the gravestones. It was bleached by the sun and was very old, but rather than inspiring hunger in the young wolf, it made her tremble as it lay there in the earth.
‘Look at this,’ gulped Fell.
Fell had found a skull. The pack gazed down at it wonderingly, for it was nothing like the skulls of the Lera they knew. It was rounded and the eye sockets lay flat across its top.
‘Man,’ whispered Palla.
‘Mother,’ asked Larka, ‘do humans bury their dead in the earth like wolves?’
The pack fell silent as the wolves’ shadows brushed against the weird stones, and a breeze suddenly came up, sending clouds drifting across the face of the moon, and casting heavy shapes over the burial ground that seemed to be following them.
But the wolf pack was nearly at the end of the graveyard when a cloud much denser than the rest darkened the moon completely and, for a moment, Bran couldn’t see where they were going. He bumped into Larka and suddenly they both found themselves slipping. The earth in front of them was so soft it gave way and they tumbled forwards into the half-dug grave.
Bran landed on top of Larka, who was startled from her own dark thoughts, and started to snarl and scramble desperately at the earth walls around them. For a moment the two wolves lost all sense of what was happening and began to tussle with each other in the earth.
‘Stop it, both of you,’ said a voice sternly from above.
‘It’s all right.’
Huttser and the others were peering down at the two of them and, for a moment, Fell found it almost amusing. But as Larka shook herself and they climbed out of the grave again, a shudder ran down Palla’s spine.
The pack rested that night near the church, but none of them got to sleep much before dawn, for the wolf carcass and the grave had troubled them deeply, so soon after Kipcha’s loss, and they were wary of the Night Hunters. Larka had a strange dream that night though, quite unlike her nightmares. She was walking on her own up a steep slope and her heart was troubled, as if she had lost something and felt she would never find it again. As Larka looked on, the wild breeze strengthened and the tree shook even more. Then suddenly Larka’s eyes were filled with a brilliant light that swelled about her, until it seemed to be suffusing the whole world. Even as she woke she seemed to hear a voice in the forest. ‘Remember’, it seemed to say, ‘remember’.
Light was coming all around her, but the rest of the pack was still fast asleep. Huttser was snoring loudly next to Palla, and Bran was lying on his own, dreaming fitfully and twitching all the while. Larka shook her head guiltily as she looked at them all. She thought of waking Fell and Kar who were nestled in a pile of moist leaves nearby, but instead she got up and, without even thinking about it, wandered off.
A hunger began to rise in Larka as she went, and suddenly she caught a scent on the morning air. She crept after it towards the edge of the forest and, on a hillock beyond, saw a hare standing bolt upright in the grass. Its huge white ears shook and its whiskers twitched as it nibbled on a thick stem of grass.
Larka acted from pure instinct. Her fur began to bristle and her tail shook. As her eyes locked on the hare, they to
ok in the Lera’s slightest movement and she knew immediately that it had sensed her and that fear was thrilling through its body. Larka could feel the tension between them almost as a physical thing, and as she prowled forward she saw it turn its head strangely, against the natural angle of its body, which seemed caught by her gaze, pinioned by terror.
Larka’s heart beat faster at the power she suddenly felt over this animal. She realized that it was feeling what she herself had felt in the forest when the hunters had come. The hare too was trembling on nature’s delicate balance between the instinct to hide and lie motionless, to remain unseen, and the desperate desire to release its own energy and run; the ancient dilemma of the hunted.
Larka’s trot turned to a steady lollop and suddenly the hare bolted. Luckily its hole was in the soft earth between it and Larka, so it could not make straight for ground. Where a hare has sudden spurts of speed, a wolf has stamina and the hare quickly exhausted itself and Larka began to close.
As the sun shone down on her coat and her paws sprang across the grass, the she-wolf felt suddenly happy and free. But just as Larka was on the hare she remembered Khaz’s terror at the pit and a terrible fear overcame her. There was a flash of black and Larka knew that the grass that was rushing by, the leaves and stems, were seen through different eyes, the hare’s eyes. She felt herself springing, her claws opening and her paws reaching out, but with it she felt a horror grip her and then an agonizing pain in her own body. Larka was tumbling, sightlessly now, with the hare caught in her paws, feeling its agony as she killed it.
There was another flash and Larka was lying next to the hare. It was dead, but the horrible pain that had struck Larka was only just beginning to fade. She lay panting in the grass, blinking at the Lera in terror.
‘Larka. Larka.’
Fell and Kar were coming down the hill towards her in the sunshine, as the she-wolf swung her bloodied head. Suddenly, filled with doubt and confusion, Larka turned and sprang away. It was a good while before the others managed to catch up with her. Fell, who had stopped to pick up the hare, laid its carcass in the grass in front of Larka.