Larka snarled as she stared at the old she-wolf. Terror ran through her as she saw her aunt’s torn ear and the scars, that angry muzzle. Kraar was hopping after her, snapping his beak greedily. They passed a cave and came to the edge of the trees. Larka knew that there was something waiting beyond too.
Then Larka saw it. It was like a shadow flickering on the edge of the snow; something waiting silently in the wood. A ghastly, steely-grey shape. She could see nothing more, but a feeling hit her. She felt it as a physical thing, like a wound. All around the boughs of the trees hung dead animals and, even as Larka watched, she felt her jaws begin to slaver hungrily. From somewhere within the fear came a much darker emotion, too. A furious desire. Something Larka could not understand, for Larka realized with utter horror that she was suddenly drawn to this thing in the wood.
Larka slashed at the river with her paw. The image broke but, even as she looked around at the snow, its chill white began to change. Larka blinked, but no, this was real. Around her the snow itself crept into darkness. The sky was still blue, and the thin tufts of grass that here and there poked through the snow were green, but the snow itself was as black as night.
‘Wolfbane,’ gasped Larka. ‘Wolfbane’s winter has come.’
Larka swung back to the pool but the images were gone. As Larka looked about her, and the snow began to turn white again, she saw light filtering through the trees, painting the bark with colour. Even as it illuminated the water, touching the eddies with shadows, Larka heard a sound echo across the river. It was laughter. The cold cruel laughter of a she-wolf.
Larka was growling angrily as she approached the others. But the young she-wolf’s mind was made up.
‘What is it, Larka?’ screeched Skart, swooping down from the tree above as they heard her coming.
‘Wolfbane is no story,’ she cried coldly, ‘the Evil One has returned.’
‘Are you certain?’ said Tsarr, and Skart cocked his head oddly as he settled beside them.
‘I have seen Morgra, and Wolfbane is with her. Helping her. I know it was the Shape Changer, Tsarr. There was such darkness there, such terrible anger.’
Larka could not bear to tell her friends that she had been drawn to the thing in the trees too.
‘We must kill the human,’ Larka snarled suddenly.
‘No, Larka,’ growled Jarla, but Tsarr’s look silenced her.
‘Must we?’ he said turning calmly to Larka, ‘and will its death put an end to Wolfbane, or to the hate Morgra is spreading through the Varg? Will it even put an end to Man’s hate?’
‘But what if she ever gets her paws on it, Tsarr?’ cried Larka desperately.
Larka swung round towards the eagle, appealing to Skart’s yellow-black eyes.
‘Tsarr,’ said Skart quietly, though his eyes were sad too, ‘you spoke of the law. But Tsinga taught us the true law of the Sight is that Larka must decide for herself. Be true to herself and her nature. We must learn from her, too. All things must learn from each other. The human’s fate. It must be her choice.’
Tsarr glared at Skart, but as his eagle eyes stared back at him, Tsarr growled and dropped his muzzle. Tsarr knew that the eagle was right.
‘Very well, then. Jarla, come with me.’
‘Where are you going?’ cried Larka.
But as Jarla followed Tsarr from the clearing, looking back behind her all the while at her charge, Skart took to the air too. They had left Larka alone with the baby.
In that terrible moment Larka realized the creature’s future was her choice now. The baby had crawled out of the den once more, and as Larka glared down at its little earth- covered limbs, the saliva began to dribble through her teeth. But as she approached the child, something held her back. She shook her head as she thought of how Tsarr had described Man as the greatest of the Putnar.
‘But you are just like a little cub, aren’t you?’ whispered Larka gravely, lying down slowly next to it. ‘Nothing more.’
As Larka lay there and tried to decide what to do, she suddenly felt a great weariness overcome her again. The pain in her tail had come again and, as she drifted towards sleep, she tried to focus her mind on her own raw skin and pass a warmth down through her own body.
When Larka woke she was surprised to feel that her tail was hurting much less and she got up. The baby had opened its eyes, too, but Skart and the others were nowhere to be seen.
Larka shook herself and felt a new cold thrill through the air. But suddenly her ears twitched and Larka looked up. There was another wolf on the ledge of the mountain above her, and this time it didn’t vanish. As soon as Larka spied him, the wolf turned with an angry growl and padded back into the trees.
In that moment of cold fear Larka’s muzzle swung right over the child’s face. It looked thin and sickly, but suddenly its mouth broke into a grin and it gurgled softly as a little pink paw came up and clutched at Larka’s fur. Then both its little arms came up and hugged the she-wolf’s neck. Larka could do nothing. The anger in her drained through her paws. As she felt its complete vulnerability and total trust, Larka remembered her mother’s warmth in the den.
‘Palla,’ she whispered bitterly, ‘Huttser. Perhaps you are both dead too. But I wish more than anything you were here to help me. To tell me what to do.’
But a voice was telling Larka exactly what to do, a voice from deep within her. In her loneliness and isolation Larka suddenly felt a desperate need, the need to give. To love something and care for it.
‘No, little one, I am a she-wolf,’ she said simply as she stood over the human and felt a strange stirring for the child.
‘Our destiny is intertwined. So I must protect you, mustn’t I? I must help you to live.’
Morgra’s face twitched and the fur around her sunken eyes seemed to quiver. The scars around her muzzle, sprouting with tufts of fur, made her look ferocious and the single, torn ear gave her an air of violence and horror. But beneath that aspect Morgra was not an ugly wolf and there was something in her look now that brought back gentler days.
For a moment, beneath the veil of anger and age and experience that had become patterned in her features, she might have been recognized as a young wolf again, full of hope and wonder and innocence. Morgra was thinking of the little pup that she had been so fond of in her youth. The pup whose life she had tried to save. But Morgra threw off the painful thoughts and returned to the business in hand.
‘I must find out more of what is happening, Kraar.’ Morgra hissed, bending her head lower and lower over the water, as if she were about to drink deep.
‘Wolfbane,’ she whispered. ‘Help me, Wolfbane. Help me to find the child.’
Dawn was coming, thin and cold. Morgra closed her eyes. In her mind she was turning her thoughts back to all she had suffered and using the angry force of those hateful memories to call to the second power. As she did so, her face lost all its gentleness and once more she was that Morgra the pack had seen above the ravine, cold and vengeful and malevolent. When she opened her eyes again she growled with disgust.
‘What’s this?’
Morgra was looking into water, but what she saw was not the pool but the sea, pounding against a rocky shore. Even as she watched she saw something moving on its edge, and then a shape sprang out of the waves and lay flapping in the burning sun. It was a fish of some kind and as it lay there it seemed to be trying to move, pressing against the rock with its stubby fins. Its eyes were completely empty but some intelligence seemed to be at work, even within its body, something driving it on.
Morgra shook her head for she had not expected to see this at all and she did not understand what it meant, but as she closed and opened her eyes again she growled with satisfaction. She was looking down on wolves in a wide valley. Some were patrolling, others seemed to be fighting, while still more were sharpening their teeth on branches and stones as they prepared themselves for what was to come.
‘The rebel pack,’ cried Morgra with pleasure. ‘At last.’ But as s
he spoke the breeze stirred the pool, and as it rippled and settled, now Morgra was looking directly into the face of a she-wolf. Morgra might have been looking at Larka, so uncanny was the resemblance. Yet this wolf was a grey and she had a scar that ran the full length of her muzzle, while her eyes were hard and angry.
‘Slavka,’ Morgra growled, ‘but where are you?’
Morgra paused and suddenly her eyes began to sparkle. Thoughts were rushing through her mind, thoughts out of legend. Before her, on the edge of the valley, she had spied the trees, and, as she realized that they were mostly rowans, she recognized the place.
‘Kosov,’ she growled in amazement, ‘you’re in the valley of Kosov.’
Morgra drew even closer to the pool and what she saw now, the secret she suddenly spied in the water made her mind flame.
‘Of course, Kraar. Tsinga was not so blind as all that, for she always talked of the legend as if it had already been. The ancient verse is unfolding on its own. It’s like a story, a story that’s telling itself.’
‘What does it all mean, Mistress?’ whispered the bird, but Morgra ignored her Helper.
‘Very well, then,’ she snapped as she looked down and Slavka and the rebels appeared once more in the water. ‘You think you are fighting for freedom and your own boundaries, but all you do is serve the legend. For he is there too, Slavka. He is always there. Bring the free Varg together then, Slavka, in the valley of Kosov. Bring them all as carrion for Wolfbane’s feast.’
Morgra swung round to Kraar.
‘We move, Kraar. We move now.’
‘Now, Mistress?’
‘Yes, and we must draw all the Night Hunters together again.’
‘But what of the child and the citadel?’
‘All in good time, Kraar. First we must serve the verse. Or it must serve us.’
Once more the breeze rippled over the surface of the pool. But this time Morgra gasped as she looked down and she began to shake furiously. There were two wolves before Morgra now – a Dragga and a Drappa. They stood near each other and, before the wind so disturbed the water’s surface that the image was lost all together, Morgra hissed and a furious weakness entered her.
‘No,’ she snarled, as though in terrible pain, ‘you have survived.’
10 - Rebels
‘To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun?’W. B. Yeats, ‘Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation’
Huttser’s proud, grey muzzle looked older as he stood there in the snow, far away from Morgra’s cave in the valley of Kosov. Palla’s eyes had a terrible sadness in them too, for the she-wolf was grieving. Palla had taken Fell’s death desperately hard and at night she would often slope off and sit on her own, brooding on her son, and cursing herself and Huttser, cursing even Tor and Fenris. Palla remembered his hopeful little muzzle as he played at the Meeting Place, or the brightness in his eyes as he talked of going on a hunt.
Then she would think of the ice and the river and his soul doomed never to find a resting place, and she would feel a blow to her stomach like a wound. The pain would howl through her belly and throb in her paws and sting in her eyes. ‘There is nothing more terrible,’ Palla would often think bitterly, ‘than for a child to die before its parent.’
There were suns when the she-wolf thought she could go on no longer, and only the thought of Larka and Kar and the hope that they were still alive would tell her that they must continue. But even as Palla and Huttser stood near each other and watched Slavka, the rebel leader, prowling among her band of grey wolves, there was a distance between them that there had never been before.
Huttser turned his head as though he was about to address his mate, but then he growled and turned away once more. They had hardly had a chance to talk to one another since their capture, but Huttser knew that Palla still blamed him for what happened to Fell. It was almost three moons since that terrible night and Huttser, too, felt the gulf between them like a wound.
It was the rebels that had captured them on the ice that night, though the pair were so full of pain and fury that they had hardly been able to understand what had happened to them. For suns on end the strangers had driven them through the trees into the mountains to the valley of Kosov where Slavka’s camp now lay. Huttser and Palla had kept their identities secret, and said nothing of Larka or their own knowledge of the legend. They remembered all too well what they had heard of Slavka and her hatred of the Sight.
At first Huttser asked for free passage through the mountains, but Slavka had laughed at him and told him that the free wolves were either for or against Morgra. That there was no middle way. There was such a veiled threat in the rebel wolf’s voice that Huttser and Palla knew that it would be more than their lives were worth to resist. Since then they had been kept apart, and it was made clear that if one of them tried to escape, the other would suffer for it. Their separation was not unusual in the rebel camp, though, for as part of their training, all mates were only allowed close contact once in a half moon. But Slavka was only just beginning to trust that the pair were not Balkar spies. She had recently given word that in another moon’s cycle they too would be allowed to talk.
As Slavka padded down the slope, she looked larger than she had seemed to Morgra in the water. She passed a male wolf and stopped to address him.
‘Gart, take out another patrol. More Balkar scum have been spotted.’
Gart dropped his muzzle immediately and growled in assent.
‘Loyalty always, Slavka.’
Loyalty was the watchword in the valley, for the rebel pack had been brought together almost entirely from lone wolves or pairs whose families had been destroyed by the Balkar. Without the natural hierarchies of family life Slavka had made herself the focus to unite the growing pack.
‘But first deal with Darm,’ she growled suddenly. ‘He was caught talking about the Sight. This same nonsense about seeing wolves that vanish into darkness. He was spreading rumours, too, of the family that whelped under the Stone Den. There must be no more talk of it, do you understand? No more false hopes.’
Slavka’s voice had grown angry, but Gart’s eyes were full of guilt. He remembered his journey with Darm through the forests and he liked the wolf.
‘Take some rebels and drive him out of our pack, Gart. If he is so fond of the Sight, let him join Morgra and the rest.’
It was forbidden to talk of the Sight among the rebel pack, but Slavka sent out regular patrols in search of the human cub. All the rebels muttered of how their leader hated Man. There were many stories drifting around camp about how the humans had murdered her whole family, though none of them knew the truth of it.
Huttser was listening carefully. He had been interested in Slavka from the first, and he had begun to study her methods. He noticed that although Slavka often went among the wolves and gave them words of encouragement or talked of the great fight against Morgra, she could be very cruel.
Huttser could see that without a Dragga to lead them it made her both feared and respected in her pack. He wondered now what Skop would have made of her, though they had seen nothing of Palla’s brother.
Hobbling was the harshest punishment for serious dis-obedience – biting through the tendons on the prisoners’ back legs. Meanwhile, the wolves were trained by being made to take part in daily combats. The most ferocious of these were always the fights between males and females, for when the wolves faced off their mates they were wrestling with an instinct quite as deep as the will to hunt and survive.
The rebels were also forced into a regime of constant exercise and a daily routine sharpening their teeth and claws on branches and stones. Sometimes the rebel wolves were taken off into the mountains and made to run up and down hard slopes, and to jump rocks, or they were chased through gullies and expected to hide in caves or double back on their mock pursuers. If they succeeded in this they were rewarded with extra meat at the communal feeding times.
Slavka suddenly lifted her muzzle.
‘Come,’ she
cried.
The rebels began to drift down from the slopes into the valley to listen. As Palla watched Slavka she shivered bitterly, for she reminded her so much of Larka. Palla ached to know what had become of her daughter.
Slavka’s face was as fine as Larka’s and her brilliant golden eyes, ringed with white fur that offset the streaks of red that ran down along either side of her muzzle, searched the wolves keenly, resting only momentarily on their waiting eyes, before moving on.
‘Brothers,’ Slavka cried, lifting up her head. Her voice was strong and certain in the cold air. ‘Sisters. The training goes well, but we must not let up for a moment. Our very freedom depends on it. The hunting parties report game is growing scarce, but have no fear. With the summer the Lera flock like birds to the valley of Kosov and we shall grow fat again. There shall be enough for all, even when the Greater Pack comes to the Gathering Place.’
The rebels were nodding.
‘When the winter passes the families shall come, not forty but hundreds of free wolves to fight Morgra. Then we shall go on a marking the likes of which has never been seen before. Our boundary shall ring the land beyond the forest like a mighty river and nothing shall pass. No, not even Man.’
Huttser remembered what he had said once to Brassa about marking his own boundary to keep out the curse. He stared oddly at Slavka though, for she suddenly looked strangely magnificent and her eloquence always stirred the rebels.
‘Very well, then, now I go on patrol.’
Slavka suddenly turned towards Huttser. She had had an instant liking for the Dragga and he had always fought well in the combats.
‘Huttser,’ she barked, ‘you will come too this time, and we shall hunt.’
Huttser growled at being ordered to do anything by a she-wolf and he glanced accusingly at Palla, but he stepped forward. As soon as he did so he felt the rebels’ eyes lock on his body. He knew that many of the rebels were deeply suspicious of him, while others had begun to grow resentful, for word was spreading of how highly Slavka thought of him. But Huttser braced to deflect their gaze, and lifted his tail proudly.