Again Tsarr paused.
‘But that wasn’t really why Sita had come among the Varg.’
‘Why, then?’ growled Larka.
‘Tor, knowing that Fenris was vengeful and had demanded tribute from the wolves to appease his wrath, let the Varg mock Sita, and spit at her and finally kill her.’
Larka opened her eyes in horror and she licked the little baby as she thought of what she had said to Tsinga about the altar and the child.
‘You don’t mean that Tor sacrificed her own daughter?’ growled Larka.
‘Yes,’ whispered Tsarr sadly, ‘because she loved all the wolves and she wanted them to see what a terrible thing they had done. The most terrible thing they could ever do.’
‘But Tor created the wolves,’ growled Larka, ‘she didn’t have to do that. She could have just stopped them fighting.’
Tsarr shook his head.
‘No, Larka, in the stories when the Varg were created they were allowed the greatest gift of all. Freedom. To do as they would. But the story doesn’t end there.’
‘It doesn’t?’
‘No. After three moons Sita was resurrected.’
‘What,’ said Larka with surprise, though it made her feel strangely hopeful, ‘brought back from the dead?’
‘Yes,’ growled Tsarr, but then he paused, ‘well, not exactly. You see there was no death, as Sita had said, and Sita was the daughter of a god.’
The wolves looked at each other in the snow cave.
‘Besides, Larka,’ growled Tsarr, ‘Tor didn’t make the world.’
‘She didn’t?’ said Larka with surprise.
‘No, Larka,’ said Tsarr, ‘Tor and Fenris made the world.’ For suns it went on snowing, but their cave was warm and the human baby seemed to recover a little, nestled between Jarla and Larka. Each sun Tsarr would have to push his nose through the snow at the mouth of the den, to give them air, and somehow the wolves and the human kept themselves alive.
But one night Larka fancied she heard another sound on the wind, a growling. At first she thought it must be a trick of her imagination, but as they listened they distinctly heard it. There were wolves outside their cave and, as the wind dropped slightly, they heard the growling right next to them through the thin snow wall.
Larka could see their shadows through the ice as the friends listened fearfully in the cave. She shivered bitterly, but as she saw those shadowy forms through the snow, she suddenly felt a growling fury in her belly and the god Fenris’s commandment came back to her. The wolves had frozen in the snow den, but now the voices of the hunters passed away again, and in the distance Larka heard a single howl on the night.
‘Tsarr,’ growled Larka, when she was sure they had gone.
‘The ancient howl, Tsarr. How could Morgra summon these Searchers?’
Tsarr lifted his head fearfully.
‘That was the secret that Tsinga entrusted to Morgra,’ he answered, ‘but Morgra doesn’t know that she entrusted it to me, too, when she realized Morgra’s intention.’
‘Tell me,’ said Larka, and her voice held more of an order than a request.
As they lay in the icy cave Jarla shuddered and pressed closer to the child as Tsarr told Larka how to use the howl.
He told her how to speak Fenris’s name as the seeker began to call to the shadows, and how the ancient howl should be made after a kill, in that strange, heightened dream state that only those with the Sight could reach. How the howl could touch the edges of beyond and summon the Searchers.
When he had finished, the wolves began to doze, but as their breath smoked in the snow den, Larka noticed that the walls of the cave were melting slightly. She began to wonder what was going to outside in the storm and, as she did so, suddenly the second power came on her again. Larka was startled to see the humans’ orange light flickering before her in the snowy water as it glittered on the walls of the den.
On the wall of the snow cave a wide field edged by rowan trees appeared, beaded bright with red berries, and the glow was coming from a number of campfires. All around Larka drifted humans, some clad in armour, others in rough cloth. They were wearing swords at their belts, or carrying staves as they wandered aimlessly about the camp. The baby stirred, but Larka was mesmerized by the living pictures around her, just as she had been by the Gypsies in their camp. But in a matter of moments the humans had faded, leaving only the shadow of Larka’s muzzle reflected faintly in the cave wall.
‘Larka,’ growled Tsarr, waking beside her and feeling the tension in her body. ‘What is it?’
‘Pictures,’ growled Larka. ‘But they vanished again.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Tsarr, ‘with time they will last longer and their meaning may grow clearer.’
But Larka suddenly threw back her muzzle and she was trembling furiously.
‘What is it, Larka?’ said Tsarr.
‘Kosov,’ gasped Larka. ‘Fell told me the story of Wolfbane’s promise once. He said there were rowan trees there.’
‘Of course,’ shrugged Tsarr, ‘it means the place of rowan trees.’
Larka’s eyes were suddenly huge with fear.
‘What, Larka?’
But as Larka told Tsarr what she had just seen the old wolf seemed confused.
‘Think about it, Tsarr,’ growled Larka. ‘There are humans near this Gathering Place, or will be. Near the rebel camp.’
‘So what?’
‘The words of the verse, Tsarr. ‘‘For the Shape Changer’s pact with the birds will come true.’’ ’
Tsarr began to shudder furiously as his growling voice completed the words himself.
‘When the blood of the Varg blends with Man in the dew.’
It was Larka that first discovered that the snows had stopped. The she-wolf had suddenly felt a furious cramp in her leg and got up to stretch herself. She pushed her muzzle through the snow wall and gasped as she looked outside. The sky was a brilliant blue and the sun sparked and flashed in the white. Larka pulled her whole body outside and as she stood there, a smudge of fur in the snow, and realized that they had all survived against such bitter odds, she suddenly felt a glorious sense of liberation, as freeing as her first journey with Skart.
Even as she thought of her friend she saw a shape on the horizon. It grew and grew as she watched. The eagle was sailing towards her and – though it was thinner, for it too had suffered in the snows – Larka marvelled at how free and beautiful Skart looked as he glided through the air. So different to when he was hopping and flapping along the ground.
‘Larka,’ cried Skart, as he landed beside her. ‘Thank heavens I’ve found you. I’ve been looking for suns. There’s news.’
‘News?’
‘Varg. Trailing through the snow. They were following each other in a line and at height they looked like lost kittens. But I flew lower and they seemed to be searching.’
‘I know, Skart. They nearly found us in the storm. Are they coming back?’
‘No, they made for the rock by the stream, but the snow had obscured our tracks. Then they moved off to the west.’
‘Thank Tor,’ whispered Larka, but as Larka told Skart what she had seen on the walls of the snow den the bird snapped his beak fearfully.
‘Shouldn’t we warn them,’ growled Larka, ‘of what is happening?’
Skart shook his head almost helplessly.
‘And sacrifice you and the child? Slavka will kill you, Larka.’
Larka shivered, but she suddenly thought of Tsarr’s story of Sita.
‘But the legend, Skart.’
‘No,’ said Skart. ‘Perhaps what you saw lay in the past, Larka. They say a great battle was fought in Kosov once. Perhaps it was with the humans.’
Larka dropped her head almost shamefully.
‘But everything that has happened,’ she growled, ‘it all seems to be leading in one direction. Morgra’s curse came true. Now—’
‘Have hope,’ cried Skart sternly. ‘We still have the child, and w
ithout him nothing can be fulfilled. And the citadel, Larka, now Tsinga is dead, none know where it lies.’
In that moment Larka wanted to believe anything she was told.
‘Very well,’ she growled, ‘but with these Varg about, whoever they are, we must keep watch. And we must find the child some meat.’
‘Come, then. Let us hunt together.’
But Larka shuddered and she shook her head sadly.
‘I’d rather just scavenge something.’ Suddenly Skart looked rather scornful.
‘Like that filthy raven,’ he cried, blinking sternly at her. Again an old self-pity had entered Larka’s eyes.
‘But when I—’
‘Larka,’ said Skart in a kindly voice this time, ‘the eye of the Sight. It is possible to close it too, Larka, when it is necessary.’
Larka looked at Skart in amazement.
‘Close it?’
‘Come with me and I will show you how to hunt.’
As Larka followed the bird she did not try to see through his eyes, but instead Skart flew above her, screeching encouragement. It wasn’t long before they spotted a sheep that had split from the fold and had been caught in a thicket. But as Larka watched it struggling and bleating she began to shake terribly.
‘Tell me what you’re thinking, Larka,’ called Skart.
‘There has already been so much anger, Skart, and so much death. Morgra is hunting us. Am I any better? Besides, I don’t want to feel its pain.’
‘Larka,’ said Skart sternly, ‘as you look at the world you think perhaps that everything is trying to kill everything else. But that is not true. There is often peace. Must be peace. Does not the carp often swim past the minnow without opening its mouth, and the field mouse live safely near the grass snake? And not all things are hunters, nor all things their natural prey.’
Larka was trembling now as she stared at the sheep.
‘And, Larka,’ cried Skart, his voice scything through the air.
Larka looked up at the bird helplessly.
‘It is possible,’ cried Skart, circling right above her head again and again, ‘it is possible to kill without hate. To kill, quickly and cleanly, with compassion.’
‘Compassion,’ growled Larka, and it suddenly seemed to her the most beautiful word she had ever heard.
‘And to feel compassion for other things, you must learn to feel compassion for yourself too.’
Larka felt a lightening in her, as though she was being given permission.
‘Larka,’ said Skart, ‘you have done nothing wrong.’ Larka was so startled that the fur on the back of her neck quivered. It was as though a paw had slapped across her muzzle. She suddenly knew what she had really been running from for so long. It was guilt. The shadow of guilt that Morgra, that the legend itself, had cast like a net over the pack.
‘But, Skart,’ she whispered, ‘when the Putnar kill... Why?’
‘Does a cub question why it rolls in the sunlit grass and plays with its teeth against its brothers and sisters,’ screeched Skart, ‘or a chick wonder why it should flap its wings in the nest and cry for food? You have a body, Larka, beautiful and clever and strong. You have sharp teeth and fine claws. Enjoy your form, Larka, for you have a right to be what you are, as much right as anything else.’
Larka felt a wonderful peace enter her as the sun shone down on her fur. As Skart spoke of the body it was as if the thoughts that had been oppressing her for so long had lifted from her mind. She pressed her pads into the snow and felt the wonderful tingling touch of the earth beneath. She lifted her ears to the wind and sucked in the cool, fizzy air and let her eyes flicker across the beautiful day. It was as though she was sinking back into herself, becoming whole again. Larka sprang forwards. The energy in her as she sped towards the lamb was like pure thought, untrammelled by notions of hate or love, or right or wrong. It was purpose.
Larka fed that day without any of her terrible visions, and she felt health swelling in her as she did so.
But it was Skart who brought the prize for the child. It was mid-sun when he returned and, as his great claws settled in the snow, he opened his beak and dropped a squirrel in front of Larka. Jarla’s tongue flickered round her teeth as Larka laid it by the human’s head, but the baby just gurgled and its little hands came out and clutched at the furry object like a toy. The wolves waited for the baby to do something with it, to open it with its teeth, but it could do nothing and Larka picked up the squirrel again.
‘We must feed it somehow,’ she growled angrily.
The she-wolf gnawed at the Lera, dicing it, the juices of her own hunger beginning to stir in her belly again. At last she had made the pieces of meat so small that the child was able to take it from Larka’s muzzle with his tiny hands.
As the suns passed, Larka herself hunted again for the child and with the meat, its strength began to return. But then something happened that brought hope, despite what Larka had learnt of Man gathering near the valley of Kosov. The snow thawed.
The voice of spring was in the air and, if the winter had been a bitter one, it had not been Wolfbane at all that had made it so. To keep the child dry the wolves carried it up to a forest of birch trees and cleared away the snow with their paws. The wolves collected dead leaves and twigs and made it a kind of bed and Skart was startled when he saw it, for to him it looked like nothing so much as a nest.
So spring did come, as the wolves and the bird fed and tended to the child. In the mountains the snows melted and on the plains the high grasses bloomed. The almond trees came into blossom, painting the boughs with soft, pinky whites and the brown ribs of the mountains, burnt by the cold, turned green again and purple. The flowers blossomed and with them a thousand chrysalises burst open like little pods and sent butterflies skimming like winged rainbows through the petals.
With the meat they were feeding it the human seemed to grow in strength, and now its little cheeks gave off a fine, healthy glow. The fur on the human’s head had grown, too, and it could stand in the forest without falling over.
Larka noticed with amazement how its features were changing. It seemed to happen almost overnight. Where the wolves had been looking at a plain, featureless bundle of skin and bones, they saw character appearing in the child, tiny crow’s feet on the edges of its eyes and little wrinkles puckering around its mouth. Larka stirred wonderingly at the transformation and thought of what Skart had said in the air about becoming, for she knew that she herself had changed too. She had grown up.
That same night she lay next to Jarla, staring at it and shaking her head.
‘We must call it something,’ she growled.
‘What, Larka?’
Larka pressed her handsome muzzle closer to the helpless creature.
‘I know,’ she cried delightedly, ‘we’ll call you Bran.’
In the baby’s trusting blue eyes there was no understanding of her growls, but it gurgled and opened its arms and then, to the wolves’ amusement, it suddenly rolled on all fours and gave a little growl.
Over the coming suns Larka couldn’t let Bran out of her sight. Her naming of him seemed to have brought her even closer to the baby. Sometimes she tried to imagine what it would really be like to look into the mind of a human. But Larka could never hold Bran’s gaze for very long and each time she was forced to look away, she thought of the Man Varg’s power over all the Lera and trembled.
One time Larka thought of the story Tsarr had told her, and she touched Bran in the centre of its forehead with her muzzle, just as Tor had done to Fren. Even as she did so, she shivered, and for a moment she imagined that she could feel an energy coming from Bran. Could it be true, wondered Larka gravely, was there really some third eye here? But what kind of eye was it, for it had no lid and no iris? Nothing surely that could show it anything of the world. But Larka suddenly had the feeling that a great power lay in that forehead.
The next sun, for a change, Larka had gone off on her own, leaving Bran in the others’ charge. Skart
sat high in a tree looking down on them as Tsarr and Jarla talked together. Larka was returning over a hill in sight of the wood again when she suddenly stopped and her tail came up immediately.
She saw them first, not as bodies, but as heat and light. It was instinct that told her instantly they had come to do harm in the twilight. The five wolves were moving steadily, stealthily, weaving through the trees towards Bran and her friends. As Larka scanned the distance between her and the child’s bed she growled furiously. She wanted to hurl herself through the sky towards her friends, to do something instantly to protect them. But Larka knew she could do nothing.
‘The Sight,’ she cried, ‘what use is it to me to see these things and be powerless?’
But even as she spoke Larka remembered what Skart had showed her of hunting, and something Tsinga had said long ago about not fearing her own nature. She remembered, too, Fenris’s cold commandment.
‘No,’ she snarled furiously, ‘I am a wolf, too, and I have teeth and jaws. For I am Putnar.’
Larka leapt down the slope. The white wolf ran like lightning across the grass, her ears quivering, her tail streaking out behind her. There was a fury in her stride and violence in her paws, but as she moved with a new intent something else stirred too – freedom.
Jarla heard them first. She caught the sound of breaking twigs. The five wolves attacked at speed and Skart screeched in the trees and opened his wings as Tsarr and Jarla sprang forward. They were facing off four of them now, but one of their attackers called to the fifth.
‘Quick,’ Gart snarled, ‘the human. Kill the human.’
As the rebel leapt towards Bran, the baby began to bawl in terror and Jarla launched herself furiously on the two wolves in front of her. They both sprang. Tsarr made to turn, but Gart and another Varg were on him and the rebel was nearly at the child. Above them Skart swooped. His talons missed the wolf’s head, but they scared the rebel so badly that he turned and clawed at the air. Gart broke away and lunged at the child himself. He was almost on it, his jaws about to slice it in two.