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.
The leaves fell and winter came once more to Transylvania, biting the land with cold and piling the mountaintops with snow and, because the animals possess the gift of memory but faintly, they began to forget what Larka had shown them. The snow settled on the forest and the slopes, it fizzed around the edges of the river and heaped about the sides of the castle, softening for the first time that grim aspect.
Fell was becoming more and more distant. As he watched winter’s teeth closing on the Lera and the forests again and felt the anger of survival stirring in his guts, more and more his thoughts would turn back to Morgra and all he had seen and done, as though the patterns of the land were shaping the contours of his mind. But they were thoughts he could not share with his parents, or Kar, and the evenings would see the wolf standing solitary on the slopes of the valley, etched black against the freezing white.
The pain of Larka’s loss tortured Kar. He was losing the will to live. He would howl long and softly to himself, a mourning call, and mutter of Tor and Fenris and Va. He would ask Palla to tell him the stories from his childhood of magic and power and somewhere make himself believe that Larka had not gone. That one sun soon she would step from the trees like Tor, to heal his wound. But in his secret heart Kar doubted that stories could change life.
Kar was lying on his own one wintry night, though, when suddenly he looked up. A she-wolf was coming towards him through the grass. Kar’s heart began to pound furiously. It couldn’t be. It was a cub’s fable. Larka was padding through the stones. Kar sprang forwards whimpering, but even as he did so and saw the scar across the she-wolf’s muzzle he started to growl. It was only the darkness had made her coat appear white.
‘Slavka,’ growled Kar.
Kar growled again but there was something in her eyes, a warmth, that touched him.
‘What do you want here?’ he said. Slavka looked tired and sad.
‘Solace, and perhaps forgiveness.’
Huttser and Palla sprang up as Kar and Slavka approached them, but as Slavka began to talk to them they realized immediately that she had changed. Her eyes were clear and certain as she told them how she had found her way down from Harja.
‘You have softened, Slavka,’ said Huttser, as they listened to her. ‘Have you stepped beyond the harshness of survival?’
‘We must survive,’ growled Slavka, ‘but I was too hard, Huttser. I’ll use my instincts and hunt where I will and fight when I must. But as a wolf. No more than that.’
‘No more talk then of a Greater Pack,’ whispered Huttser, ‘or a boundary that can keep everything out.’
‘The wolf needs to know its boundaries if we are to respect each other,’ answered Slavka thoughtfully. ‘And not murder each other as we try to survive. And perhaps we all need to ask Larka’s Blessing of each other.’
‘Larka’s Blessing,’ said Palla in amazement.
‘The free wolves,’ growled Slavka softly, ‘they no longer call it Tratto’s Blessing. Now they call it Larka’s Blessing.’
There was a sadness in Huttser and Palla’s eyes, but a gratitude too.
‘But, Huttser,’ Slavka went on slowly, ‘a Greater Pack was a foolish dream. Until, perhaps, the wolves are ready for it. They must choose that for themselves. And now I know there are things in life that we cannot keep out with mere boundaries. Should not keep out.’
‘What do you mean, Slavka?’ growled Palla.
‘Larka. She did cross boundaries, not only of rivers and trees, or the markings of power and fear, but borders of the mind and spirit. She crossed them for us all.’
‘And now she has gone,’ growled Kar.
‘Or perhaps she has simply crossed the greatest boundary of all.’
Slavka was looking kindly at Kar. Huttser raised his head.
‘What do you seek here, Slavka?’ he asked. Slavka’s eyes were unafraid.
‘To join your pack. To have cubs again and love and protect them. To live.’
Huttser and Palla remembered Morgra outside the den, Morgra who in her very birth had been made the scapegoat. Huttser licked his mate.
‘Very well, and we shall learn together.’
Kar had a vivid dream that night. Larka seemed to rise out of a swirling mist, and then she was standing before him among the trees and her coat was shining with a brilliant light. The wolf whimpered in his sleep.
‘Love is what shields us from the pain and fear and loss, Kar,’ she whispered. ‘What shields us from ourselves too. From our own hate and fear. And it is the greatest energy there is.’
‘Love, Larka?’ growled Kar in his sleep, thinking bitterly of how she had left him. ‘The stories command us to love, Larka, but was it not partly Morgra’s love of cubs that began all this? Isn’t there a law in life that makes love nothing more than a word we use for our own?
‘Perhaps love takes cunning, Kar,’ growled Larka strangely. ‘I despaired, too, and at the last it made me believe even more. Believe in the Varg. In a pack and a mate and cubs. Be true to your own nature, but don’t let that nature turn on itself. Believe in life, and freedom. And Kar, love is not a commandment, it is a need, as real as eating. But, like the oriel in the old, old story, love must be free, as free as the birds. Free to leave and free to return.’
Larka paused.
‘But make me a promise, Kar.’
‘What, Larka?’
‘Promise me that whenever you really love someone,’ she whispered, ‘you will tell them. You will not keep it a secret.’
Kar whined.
‘And tell Fell. That he must learn to close the eye of the Sight too. To heal himself. For the Sight does heal.’
‘But you died, Larka,’ growled Kar in his sleep. ‘We all die.’
‘Yes, Kar. And perhaps only when we know that we are
going to die can we truly begin to live. To see the beauty and wonder of it all. ‘The light side of the Sight?’
‘Yes, Kar, though it is all really one. As Man and Lera come from one. But there is something in us – in our thoughts – that splits us and we must beware. As the Dragga is split from the Drappa. Beware of the dragons that fight in our minds, that throw false shadows on the world about us. Trust life, Kar, let it carry you to safety.’
‘I would sacrifice myself if I could bring you back. Kill myself.’
Suddenly, in his dream Larka snarled furiously at him from the trees.
‘No,’ she cried, ‘no more sacrifices. Not in blood.’
‘But you, you sacrificed yourself.’
‘I did not escape the legend, Kar,’ growled Larka. ‘For it was its own kind of trap, as Man’s freedom will be if he doesn’t learn. But life is not a legend or a story. Reality is far more precious than a story. And to love each other we must begin to see each other properly. Besides, Kar, at times, the greatest courage of all is to live.’
Kar trembled.
‘So let me give you a blessing. Whenever the darkness threatens to consume you, learn to hold on to the truth.’
‘What do you mean, Larka?’
‘When everything around you seems conspiring to tear out your heart and your mind, or show you that there is nothing but power and survival, look up there, Kar, at the moon in the giant sky. Hold it as a truth, beyond what we are too blind or ignorant to see all around us. Hold it like love, Kar, and remember me.’
‘Remember.’ Kar shuddered in his sleep.
‘Learn to heal your mind.’
‘How?’ growled Kar sadly.
‘By going out there and looking, Kar. By turning and walking out of the cave of your own thoughts. By opening your eyes and feeding your sight on the mists that furl the mountains, and the waterfalls that shimmer past the rocks, on the great lakes that lie like a sigh among the trees and the mighty rivers that thunder to the sea. For it is you, Kar.’
Kar growled and stirred in his dream.
‘But the humans, Larka, they will destroy it all.’