Viper's Daughter Read online

  They’d turned her luck in another way too. Part of the black flint had shattered, littering the ground with shards. Squatting awkwardly, she grabbed one. Its edges were knife-sharp; but try as she might, she couldn’t bend her fingers far enough to cut the rawhide at her wrists.

  Clutching the shard, she rose to her feet. She couldn’t stay here, Naiginn would soon discover the ravens’ trick.

  A mammut skeleton loomed into sight. It wasn’t the same as the one that had unsettled him in the gully. It wasn’t as big and the skull was riddled with cracks. Renn saw at once how she could use it. Wedging her flint in a crack, she moved her wrists up and down the fixed blade. She couldn’t see what she was doing, felt blood trickling over her hands, but the flint was so sharp it didn’t hurt.

  The bindings snapped. She cut the hated rope from her neck. She was free. She was Renn again, not some bound and beaten thing to be dragged on a leash.

  Having tied the rope round her waist, she stuffed the flint in her medicine pouch with Torak’s headband. Before her another gritty ridge. She no longer felt the pain in her neck and wrists, or her bloodied and blistered feet. Soon she would find Naiginn’s skinboat and escape.

  At the top of the ridge she halted. Below her lay a bleak, smoke-filled plain of charcoal rock. Here and there, a distant glimmer of fire. She’d never seen this place. It wasn’t the way she’d come.

  ‘It’s over, Renn,’ shouted Naiginn from the smoke.

  Wind blew the icy breath of the mountain in all directions. Clouds hid the sun. She was lost.

  And through the demon breath a mountainous shape was lurching towards her.

  Wolf scrambled ashore while Torak clung to the rocks, fighting to keep hold of the skinboat. The Sea wrenched it from his hands and smashed it beyond repair.

  The wind had punished him for daring to fly. It had blown him off course and stranded him – where? Somewhere on the east coast of the Island at the Edge of the World, entombed in dense, freezing fog.

  He poured seawater from his boots and checked his gear. He still had his weapons and sleeping-sack, with the pouch of dried ptarmigan tongues Shamik had given him. She’d also given him a waterskin made of walrus gut; on the journey he’d filled it with ice and slipped it under his parka to melt. To steady himself he took a few sips and gave some to Wolf.

  The fog was so thick he couldn’t see his outstretched hand. He asked Wolf if he smelt demons. Wolf said yes, but not close.

  Can you smell the Great Hard Cold?

  Not close.

  The old tailless and the half-grown female?

  No.

  The pack-sister?

  Wolf’s amber gaze grazed his, then slid away. No. Torak shut his mind to what that might mean.

  They had set off for the Island in two boats: Torak and Wolf in one, Shamik and Marupai in a craft they kept near the shore. Shamik had led the way while Marupai hunched in the prow like a blind old eagle, fingering a tangle of knotted cords that he called his map.

  Now and then he’d barked a command: ‘East at the headland shaped like a triple-barbed harpoon…’ ‘Tell me when you spot the next isle, I’ll need to smell the coves…’ And finally: ‘You’ll know it’s close when you see the ice-blink.’ This turned out to be a bank of strangely radiant clouds, which told them that the ice-covered Island lay beneath, glaring up at the sky.

  As they’d paddled towards it they’d heard the clamour of waterfalls and the creak and boom of ice. With a growl Wolf had sprung to his feet: Demons!

  Torak hadn’t been able to drag his eyes from the harsh glitter of the mountain and its dreadful blue cliffs. Was Renn trapped in there? Had Naiginn already forced her to break the spell?

  ‘Stay west of the cliffs!’ shouted Marupai, but the wind and the current were dragging Torak east – and suddenly he couldn’t see the others and the fog’s clammy white arms were drawing him in…

  Wolf’s cold nose on his hand nudged him back to the present. Wolf’s hackles were up and his mouth was tense. Torak asked if he smelt ice bears. No bears, no wolves. Strange prey. Where are we?

  Torak heard waves slapping rocks and the clink of drift ice, but the waterfalls were muted by distance and he caught no sound from the ice mountain. His belly turned over. Had the wind carried them that far away?

  The ground rose steeply. All Torak could hear was the creak of his clothes and the click of Wolf’s claws.

  The fog had darkened to grey. The sun had gone to sleep for the first time: a chilling reminder that winter was not far off.

  Wolf had vanished in the murk. Torak groped his way forwards. Maybe his next step would take him over the Edge of the World. Maybe Naiginn had already got what he wanted and flung Renn screaming into the void…

  The rocks levelled, the fog cleared a little, and Torak heard the chatter of water. Wolf was racing about, sniffing the muddy banks of a stream. Strange prey.

  Torak halted. His hunter’s eye told him that something big had trampled the mud – and yet he saw no print of hoof or paw.

  He found a clot of hair snagged on a boulder. He pulled out a strand as long as his arm. Higher up on the boulder, a band had been worn smooth. He’d seen such marks in the Deep Forest, where bison used boulders as scratching-posts. But no bison had rubbed these marks. Whatever had made them had stood as tall as a man standing on the shoulders of another.

  Wolf was sniffing a shallow indentation in the mud as big as a Mage’s drum. Torak stooped to examine it. His spine tingled. Four rounded dents at the front edge were unmistakeably toes. He remembered the painted mammut in the Narwals’ shelters; the giant foot jutting from the riverbank.

  He spotted more of the huge round footprints. The mammut’s stride was so long that Torak could barely leap from one print to the next. Spirits don’t leave tracks. The mammut who’d made these prints was alive.

  An eerie shriek rang through the fog. Torak and Wolf exchanged startled glances. It sounded like … like an elk, or the Raven Clan’s birch-bark horns – but far more powerful.

  Warily they headed upstream. Somewhere in this fog was the biggest creature on earth: a creature about whom Torak knew nothing at all.

  Wolf caught a scent and loped ahead with eager grunt-whines. Torak ran to keep up – and suddenly he was out of the fog, into dazzling sunlight under a bright blue sky.

  Below him stretched an endless, rippling sea of green grass. His astonished gaze took in herds of grazing reindeer and musk-oxen; silver willows fringing gleaming rivers. And far away, the glare of the ice mountain.

  With a tightening of his innards he realized what this meant. On this side, the mountain sent rivers to water these lush green plains – but on the other side, the side he’d seen on reaching the Island, it reared above the Sea in those dreadful blue cliffs.

  The wind had carried him much further up the coast than he’d feared. It had stranded him on the wrong side of the mountain – and Renn, if she was still alive, was somewhere on the other.

  Wolf thought he’d heard the ravens that belonged to his pack, but they hadn’t cawed again.

  He raced ahead of Tall Tailless, relishing the grass beneath his pads and the smell of prey streaming over his nose. He didn’t care that they were making for the Great Hard Cold. The wind had turned and he could no longer hear the mountain’s growls, or catch the stink of demons and burning rock.

  In the distance Tall Tailless howled: Where are you?

  Here! Wolf howled back. He could still see Tall Tailless wading through the grass, but his pack-brother’s poor weak eyes could no longer see him.

  A herd of reindeer barred his way. A stag put up its muzzle and bellowed, but the other reindeer saw that Wolf wasn’t hunting and moved aside to let him through.

  Again he caught the caws of ravens. His spirit leapt. Definitely the ravens who belonged to his pack!

  Now the wind carried a sound he’d never heard before: a low rumbling, deeper than thunder – but gentle and slow, like the earth talking to itself.


  Wolf heard that it was made of many voices, each full of feeling. He felt a pang, for these feelings were like those of his pack: playfulness, impatience, curiosity, love. He longed for his mate and cubs, and whined aloud.

  But the rumblings came from creatures unknown, so Wolf slowed to a trot. He reached a wide Fast Wet with piles of dung on its banks. He smelt that the dung had been left by the unknown prey: prey so enormous that no wolf would dare hunt it alone. To hide his scent, he rolled in the dung till he was thoroughly caked.

  He had to warn Tall Tailless, who’d fallen so far behind that Wolf couldn’t see him. Where are you? he howled.

  No answer. Only the Fast Wet tumbling over the rocks and the wind moaning in the grass.

  Where are you? howled Wolf.

  Torak opened his mouth to howl back – then shut it. The riverbanks were high, he couldn’t see over the top. Anything might be lurking on the other side: a musk-ox, an ice bear. A mammut.

  All day he’d been heading upstream at a steady trot, but the ice mountain wasn’t getting much closer and he’d lost sight of it, as the land was more hilly than he’d thought. Once he’d seen a snow owl watching him from an outcrop. Don’t let Naiginn hurt Renn, he’d begged the guardian of the Far North. I’ll do anything you want, just don’t let him hurt her.

  He came to a stretch where the river ran wide and shallow. The banks on the opposite side were rocky and steep, but on his side they were a gentle slope of willows and sedge. The shallows had been trampled by huge round feet. Torak made out the trails of several full-grown mammut and the smaller prints of a young one. The youngster had slipped as it climbed the slope, then hurried after the grown-ups.

  The herd had flattened a broad swathe of sedge on its return to the plains, leaving mounds of greenish-brown droppings. They smelt like horse dung. Torak hoped this meant that mammuts didn’t eat meat.

  He found more droppings near a jumble of boulders that looked as if they’d been piled up by a flood. The droppings were steaming. Torak was examining them when he became aware of a faint, deep rumbling. It sounded like distant thunder and it was getting louder.

  Taking cover among the boulders, he heard an answering rumble: as if two rocks were talking to each other. The rumblings came nearer. He heard slow huffings, croppings, munchings. Mist rose from the other side of his hiding-place.

  Or was it breath?

  In front of him a slab of basalt lay aslant another, with a clump of mushrooms beneath. A thick, furry brown snake reached under the slab and flipped it aside as easily as a blackbird overturning a leaf. The ‘snake’ ended in what looked like a wrinkled finger and thumb. These delicately plucked a mushroom, then coiled back and disappeared.

  More rumbling and munching. Sweat trickled down Torak’s spine.

  Where are you? Wolf howled again.

  Torak dared not reply. He was pretty sure there was a mammut on the other side of these rocks.

  Again the trunk appeared. This time it snaked round and bumped his shoulder. The rumbling rose: What’s this? Musky breath heated his face as the forked tip of the mammut’s trunk probed his throat, his nose, his brow… It felt like warm, supple rawhide but it could twist off his ear as easily as it had plucked that mushroom. He stifled a cry as the finger and thumb grabbed a lock of his hair and tugged. The mammut let go and withdrew its trunk. Maybe it had decided he wasn’t good to eat.

  As he wiped the sweat from his face the sky darkened. Glancing up, he saw a shaggy brown mountain gazing down at him from the other side of his boulder.

  The mammut was resting its tusks on top of the rock while it pondered this odd little creature below. Its domed head was a forest of nutbrown fur rising to another forested hump between its shoulders. Its rheumy gaze met Torak’s, wise and unafraid. To the mammut he was no different from the teeming midges in the sedge: another brief life that would soon flicker and blink out.

  At last the huge beast seemed to lose interest. It ambled towards the river, placing its tree-trunk feet so softly that all Torak heard was the swish of tusks through sedge and that sonorous rumbling, so full of mysterious feeling.

  He watched it uproot a willow bush the size of a boar, cram it in its mouth and begin to chew. It went on chewing, occasionally flicking its short, tufted tail.

  Torak was about to make his escape when three more mammuts appeared on the slope behind him. A grizzled old one waded stiffly into the shallows, where it sucked water through its trunk and sprayed its back with slit-eyed pleasure. A darker mammut with yellowish tusks found a patch of gravel, sat down and scratched its bottom. A buff-coloured giant approached the nutbrown one and they rumbled affectionately, lightly rubbing tusks and entwining trunks. Still more mammuts appeared. Torak was surrounded.

  They were so shaggy it took him a while to work out that the old one was the only male. Maybe mammuts were like aurochs, and the females herded together, while males in their prime wandered alone until seized by the urge to mate.

  Something told Torak that the nutbrown mammut was the leader of the herd. He remembered a mare in the Deep Forest who’d been leader of her herd. The nutbrown mammut showed the same vigilance, keeping an ever-watchful eye on her kin. Perhaps it was not by chance that she had found him first.

  A high-pitched squeal rang out and a baby mammut tottered towards the nutbrown female. The calf was as big as a bison, but the milk-tusks poking through its blond fur were only as long as Torak’s thumb. His heart sank as he watched it duck under its mother’s belly to suckle. These giants might seem peaceable, but they would doubtless turn deadly in defence of their young.

  And they showed no sign of leaving. To escape he would have to walk through the herd. A startled mammut might skewer him on its tusk, or break his back with a thwack of its trunk. It might simply tread on him by mistake.

  The calf finished suckling and wandered off, dribbling milk. To Torak’s horror it was coming towards him. Willing it to stay away, he shrank deeper among the boulders – but like all young creatures it was curious. It halted two paces from his hiding-place, blinking at him through long blond eyelashes.

  ‘Shoo!’ he whispered.

  The calf stretched its trunk towards him and sniffed.

  He waved his arms. ‘Shoo!’

  He had no idea whether mammuts were clever, but this one wasn’t. It went on staring, breathing noisily through its trunk.

  Suddenly Wolf appeared on the bank on the other side of the river. Scrambling down the rocks, he splashed across and went for the youngster, snapping and snarling.

  The nutbrown female moved at frightening speed to protect her calf. A swing of her trunk sent Wolf flying. He hit the ground with a yelp but was up in an instant, hurtling for the boulders to take refuge with Torak. The calf fled for the shallows and sank knee-deep in mud. Unable to get out, it burst into startled squeals. It didn’t stop squealing till its mother hooked her trunk under its belly and hauled it to safety.

  As she steered her calf towards the others, she eyed Torak irritably: Stay away from my herd.

  Yes, but how? He was desperate to make a break for it, but the mammuts were going nowhere.

  Beside him Wolf’s hackles were bristling. He was snuffing the wind. Uff!

  At that moment every single mammut stopped what it was doing and stared upriver. Their rumblings grew louder and they were flapping their ears: they were alarmed. Swiftly they surrounded the youngster, facing outwards to defend it from whatever threat they’d sensed.

  At last Torak caught what Wolf and the mammuts had heard: furious bellows heading this way.

  With an ear-splitting shriek the bull mammut rushed down the slope, nearly crashing into the boulders where Torak and Wolf were hiding – then veered round to attack the herd. Its tusks were longer than its body, extravagantly curved and brown at the tips, as if from savaging earth. Torak only glimpsed its eyes but that was enough: this wasn’t the frenzy to find a mate. Something had sent this huge bull mad.

  Rumbling loudly, the
herd stood its ground while the bull gouged mud with its tusks and uprooted willows like grass, raising clouds of dust. Flinging up its trunk it uttered a bellow that shook the ground. It charged. The lead female rushed to meet it.

  The clash of their foreheads was a thunderclap. They staggered back, charged again, tusks crashed and locked. The female was smaller but wily, twisting her head, taking the bull by surprise. One foot slipped. The female shoved the bull against the boulder behind which Torak and Wolf crouched. It rocked alarmingly, like a tooth working loose. If that happened again they’d be squashed like flies.

  With an urgent glance at Torak, Wolf made a break for the river. Torak couldn’t see for the dust. Trusting his pack-brother, he dashed past the herd.

  The river was shallow yet strong, mud sucking his boots as he floundered across. The opposite bank was a wall of unclimbable rock.

  ‘Torak!’ yelled a voice. ‘Over here!’

  He faltered. That couldn’t be Renn?

  Behind him the bull rushed to head-slam the female. She dodged. One of the bull’s tusks struck a boulder with shattering force, snapping off at the root. Shrieking in agony, the bull staggered into the river, shaking its ruined head and spattering Torak with blood.

  ‘Here! Upstream!’ screamed Renn.

  Wolf had scrabbled to the top of the rocks but Torak couldn’t find a way up. Wolf skittered down again, barking frantically at him to follow.

  The wounded bull was lurching after Torak, blaming him for its agony.

  ‘Torak, here!’ A flash of red against black and there she was, halfway up a gully. ‘Take my hand! I’ll pull you up!’

  ‘I’m too heavy, I’d drag you down!’

  The bull was rampaging towards him. Torak spotted a handhold and swung himself off the ground, the bull’s remaining tusk raking the basalt where he’d been an instant before.

  Rearing on its hind legs, the great beast flung its trunk high to dash Torak off the gully – overbalanced, toppled backwards – and lay still.