Chronicles of Ancient Darkness Read online

  His father breathed out. ‘Good. Good. Now. Put the Death Marks on me. Hurry. The bear – not far off.’

  Torak felt the salty sting of tears. Angrily he brushed them away. ‘I haven’t got any ochre,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Take – mine.’

  In a blur, Torak found the little antler-tine medicine horn that had been his mother’s. In a blur, he yanked out the black oak stopper, and shook some of the red ochre into his palm.

  Suddenly he stopped. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You can. For me.’

  Torak spat into his palm and made a sticky paste of the ochre, the dark-red blood of the earth, then he drew the small circles on his father’s skin that would help the souls recognise each other and stay together after death.

  First, as gently as he could, he removed his father’s beaver-hide boots, and drew a circle on each heel to mark the name-soul. Then he drew another circle over the heart, to mark the clan-soul. This wasn’t easy, as his father’s chest was scarred from an old wound, so Torak only managed a lopsided oval. He hoped that would be good enough.

  Last, he made the most important mark of all: a circle on the forehead to mark the Nanuak, the world-soul. By the time he’d finished he was swallowing tears.

  ‘Better,’ murmured his father. But Torak saw with a clutch of terror that the pulse in his throat was fainter.

  ‘You can’t die!’ Torak burst out.

  His father gazed at him with pain and longing.

  ‘Fa, I’m not leaving you, I –’

  ‘Torak. You swore an oath.’ Again he closed his eyes. ‘Now. You – keep the medicine horn. I don’t need it any more. Take your things. Fetch me water from the river. Then – go.’

  I will not cry, Torak told himself as he rolled up his father’s sleeping-sack and tied it across his back; jammed his axe into his belt; stuffed his medicine pouch into his jerkin.

  He got to his feet and cast about for the waterskin. It was ripped to shreds. He’d have to bring water in a dock leaf. He was about to go when his father murmured his name.

  Torak turned. ‘Yes, Fa?’

  ‘Remember. When you’re hunting, look behind you. I – always tell you.’ He forced a smile. ‘You always – forget. Look behind you. Yes?’

  Torak nodded. He tried to smile back. Then he blundered through the wet bracken towards the stream.

  The light was growing, and the air smelt fresh and sweet. Around him the trees were bleeding: oozing golden pine-blood from the slashes the bear had inflicted. Some of the tree-spirits were moaning quietly in the dawn breeze.

  Torak reached the stream, where mist floated above the bracken, and willows trailed their fingers in the cold water. Glancing quickly around, he snatched a dock leaf and moved forwards, his boots sinking into the soft red mud.

  He froze.

  Beside his right boot was the track of a bear. A front paw: twice the size of his own head, and so fresh that he could see the points where the long, vicious claws had bitten deep into the mud.

  Look behind you, Torak.

  He spun round.

  Willows. Alder. Fir.

  No bear.

  A raven flew down onto a nearby bough, making him jump. The bird folded its stiff black wings and fixed him with a beady eye. Then it jerked its head, croaked once, and flew away.

  Torak stared in the direction it had seemed to indicate.

  Dark yew. Dripping spruce. Dense. Impenetrable.

  But deep within – no more than ten paces away – a stir of branches. Something was in there. Something huge.

  He tried to keep his panicky thoughts from skittering away, but his mind had gone white.

  The thing about a bear, his father always said, is that it can move as silently as breath. It could be watching you from ten paces away, and you’d never know. Against a bear you have no defences. You can’t run faster. You can’t climb higher. You can’t fight it on your own. All you can do is learn its ways, and try to persuade it that you’re neither threat nor prey.

  Torak forced himself to stay still. Don’t run. Don’t run. Maybe it doesn’t know you’re here.

  A low hiss. Again the branches stirred.

  He heard the stealthy rustle as the creature moved towards the shelter: towards his father. He waited in rigid silence as it passed. Coward! he shouted inside his head. You let it go without even trying to save Fa!

  But what could you do? said the small part of his mind that could still think straight. Fa knew this would happen. That’s why he sent you for water. He knew it was coming for him . . .

  ‘Torak!’ came his father’s wild cry. ‘Run!’

  Crows burst from the trees. A roar shook the Forest – on and on till Torak’s head was splitting.

  ‘Fa!’ he screamed.

  ‘Run!’

  Again the Forest shook. Again came his father’s cry. Then suddenly it broke off.

  Torak jammed his fist in his mouth.

  Through the trees, he glimpsed a great dark shadow in the wreck of the shelter.

  He turned and ran.

  TWO

  Torak crashed through alder thickets and sank to his knees in bogs. Birch trees whispered of his passing. Silently he begged them not to tell the bear.

  The wound in his arm burned, and with each breath his bruised ribs ached savagely, but he didn’t dare stop. The Forest was full of eyes. He pictured the bear coming after him. He ran on.

  He startled a young boar grubbing up pignuts, and grunted a quick apology to ward off an attack. The boar gave an ill-tempered snort and let him pass.

  A wolverine snarled at him to stay away, and he snarled back as fiercely as he could, because wolverines only listen to threats. The wolverine decided he meant it, and shot up a tree.

  To the east, the sky was wolf grey. Thunder growled. In the stormy light, the trees were a brilliant green. Rain in the mountains, thought Torak numbly. Watch out for flash floods.

  He forced himself to think of that – to push away the horror. It didn’t work. He ran on.

  At last, he had to stop for breath. He collapsed against an oak tree. As he raised his head to stare at the shifting green leaves, the tree murmured secrets to itself, shutting him out.

  For the first time in his life he was truly alone. He didn’t feel part of the Forest any more. He felt as if his world-soul had snapped its link to all other living things: tree and bird, hunter and prey, river and rock. Nothing in the whole world knew how he felt. Nothing wanted to know.

  The pain in his arm wrenched him back from his thoughts. From his medicine pouch he took his last scrap of birch bast, and roughly bandaged the wound. Then he pushed himself off the tree trunk and looked around.

  He’d grown up in this part of the Forest. Every slope, every glade was familiar. In the valley to the west was the Redwater: too shallow for canoes, but good fishing in spring, when the salmon come up from the Sea. To the east, all the way to the edge of the Deep Forest, lay the vast sunlit woods where the prey grow fat in autumn, and berries and nuts are plentiful. To the south were the moors where the reindeer eat moss in winter.

  Fa said that the best thing about this part of the Forest was that so few people came here. Maybe the odd party of Willow Clan from the west by the Sea, or Viper Clan up from the south, but they never stayed long. They simply passed through, hunting freely as everyone did in the Forest, and unaware that Torak and Fa hunted here too.

  Torak had never questioned that before. It was how he’d always lived: alone with Fa, away from the clans. Now, though, he longed for people. He wanted to shout; to yell for help.

  But Fa had warned him to stay away from them.

  Besides, shouting might draw the bear.

  The bear.

  Panic rose in his throat. He pushed it down. He took a deep breath and started to run again, more steadily this time, heading north.

  As he ran, he picked up signs of prey. Elk tracks. Auroch droppings. The sound of a forest horse moving through the bracken. The bear hadn’t frig
htened them away. At least, not yet.

  So had his father been wrong? Had his wits been wandering at the end?

  ‘Your fa’s mad!’ the children had taunted Torak five summers before, when he and Fa had journeyed to the sea-shore for the clan meet. It was Torak’s first ever clan meet, and it had been a disaster. Fa had never taken him again.

  ‘They say he swallowed the breath of a ghost,’ the children had sneered. ‘That’s why he left his clan and lives on his own.’

  Torak had been furious. He would’ve fought them all if his father hadn’t come along and hauled him off. ‘Torak, ignore them,’ Fa had laughed. ‘They don’t know what they’re saying.’

  He’d been right, of course.

  But was he right about the bear?

  Up ahead, the trees opened into a clearing. Torak stumbled into the sun – and into a stench of rottenness.

  He lurched to a halt.

  The forest horses lay where the bear had tossed them like broken playthings. No scavenger had dared feed on them. Not even the flies would touch them.

  They looked like no bear kill Torak had ever seen. When a normal bear feeds, it peels back the hide of its prey and takes the innards and hind parts, then caches the rest for later. Like any other hunter, it wastes nothing. But this bear had ripped no more than a single bite from each carcass. It hadn’t killed from hunger. It had killed for fun.

  At Torak’s feet lay a dead foal, its small hooves still crusted with river clay from its final drink. His gorge rose. What kind of creature slaughters an entire herd? What kind of creature kills for pleasure?

  He remembered the bear’s eyes, glimpsed for one appalling heartbeat. He’d never seen such eyes. Behind them lay nothing but endless rage and a hatred of all living things. The hot, churning chaos of the Otherworld.

  Of course his father was right. This wasn’t a bear. It was a demon. It would kill and kill until the Forest was dead.

  No-one can fight this bear, his father had said. Did that mean the Forest was doomed? And why did he, Torak, have to find the Mountain of the World Spirit? The Mountain that no-one had ever seen?

  His father’s voice echoed in his mind. Your guide will find you.

  How? When?

  Torak left the glade and plunged back into the shadows beneath the trees. Once again he began to run.

  He ran for ever. He ran till he could no longer feel his legs. But at last he reached a long, wooded slope and had to stop: doubled up, chest heaving.

  Suddenly he was ravenous. He fumbled for his food pouch – and groaned in disgust. It was empty. Too late, he remembered the neat bundles of dried deer meat, forgotten at the shelter.

  Torak, you fool! Messing things up on your first day alone! Alone.

  It wasn’t possible. How could Fa be gone? Gone for ever?

  Gradually he became aware of a faint mewing sound coming from the other side of the hill.

  There it was again. Some young animal crying for its mother.

  His heart leapt. Oh, thank the Spirit! An easy kill. His belly tightened at the thought of fresh meat. He didn’t care what it was. He was so hungry he could eat a bat.

  Torak dropped to the ground and crept through the birch trees to the top of the hill.

  He looked down into a narrow gully through which ran a small, swift river. He recognised it: the Fastwater. Further west, he and Fa often camped in summer to gather lime bark for rope-making; but this part looked unfamiliar. Then he realised why.

  Some time before, a flash flood had come roaring down from the mountains. The waters had since subsided, leaving a mess of wet undergrowth and grass-strewn saplings. They’d also destroyed a wolf den on the other side of the gully. There, below a big red boulder shaped like a sleeping auroch, lay two drowned wolves like sodden fur cloaks. Three dead cubs floated in a puddle.

  The fourth sat beside them, shivering.

  The wolf cub looked about three moons old. It was thin and wet, and was complaining softly to itself in a low, continuous whimper.

  Torak flinched. Without warning, the sound had brought a startling vision to his mind. Black fur. Warm darkness. Rich, fatty milk. The Mother licking him clean. The scratch of tiny claws and nudge of small, cold noses. Fluffy cubs clambering over him: the newest cub in the litter.

  The vision was as vivid as a lightning flash. What did it mean?

  His hand tightened on his father’s knife. It doesn’t matter what it means, he told himself. Visions won’t keep you alive. If you don’t eat that cub, you’ll be too weak to hunt. And you’re allowed to kill your clan-creature to keep from starving. You know that.

  The cub raised its head and gave a bewildered yowl.

  Torak listened to it – and understood.

  In some strange way that he couldn’t begin to fathom, he recognised the high, wavering sounds. His mind knew their shapes. He remembered them.

  This isn’t possible, he thought.

  He listened to the cub’s yowls. He felt them drop into his mind.

  Why won’t you play with me? the cub was asking its dead pack. What have I done now?

  On and on it went. As Torak listened, something awakened in him. His neck muscles tensed. Deep in his throat he felt a response beginning. He fought the urge to put back his head and howl.

  What was happening? He didn’t feel like Torak any more. Not boy, not son, not member of the Wolf Clan – or not only those things. Some part of him was wolf.

  A breeze sprang up, chilling his skin.

  At the same moment, the wolf cub stopped yowling and jerked round to face him. Its eyes were unfocused, but its large ears were pricked, and it was snuffing the air. It had smelt him.

  Torak looked down at the small anxious cub, and hardened his heart.

  He drew the knife from his belt and started down the slope.

  THREE

  The wolf cub did not at all understand what was going on. He’d been exploring the rise above the Den when the Fast Wet had come roaring through, and now his mother and father and pack-brothers were lying in the mud – and they were ignoring him.

  Since long before the Light he’d been nosing them and biting their tails – but they still didn’t move. They didn’t make a sound, and they smelt strange: like prey. Not the prey that runs away, but the Not-Breath kind: the kind that gets eaten.

  The cub was cold, wet, and very hungry. Many times he’d licked his mother’s muzzle to ask her please to sick up some food for him to eat, but she didn’t stir. What had he done wrong this time?

  He knew that he was the naughtiest cub in the litter. He was always being scolded, but he couldn’t help it. He just loved trying new things. So it seemed a bit unfair that now, when he was staying by the Den like a good cub, nobody even noticed.

  He padded to the edge of the puddle where his pack-brothers lay, and lapped up some of the Still Wet. It tasted bad.

  He ate some grass and a couple of spiders.

  He wondered what to do next.

  He began to feel scared. He put back his head and howled. Howling cheered him up a bit, because it reminded him of all the good howls he’d had with the pack.

  Mid-howl, he stopped. He smelt wolf.

  He spun round, wobbling a little from hunger. He swivelled his ears and sniffed. Yes. Wolf. He could hear it coming noisily down the slope on the other side of the Fast Wet. He smelt that it was male, half-grown, and not one of the pack.

  But there was something odd about it. It smelt of wolf, but also of not-wolf. It smelt of reindeer and red deer and beaver, and fresh blood – and something else: a new smell that he hadn’t yet learnt.

  This was very odd. Unless – unless – it meant that the not-wolf wolf was actually a wolf who’d eaten lots of different prey, and was now bringing the cub some food!

  Shivering with eagerness, the cub wagged his tail and yipped a noisy welcome.

  For a moment the strange wolf stopped. Then it moved forwards again. The cub couldn’t see it very clearly because his eyes weren’t near
ly as sharp as his nose and ears, but as it splashed across the Fast Wet, he made out that this was a very strange wolf indeed.

  It walked on its hind legs. The fur on its head was black, and so long that it reached right down to its shoulders. And strangest of all – it had no tail!

  Yet it sounded wolf. It was making a low, friendly yip-and-yowl which sounded a bit like it’s all right, I’m a friend. This was reassuring, even if it did keep missing out the highest yips.

  But something was wrong. Beneath the friendliness there was a tense note. And although the strange wolf was smiling, the cub could tell it didn’t really mean it.

  The cub’s welcome changed to a whimper. Are you hunting me? Why?

  No, no, came the friendly but not-friendly yip-and-yowl.

  Then the strange wolf stopped yip-and-yowling and advanced in frightening silence.

  Too weak to run, the cub backed away.

  The strange wolf lunged, grabbed the cub by the scruff, and lifted him high.

  Weakly, the cub wagged his tail to fend off an attack.

  The strange wolf lifted its other forepaw and pressed a huge claw against the cub’s belly.

  The cub yelped. Grinning in terror, he whipped his tail between his legs.

  But the strange wolf was frightened too. Its forepaws were shaking, and it was gulping and baring its teeth. The cub sensed loneliness and uncertainty and pain.

  Suddenly, the strange wolf took another gulp, and jerked its great claw away from the cub’s belly. Then it sat down heavily in the mud, and clutched the cub to its chest.

  The cub’s terror vanished. Through the strange furless hide that smelt more of not-wolf than wolf, he could hear a comforting thump-thump, like the sound he heard when he clambered on top of his father for a nap.

  The cub wriggled out of the strange wolf’s grip, put his forepaws on its chest, and stood on his hind legs. He began to lick the strange wolf’s muzzle.

  Angrily, the strange wolf pushed him away, and he fell backwards. Undeterred, he righted himself and sat gazing up at the strange wolf.

  Such an odd, flat, furless face! The lips weren’t black, like a proper wolf’s, but pale; and the ears were pale too – and they didn’t move at all. But the eyes were silver-grey and full of light: the eyes of a wolf.