Chronicles of Ancient Darkness Page 27

  It was two days since he’d left the edge of the Deep Forest. Two days and nights on the alert for the Follower. But though he sensed that it was still with him, it hadn’t shown itself, or played one of its lethal tricks.

  Then last night things had got abruptly worse – but for reasons that had nothing to do with the Follower.

  Torak had been sitting by the fire, struggling to stay awake while he listened to a storm growling away in the eastern hills. Twice he heard a snatch of cruel laughter on the wind. Twice he ran out of the shelter – to find nothing but tossing branches and glinting stars.

  Then – very far off – he heard the wolf.

  Heart racing, he strained to catch the meaning of the howls. But they were too far away, the pines too loud. He couldn’t make them out . . .

  Desperate, he dropped to the ground and pressed both hands flat, trying to pick up the faint tremors which wolf howls sometimes send through the earth.

  Nothing.

  Had he really heard it? Or had he only heard what he’d wanted to hear?

  He’d stayed up most of the night, but he didn’t hear it again. It was if he’d dreamed it. But he knew that he hadn’t.

  The scream of a seabird wrenched him back to the present.

  To his right the trees thinned, and he went to investigate – and nearly fell over a cliff. It wasn’t high, but it was steep. He saw crumbly earth and tree-roots; heard a clamour of seabirds. They seemed to be nesting in it.

  More cautiously, he continued west with the cliff to his right. Pine-needles deadened his footfalls. His breath sounded loud. The ground sloped down, and suddenly there were no more trees, and the sunlight blinded him. He had reached the edge of the Forest.

  Before him the Widewater flowed into what appeared to be a very long, narrow lake – except that the lake had no end. To the west he saw a distant clutch of pine-covered islands. Maybe those were the Seal Islands, where his father’s mother had been born. Beyond them lay the glittering haze of the open Sea.

  As soon as he saw the Sea, memories flooded back.

  He was seven summers old, and brimming with excitement. Until now, Fa had kept him away from people, but today they were going to the great gathering of the clans.

  Fa didn’t tell Torak why they were going, or why they had to disguise themselves by painting their faces with bearberry juice. He made a game of it, saying it was best if nobody knew their names.

  Torak had thought it was fun. In his ignorance, he’d thought the people at the clan meet would think so, too.

  By the time they got there, the shore at the mouth of the Fastwater was dotted with a bewildering number of shelters. Torak had never seen so many different kinds: of wood and bark, turf and hide. Or so many people . . .

  His excitement didn’t last long. The other children scented an outsider, and closed in for the attack.

  A girl threw the first stone: a Viper with cheeks as plump as a squirrel’s. ‘Your Fa’s mad!’ she sneered. ‘That’s why he ran away from his clan, because he swallowed the breath of a ghost!’ Willow and Salmon Clan children joined in. ‘Mad! Mad!’ they jeered. ‘Painted faces! Addled souls!’

  If Torak had been older, he would have realised that he couldn’t win against so many, and beaten a retreat. Instead the red mist had descended. No-one insulted his father.

  He’d snatched up a fistful of pebbles, and was on the point of letting fly when Fa had come along and hauled him off. To Torak’s astonishment, Fa didn’t seem to care about the insults. He was laughing as he swung Torak high in his arms and started back for the Forest.

  He’d been laughing the night he’d died. Laughing at a joke Torak had made as they were pitching camp. That was when the bear had come.

  It was nine moons since Fa had been killed, but there were still times when Torak couldn’t believe that he was really gone. Some mornings when he’d just woken up, he would lie in his sleeping-sack and think, there’s so much I’ve got to tell him. About Wolf and Renn and Fin-Kedinn . . .

  Then it would hit him all over again. He was never going to tell Fa anything.

  Don’t think about it, he told himself.

  But that hadn’t worked in the past, and it didn’t now.

  Leaving the trees, he found himself on a narrow, curving beach of grey sand. At his feet, purple mounds of seaweed gave off a salty stink. To his left, great slabs of rock lay in chaos, as if shattered by a giant hammer. To his right, the Widewater flowed into the shimmering Sea.

  Torak’s spirits quailed. He didn’t know this world. Seagulls screamed overhead, utterly unlike the tuneful singing of Forest birds. He saw unfamiliar tracks in the sand: a broad furrow flanked by five-clawed prints like half-eaten moons. He guessed they’d been made by some large, heavy creature dragging itself towards the water. But he didn’t even know if it was hunter or prey.

  He climbed onto the rocks, and tiny white shells crunched under his boots. They looked like some kind of snail, but he didn’t know their name, or the name of the fleshy plants that grew in the cracks, their yellow flowers trembling in the breeze.

  A few paces away, a black and white bird like a magpie, but with a long red beak, pecked at a shell stuck to the rock. The bird struck suddenly and hard, prised off the shell, and ate the innards. Then it flew off with a loud, piping call.

  Torak watched it go. Then he knelt at the water’s edge and peered into a strange, swaying world. He saw golden-brown fronds and thread-like green weeds. When he put in his hand, the fronds felt slimy as wet buckskin, and the weeds clung to his fingers like hair. A creature with a warty orange shell felt his shadow, and slid beneath a stone.

  The salt stink was making his head throb, and the glare hurt his eyes. He was gripped by an overpowering urge to run back into the Forest: to hide, and never come out.

  Then he thought of the clans battling the sickness. If he didn’t find the cure . . .

  He forced himself to stay – and went in search of food.

  He didn’t know what was good to eat on the shore, but to his relief he found a clump of goosefoot at the edge of the Forest, and picked handfuls of the succulent shoots. He made a driftwood fire, and heated some large pebbles in the embers. Then he half-filled his cooking-skin with seawater, hung it from a tripod of driftwood, and with a forked stick added the hot pebbles – followed by the goosefoot, and the remains of a hare he’d snared the night before. Soon he had a tasty if very salty stew.

  He was tired, although too on edge to sleep. Instead he took off his clothes and had a wash. The seawater left him clean, but a bit sticky. He pulled on his leggings, and laid his boots and jerkin to air on the rocks.

  At the bottom of his pack he found the boar’s tusks.

  Maybe the Forest Horse Leader had been right. Maybe he should make an amulet of the tusks, in memory of the friend he’d had to kill.

  Taking them to a rock pool, he cleaned them, scraping the flesh from the insides with a stick. Then he put them on the rocks to dry.

  Next he strung a line of bramble-thorn fishing-hooks across an inlet where he guessed the fish might come to feed among the weeds. For bait he used the flesh from the tusks; but to keep the hooks below the surface, he would need sink-stones.

  There were pebbles on the beach, but no more rawhide cords in his pack for tying them to the lines. He didn’t like the idea of cutting strips from the slimy brown seaweed. There might be Hidden People in the water; maybe those weeds belonged to them.

  A couple of split pine roots would do. Which meant going back into the Forest.

  He felt safer among the trees, and he wanted a reason to stay. Maybe he should cut more pine roots; always useful to have some to spare. And that meant going further in, because you must never cut more than two roots from the same tree.

  The sun was getting low by the time he got back to the Sea. His things lay on the rocks where he’d left them.

  Almost.

  Whoever had searched his gear had gone to some lengths to replace it, but Torak
knew instantly that it had been moved. A patch of yellow flowers by his pack was slightly crushed: that was where he’d set down the pack in the first place. The boar tusks, too, had been rearranged: he made out the faint crescents of damp where they’d originally lain.

  Noiselessly he slipped back into the Forest. Crouched low. Wished the undergrowth was higher.

  Voices on the sand, thirty paces away. Two boys were climbing out from behind the rocks. Walking slowly, searching for tracks.

  Both were bigger than Torak, and looked about a summer older than him. They had sun-darkened faces and long yellow hair beaded with shells. Bands of slitted grey hide tied across their eyes gave them a blank, mask-like look.

  Torak didn’t need to see their eyes to know that they meant him harm. Their weapons told him that: sturdy harpoons with barbed bone heads, and knives of blue flint. The smaller one carried a slingshot stuck in his belt.

  They were barefoot, in knee-length breeches of some kind of supple grey hide, and sleeveless jerkins that revealed wavy blue clan-tattoos all over their arms. Their jerkins bore a strip of clan-creature skin: glossy grey fur marked with small dark rings. Whale? Seal? Torak didn’t know.

  But the oddest thing about them was that he could see their tattoos and their clan-creature skins at all, because over their jerkins each boy wore a long-sleeved parka of very light, yellowish hide: so light that Torak could see right through it. He wondered what kind of creature had skin that you could see through.

  ‘He can’t have gone far,’ said the shorter of the two, his voice carrying in the evening air.

  ‘He must have slunk back into the trees,’ said the other. ‘Like one of those – what d’you call them? Horses?’

  His companion sniggered. ‘Detlan, I don’t think horses slink.’

  ‘How would you know, Asrif?’ said Detlan. ‘You’ve never seen one either.’

  ‘I’ve heard about them,’ said Asrif. ‘Come on, let’s go. He’s not coming back.’

  ‘He’d better not,’ said Detlan. ‘Tainting the Sea with his filthy Forest gear . . .’

  Holding his breath, Torak watched them make their way down to the rocks.

  From beneath an overhang they pulled two long, slender hide canoes. The canoes were utterly different from those Torak was used to: extremely shallow in the draught, and covered at prow and stern with tight-stretched grey hide. And they must be extraordinarily light, because each boy hoisted his boat on his head without difficulty, and carried it down to the water.

  Torak watched them set the canoes in the shallows, then leap aboard. With narrow double-bladed paddles they began to row, and soon disappeared, gliding silently out of sight beyond the rocks.

  But he knew that it was too soon to feel relieved. This felt like a trap. He would wait them out. And like all hunters, he knew how to wait.

  The breeze fell to nothing, and the water became as smooth as polished slate. The only sounds were the suck and slap of wavelets, and a duck nibbling seaweed in the shallows.

  The sun sank lower. The duck spread its wings and flew off. Dusk came on – although as it was the middle of the Moon of No Dark, night would be merely a brief interval of deep blue twilight.

  Still Torak waited.

  It was nearly dawn when he judged it safe to go out. Stiff from crouching so long, he made his way onto the rocks.

  The dew had dampened his pack, but when he checked its contents, he found to his relief that nothing had been taken.

  Hungry, he went to check the fish-hooks. Stooping to draw in the line, he brushed away piles of seaweed which the wind had blown across it.

  Except – there had been no wind. So how had that seaweed got there?

  He leapt back just as the rope snapped taut around his ankle and yanked him off his feet.

  SIXTEEN

  Torak fell, knocking his head on a rock. A tall figure blotted out the sun.

  Against the glare, Torak glimpsed a dark face and a blaze of yellow hair; a knife in one hand and a rope in the other, pulled tight on the noose round his ankle.

  ‘I’ve got him,’ said his captor to someone Torak couldn’t see. Then to Torak, ‘Come quietly or I’ll hurt you.’ He spoke without malice, but clearly meant what he said.

  Torak, however, was not about to come quietly. He didn’t know many fighting tricks, but he knew about feints. As his captor leaned down to tie his hands, he whipped out his knife. His captor’s head jerked to follow the blade – and with his free foot Torak kicked the boy’s shin as hard as he could. With a howl of pain the boy crashed onto the rocks.

  Torak cut the rope at his ankle and raced off into the Forest – keeping low, and zigzagging through the willowherb so that they wouldn’t get a chance to take aim.

  ‘You can’t get away from us, Forest Boy!’ called a voice some way behind him – and he recognised the small boy with the slingshot, the one named Asrif.

  About sixty paces in, Torak threw himself beneath a fallen pine, biting his lips to keep his breath from betraying him. The Forest was deathly quiet. There was nothing to cover the noise of his escape.

  ‘We’ve got you surrounded,’ yelled another boy somewhere to his right; he recognised the big one, Detlan.

  ‘Better come out,’ urged the third boy, the tall one from the rocks.

  Make me, Torak told him silently.

  A stone smacked into the tree-trunk above his head.

  ‘Oh, you’re in trouble, Forest Boy!’ taunted Asrif. By the sound of it, he was making no attempt at stealth.

  ‘How could you do it?’ cried Detlan.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ shouted the tall boy.

  Why did I do what? wondered Torak. Then he realised what they were doing: talking to distract him while they closed in.

  Quickly he looked about. Before him the ground sloped down into a long, lush hollow. He made out alders and willows; pale-green moss and fluffy white haregrass. If you knew the Forest, that told you one thing: a bog. But from what they’d said about horses, they didn’t seem to know the Forest at all.

  Staying low, Torak crept to the edge of the bog. It was big – about twenty paces long and fifteen wide – and by the smell of it, deep. No way around it. He’d have to get across, and noiselessly. Only when he was on the other side would he lure them in.

  It might work. If he didn’t fall in himself.

  Quietly he climbed a willow overhanging the bog – first making sure that it wasn’t a crack willow. Then he made his way out onto a branch. There was an alder on the other side, if he could reach it . . .

  He jumped, landing half in the alder, with his feet trailing in cold, stinking mud. A branch snapped as he hauled himself up, and he breathed an apology to the tree.

  Shouts behind him. ‘Down there!’

  They crashed towards him, noisier than a herd of aurochs, and he fled up the slope, junipers scratching his shins.

  Below him his pursuers bellowed with rage. Good. They’d blundered into the bog.

  ‘Filthy Forest tricks!’ yelled one.

  ‘You’re not getting away with this!’ howled another.

  But it sounded as if only two of them were down there. Where was the third one, the tall boy from the rocks?

  No time to think about that. He reached the top of the slope – and would have tumbled off the cliff if he hadn’t grabbed a sapling just in time.

  He stifled a cry of frustration. He hadn’t come nearly as far as he’d thought.

  The bog wouldn’t slow his pursuers for long; and even if he could scramble down the cliff, the river was too wide to swim, and in those canoes they’d easily catch him. He’d have to follow the Widewater upstream, and hope he could lose them in the Forest. Which would mean leaving his gear behind on the rocks; although at least he still had his knife . . .

  His knife . . .

  What he held in his hand was the knife Fin-Kedinn had made for him, but Fa’s knife – his most precious possession – was in his pack.

  Above him there was a t
earing sound – and he glanced up to see a large branch rushing towards him. He leapt aside – but not far enough. The branch caught him painfully on the elbow, and he cried out.

  ‘Up there!’ bayed his pursuers.

  He heard a ripple of laughter – and looked up to see a face of leaves disappearing into the trees.

  A stone struck him on the cheekbone, and he fell against the sapling.

  ‘We’ve got him,’ said a voice close by.

  Through a blur of pain, Torak saw the tall boy from the rocks moving calmly towards him through the pines. ‘Asrif,’ he said to his companion, ‘I’ve told you before, not the head. You could have killed him.’

  Asrif tucked his slingshot in his belt and grinned. ‘And then wouldn’t I have been sorry.’

  They were back on the rocks: Torak with his hands bound behind him, his captors prowling up and down. They no longer wore the strips of hide across their eyes, but it wasn’t an improvement. He could see the violence in them; their fingers flexing on the hilts of their knives. Strange knives, with hilts made of something that was neither wood, antler nor bone.

  The tall boy who’d caught him on the rocks came close. He had a clever, watchful face, and eyes as cold as blue flint. ‘You shouldn’t have run,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s what a coward does.’

  ‘I’m not a coward,’ said Torak, meeting his gaze. His cheek was throbbing, his feet and shins burning with scratches.

  Asrif gave a gleeful laugh. ‘Oh, you’re in trouble, Forest Boy!’ He had a weaselly look, and kept baring his teeth in an edgy grin. ‘He is, isn’t he, Bale?’ he said to the tall boy.

  The boy called Bale did not reply.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Detlan, shaking his head. ‘To taint the Sea with the Forest! Why would he do it?’ His heavy brows made a deep crease on the bridge of his nose, and Torak guessed that he wasn’t too bright, but very good at following orders.