Chronicles of Ancient Darkness Read online

  Fat, happy and careless.

  Torak heard a twig snap behind him just as a large hand grabbed him by the jerkin and yanked him off his feet.

  SEVEN

  Three hunters. Three lethal flint weapons. All aimed at him.

  Torak’s mind whirled. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t see Wolf.

  The man gripping his jerkin was enormous. His russet beard was a bird’s nest tangle; one cheek was pulled downwards by an ugly scar, and whatever had bitten him had taken off one ear. In his free hand he held a flint-edged knife, its point jabbed under Torak’s jaw.

  Beside him stood a tall young man, and a girl about Torak’s own age. Both had dark-red hair, smooth, pitiless faces, and flint arrows trained on his heart.

  He tried to swallow. He hoped he didn’t look as scared as he felt. ‘Let me go,’ he gasped. He took a swing at the big man and missed.

  The big man grunted. ‘So here’s our thief!’ He hoisted Torak higher – chokingly high.

  ‘I’m not – a thief!’ coughed Torak, snatching at his throat.

  ‘He’s lying,’ the young man said coldly.

  ‘You took our roe buck,’ said the girl. To the big man she said, ‘Oslak, I think you’re choking him.’

  Oslak set Torak on his feet. But he didn’t loosen his hold, and his knife stayed at Torak’s throat.

  Carefully, the girl replaced her arrow in her quiver, and shouldered her bow. The young man did not. From the gleam in his eyes, it was clear that he was enjoying himself. He wouldn’t hesitate to shoot.

  Torak coughed and rubbed his throat, surreptitiously reaching for his knife.

  ‘I’ll take that,’ said Oslak. Still gripping Torak, he relieved him of his weapons and tossed them to the girl.

  She studied Fa’s knife curiously. ‘Did you steal this too?’

  ‘No!’ said Torak. ‘It – it was my father’s.’

  Clearly they didn’t believe him.

  He looked at the girl. ‘You said I took your buck. How could it be yours?’

  ‘This is our part of the Forest,’ said the young man.

  Torak was puzzled. ‘What do you mean? The Forest doesn’t belong to anyone –’

  ‘It does now,’ snapped the young man. ‘It was agreed at the clan meet. Because of . . . ’ he broke off with a scowl. ‘What matters is that you took our prey. That means death.’

  Torak broke out in a sweat. Death? How could taking a roe buck mean death?

  His mouth was so dry that he could hardly speak. ‘If – if it’s the buck you’re after,’ he said, ‘take it and let me go. It’s in my pack. I haven’t eaten much.’

  Oslak and the girl exchanged glances, but the young man tossed his head in scorn. ‘It isn’t that simple. You’re my captive. Oslak, tie his hands. We’re taking him to Fin-Kedinn. ’

  ‘Where’s that?’ asked Torak.

  ‘It’s not a place,’ said Oslak, ‘it’s a man.’

  ‘Don’t you know anything?’ sneered the girl.

  ‘Fin-Kedinn is my uncle,’ said the young man, drawing himself up. ‘He’s the leader of our clan. I am Hord, his brother’s son.’

  ‘What clan? Where are you taking me?’

  They did not reply.

  Oslak gave him a shove that knocked him to his knees. As he struggled to his feet, he glanced over his shoulder – and saw to his horror that Wolf had trotted back to look for him. He stood uncertainly some twenty paces away, snuffing the strangers’ scent.

  They hadn’t spotted him. What would they do if they did? Presumably even they respected the ancient law which forbade the killing of another hunter. But what if they chased Wolf away? Torak pictured him lost in the Forest. Hungry. Howling.

  To warn Wolf to stay out of sight, he gave a low, urgent ‘uff’. Danger!

  Oslak nearly fell over him in surprise. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Uff!’ said Torak again. To his dismay, Wolf didn’t retreat. Instead, he put back his ears and raced straight for Torak.

  ‘What’s this?’ muttered Oslak. He reached down and grabbed Wolf by the hackles.

  Wolf wriggled and snarled as he dangled from the huge red hand.

  ‘Let him go!’ shouted Torak, struggling. ‘Let him go or I’ll kill you!’

  Oslak and the girl burst out laughing.

  ‘Let him go! He’s not doing you any harm!’

  ‘Just chase it away and let’s go,’ said Hord irritably.

  ‘No!’ yelled Torak. ‘He’s my gui – no!’

  The girl threw him a suspicious look. ‘He’s your what?’

  ‘He’s with me,’ muttered Torak. He knew he mustn’t reveal his search for the Mountain, or that he could talk to Wolf.

  ‘Come on, Renn,’ snarled Hord. ‘We’re wasting time.’

  But Renn was still staring at Torak. She turned to Oslak. ‘Give it to me.’ From her pack she pulled a buckskin bag into which she shoved the cub, drawing the neck tightly shut. As she shouldered the wriggling, yowling bag, she told Torak, ‘You’d better come quietly, or I’ll bash him against a tree.’

  Torak glared at her. She probably wouldn’t do it, but she’d just ensured his obedience far more effectively than either Oslak or Hord.

  Oslak gave Torak another push, and they started along a deer-track, heading north-west.

  The rawhide bindings were tight, and Torak’s wrists began to hurt. Well let them, he thought. He was furious with himself. Look behind you, his father had said. He hadn’t, and now he was paying for it – and so was Wolf. No more muffled yowls were coming from the bag. Was he suffocating? Already dead?

  Torak begged Renn to open the bag and let in some air.

  ‘No need,’ she said without turning round. ‘I just felt it wriggle.’

  Torak set his teeth and stumbled on. He had to find some way to escape.

  Oslak was behind him, but Hord was right in front. He looked about nineteen, well-built and handsome. He also seemed both arrogant and uneasy: desperate to be first, but scared that he’d only ever come second. His clothes were finely made and colourful, his jerkin and leggings stitched in braided sinew dyed red, and edged in some kind of birdskin stained green. On his chest he wore a magnificent necklace of red deer teeth.

  Torak was mystified. Why would a hunter want so much colour? And that necklace clinked, which was the last thing you needed.

  Renn resembled Hord in feature, and Torak wondered if they were brother and sister, although Renn was younger by four or five summers. Her clan-tattoos – three fine blue-black bars on her cheekbones – showed clearly on her pale skin, giving her a sharp, mistrustful look. Torak didn’t think he’d be asking her for help.

  Her buckskin jerkin and leggings were scruffy, but her bow and quiver were beautiful, the arrows deftly fletched with owl feathers for silent flight. On the first two fingers of her left hand, she wore leather finger-guards, and strapped to her right forearm was a wrist-guard of polished green slate. Torak guessed that such wrist-guards were worn by people who lived for their bows. That’s what matters to her, he thought. Not fine clothes, like Hord.

  But what clan was she? Sewn to the left side of her jerkin – and those of Hord and Oslak – was their clan-creature skin: a strip of black feathers. Swan? Eagle? The feathers were too tattered. Torak couldn’t tell.

  They walked all morning without stopping for food or water: crossing boggy valleys choked with chattering aspen; climbing hills darkened by ever-wakeful pines. As Torak passed beneath, the trees sighed mournfully, as if already lamenting his death.

  Clouds obscured the sun, and he lost his bearings. They came to a slope where the Forest floor was bumpy with the waist-high nests of wood-ants. As wood-ants only build by the south side of trees, Torak worked out that they were heading west.

  At last they paused at a brook to drink.

  ‘We’re much too slow,’ growled Hord. ‘We’ve got a whole valley to cross before we reach the Windriver.’

  Torak pricked up his ears. Maybe he’d overhear so
mething useful . . .

  Renn sensed he was listening. ‘The Windriver,’ she told him slowly, as if talking to a baby, ‘is to the west, in the next valley. It’s where we camp in autumn. And a couple of daywalks to the north is the Widewater, where we camp in summer. For the salmon. They’re fish. Maybe you’ve heard of them.’

  Torak felt himself reddening. But he knew now where they were heading: his captors’ autumn camp. It sounded bad. A camp would mean more people, and less chance of escape.

  As they walked, the sun sank lower, and Torak’s captors became edgy, pausing often to listen and look about them. He guessed that they knew about the bear. Maybe that was why they’d adopted the unheard-of measure of ‘owning’ prey. Because it was getting scarce; the bear was frightening it away.

  They descended into a big valley of oak, ash and pine, and soon reached a wide silver river. This must be the Windriver.

  Suddenly Torak smelt woodsmoke. They were nearing the camp.

  EIGHT

  As the four of them crossed the river by a wooden walkway, Torak stared down at the sliding water and thought about jumping in. His hands were tied. He’d drown. Besides, he couldn’t leave Wolf.

  About ten paces downstream, the trees opened into a clearing. Torak smelt pine-smoke and fresh blood. He saw four big reindeer-hide shelters unlike any he’d ever seen, and a bewildering number of people: all hard at work, and as yet unaware of him. With a clarity born of fear, he took in every detail.

  On the riverbank two men were skinning a boar strung from a tree. Having already slit the belly, they’d sheathed their knives and were peeling off the hide by hand, to avoid tearing it. Both were bare-chested, and wore fish-skin aprons over their leggings. They looked terrifyingly strong, with raised zigzag scars on their muscled arms. From the carcass, blood dripped slowly into a birch-bark pail.

  In the shallows, two girls in buckskin tunics giggled as they rinsed the boar’s guts, while three small children solemnly made mud-cakes and studded them with sycamore wings. Two sleek hide canoes were drawn up out of the water. The ground around them glittered with fish-scales. A couple of large dogs prowled for scraps.

  In the middle of the clearing, near a pinewood long-fire, a group of women sat on willow-branch mats, talking quietly as they shelled hazelnuts and picked over a basket of juniper berries. None of them looked anything like Hord or Renn; Torak wondered briefly if, like him, they’d lost their parents.

  A little apart from them, an old woman was heading arrows: slotting needle-fine flakes of flint into the shafts, then gluing them in place with a paste of pine-blood and beeswax. A round bone amulet etched with a spiral was sewn to the breast of her jerkin. From the amulet, Torak knew she must be the clan Mage. Fa had told him about Mages: people who can heal sickness, and dream where the prey is and what the weather will do. This old woman looked as if she could do far more dangerous things than that.

  By the fire, a pretty girl leaned over a cooking-skin. Steam crinkled her hair as she used a forked stick to drop in red-hot stones. The meaty smell of whatever was cooking made Torak’s mouth water.

  Near her, an older man knelt to spit a couple of hares. Like Hord, he had reddish-brown hair and a short red beard, but there the resemblance ended. His face had an arresting stillness, and a strength that made Torak think of carved sandstone. Torak forgot about the cooking smell. He knew, without being told, that this man wielded power.

  Oslak untied the bindings and pushed Torak into the clearing. The dogs leapt up, barking ferociously. The old woman made a slicing motion with her palm, and they subsided into growls. Everyone stared at Torak. Everyone except the man by the fire, who went on calmly spitting the hares. Only when he’d finished did he rub off his hands in the dust and rise to his feet, waiting in silence for them to approach.

  The pretty girl glanced at Hord and smiled shyly. ‘We saved you some broth,’ she said.

  Torak guessed that either she was his mate, or wanted to be.

  Renn turned and rolled her eyes at Hord. ‘Dyrati saved you some broth,’ she mocked.

  Definitely his sister, thought Torak.

  Hord ignored them both, and went to talk to the man by the fire. Quickly, he related what had happened. Torak noticed that he made it sound as if he, not Oslak had caught ‘the thief’. Oslak didn’t seem to mind, but Renn flashed her brother a sour glance.

  Meanwhile, the dogs had scented Wolf. Hackles bristling, they advanced on Renn.

  ‘Back!’ she ordered. They obeyed. Renn ducked into the nearest shelter and emerged with a coil of wovenbark rope. She tied one end round the neck of the bag containing Wolf, tossed the other over the branch of an oak tree, and hoisted the bag high: well out of the dogs’ reach.

  And out of mine, realised Torak. Now even if he got the chance to escape, he couldn’t. Not without Wolf.

  Renn caught his eye and gave him a wry grin.

  He scowled back. Inside, he was sick with fear.

  Hord had finished talking. The man by the fire nodded once, and waited for Oslak to push Torak towards him. His eyes were an intense, unblinking blue: vividly alive in that impenetrable face. Torak found it hard to look into them for long – and even harder to look away.

  ‘What is your name?’ said the man in a voice that was somehow more frightening for being so quiet.

  Torak licked his lips. ‘Torak. – What’s yours?’ But he thought he already knew.

  It was Hord who answered. ‘He is Fin-Kedinn. Leader of the Raven Clan. And you, you miserable little runt, should learn more respect –’

  Fin-Kedinn silenced Hord with a look, then turned to Torak. ‘What clan are you?’

  Torak raised his chin. ‘Wolf.’

  ‘Well there’s a surprise,’ remarked Renn, and several people laughed.

  Fin-Kedinn wasn’t one of them. His burning blue eyes never left Torak’s face. ‘What are you doing in this part of the Forest?’

  ‘Heading north,’ said Torak.

  ‘I told him it belongs to us now,’ Hord put in quickly.

  ‘How could I know that?’ said Torak. ‘I wasn’t at the clan meet.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Fin-Kedinn.

  Torak did not reply.

  The Raven Leader’s eyes drilled into his. ‘Where are the rest of your clan?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Torak truthfully. ‘I’ve never lived with them. I live – lived – with my father.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Dead. He was – killed by a bear.’

  A hiss ran through the watchers. Some glanced fearfully over their shoulders; others touched their clan-creature skins, or made the sign of the hand to ward off evil. The old woman left her arrows and came towards them.

  No emotion showed in Fin-Kedinn’s face. ‘Who was your father?’

  Torak swallowed. He knew – and so must Fin-Kedinn – that it is forbidden to speak a dead person’s name for five summers after they die. Instead they can only be referred to by naming their parents. Fa had hardly ever talked about his family, but Torak knew their names, and where they’d come from. Fa’s mother had been Seal Clan; his father had been Wolf Clan. Torak named them both.

  Recognition is one of the hardest expressions to conceal. Not even Fin-Kedinn could hide it completely.

  He knew Fa, thought Torak, aghast. But how? Fa never mentioned him, or the Raven Clan. What does this mean?

  He watched Fin-Kedinn run his thumb slowly across his bottom lip. It was impossible to tell whether Torak’s father had been his best friend or his deadliest enemy.

  At last Fin-Kedinn spoke. ‘Share out the boy’s things between everyone,’ he told Oslak. ‘Then take him downstream and kill him.’

  NINE

  Torak’s knees buckled.

  ‘Wh – at?’ he gasped. ‘I didn’t even know the buck was yours! How can I be guilty if I didn’t know?’

  ‘It’s the law,’ said Fin-Kedinn.

  ‘Why? Why? Because you say so?’

  ‘Because the cla
ns say so.’

  Oslak put a heavy hand on Torak’s shoulder.

  ‘No!’ cried Torak. ‘Listen! You say it’s the law, but – there’s another law, isn’t there?’ He caught his breath. ‘Trial by combat. We – we fight for it.’ He wasn’t sure if he’d got that right – Fa had only mentioned it once, when he was teaching him the law of the clans – but Fin-Kedinn’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ Torak insisted, forcing himself to give the Raven Leader stare for stare. ‘You don’t know for sure if I’m guilty, because you don’t know whether I actually knew the buck was yours. So we fight. You and me.’ He swallowed. ‘If I win, I’m innocent. I live. I mean, me and the wolf. If I lose – we die.’

  Some of the men were chuckling. A woman tapped her brow, shaking her head.

  ‘I don’t fight boys,’ said Fin-Kedinn.

  ‘But he’s right, isn’t he?’ said Renn. ‘It’s the oldest law of all. He has the right to fight.’

  Hord stepped forward. ‘I’ll fight him. I’m closer to him in age. It’ll be fairer.’

  ‘Not by much,’ Renn said drily.

  She was leaning against the tree from which Wolf was suspended. Torak saw that she’d loosened the neck of the bag a little, so that Wolf’s head was poking out. He looked bedraggled, but was gazing curiously down at the two dogs slavering beneath him.

  ‘What do you say, Fin-Kedinn?’ said the Mage. ‘The boy’s right. Let them fight.’

  Fin-Kedinn met the old woman’s eyes, and for a moment there seemed to be a battle of wills between them. Slowly, he nodded.

  Relief washed over Torak.

  Everyone seemed to be excited by the prospect of a fight. They talked in huddles, stamping their feet, their breath steaming in the chill evening air.

  Oslak tossed Torak his father’s knife. ‘You’ll need that. And a spear and an arm-guard.’

  ‘A what?’ asked Torak.

  The big man scratched the scar where his ear had been. ‘You know how to fight, don’t you?’