Fell (The Sight 2) (43 page)

“So the wolf is gone, Alina?” whispered Catalin.

“Fell,” cried Alina suddenly. “Will you wait here for me, Catalin? There’s something I must do.”

Alina ran down the steps to the battlements and out across the plain. Darkness was coming now, and as she hurried towards the trees on this side of the river, her heart was thundering. She knew that what Morgra had said of man and wolf was true, that they were not meant to be together. Alina WovenWord had her world and Fell had his. They were set apart, but perhaps they could learn to honour each other.

“Fell? Are you there, Fell?” she cried as she reached the trees. No sounds came back, except the chattering of birds and the shadows put a fear in Alina’s mind that perhaps Fell had gone already. It couldn’t be.

Then she saw the wolf, standing quietly by an oak tree, waiting.

“Oh, Fell, dear Fell. I was worried I’d be too late.”

Fell growled, but Alina felt the ache in her mind, though faintly now, like a memory of childhood.

“I could not leave, human, without saying farewell.”

“You have to go?”

The wolf whimpered slightly.

“Yes, Alina. I have my own. I …”

As Alina knelt down, she heard Fell’s thoughts turning to growls, and she felt a violent tugging at her heart. It felt as if it were breaking. Alina lifted her hand and touched the wolf’s muzzle softly, then she stroked his dear head. The tears were streaming down her face.

“Thank you, Fell. For everything you’ve done. For bringing me home.”

Fell’s great yellow gold eyes blinked slowly, and he raised his black paw and placed it gently in Alina’s hand. She grasped it.

“Everything we have done together, friend.”

Alina was filled with sorrow, yet she knew that her friend had to be wild and free, and bravely she tried to hold back her tears and be strong for him. Fell whimpered again, and licked one of the tears from Alina’s cheek. Then again she threw her arms about the wolf’s neck and hugged him, before she pushed him away for a final time.

“Go, Fell. Quickly. I cannot bear this pain. I will remember you always.”

Alina stood, and Fell growled one more time, before he turned to the shadows and was gone. There were still tears in Alina’s hazel eyes as she mounted the palace steps again, and now great flickering tapers had been lit, which reminded the young woman of the halls of the Helgra. Catalin was still standing there, waiting for her.

“Oh, Catalin,” said Alina desperately. “He’s gone.”

The young storyteller stepped forwards and took her tenderly in his arms and held her again.

“Come, you two,” said a voice suddenly.

They turned to see Romana walking towards them once more.

“Mother?”

“There’s much to be done, Alina, and undone too. First we shall feast, and give thanks for our blessings. You must tell us some of your stories, while this handsome young man shall sit by me, Alina,” said Romana, “if you, and your father, will allow it.”

Alina almost blushed as her mother took Catalin by the arm.

“And you, Ovidu,” said Romana, as she saw the Helgra leader mounting the steps to the battlements too, leading a proud old man, with tears in his blind eyes, by the arm. “You’ll sit by me as well, with your father, Ilyan. For I would talk of my people and hear our songs again.”

Ovidu smiled, but there was a great sadness in his eyes. He was thinking of his brother.

“If we have the heart to sing, my lady.”

“Cascu’s own actions have punished him,” said Romana softly, understanding the look, “but the Helgra must decide his fate.”

There was laughter in the party as they began to walk towards Dragomir through those burning tapers, but suddenly Alina turned and looked back. It was no sound that had made her turn. No howl. It was the sense of it.

There, high on the hill above the palace walls in the moonlight, where the Vengerid had saluted him, was a single black shape. Fell stood all alone and Alina shivered. As she gazed at her wild friend, he dipped his muzzle.

“Good-bye, Fell,” she whispered, as the others’ laughter rose around her. “You shall walk with me, always. If not in fact now, then in thought at least. No, in memory, and in stories.”

There were tears in Alina’s eyes again as the storyteller turned, but turn she did, for she heard the irresistible pull of human voices, and high up there on the mountainside, another shape stepped up next to Fell in the darkness.

“Come,” said Tarlar softly. “It’s time.”

“Time?” said Fell almost sadly. “Time to let thoughts of these humans go?”

“Why not, Fell? Time to remember our own world, for the humans are dark indeed. More even than for each other, they seem to have a fondness for demons.”

“The only demons are in their own minds, Tarlar,” growled Fell. “And such strange minds they have.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s as if they have the power to make things that are impossible come true. Yet perhaps, because of their minds, they are not impossible at all. Would not that vision seem impossible if the Lera hadn’t seen it with their own eyes?”

Fell seemed lost in thought.

“But I’ve seen evil amongst them, Fell.”

“Evil? Yes, there is evil, very great evil, but it is not outside them like some sickness, Tarlar, or a winged grasht, it’s inside them. Or the potential for it. Perhaps only if they recognise that will they be free. Perhaps too, if they recognise that they’ve a right to some of their darkness and anger and pain. If they know and love their own clever natures. And now the animals have shown them too.”

“Are you all right, Fell?”

The black wolf was lifting his gaze then to the heavens and the stars that were beginning to glitter wonderfully above them. The Wolf Trail.

“I had a dream, last night,” he answered, gazing up longingly, “in the thin, formless hours of the morning after the battle.”

“A dream, Fell?”

“I saw you, Tarlar, standing on a hill, calling to me. But somehow I was afraid. Then as I began to walk towards you, there were spectres all about me from the Red Meadow, and as I went they began to talk to me.”

“Talk to you?”

“With sadness, Tarlar, and longing and accusation. It was like the Gauntlet that my parents spoke of once, when they were with the rebel wolves. I was in a Gauntlet of voices, and all of them were trying to hold me back, because of their own fear and pain and confusion.”

Tarlar lifted her paw and touched him on the flank.

“But I remembered those old words about a courage as deep as despair, and then I heard another voice. ‘No, Fell,’ it cried passionately. ‘Go to her. Live and be free.’ At that voice I began to run, as fast as a river, and it grew stronger, like a wind I heard in a cave. ‘Yes, Fell. Life is wonderful, so revel in its beauty. Be all you can be, and let go of the past. It is nothing but shadows.’

“And then I had broken out beyond that terrible Gauntlet of doubting and self-doubt, and I no longer felt sad or guilty, and as I swung my head, I saw her standing there again, shining like moonlight, my sister Larka, watching me kindly. She said one thing to me then. ‘It’s a lovely place’ was all that Larka whispered.”

“Perhaps she’s been watching over you all along,” said Tarlar.

Fell thought of the voice that had begun it all and Larka’s great face in the ice cliff and he wondered.

“Even if Tor and Fenris are nothing but stories, or fables for cubs, perhaps she has,” he said. “Because she’s been there, if only in my memories. And I knew then too that even though my father had not the words, he did say good-bye, and give me a blessing when he died. Because if he was only working it out within himself, it does not mean it was not directed towards me too. ‘Open,’ he said, ‘open like a flower.’ ”

Tarlar nodded.

“And then I had another dream,” said Fell, “of Huttser and Palla together. They were young again and smiling at me from the highest mountaintop. It was night, but the air was filled with a shining glow from the stars, that seemed to reach down from the heavens and glitter like dewdrops in the grass around them. Their tails were raised and suddenly they began to run, and the carpet of the stars lifted them up and carried them heavenwards, racing up the skies, up there towards the Wolf Trail.”

“How wonderful, Fell,” whispered Tarlar gravely, looking up.

“Yes. I knew they were going to Tor and Fenris. Just as I know now that the world is made up of far more than what we call real. Perhaps that reality is only what we see, Tarlar, but the true reality is what lies beyond us, and our struggling, clouded understandings, which seem to change all the time.”

Tarlar nodded.

“And suddenly another shape was running at their side, young and innocent and free, but not with the innocence of childhood, with the innocence of knowledge and self-knowledge, and of joy. Running beside her dear sister, Palla. Running happily, her ears raised above her head. It was Morgra.”

The wolves were looking up at the Wolf Trail together, and suddenly, just as it had been with Catalin and Alina, it was as if nothing of the terrible history of the Sight had happened at all, and the world was as young and happy and fresh as ever.

“Death,” whispered Tarlar, “you do not fear it, Fell? By water, or any other way?”

“What is there to fear?” answered the black wolf. “If it is an end, then so be it. For there is no pain in that, except the pain left to the living. I once thought, and felt with the Sight, that I could see the pain of the whole world, and it grew and grew like a sea. But though all feel pain, it does not join together like individual droplets in a pool. A million deaths is really only one death. And if death is not an end, then what more wonderful journey, if we do not fear it? We must have courage to face the truth, and the future.”

“Come, Fell,” said Tarlar, “we’ll run happy and free through the world, together, until we too must walk the Wolf Trail in our turn. For that is as it must be.”

“Wait, Tarlar, there’s something I must do first.”

“Do?”

Fell had stepped away again and raised his muzzle.

“I must howl, Tarlar. For I must ask their forgiveness too. Only they can let me go, I think.”

Fell’s sleek black muzzle lifted and his cry rose in the air.
Aaooow
. It sang in the night, weaving a mysterious wildness over the gathering revellers below, as if casting a wild spell to protect them from any harm. But Fell was not talking to them alone.

“For you,” cried the black wolf’s howl. “For all who are lost, or alone, or frightened in the world. For we are all lost, and all frightened. For any in pain too, or in sorrow, and for any who can no longer tell the light from the darkness, the sadness from the joy. I must leave you now, for I’ve found my way, for a time at least, and I wish you well.”

The howl went on in the night, like a wonderful song, yet both more and less than a song, and as it did so it seemed to the black wolf as if the world was changing. As if the things he saw about him, the trees and the forest and the palace, he no longer had words for at all, and so he no longer knew what they were.

“But I let you know that I too have seen what you have seen, and felt what you have felt,” cried Fell. “I have suffered as you have suffered. For all things walk the same way. But now, for the last time, I, Fell of the Mountaintops, give you my blessing. So listen well, for love’s greatest art is to listen.”

Fell’s mind was already losing the memories of the journey he had made with Alina Sculcuvant and the humans, and as it did so the smells on the wind became stronger, the ground firmer beneath his paws, the mystery of the wild, of life itself, deeper and deeper. Then a distant voice was whispering to the wolf, yet not a voice at all, a boom from the mouth of a cave:
A path that will free you at last
, it said.

The beautiful song ceased and Fell turned back to Tarlar.

“Come then,” cried the black wolf, although his words had become nothing but powerful wild growls.

Then the two of them were running, side by side, their brilliant yellow gold eyes flashing like stars, searching through the darkness, as the Dragga and the beautiful Drappa vanished down the chasms of the welcoming night.

By The Same Author

The Sight by David Clement-Davies

1 The Stone Den

‘I cannot tell my story without going a long way back.’ Herman Hesse, the prologue to Demian

In the beginning
was a castle high on a craggy precipice. The air around it was so cold that it seemed that the sky itself would crack like ice. Night was beginning to fall around its walls and the great stone stairway which rose up and up towards the castle through the vaulting pines. The huge, weathered steps disappeared into darkness and the shadows reaching out from the forest far below clawed their way towards a little village nestling just beneath the cliffs.

All around the sky was draining of colour, the air growing pale and bloodless, as the dying circle of the sun finally disappeared behind the crags. Beyond the castle the range of the Carpathian mountains rose into the distance, like mighty clouds frozen into lonely monoliths below an infinite heaven.

The conifers climbing the valley slopes were laden with snow and their tops smoked eerily in the coming darkness. Now and then a mound of snow would topple to the forest floor with a muffled thud that quivered through the air like the boom of distant thunder. It was the only sound in the wood. The stillness that settled now across the country was as deep as the blackness beginning to swallow up Transylvania, the land beyond the forest.

But there was life in the wood; a single pair of hungry, searching eyes. They were moving rapidly through the twilight, glittering furiously in the shadows as they came. Their intelligence, the ancient cunning of the predator, and their febrile, nervous brilliance made them seem thoroughly human. But they were far from human – for they belonged to a Lera, a wild animal. There was a longing and profound curiosity in those strange,semi-transparent orbs, and as night swelled they became even more aware of the shadow world around them.

As the darkness thickened, the wolf’s pace through the trees grew even faster and its pupils opened wider, seeming to draw in the last rays of light. Then, as it came to a sudden stop at the edge of the wood and peered out towards the glow of fires twinkling from the village at the western edge of the valley, those eyes changed colour. For the wolf has a power that Man himself has always longed for, the power to see in the dark. Gold suddenly turned to a brilliant greenish yellow.

It was a grey wolf, very common to Transylvania, but its strength and size was unusual. It was clearly a Dragga – an alpha male, dominant in its pack – but it was bigger than most. Its fur was a beautiful glittering silver grey, though its tail was tinged with red. It had a strong, handsome face, with brilliant white fangs and gums as pink and healthy as the flesh of a new plum.

From where the wolf was standing he could just spy humans moving about on the edge of the village, stooping in the night to collect wood for their fires, and his nose curled into the beginnings of a snarl. But suddenly a wind raked the forest, and in the surrounding air giant flakes began to flurry from the heavens. The wolf swung up his head and there was fear in his eyes. ‘It’s starting again,’ he growled bitterly. ‘The cave. I must find the cave.’

The wolf started to run once more. To ordinary eyes he was almost invisible against the snowline and he seemed to float as he came. His ears were up and his senses so alert that his muscles quivered as he ran. But he had hardly gone any way at all when he heard the snap of a twig in the wood. He swung round instantly and the snarl that came from his jaws had a killing threat in it. But as another muzzle appeared through the trees, the wolf relaxed a little, although his eyes were still blazing.

‘Palla,’ he cried angrily, ‘don’t ever sneak up on me like that. I thought you were a Night Hunter.’

The female coming towards him was a dominant also, or Drappa as wolves call them, but she had a beautiful sleek muzzle and bushy, silver ears. She was as lean and graceful as a mountain leopard. Only her swollen stomach and the exhaustion in her tread spoke of the cubs that now lived in her belly. Palla was close to her time.

NOW READ ON at Amazon, or by going to 
www. phoenixarkpress. com