Fell (The Sight 2)
FELL
“Animal and human forces converge
… beautiful setting and character
depictions.” —
School Library Journal
“Full of rousing battles, detailed wolf
mythology, and lyrical descriptions, this
long, dark, involving tale will appeal to
fans of animal fantasy epics.” —
Kliatt
“Mesmerizing page-turner …
worth the trip.” —
Booklist
Contents
IN THE SHADOWS OF A LOOMING MOUNTAIN, deep within the mysterious land beyond the forest, a small grey wolf pack came weaving invisibly through the red gold trees and soaring pines. For a month the wolves had been fleeing for their lives, but their growing fear now was for their new surroundings, for they were passing through one of the most haunted regions in all of Transylvania, or so it was said.
They came as silently as ghosts themselves, swept along like leaves being scattered about them in the scurrying east wind. Yet their running forms seemed carved out by the wild landscape, in the natural facts of evolution, so they were almost perfectly camouflaged, shielded by the deepening colours of autumn change.
As they broke from the trees a Dragga and a Drappa appeared—the wolves’ own words for an Alpha male and female—running side by side, their fine heads up, their ears cocked forwards for any sounds of danger. They were followed into the open by four other healthy grey wolves, including a Beta male, two large cubs, and the smallest and weakest of the group, the Sikla, or Omega, wolf.
The Sikla had been trailing all day, and suddenly caught his front leg on a branch and went tumbling painfully forwards. His startled yelping was snatched away by the howling wind as he disappeared in a cloud of leaves and twigs, and the rest of the wolf pack turned and raced back towards him.
Wild wolves are group animals, fierce in their competitions and rivalries, but also deeply social creatures, pack beings who, when not battling for dominance, will work for the good of the whole. If one falters, or is injured, in the wild, they will do all they can to aid him, and then work to restore the balance of the group. Only when nature itself becomes the enemy of all might they abandon an injured pack member to his fate.
As the grey wolves surrounded the Sikla, the Dragga saw quickly that he was not injured after all, as he picked himself up and shook out his coat, and the Dragga’s look changed from concern to anger that this clumsiness had slowed their pace.
“Forgive me,” whispered the Sikla, “but I had a feeling that distracted me.”
“Feeling?” growled the Drappa, stepping up beside her mate. “What feeling?”
Wolves command the kingdom of the senses, and females especially trust their instincts completely. This Drappa had felt something too. Danger.
“I don’t really know,” answered the Sikla softly, but thinking nervously of ghosts. “I felt as if we’re being watched.”
“And I,” growled the Drappa, looking around gravely and scenting the air. “I’ve felt it for a while now. Could it still be the Vengerid?”
The cubs, a male and female as large as Alsatian dogs, but far more sinewy and vigorous than dogs, suddenly looked terrified.
“Hush,” snapped the Dragga. “Jalgan’s curs are long gone by now. I’ve led you all to safety.”
The Drappa growled, and the female cub wondered if her parents would argue again. With all the trials of the last few months, the adults had fought terribly on many occasions—loud, angry growls in the night—and the young cub hated it. It had made her so miserable, in fact, she had even thought of running away.
“Perhaps it’s man,” said the Beta wolf, scratching at the ground with his right paw and scenting too.
“No,” said the Dragga, “I always know when they’re about.”
The Sikla’s eyes narrowed.
“Another Varg then?” he suggested, using the wolf’s name for their own kind.
“I saw something,” ventured the female cub, “just after we crossed the stream back there, high up on the mountaintop. I think it’s a Kerl, Father.”
The powerful Dragga dropped his forehead in the gathering twilight and gave a low snarl, which made the Sikla back away. Apart from predators and common accidents, few things are more threatening to a wild wolf pack than a Kerl—a lone wolf. To highly sociable beings like grey wolves, a Kerl is surrounded with sadness and thoughts of bitter failure, but its presence also represents the mystery and threat of the dangerous world.
“No ghost then,” said the Sikla, trying to be reassuring.
“There’s something else though, Father,” said the she-cub nervously, “the shape I saw. Just for a moment, I thought it was pure black.”
The pack, who so often avoided direct eye contact for fear of arousing one another’s anger, were searching back and forth in the sudden silence, for the wind had dropped.
“You’re sure of this, child?” growled the Dragga.
A lone buzzard cried on the air and the she-cub shivered a little, but wagged her tail and nodded. “Yes, Father.”
“Oh, stop showing off,” said her brother suddenly. “You’re just telling stories of black wolves to get attention.”
“I’m not telling stories,” his sister snapped indignantly. “I did see it.”
They had been quarrelling all day too, and the young she-wolf glared at her sibling.
“Do you think it could be
him
, Father?” she said. “Fell. They say he haunts these parts.”
The Sikla whimpered at the name. These wolves were not of the region, for they were fleeing the Vengerid, a band of renegade wolves lead by the murderous Jalgan. But if Jalgan was to be feared, the name of Fell was like a curse to all the Varg of Transylvania.
Some said the lone black wolf was a ghost himself, whose spirit had returned from the Balkar Wars of more than five years before, to haunt the mountains and bring fear and hatred to the Free Wolves of Transylvania. To impressionable young cubs like these, although growing fast and less gullible by the day, Fell was associated with extraordinary powers too: from the ability to make himself invisible, and to send bolts of pain through his victims and blind them, to the power to fly and swoop through the night like a horrible winged grasht—a vampire.
When Varg cubs misbehaved, Fell was often invoked to discipline them. “Stop biting your sister, Child, or Fell will strike,” the adults might whisper ominously, or “Eat up your rabbit, or Fell will eat it for you. Then snap you up into the bargain.” His name was almost as fearful as the name of Wolfbane himself, the Evil One.
Of all the terrible tales told of the black loner though, living on his own high in the wild mountains, the one that troubled the grey wolves most was that Fell was said to possess the dark powers of the Sight.
The Sight was the ancient gift that the Putnar, the predators of the land and forests, had believed in since the dawn of time. A gift which only a rare few were born with. It was the power that comes through the forehead to talk to some of the animals, and to look into water—a river, or pool, or mountain stream—and see visions there of past, present, and future. The power to glimpse the thoughts of others too, and control wills and actions, and even to look into the very mind of man—a world as closed to the rest of the Lera as an island in a stormy sea.
“Mother,” said the she-cub suddenly, “is it true what they say of the Sight? That those who possess it can feel the pain of their own prey, even as they strike?”
The Drappa couldn’t answer her daughter, but she shivered and the she-cub wondered if a shape would suddenly swoop down on great black wings and drink her blood.
“And if it’s true Fell’s around here, Father,” whispered her brother, gulping now and wondering if the wild expanses around them were really haunted, “was such an evil wolf truly Larka’s brother?”
As he said it, a howl came to the pack’s ears that froze them in their paw marks. Wolves have many different calls in their journeys; howls of loneliness and of anger, howls of warning and of friendship. But this powerful cry, high up on the cliff above them, was so deep and filled with intelligence and longing, with pain and searching, that the very air seemed to grow chill, and the trees to drop their autumn leaves in sadness.
“Look, Father!” cried the male cub in terror. “Up there.”
The worried little family had seen it now, a dark speck on the jagged cliff edge, high above them. A single black wolf was standing on a beetling precipice, and looking down.
Up there it was as if the wolf had heard the family’s words and, in the naming of Larka, had been unable to keep silent. His strong black mouth opened even wider as he howled—a muzzle that had once carried terrible lies and anger within it—and his sharp fangs glittered savagely.
“It’s a Kerl, all right, and as black as night,” growled the Dragga far below. “Perhaps it really is Fell.”
It was hard to impress a brave Dragga like this one, but he had fear in his eyes, until the Sikla spoke.
“Perhaps we should never have left.” He trembled furiously. “Perhaps you should have taken Jalgan’s challenge.”
The Dragga glared at the Sikla, but his Drappa spoke again.
“He looks so strong,” she whispered as she peered up at the black wolf on the cliff’s edge. “Yet they say it all happened before I was even born. Fell should be old and grey by now, or even dead.”
“Then perhaps he really is a ghost,” growled her mate.
“Hush now. There’s no such thing. Not even in these parts.”
It wasn’t quite true what the Drappa said about Fell, even though she was talking of one of her own. If they survive infancy, wolves commonly live to about seven or eight, but they can last for twice as long in captivity. In nature it is not so much old age that takes them, but their failing strength in their struggles in the wild.
Yet there was something strangely youthful in the seven-year-old up there on the mountaintop, who turned suddenly and was gone. Fell began to climb, the hardened pads on his paws clawing vigorously on the leafy ground, lifting him higher and higher into the great Carpathian Mountains.
His yellow gold eyes, flecked with a sliver of pure green below the right iris, searched the distances ahead of him again, taking him away from the little wolf pack, and out once more into the lonely world.
The black wolf had made an easy kill that afternoon, a weak roebuck, and he could still taste meat and musk on his tongue. His belly was full, and he knew where he would rest for the night, in a low cave out of the fury of the east wind, bringing its scent of winter snows to Transylvania, carried from the great Russian Steppes and the freezing expanses of Siberia.
There the lone black wolf would sleep safe and warm, with no threat of other Putnar—other predators—to trouble his dreams. Dreams that were troubled enough already. Predators were plentiful in Transylvania, but apart from man and nature, only Putnar like the mountain bears posed any real threat to an Alpha wolf like Fell. He had scouted the cave the day before, marking it with his scent and eating a meal there, and had seen no sign of bear tracks at all.
With his recent kill, and this guarantee of a safe resting place for the night, the black wolf should have been in his element, even though Fell had also heard rumours of the ghosts in these parts. Yet the Kerl felt a pang in his heart, which made him whimper softly as he bounded upwards.
It was not the thought of ghosts, but the sight of the little wolf pack that had troubled Fell so deeply, for all morning he had been thinking of his own family, and just for a moment when he had first spied them, had wondered if it might be them; his parents Huttser and Palla, or his adopted brother Kar. Their fine new cubs too, his younger brothers and sisters. They should be five years old by now, and fully grown, and Fell wondered if they had cubs of their own.
His keen eyes darkened, and he asked himself where, in the great expanses of the land beyond the forest, they might be, or if his parents were even still alive. Huttser and Palla would be almost fourteen by now, if they had survived so long. It might be good to see them again, if only for a moment—a distant glimpse of the happy life of a wolf pack.
It had been Fell’s own choice to leave them, one sun long ago, and become a Kerl. After what had happened to him—how he had felt he had betrayed them—Fell had needed to hunt down the truth of life for himself. But it was all that Fell had seen and suffered, and all that he had learnt of wolf and man too in his dark journey, that had really driven him away.
The story had all begun more than seven years before, with the birth of two wolf cubs, Larka and Fell—one white and one black—in a cave below a great stone castle. Wolf cubs with an unusual gift that had attracted the attention of their wicked aunt Morgra. Their brave little family had protected them, defeated a curse, and wrestled with a legend, even at the cost of their own lives.
The white she-wolf Larka, Fell’s sister, had journeyed up to a mountain citadel called Harja, to confront Morgra and free a human child, snatched from a village below the castle. There, Larka had used the Sight to touch the child’s mind, bringing a vision of man and nature that had opened the minds of all animals, the Lera, to the Great Secret: that man is an animal too. She herself had fulfilled a legend that had promised to bring forth the greatest Putnar the world had ever seen.
For ordinary Varg the stories of it were now largely myths shared in the pack dens, or during a hunt to lighten a weary day. But they persisted, for the defeat of Morgra and her pack of male killers—the Balkar—and the return of the stolen human child to its own, allowed the grey wolves of Transylvania to roam at will again; in freedom and peace through these beautiful lands, hunting and living as they wished.