The Sight (56 page)

Kar looked up at the castle.  The twilight cast flickering shadows across its walls.  Bands of light and dark were stroking its battlements.

‘Oh no,’ said Kar, ‘there’s nothing up there for a wolf.  Just empty ruins.’

‘How do you know?’ asked little Kipcha disbelievingly.

‘I just know, Kipcha,’ answered Kar softly, nuzzling the little Sikla towards him as if to protect her from the world.  The cubs looked at Kar and they suddenly thought how very grown up he was.

‘The Sight, Kar,’ Skop piped suddenly.  ‘Tell us the legend of the Sight.’

Hush, little one,’ said Kar, wondering what Huttser and Palla had been telling their children, but as he looked down at the cub he shivered.  He had seen a glint in his eye, a little mischievous twinkle, and for a moment he was reminded of when he had first met Larka by the Meeting Place.

‘You are too young, Skop.  You have plenty of time to learn of such things.’

‘Then tell us a hunting tale,’ whispered Khaz.

‘Oh yes,’ cried Larka, pretending to bite her brother, ‘tell us about Wolfbane.  Will he come again?’

A note came to them suddenly across the wind and they all looked up.  There, standing on a rock above the castle, silhouetted against the brilliant starlight, stood Fell.  The black wolf’s howl rose from his lifting muzzle and came loud and mournful to their ears.

In the trees something stirred.  It swivelled its head slowly away from Fell and its piercing eyes turned in a circle, once more, to the little family of wolves at their Meeting Place.  As it watched Kar, and Huttser and Palla’s cubs, those yellow-black eyes blinked slowly.  Then the eagle’s great wings opened and it lifted into the sky.

On the mountain high above them other voices had begun to answer Fell.  He turned and, without once looking back, the black wolf vanished into the night.

‘No, Larka,’ whispered Kar as he watched his brother go.

‘I won’t tell you a story of Wolfbane.’ The cubs started to grumble.

‘But I will tell you a better story.’ The children looked up happily.

‘It was when Tor the Varg goddess mated with the great god Fenris and their mating first brought forth the earth.’

Kar paused and his eyes twinkled.

‘Before they had made the waters and the forests or the Lera to roam in them.  Before they made Dammam and Va who gave birth to Fren, who slew his brother Barl and made all Lera forgetful;.  Before they made Man, the strangest Lera.  Before they did any of this they looked out on the universe and they were glad at what they saw.’

‘Why, uncle Kar?’ cried the cubs.  ‘What was that?’

‘Why that was the stars, my little ones,’ growled Kar, lifting his proud eyes to the endless heavens.  ‘For in the beginning there was light.’

As a she-cub is whelped with a coat that is white,
And a human child stolen to suckle the Sight
From a place where injustice was secretly done
Then the Marked One is here and a legend begun.
When Wolfbane is dreamt of with terror and dread,
And untamed are tamed, prepare for the dead
For the Shape Changer’s pact with the birds will come true,
When the blood of the Varg blends with Man in the dew,
As the Searchers are tempted, who hunger and prowl
Down the Pathways of Death, by the summoning howl.
Then the third of the powers will be fleshed on the bone
And the Searchers tempt nature to prey on its own.
With blood at the altar, the Vision shall come
When the eye of the moon is as round as the sun.
In the citadel raised by the lords of before,
The stone twins await – both the power and the law.
Then the past and the future shall finally show,
To the wounded, the secret the Lera must know.
And all shall be witness to that which will be,
In the mind of the Man Varg, then none shall be free.
And only a family both loving and true,
May conquer the evil, so ancient, so new.
As they fight to uncover what secrets they share
And behold in their journey how painful is care.
Their faith shall be tried by the makers of life,
Beware the Betrayer, whose meaning is strife
For who shall divine, in the dead of the night,
The lies from the truth, the darkness from light?
Like the cry of the scavenger, torn through the air
A courage is needed, as deep as despair.’

‘When the Lore is bruised and broken, Shattered like a blasted tree, Then shall Herne be justly woken, Born to set the Herla free.’ Herla Prophecy

A lone red deer was grazing across the glen swaying through the deep tangle of heather which covered the hillside. The stag’s coat glinted russet and gold in the dying sunlight slanting down the valley and on its head a pair of ragged antlers reared into the sky, like coral or the branches of a winter oak.

The stag was a royal with twelve spikes, or tines, on its proud head and its antlers marked it out instantly as an animal of power and distinction. The antlers’ beams were covered in summer velvet, the downy grey coating that lines new antlers as they grow. From their base, the two sharp brow tines flayed out like curved daggers. Above them the bez tines were slightly smaller and, further up the beams, the trez tines rose larger again, before the antlers flowered into their high cups.

The stag’s fur was already thick but this could not hide a series of cuts and wounds on its sides and haunches, the marks of innumerable battles, and a livid scar that ran from the bottom of its neck clear to the base of its spine. The deer was not an unusual sight in the glen, for although this was long ago, in the days when the Great Land was still known to many men as Scotia, red deer were as plentiful then as they are in our own time. But it was unusual to see such a magnificent animal and such a splendid head of antlers.

Suddenly the stag flinched and swung its head towards the beech wood on the edge of the western slope. Its ears pressed forward, its muscles tensed and its nostrils began to flare, sending out wreaths of vapour that hung in the air. The stag’s huge eyes pierced the thickening twilight, casting restlessly along the shadow of the trees. But the scent it had caught on the breeze was lost and the deer’s head returned to its mossy pasture, nosing through the undergrowth, rooting out the juiciest of the summer stems.

As it went the deer’s legs carried it gently back and forth like rushes on a pond. Now and then its hoofs would slip into a crevice, hidden below the deepening covering of vegetation, but the stag never once lost its footing. Its great body would compensate instinctively, like some huge yet graceful cat, so that it seemed almost to be a part of the landscape around it, inseparable from the contours which made up its home.

All around the silence was deepening with the evening. The stillness was broken only by the distant cry of a goshawk glorying in the hunt, the lonely hallooing of a night owl or the cracking flurry of a pheasant as it broke cover and exploded into the gloom. But everyday sounds like these did not frighten such an experienced animal. The stag’s body might brace to deflect the sudden violence of the noise, but it went on feeding. A hind or a young buck might have been unnerved by these sounds. But not a beast that had spent so many years in the Corps. Not the veteran of countless battles. Not a deer whose sight, smell and sense had taken him so quickly up the ranks of the herd. Not Brechin, Captain of the Outriders.

Brechin had reached a rocky hillock, purple with vegetation, and he was just settling in to enjoy a thick sprig of gorse when he suddenly threw up his head again. Now his eyes shone with recognition at the scent he had just caught again. But this time Brechin snorted and stamped the ground angrily. He dropped his antlers, then, aiming his head towards the north-west corner of the wood, he raced off along the edge of the valley, tossing his head as he ran. As he neared the wood he began to swing his antlers right and left in a great arc and then, abruptly, no more than three branches’ length from the trees, he crashed to a halt and stamped the earth.

‘So,’ he shouted furiously. ‘Now Herla spy on Herla?’ Brechin had used the deer’s name for their own kind, but it brought no response. From far away the cry of an eagle haunted the breeze but nothing stirred in the wood.

‘Come, I’m no green hind to be stalked like a rabbit,’ continued Brechin. Show yourself. I nosed you on the other side of the valley.’

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The Sight is a darker book than my first novel, Fire Bringer, perhaps because it came out of emotional difficulties for me, the end of a relationship.  It also has many adult fans, so it is published by Phoenix Ark not only as a Children’s book, but as a ‘cross-over title’, which Phoenix hope will be enjoyed by all.  Children’s’ writing is a great tradition, perhaps the greatest, but the best fantasy books, as well as creating doorways into ‘other’ worlds, are very often an introduction into the entire world of adult literature too.

It also came directly out of a trip I made to Romania, in 1990, just after the revolution there, that saw the end of Communism in Eastern Europe. For five weeks, in the coldest winter, I travelled through that country with a friend called Sophie Thurnam.  It had many beauties, in the wonder on the Carpathian Mountains, the very extraordinary painted monasteries of Bukovina, and some ravishing landscape.  It had many darknesses too though, in the poverty we saw, the fear and confusion circulating, the legacy of the dictator Ceaucescu’s regime, and a land stuck in a kind of time warp and brutalised mind-set.

Although it was written on a hilltop in Spain, all these things began to inform the spirit of The Sight, as of course did the legends there, from Vlad the Impaler to Dracula.  Certain events too, like the appearance of the woodcutter, or a visit to ‘Dracula’s Castle’, used at the start, were based on direct experience. Wolves too feature much in Romanian folklore, often distorted by human spiritual belief systems, to become a creature of ‘evil’, when wolves are very far from that, and man might learn much from them.

It is one of the points of the book, to try and distinguish human and conscious labels like good and evil, from the often tough yet beautiful, and of course inevitably harsh realities of struggling nature, which people, as part animals, are involved in too.  With that then there is also the theme of ‘the Balkans’, a region historically riven by conflict, which gave me the idea for the Balkar. Just as Kosovo became the field of Kosov.

The terrible civil war that erupted between Eastern European countries in the collapse of Yugoslavia, and the fight between religious and ethnic groups, especially Christian and Muslim, seems to have had echoes far beyond Eastern Europe, reaching perhaps to the tragedy of the Twin Towers.

One critic called The Sight ‘a heart-breaking work of imaginative vision’.  Perhaps the heartbreak is that prevailing question of whether man, with his extraordinary mind and imagination, can ever step beyond the atavistic hates and conflicts that seem to beset us everywhere.  Perhaps that is the point of Larka’s love, and her transcendence.  A consciousness that can wake up to something far beyond simple opposites.

I woke up too to my own disillusionment with modern publishing, when my own search for love and happiness fell foul of someone who did not realise how close my books are to my own emotional journeys, and philosophical struggles.  Perhaps too close. I wish they had read the book that nearly healed it all for me, the sequel to The Sight, Fell.  Since they were at the very publisher in New York that published Fell, it all became a bridge too far.

That was a sad, but also rather remarkable story in itself, since another book I was writing seemed to confirm something of a real power of The Sight, in an example of what is to me proof of some kind of power of precognition, that suggests the mind is far more powerful than we think, or perhaps just as powerful as we really know it is.

Hence the birth though of Phoenix Ark Press, ‘the Storyteller’s Publisher’, built by writers, for writers and artists.  The Phoenix is of course the mythical bird that rises from the ashes, the Ark a protective emblem, both for animals and perhaps animal storytellers too.  It is a little cottage industry, but in that we hope to maintain something essential, in this world of frantic branding, and massive bestseller-led competition, a real respect for the writer’s craft, and a deep a love of story.  I hope you will join the adventure, and share in some of our creations, but you can find us, now, at
www.phoenixarkpress.com
.  There you will also be able to share, free, a serialized story as it’s written -
Dragon in the Post
.  It would be wonderful to have you come along.  DCD 2011

For Children and Adults

Fire Bringer by David Clement-Davies (eBook edition)