It was two yards square and mounted upon leather. The mountains and lakes and forests had been worked out of leather and colored and glued to the map so that it was like a model of the countryside. There were the two great systems of mountains, one in the east and one in the west. The eastern chain rose in the northeast of the Chameln land, around a mountain province called Vedan, home of the Aroshen, an ancient tribe whom the Nureshen regarded as primitive and quarrelsome. It reached its highest point beyond the tip of the inland sea, the Dannermere, then went on, past the area of this map, down the Eastmark of Mel’Nir. The western mountain chain formed the border range with its thick forest, dividing Athron from the Chameln lands and stretching down into Cayl and Mel’Nir. This chain was highest in the northwest: the mountains rose up and marched across the roof of the world. Ramparts of peaks and valleys threaded by rivers of ice ended in a patch of whiteness, the distant north where no mortal man had ever been.
Between these two chains of mountains, east and west, there stretched a rising plain shaped like a river itself and this was called the Boganur, which might mean the “hard northern ground” in the old speech of these parts. It was a hunting ground for the tribes; a hardy breed of fur-trappers lived there and even wintered there in caves and ice huts. I saw a small tarn called Last Lake and beyond it a camp on the Boganur. Near this camp was a valley that led to a river of ice, and further northwest was a mountain with a scrap of red wool on its crest. I asked if this was a fire mountain.
The shaman, who knew the common speech, answered that it was and pointed to other warm places. Here was a lake with boiling pools at its edges and here another fire mountain that had destroyed a village with its lava stream a hundred years ago. I still peered into the northwest and marked my own map to correspond with the shaman’s map. I saw certain camps or villages marked in the mountains not far from the fire mountain, Egilla, that had first caught my eye and asked if these places were inhabited by a tribe known as the Children of the White Wolf.
“That may be what they call themselves,” said the shaman. “We call them Garmicha, the children of Garm.”
“Who is this Garm?” I asked. “Is it some god?”
“It is a giant,” said the holy man. “He is a half-god, a hero, and some say that he lives among those mountains and that while he lives there the winters will never be too hard for mortal men to bear. The word has been taken into the old speech, sir, to mean giant. Have you not heard of the Morrigar, the giant-killers?”
His smile was positively sly. I knew who the giant-killers were very well: the men and women of the Great Ambush who had killed so many men of Mel’Nir at the Adderneck Pass.
Now I knew at least where to go. I bade farewell to my kind hosts of the Nureshen and to my good brown steed, for large horses were not used on the Boganur. I set out with a family of trappers for Last Lake. It was another strange country in which I found myself, beautiful at this time of year, with wild flowers and the white and purple heather. It swarmed with life: snow birds, in brown and white plumage, rose up clumsily at our approach. Small deer and the fierce wolf-cats, who preyed on them, whisked away into the stunted firs. I walked and was sometimes carried on a pony sledge. We came upon trappers with a team of dogs drawing their sledge, and the first whiff of Zengor almost drove them mad. The white wolf loved this new country. He brought me game, and in the night he howled at the moon like a true wolf.
“Peace,” I said. “Hush, Zengor. Do not run off to the wolves.”
The journey to Last Lake took many days. It was still very cold in the northern spring weather; the trappers told me that summer was coming, but I did not think it would be a true summer for me. I had a fur blanket, which I could use as a cloak, two pairs of boots from the Nureshen, and all that I needed to make camp. I bathed one last time in the manner of Mel’Nir, immersing myself in the waters of Last Lake; I understood why bathhouses full of dry heat were popular in this country.
I would not stay, but moved on alone with only Zengor for company and set my face towards the northwest. I found the camp marked on the map, a few wretched huts, deserted. I had provisions and even a bow, although I am not a good shot with this queer little tribal weapon. Zengor brought me snow hens, and I had some lucky shots at the hares. We worked our way steadily through the valley that led to the river of ice.
I saw no one. The slopes of the mountains were bare and stony, patched with hard, yellowish snow. There were few birds and beasts in the valley and on the river of ice. Zengor shared my dried meat and fruit porridge. Then we noticed a slight warmth in the sun . . . summer was coming, even to this icy place. I found the going hard, on the ice itself or on the edge of the river, strewn with boulders. We came to a patch of scrub and feasted on a snow hare, our first meat in many days. Far off, on the river bank, I saw a tall, pocked stone, a black rock.
I was lonely and the way was hard. I saw no sign of the Children of the White Wolf. At last the black rock was reached, and I climbed it with Zengor whining at the base. It was near evening or what passed for evening in a land where the sun never set. Fingers of light came through the mountains to the west, and when I looked over the ice river I had a shock. A giant figure was poised in the air against a cliff. Garm had come out of his lair. I raised a hand, and the mist giant raised a hand. It was my own spectre that I saw.
I stared until the landscape blurred but could not see the fire mountain. Then the sun went a little lower, and I glimpsed a smudge of cloud or smoke. There was only one peak in a dark ridge. I realised at last the madness of the whole journey. Had the Alraune really existed? Was she some conjuring of my brain? Had an evil spirit played a trick on me to lead me into the wilderness?
In the morning we went on, and for the first time the sun was warm. We made better time and came to a place where the ice river curved away to the north to seek an icy sea. I could see the fire mountain plainly now, a broken volcanic cone, and when at last I came to its base, it was clear that there had once been three of these cones. Now two were worn down to heaps of rock and rubble, the size of a high ridge; perhaps an earthquake had brought them down. The remaining mountain smoked dangerously through its crest and through side vents. The ground seemed to move under our feet. Scrub pines and bushes flourished in the sandy, sulphurous warmth of the place, and a jet of steaming water came up out of the ground almost at our feet and then fell away again.
“There is nothing for it,” I said to Zengor. “We must go over the wall!”
It took me more than a day to climb over the stony barrier. We spent one night on a ledge and went on as the sun began to climb. From the top of the broken cones, I could see nothing but frowning masses of rock, impassable ridges, and to the north and west, snowy summits. We scrambled down into a narrow valley absolutely dark and full of ashes and crept forward hardly able to breathe. Zengor whined and protested. The valley led nowhere. We came to a wall of solid rock.
I lit a torch to see the face of the rock before me; it was patterned by wind and weather, and glassy in places as if it had been hardened in fire. Nothing grew on this wall, but I saw a scrap of brown lichen. I touched it, and my hand shook. It was caught right in the wall as if it grew from the rock, and when I tugged to draw it out it broke away. I held in my palm half of a dried oak leaf. I planted my torch in the ashes and began to feel the rock wall with my fingers. I pushed on it. I spread my arms wide and lay against the wall and pushed with a gentle, even pressure. Zengor who had been watching his foolish master, suddenly let out a howl and began to dig furiously in the ashes at the base of the wall.
There was a low rumbling like distant thunder; the wall began to move. A huge slab of rock pivoted and swung me along with it. I had only a moment to step back and seize my belongings. Zengor raced through the opening in the wall, and I stumbled after him. The rock swung shut behind us. I stood half blinded by the light; it was the light of the sun, but it came to me as a blaze of pure green: green of the thick grass; the reeds that grew by the purling s
tream; green of the foliage of the oak trees, saplings, young trees and trees so old that they might have been planted in the morning of the world, here in lost Ystamar.
III
I had come for the third time in my life into a magic place and I made it my home. The oaks of Ystamar are wise, but they do not speak: I believe they have accepted me. I have explored the valley, but it still holds many secrets. I know many paths in and out between the frowning ridges, but I do not think that anyone can enter this place unless it is permitted. The valley has its seasons; the oaks lose their leaves in autumn and stand bare in winter; but the winter is mild, with a few light falls of snow. Beyond the valley the winter is unbearably harsh, a long night, lit by the fires of the Goddess, the fiery curtains of the northern lights, which I see over the northern mountains. When the blizzards rage, birds and animals come to take refuge in Ystamar. I thought at first that I should not kill game or fish for my food, but I could not keep this rule. I am a flesh-eater, like Zengor.
I set to work in that first summer and built myself a house out of stone and clay. I built it beside a huge hollow oak in which I had been sleeping, and when I woke up one morning, I found that a “dead” branch of the tree had swung round in the night to make the roof of my house. I thatched and daubed this branch into place and used the tree’s mighty hollow trunk as one room of my house. I added other rooms and lined the house with reeds.
On the banks of the stream I planted the core of the apple from Liran’s Isle, and it grew and thrived. Emboldened by this I thrust my good ash staff into the ground. I was loath to lose it, but there were many staffs of oak for me to use if I needed them. After sometime, I saw that the ash staff had been wakened to life again and had taken root.
I made a calendar out of a slab of white stone embedded in a hillside on the north side of the valley. I scratched the days deep in the stone and colored them with charcoal. I made a writing ink and filled up with about half of my life the book of blank pages that Hagnild had given me. Then I set about making more paper to write the rest. I tried for a kind of woven reed paper that Hagnild had showed me, and in the end I had something very like it. I made clumsy clay vessels but could not fire them and simply dried them in the sun.
Zengor roamed the whole of the valley and was happy. In the first winter we heard wolves in the distance, but I do not think any came into the valley. I mused on his life as I did on my own. He was not a true wolf, his nature had been changed because he had been tamed. I could not tell what my true nature was. I was very lonely at times, at others very contented, as I had been on Liran’s Isle without my memory. In the second spring I decided to revisit the world.
I studied my map, went out of a certain way between the rocks on the west side of the valley and strode off through the mountains towards a marked camp. The going was heavy, but I was in good training. I passed through a long valley and came over the shoulder of a mountain, sinking into last year’s drifts. I came round a cairn of stones, and there they were: three shaggy, stunted folk with bow and spear. They stood stock still when I appeared. Zengor ran towards me down a steep bank, and I was afraid of their spears. I raised a hand and called to them in my few words of the Old Speech.
“We come in peace!”
Their reaction was strange. One turned and ran, one flung himself face downwards into the snow. The third remained upright, but his spear fell from his hand. I leashed Zengor, then walked closer. Slowly the fallen one, who was a young boy, raised himself up, clinging to his comrade. They stared at me as if their black eyes would never shut again. I said “Peace,” to them again, and the man who still stood whispered, “Peace.”
“I seek Ark, Chieftain of the Children of the White Wolf!” I said.
“Ark.” The man nodded. “Ark is our Chief . . .”
He pointed in the direction in which the third hunter had run off, shook his dazed companion and hurried away with gestures to me to follow. They kept a good distance ahead but kept looking back as if to make sure I had not vanished. We came to the place marked on my map, and it was a large village, almost a town, with leather tents and storehouses of stone. The place was in an uproar; the people ran about like ants, and a word grew out of the murmuring and crying: Garm . . . Garm . . . Garm.
The chieftain was coming to meet me. He was thickset and ferociously ugly, distinguished from his fellows by an air of command. The people thrust back against the tents at his word, and he came on alone so that we met in the middle of the village beside a rough well.
“Ark?” I said. “I bring greeting from the Queen of the Firn in the Chameln lands.”
He bobbed his head, turned and called up a younger man and presented him to me . . . his son Kizark. This fellow had the common speech better than his father.
“I am called Yorath,” I said, “and my tame wolf here is called Zengor.”
“Do you live in the mountains?”
The question came from Ark.
“Yes,” I said. “I live alone. I am a hermit.”
They whispered together.
I said, “I am not Garm. I am a mortal man.”
“You are a giant, Lord,” said Kizark boldly.
“I am a man of Mel’Nir, a distant country,” I said, “where many men are of my stature.”
“Did the queen send greeting?” asked Ark. “She came into my tent once in the land of Athron. I took her for a highborn maid of the Chameln, but now I know it was the queen.”
“She sent greeting,” I said, “and a greeting to the Blessed Ilda, your spirit maid.”
“Alas,” said Kizark, “the spirit maid has left us these nine years past . . .”
He laid a hand on the only spirit tree in the village, and we raised our eyes. The thick stripped trunk of fir was unusually decorated—it was not strung with teeth and claws or painted in red or green. Its whole length was inlaid with flat pieces of pearly stone broken only by fine pelts of ermine. At the top there hung an immense fall of light golden-brown hair, the hair, I realised, of the Blessed Maid herself. The spirit tree, glittering in the snowy light, seemed to me a marvellous thing to have been wrought by these folk in memory of their priestess.
“The most beautiful spirit tree that I ever beheld,” I said.
Kizark and his father cast their eyes down and smiled modestly. I was invited into Ark’s lodge. I had long pondered, in my secret valley, over what I should bring out as a present or to trade. It could be nothing that gave away the nature of my retreat. I had found a treasure in a certain cave, and now I brought it off my shoulder and gave it to Ark: about twenty pounds of rock salt. It pleased him and his wife—a thin, knowing woman—very much indeed.
“What do you need, Lord?” asked Kizark. “We are not rich, but the Goddess has spared us for another season.”
Zengor sat by the fire in Ark’s lofty pine-smelling hall, and children came to feed him scraps of meat. I drank a fiery spirit made of berries and the milk of the mountain sheep and sat companionably with Ark and his family. There were young women in their best clothes who came to serve us at dinner, and it was made clear to me that it would be no breach of hospitality if I were to take one to my bed. I was tempted, after so long, but I was still a bashful monster. It seemed just as polite to get drunk . . . as evidenced by the other men round about slowly rolling from their settles to the floor . . . so I remained drinking round for round with Ark. When we were both ready to sleep, he said to me, smiling:
“You are Garm, my friend, although you do not know it . . .”
“How can that be?”
“The Goddess sends a messenger . . .”
He meant, perhaps, an avatar. We rolled off to our places by the fire and slept. Next day I wondered how Ark and I could have spoken so well together when drunk.
I was fast friends with the chief and his family after this first meeting, and I stayed three days in the village. Then I turned my face back into the mountains and took up my pack, laden with dried meat, cheese, dressed leather and leather
-working tools and certain herbs from Lia Arkwife’s garden. I thought I might have to dismiss my followers, but they left of their own accord, bidding me farewell at just that point in the road where I had first appeared to them. I unleashed Zengor, and off we went through the melting snows and came safely home to Ystamar.
I thrived on my hermit’s life . . . or so I told, myself . . . and worked hard all over the valley. Once in every season I gazed into my green scrying stone and greeted Aidris, the Witch-Queen. In that second autumn a female wolf came limping into the valley, and Zengor ran off with her to a den on the south side. I called her Vyrie, after Zengor’s queen. She was a little, fierce grey she-wolf, never tamed, but her two cubs would come close enough for me to feed them. The winter was mild as usual, but any plans for a spring visit to the outer world, to Ark’s village, were spoiled by my own carelessness. I came down heavily as I moved a boulder, and for a moment thought my right ankle was broken. It was a sprain, no more, but it kept me hobbling for many days.
In the last days of the third spring, just as the valley was at its most beautiful, I became aware of the snow owls who flew about by day. There had always been one or two, now there were more, gliding in pursuit of hares or floating low over the grass in the twilight. I was turning the soil for a garden beside a great oak and saw three of these yellow-eyed birds sitting above me. I remember speaking to them familiarly as I did to all living things in the valley. I heard Zengor give his sharp wolf cry, not quite the barking of a dog, and thought that he had caught a snow hare.
The oak tree overhead began to “speak”; all its leaves vibrated and rustled, and the movement was taken up by other trees nearby. I laid aside my mattock impatiently and came out of the shadow of the trees. All the oaks of Ystamar were speaking. I walked slowly towards the northwestern tip of the valley where Zengor still raised his voice. It came to me that he was near the path through the rock walls that I called archway. The sun was in my eyes, and as I raised a hand to shade them, there was a flash of sunlight upon glass or metal. High up, where a stone arch gave on to a path down a grassy hillside, the dried bed of a stream, I made out moving shapes.
Yorath the Wolf Page 20