The Huntress: Storm

by Sarah Driver

  ‘Do you all have fangs? Do you have to sharpen your teeth every day?’ babbles Sparrow suddenly.

  Axe laughs, wiping her eyes. ‘Some of us have our teeth wrenched out and replaced with animal teeth when we’re younglings, to make us look fearsome and to lend us the power of the animal-spirit. We don’t file our teeth!’

  She turns to the folk gathered round the fire and talks to them, gesturing at Sparrow, so I reckon she’s telling them what he said. Her face looks open and unguarded for the first time since I met her. She looks as startled by her own laughter as I am.

  ‘Can you ask if Leopard’s been seen round here?’ I say in a low voice.

  ‘Leopard?’ she asks blankly.

  ‘The Protector of the Mountain.’ I watch her expectantly.

  Her look clouds over. But she asks all the same, listening while the traders confer. Then she turns back to me. ‘These people do not recollect a woman of her description,’ she says, and I feel my shoulders sag.  Leo, where are you?

  ‘If she answered a summons here, with things the way they are, there is no hope for her,’ she tells me softly. ‘Is that why you risked this journey?’

  I nod. ‘I won’t give up hope, neither,’ I fierce, warmth lashing my cheeks.

  Axe raises an eyebrow, but a smile dances in her eyes.

  After that, the talk is all about the Chieftain and how he ent been seen for ages. I catch a few words here and there. The rest of it Axe translates into the common trade-tongue. ‘They fear the Chieftain’s second in command – Stag. He drains terrodyl blood across their land, and sells their children as slaves to pay debts to the Stony Chieftains of the West.’

  As they say all this, their jaws tense, and their eyes flick to the mouth of the tent as though they’re frighted Stag’s gonna barge through with his gun. I know that fright and I pity them for it.

  The Tribesfolk say that Stag tries to make them feel primitive – that he wants them to stop using their native languages, and to dampen the old powers until they lie blackened and spitting stale smoke.

  ‘He believes we are “in the midst of nowhere”,’ says Axe, ‘but to us, this place is fattened with generations of dreams and blood. It is a sacred, wild place, teeming with life.’

  I gaze into her face, willing my heart strong. ‘He did the same thing to my Tribe, to our ship.’

  Her eyes soften, and she nods.

  Warmth makes us drowsy. Sparrow falls asleep with his head in my lap. His spine shows through his tunic, all nobbled bones, ridged like a dorsal fin. On the back of his neck is a smudge of silver moondust. Thunderbolt’s final footsteps. I trace the silver with a fingertip, careful not to rub it away.

  Axe-Thrower covers Sparrow with a reindeer skin and gifts me a Moonlands lesson. ‘When Moonlanders put the back of their hand to their forehead and pull the hand along—’

  ‘Like wiping sweat?’

  She nods. ‘While wiggling their fingers, that means: quiet the mind, whale is near.’

  I squint. ‘Whale is near.’ I make the movement, and she laughs.

  ‘You said something else. Something – rude. Practise.’

  I do, and the traders smile softly in the lamplight. They teach me how to make a loud rush of high-pitched air, like a whale-breath from deep within my belly, and teach me how it means to surface from dreams, or my dream-self must breathe.

  I practise shushing out a bellyful of air like I’m winded, and the folk with fangs pull back their gums and whistle. They teach me to say I’m hungry by rubbing my belly while making a gargled glugging sound in the back of my throat.

  Once the lesson is over, I look round at each of their worn, quiet faces and feel a surge of heart-thanks that they’re sharing shelter with us so openly.

  Then I realise a question has been brewing in my blood ever since we left the Inn Between, and I voice it. ‘Who were the Skadowan?’

  A woman makes a sign on her chest with her finger. Another murmurs something to the man next to her. Dark eyes rest on my face. None of these folk are laughing like the ones at the Inn.

  Especially not Axe. ‘Where did you hear about that?’ she asks sharply.

  I tell her about what I heard. ‘But I thought they were a myth,’ I add.

  ‘Not a myth,’ says a man with his little son tucked against his side. The boy stares at me with huge, long-lashed eyes. ‘Our people have kept the old tales alive – telling of a thousand winters ago, when they first came to control Trianukka, claiming to speak for the people. They were defeated, but the shadow of evil forever lurks under power, waiting to rise again.’

  The way he talks about the Skadowan makes me remember the strange symbol in Yapok’s letter; the symbol he said was bleeding up from underneath the runes of his manuscripts.

  ‘It is dangerous to speak of such things,’ Axe snaps, face crawling with fright. ‘Let us all seal our lips, for our own sakes.’ She stands up. ‘I will check on the dogs.’ She ducks out of the tent.

  Silence falls. The flames gobble the air.

  Before sleep snatches me, Axe returns and the traders teach me the sound for travel – a sliding noise hissed between the teeth, made to sound like a skin-hulled brown slider riding across ice. I work out that brown slider must mean sled. Sparrow startles awake when they make the sound, then glares around him and curls back down into slumber.

  ‘Why do you gush so many sounds instead of babbling words?’ I ask, through a yawn.

  Axe-Thrower pauses, pulling on her earlobe. ‘Sounds to us bear greater weight than words. Pictures, too.’ She scrapes a fingernail over the ice, drawing a likeness of a walrus.

  ‘For trading we sometimes need letters, but not all-times, even then.’

  I feel a pang of guilt when I think of what Grandma would say if she could see us now. Consorting with Fangtooths! But hare-skip-quick, the guilt deepens into missing her, like usual.

  All night I listen to the scrape of Axe-Thrower’s crescent-shaped knife as she etches her Tribe stories into a jawbone. As she works, I think of Thunderbolt.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’ asks Axe.

  I shake my head, heart-sadness tugging at my mouth.

  ‘Try to rest,’ she tells me, pulling an extra reindeer skin up and over my shoulders. ‘Sleep helps.’

  When dreams sniff me out they’re grey as storm clouds, merwraith tails, my eyes. They feel whale-skin cold and they taste like blood mixed into the sea. They smell of iron and hidden meanings.

  I claw into wakefulness, blood rushing in my ears, heart-wrenched. I was home; I felt it so strong. Someone snores, walrus-heavy, and I wish it was Grandma, just across the cabin from us. Howls and barks crack from the throats of the polar dogs tethered to the sled that waits beyond the walls of this skin tent, inches from my face. My spine tingles.

  A family have arrived while I slept and their little ones climb all over me like wolf pups, making me chuckle. I prop onto an elbow and watch them. Stag don’t want folks to run or laugh or sing or play or climb or hug or greet each other like wolf pups. But that’s what this Tribe are doing, anyway. Kestrel was right. There’s no way one Tribe could ever all be bad-blubber.

  A woman with a little kid hanging from her skirts holds out a platter to me, and I lift a soft piece of boiled meat from it. It’s in my mouth before I know I’ve moved, sticking in my teeth, and the strength from the chewy meat seeps into my gums. I shut my eyes, breathing gratefully. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Boiled whale blubber,’ she answers.

  Sparrow whimpers.

  I retch into my mouth. She crouches in front of me and presses underneath my chin, forcing me to swallow.

  She watches me with a quiet face. ‘The creature was trapped. Now some good has come of it. We will have meat and lamp fuel and ribs to paddle our boats. For us, this can be the difference betwixt life and death. If we leave a whale to rot, the meat is wasted and the stink fills our tents.’

  I bow my head, shamed.

  When we bundle onto the sled again I grit my
teeth through the pain in my back and my eye sockets feel hollow and stretched. The dead day is fevered with storm-light.

  We pass a thinning of ice, where the snow lies brushed over like shorn fur, and I yell ’til Axe stops the sled. I point at the thin ice. ‘Over there!’

  A dark shape is pressed against it. A trapped whale.

  Axe leaps from the sled. She stares down at the shape, curling and uncurling her fingers and whispering amazement under her breath.

  When she bashes open a breathing hole, a calloused, barnacle-strewn snout shoves through and the V of the whale’s breath grunt-shushes into the air, freezing as it goes, frayed ribbons of ice shattering over Axe-Thrower’s boots. Sore-looking tracks from the sharp hooks of whale lice are scored around the whale’s eyes and in wounds on its head.

  At the sight of it, our shared knowing of the sea floods sharply behind my eyes. I fall to my knees and reach out to touch the dark grey skin but Axe-Thrower snatches my hand back. ‘Show care! Their skin is too sensitive for dry-touch.’

  Heat prickles my face.

  Sparrow falls to his knees at the hole, wets his hand in the snow, stretches it out and rests it on the whale’s head. Blue song-notes tumble from my brother’s mouth.

  You leap,

  Wild,

  Like blood,

  Like joy,

  You dive,

  Deep,

  Like roots,

  Through soil,

  You dance,

  Free,

  Like sparks,

  In night-time air.

  Soon his tears replace the song in his mouth. I rub his back until he feels ready to stand.

  Axe-Thrower crunches back to the sled. I gape at her. ‘You took part in Stag’s whale hunt. You begged for first cut.’ I spit into the snow.

  Shame bites her hard in the face, twisting her features. ‘I was so desperate to prove myself and save my skin, I closed my spirit to feelings. I let the darkness in. But below decks, in secret, I wept.’

  As we race along the worn path to the Moonlander settlement, the sound of hollow rattling fills the air. Ropes of teeth are strung between creaking lanterns, and they clink against each other in the wind. ‘When we get there,’ says Axe, ‘you must bow your heads and follow close behind me. We must show them what they expect to see.’

  We pass Tribesfolk sewing skin tents with lengths of gut, and others lashing skin hulls to wooden frames, using strips of walrus hide. I peer at every face and into every doorway, scanning for signs of Leo. But I find none. And why’s it so eerie calm? I reckoned there’d be fighting here – they said Stag had turned on the Chieftain.

  Dead terrodyls sprawl across the land like tawny, ice-nipped mountains. We ride past them and I stare openmouthed at the black blood dripping from slashes in their throats into buckets. The life-blood that’s been turned into a weapon by Stag and his army, cos it eats through whatever it touches. Great deathly wells have been tunnelled by blood spills. Wounds in the landscape. Axe-Thrower scowls.

  When we finally reach the Chieftain’s dwelling the cold that slams off the snow-packed hut almost knocks me flat, like the edge of a giant’s blade.

  ‘They’re the doors I saw,’ stammers Sparrow, clutching his jar of whale-song. ‘In my vision.’

  Axe-Thower yanks us off the wooden seat and shoves us through the calf-deep snow. We pass burning branches that spill light to guzzle the darkness, but the light can’t guzzle it fast enough.

  I look back to the sled and see Thaw’s bright eyes watching me. I hold up a hand to tell her to stay hidden, praying that no one sees her or finds my longbow.

  ‘Remember what Axe said, Sparrow,’ I warn. ‘Head down, stick close to her.’

  Axe-Thrower knocks on the fur-covered doors with her lantern-staff, bellowing to be let in. The doors inch open, and a pair of ice-chip eyes glint out, mantled by bristling brows. ‘Declare yourself,’ a voice grunts.

  She sighs heavily. ‘The Chieftain’s daughter!’

  I puzzle up at her. They won’t believe her lie here, will they?

  The doors creak open and we walk through, into a fug of incense and smoke and muffled singing. I can’t resist glugging the sights and stinks of the place, but I do it with my chin tucked close to my chest.

  There’s a central fire-pit and more reindeer skins, and circles of antlers hanging from the rafters with candles dripping fat on the skins. Near the fire is a table with a map pinned on it, surrounded by ornately carved chairs. One is grand enough to be a throne. Hunks of dark red meat thaw near the fire. A woman leans close and uses a knife shaped like a crescent moon to slice off chunks to boil.

  Hollow-eyed men lean against walls, hard eyes following Axe. I brush my eyes across their faces, mouth sticky-dry. There’s no sign of Leo, or her warriors. I try to keep my heart buoyed, cos she could be anywhere in the settlement. I’ll get my chance to find her.

  Axe hesitates, then prowls forwards. We stick close. We approach a wall of walrus-helmed guards. They stare at Axe.

  ‘Where is the Chieftain?’ she asks. ‘I seek audience.’

  The crowd parts to let a glaring old woman through. Polar-dog sleds are tattooed down her arms – she’s the old heartless that threatened me and Crow when we escaped Wrecker’s Cove aboard Devil’s Hag. Her bloodshot eyes snap onto Axe-Thrower. ‘Girl! What took you so long?’ She steps forward and grabs Axe’s upper arm, making her curse.

  ‘The journey was troublesome, Grandmother. I – I found myself imprisoned.’

  ‘And whose fault was that? Did we not teach you better than to get caught?’ she spits. ‘Who are those children?’ The old woman squints at me, wrinkled lips curled up.

  ‘Slaves I paid for with my own gold,’ says Axe, through gritted teeth.

  The old grandmother nods, satisfied. ‘Slaves cast their eyes down,’ she snaps at me, pressing her fingertips into my eyelids, forcing them down. ‘Look into a face again, and I’ll gouge them out.’

  Sparrow presses against my side and grips my hand.

  ‘I seek vengeance on my gaoler, Grandmother,’ pleads Axe. ‘I heard the goat-woman of the mountain was on her way here, following a summons?’

  ‘Vengeance is not yours to demand, this day.’ The old grandmother wrenches Axe’s arm until she stumbles forwards, between the guards.

  ‘But, Grandmoth—’

  The old woman rounds on her granddaughter, her fury flecking the younger’s face with specks of saliva. ‘You may give thanks – that goat-woman is likely a slave by now. Just like her so-called warriors – no one would escape slavers with wounds as grievous as theirs. Now – pay your respects!’ She turns around, dragging Axe by the wrist.

  My mind reels. Leo’s wounded – but she’s escaped. Whatever this old windbag reckons, the Protector of the Mountain is strong enough to heal. She might still be alive, somewhere – she has to be!

  We follow the old woman behind a curtain, towards a great oak-and-whalebone casket. Women circle the casket, singing and beating axes against shields.

  Axe-Thrower stiffens. Shock punches me in the belly.  Chief gone, that draggle said. I want to groan aloud. Now I know what the beast meant, and I wish I’d listened deeper.

  Inside the casket lies the Fangtooth Chieftain, a snarling polar dog etched onto his chest and a great sword clasped in his stiff hands. Firelight plays amongst the pocks and pits of his face. Death’s barely eased the knife-blade frown valleyed between his brows. Huge red jewels glint in his eye sockets, and in his hair, and on his fingers. His arm’s been draped over his walrus-skull helm.

  And in the hollow of his throat sits a jewel of amber, brighter than a wolf ’s eyes in the dark. A stone with tiny fire spirits glimmering beneath its skin. The Storm-Opal of the Land. My chest lurches and pulls.

  Why has he got the Opal?

  My thoughts are dragged to the Sea and Sky Opals in my pockets. I swear I can feel them squirming, or is it my imagination? Can they sense their kin?

  ‘Sleep warm-bloode
d, war-man father,’ Axe-Thrower says quietly.

  My breath catches.

  Axe glances down at me. ‘When I bit my blade into that oak, never did I dream the casket would cradle my own father.’ Triumph simmers in her throat. ‘Never did I guess I would be so fortunate.’

  It’s the truth. My thoughts flip and race and scurry.

  ‘What’s that you’re muttering, girl?’ says her grandmother.

  Anger clouds Axe’s face, but it drifts away like smoke. ‘I said I have been so fortunate, having this warrior for a father.’

  ‘Whatever you’re saying, show some respect and say it on your knees.’

  Axe kneels before the casket and we do it, too. I will Sparrow not to look at anyone. Axe trembles with what I’d swear is swallowed laughter.

  When we stand, I keep my eyes on my boots.

  ‘Stag steps here, soon,’ gruffs the old grandmother. ‘You have much explaining to do. Make ready.’

  Axe-Thrower turns on her heel, pulling me with her.

  ‘Hold your dogs, child.’ The old woman pulls herself to her feet and hobbles over to jab Axe-Thrower in the gut. ‘He will need a cupbearer. Leave one boy here.’

  ‘But Grandmother, these are way-wearied, both. Let them rest, use another slave.’

  The old woman shakes her head. ‘Leave this slave, you go and rest.’ Her skinny fingers wrap around my arm.

  Axe-Thrower’s gaze drifts across my face helplessly. Then she grabs Sparrow and leads him away without another word.

  My heart raps against my breastbone. The old woman snaps her fingers at me. ‘Follow.’ She walks back towards the open space of the tent, and the guards part to let her through.

  I hurry after her, trying to ignore the way their eyes burn my face. She points to the corner, behind the map table. ‘Wait there. A sound from you, and the dogs get your toes.’

  I wait where she pointed, next to a gallon flagon standing on one of the huge knuckles from a whale’s backbone. The sight of it makes my scalp pull. I can feel the cold throbbing off the bone.