Star Wolf Read online

  “ABBAN!” CAILA BARKED AS Gwynneth set the pup down at her paws. He looked up at her, shivering so hard it seemed as if his limbs might shake loose. Water dripped from him, and he appeared half his size, for his fur was plastered to his body. He hardly looked like a wolf pup at all. He blinked a couple of times, as if he was trying out his eyelids to see if they actually worked, and his expression was vague. “Abban?” His mother crouched down beside him and whispered, “You’ve had a bad fall, dear. But you’re fine.” There was an inflection that made Caila’s last words more of a question than a statement. “I’ll warm you up in no time.” She began to lick him ferociously, and Mhairie and Dearlea rushed to help her. After a minute, his shivering lessened.

  “Abban, can you talk to me?” Caila asked. “Say something.” He looked at her, but there was still a vagueness in his green eyes. Mhairie stopped licking and crouched down directly in front of him.

  “Abban. It’s me — Mhairie. Your sister.”

  Still he said nothing. But the light in his eyes had grown brighter, and his shivering had stopped completely. And then he opened his mouth, and the words squeaked out. “You licked the sea right off of me.”

  “He spoke!” Caila said jubilantly, but she did not notice the wistfulness in Abban’s voice.

  He whispered, “I spoke, I spoke, but it was the tooth that gave the poke and then the water around me broke.”

  “What’s he saying?” Mhairie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dearlea replied. “But he sounds a little … a little strange.”

  “Not at all!” Caila snapped. “My pup is fine. Perfectly fine!”

  Dearlea brought Abban a lemming that he consumed with gusto. Then Edme gently approached him and asked if he was ready to go on. The little pup looked at her in the most curious way. His eyes grew larger and seemed to have taken on the watery greenness of the depths to which he had plunged.

  “Are you all right? Do you think you’re ready to travel again?” Edme repeated.

  “Am I ready?” He paused as if to consider Edme’s question further, and then replied in a rather singsongy voice, “Go forth we must or turn to dust.”

  Caila blinked at her son. “Say again, Abban?”

  “Say again? Again I say. But heed it not be gainsay.”

  The creatures looked at one another, each wondering why Abban was speaking in this odd manner. Finally, Katria stepped forward.

  “I think Abban is ready to go. Aren’t you, Abban?” And this time the little wolf nodded solemnly and did not utter a single word.

  Twilight was falling. Faolan glanced up at the sky, looking for any sign of Molgith, the first star in the star ladder that led to spirit trail, and finally to the constellation of the Cave of Souls. But things were slightly different or rearranged in this part of the world. The stars that had risen with such predictability in the Beyond, shifting in expected increments as the seasons changed, did not behave the same way here at all. Although he knew it was implausible, Faolan sometimes wondered if the terrible quakes that had convulsed the earth had shaken the very pillars of the sky, jiggled loose the familiar constellations they had known. Strangest of all, Beezar, the blind and staggering old wolf constellation that never appeared at this time of year, had followed the travelers west. It seemed ominous that this stumbling old wolf had been the only constellation to accompany them.

  “Mind the pups and the cubs,” Faolan barked. “Keep them close.”

  Caila picked up Abban in her mouth and began to carry him as one would a milking pup just out of the whelping den. Myrrglosch pressed in close to Edme. The bear cubs were much larger than the pups, but still the Whistler noticed how they crowded close between Airmead and Katria, the large, strong she-wolves of the once great MacNamara clan. And Banja, like Caila, picked up her pup, Maudie, in her mouth.

  Maudie squirmed and protested, “Mum, I’m not a baby anymore!”

  But Banja, her mouth firmly clamped on her pup’s nape, merely snorted.

  A snort could speak volumes, especially one coming from Banja, Edme thought. Who would have ever imagined that the cantankerous red wolf who had taken such delight in berating the new gnaw wolves at the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes would have been capable of the deep and tender love she had for her pup? It seemed to Edme that it was not simply a pup that had been born, but a whole new Banja as well.

  The little brigade trudged on. Faolan looked back nervously every few steps to make sure they were safe. At the first sign of the wind strengthening, he barked the command Vrychtong! This was Old Wolf for “hunker down.” The creatures wondered a bit as to why he was speaking in such an ancient dialect. It really was not a spoken language any longer and was rarely encountered except in the legal language of the complex codes and laws of the Beyond that ordered all aspects of the wolves’ lives, and that had been gnawed into bones from times long past.

  But for Edme, suddenly Old Wolf had a new resonance. Or is it an old one? she wondered. She felt again the deep pain in her hip. She gripped harder the bone she always carried. This, too — the pain in her hip and in her jaws — seemed to be echoes from a long ago past. What was it? She swung her head around to look at Faolan. Their eyes locked.

  She senses it, he thought. She teeters on the edges of my gyres. But how? How could she ever know, Faolan wondered, that there were lives within him that were almost as old as time? He was, after all, not simply a silver wolf, a wolf of the Beyond, but a gyre wolf. The splayed paw had marked Faolan as a malcadh, but the swirling lines marked him as a gyre soul.

  Before he was Faolan, he had lived as Eo, a grizzly bear. And before Eo, he had been Fionula, a Snowy Owl, and not a male but a female. However, his very first life, his very first soul, had been that of a wolf. And not just any wolf, but Fengo. Thus he had been named and thus thousands of years before, he had led a starving, ragtag band of wolves out of the Distant Blue and the land of the Long Cold to the east, and to the Beyond, a journey he was reversing now. He had become known as the Fengo, and the first chieftain of the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes. His name had become an honored title, and the title was inherited by scores of other Fengos throughout the centuries.

  But the creatures he now led back to the Distant Blue knew none of this — except possibly for Edme. All this passed through Faolan’s mind as their eyes remained locked. And yet they spoke not a word, for what would they say? What could they say? As she clenched the bone in her teeth, he could almost feel the pain in her hip. It was as if it were a shared pain, and he knew that there was within Edme something that was timeworn, time-tested, or perhaps time-lost. She had none of the markings of a gyre soul, but the way she walked now with an odd twist to her gait and that bone she carried were like distant whispers stirring inklings within him. The ancient bone, a femur, continued to tantalize him. He thought it was the loveliest of bones, with intricate gnaw marks that had faded until they were nearly indecipherable.

  The bone had been revealed to him in the Cave Before Time, when a spike of moonlight had fallen on it through a crack in the ceiling. And it was at that same moment that Faolan had encountered his first gyre — Fengo. It had all happened at once, or so it seemed in retrospect. He had brought the bone with him, but Edme soon took charge of it. The carvings were in Old Wolf, and though she knew far less of Old Wolf than he did, she seemed to sense more about the bone than he could. It might have been his imagination, but he felt that when she carried it, her limp diminished somewhat. Now she broke their gaze. She turned and limped off, clutching the bone in her teeth, and with each step she took, the pain he had shared with her dimmed, faded as a star might fade in the light of dawn. He wanted it back. He wanted so desperately to take a share of her pain.

  IT HAD BEEN A VERY LONG DAY starting with Abban’s fall into the Frozen Sea. The ridges they’d crossed had been too numerous to count, and the animals now sank down under the overhanging lip of one that would afford excellent protection from the building wind. Clambering up to the top of the pressure ridge,
Faolan and Edme took guard duty for the first watch of the night, digging their toes in deep to grip the ice against the gusts. Faolan tipped his head up. There again was Beezar the blind wolf clawing his way high into the sky. Are you following us or leading us? he wondered. He had never before noticed the two stars in Beezar’s port hind leg that comprised the hock joint between the knee and the fetlock. Beneath the blind wolf, lined up with his stumbling forepaw, which was made of half a dozen stars, Faolan could see scores of ridges rising and knew the next day would be as hard as the one they had just traveled.

  The wind began to lessen until it was just a low ground whisper stirring ice crystals into slow sparkling dances around their paws, and the two wolves began to walk the top of the ridge, scanning for intruders. Caila had told them that she was sure Heep would follow and that his rout of outclanner wolves outnumbered their own brigade. The thought of so many savage wolves under the command of Heep was unsettling to Faolan. Heep was one of the most ruthless wolves on earth — malevolent, contemptible, and driven by the darkest instincts. He was a leader, but was he really leading his rout to anything other than certain death? Faolan was beginning to feel trapped, trapped between the threat behind them and the peril of the unknown ahead. What awaited them — a watery death if the bridge ended or this ice world warmed and simply melted away? As the night grew darker, the haze of the Distant Blue beyond the ridges seemed reproachful, perhaps even mocking. Edme passed by on her round and stopped.

  “Don’t blame the Blue,” she said softly.

  “What?”

  “You know what I mean, Faolan.” She nudged his withers with her muzzle. “You’re looking at all those ridges and the Distant Blue … and …” Her port forepaw shot out, and she slammed it down on a lemming that had just crept from an ice hole.

  “Midnight snack?” she said.

  “No, thank you. I’ve had quite enough for one day.” Faolan looked at her as she tore the lemming apart and began to eat it. He could hear the tiny bones cracking with her first bite.

  It was uncanny, he thought, how Edme always knew what he was thinking. It was as if she could crawl right inside his head.

  “I’m not blaming the Blue, as you put it. If anything, it’s the Ice Bridge. It looked so perfectly smooth when we first saw it. So glistening. I feel as if we’ve been deceived.”

  “But, Faolan, the agents of this deception, as you call it, are the same ones that cause mirages — which are a part of nature. An optical phenomenon. You know, we saw them all the time around the Ring. Remember when it was very cold and the volcanoes became active and the light of the flames would seem to bend? The sky above looked all funny and odd, as if it had come down to earth and taken on strange shapes that seemed so real. It was as if lakes suddenly formed around the Ring.”

  “So you’re saying that this Ice Bridge was a mirage?”

  “Not literally, for here we stand on it. But I am just saying the distortions of air and distance and light caused it to look very smooth and, well … spotless. Like a well-aged bone, bleached by the sun and polished by time.”

  “And not yet gnawed by wolves.”

  Edme laughed.

  “Well, not gnaw wolves.”

  The Whistler and Airmead leaped onto the ridge for the second watch.

  “Go off and get some sleep,” Airmead said. “You both need it. It’s been a hard day.”

  “There are more ridges, unfortunately, for tomorrow. As many as today if not more,” Faolan said.

  “We’ll do it,” the Whistler replied staunchly. “One paw in front of the other. We’ll get there.”

  With such steadfast companions, Faolan knew that it was an indulgence for him to think about mirages or what he thought of as deceptions of nature. He retreated to a cavity at the base of the ridge overhung by a drapery of icicles. He made three tight circles, as was customary for wolves before they settled down. But seconds later, he rose and circled again. Sleep would be hard to come by, even if he had a soft caribou pelt beneath him instead of ice. He groaned when he thought how long it had been since he had slept on a caribou or elk pelt. Even as a gnaw wolf, the lowest-ranking wolf in the MacDuncan clan, they would often toss him a scrap of bare hide to sleep on. Now that would seem like a veritable luxury. It was all relative, he supposed. Would he ever sleep on something that made ice seem like sumptuous bedding material? He hoped not.

  He looked out once more, and this time, he glimpsed the tail of Beezar. But an even more perplexing question was that of another constellation, the one they had glimpsed just before they had stepped onto the Ice Bridge at the end of the Crystal Plain. Had it been a dream when they had watched that burst of a dozen stars or more that had inexplicably sorted themselves into a configuration none of them had ever seen in the heavens before? The shape etched in stars was that of a container — not just any container, but a memory jug of the Sark of the Slough. They had found the Sark after the earthquake, dying in her cave on a bed of shards from the shattered memory pots, which had once contained her recollections of the many scents she had encountered and somehow committed to the clay jugs she fashioned in her kiln.

  The Sark was a strange, irascible creature, hideous in many ways to look at with her skittish eye and mangy pelt. She had been feared by many for no reason other than her oddness. They whispered she was a witch, because she had skills with fire that only owls were supposed to possess. Yet the Sark had been Faolan’s staunchest ally and Gwynneth’s oldest friend in the Beyond. Her loss was a terrible one, leaving both the wolf and the Masked Owl as shattered as the pots on which the Sark had died. How they had begged her to rally. As Faolan looked out through the fringe of icicles, he remembered her last words to him and to Gwynneth: I am here with my pot shards, on a bed of fractured memories slowly coming back together. This is my heaven, my Cave of Souls. She had looked at Gwynneth. My Glaumora. She had reached out with a shaking paw to touch Faolan’s shoulder lightly, and then whispered, And my Ursulana.

  But there was no use thinking about the Sark. She was dead. Her bones were moldering among the fragments of her memory pots. Faolan knew that it was not because of the Sark that he couldn’t sleep, and it wasn’t this bed of ice. It was the little ones, the pups and the cubs, Toby and Burney. Even though the bear cubs were many times bigger than the pups, they were still vulnerable. It was not always size but maturity that counted. What he really had to do was focus on how to protect the little ones.

  He heard Edme’s familiar footsteps and could tell that her hind leg was bothering her. But that was a forbidden subject. She appeared behind the scrim of icicles that glistened fierce and sharp as fangs in the moonlight.

  “You’re up, I see.”

  “Well, so are you, Edme.”

  “Want to talk a bit?” She opened her single eye wider. The lovely green light that emanated from it seemed to dissolve the ice teeth and take the sting from the air. Her face appeared almost luminous.

  “Of course I do. You always know when I need you, don’t you?” Faolan got up and came out from beneath the ridge’s overhang where he had been attempting to sleep. They had shared much in their years as Watch wolves, but he wanted so much more. Was he becoming a foolish wolf? Perhaps. But there was no time for foolishness. Fools could not carry the worries he did.

  “How do you always seem to know?” He suddenly realized that this might be a dangerous question. “I mean” — he hesitated — “you always know when I want to talk.”

  “No, not really, but it’s easy to see you’re still worried about Abban.”

  “It’s not just Abban. I’m worried about all the little ones. What happened today could happen again. Lupus knows how that pup ever bobbed back up to the surface, and thank Glaux that Gwynneth got to him!”

  Edme realized how agitated Faolan really was. He was invoking two different animal spirits at the same time, Lupus and Glaux. Could “Urskadamus,” his favorite bear curse, be far behind?

  “Try to stay calm, Faolan,” she counsel
ed, but the words sounded weak even to her own ears.

  “But it could happen tomorrow, Edme! Don’t you see?” Faolan paused. He shut his eyes tight as he tried to envision that crucial painting in the Cave Before Time, which he had first glimpsed when he was hardly a yearling and seen many times since. It was a picture of a flowing line of wolves. He had not even known the word then but would soon learn the configuration was called a byrrgis, the seminal formation that wolves used for traveling and hunting. It was absolutely critical to their lives. It was what made wolves truly strategic hunters and was at the very core of wolf civilization. He opened his eyes now.

  “Edme, the byrrgis is useless on this Ice Bridge.” He felt something wither in him as he said these nearly sacrilegious words, and indeed Edme looked at him for just a moment as if he were some kind of infidel. He could hardly believe what he was saying. But he knew that it was true.

  Nevertheless it did not alter the fact that the byrrgis was as sacred to wolf culture as the Great Chain, the order that linked the wolves from the heavens to the land. The first link in that chain was Lupus, the spirit wolf, and was represented in the glittering constellation of the Great Wolf. The first carving lesson for every gnaw wolf in every clan was to incise this chain on a clean bone. By carving it on their gnaw bones, the chain over time became engraved in the very marrow of every wolf. No wolf knew the Great Chain better, experienced it more deeply, than the lowest-ranking wolves — the gnaw wolves, which Faolan, Edme, and the Whistler had all been. The byrrgis formation, in a sense, was an expression of that chain. In a byrrgis, wolves moved in a very prescribed order. And now Faolan was saying this order was useless, obsolete.

  “What are you suggesting?” Edme asked.

  He looked up into the sky, scanning it for a familiar star formation and wondering if that strange one, the starry configuration of the Sark’s memory jug, would ever appear again. Had it been a figment of his imagination? But they had all seen it. Still, this sky felt foreign to him.