Wolf Road, page 16
THE SECRET
As Remi listened, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, Tuuli’s story came tumbling out. Her first meeting with the boy when he helped her down to Spring Camp; finding him again with Wren, and the cave and the song; and then seeing him again the day after, hunting the faun.
Then there was a long silence, until Remi broke it.
‘This is difficult to hear,’ he said. ‘First the wolf, then this boy.’
Tuuli said nothing. She stood there, with the rain dripping off the front of her hood, looking down at the dead deer on their poles. Their neat hooves. Their bedraggled, winter-grey fur. One was a young male, with velvet just beginning to peel from his small antlers.
Remi sighed deeply, and continued.
‘You’re now of an age where you want your own adventures. I understand that. It’s just, I thought I’d taught you well… how to think about danger; to make the right choices…’
‘You have, Papa,’ said Tuuli quietly.
Remi rolled his shoulders, groaned, then stooped to pick up the poles again, and Tuuli followed. Remi hissed at the pain from his deeply bruised back as he straightened up.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
Is that it? thought Tuuli. Maybe she’d expected more of an interrogation. But it seemed Remi was furious with her – and this was, characteristically, how he dealt with anger. Calmly and logically. In some ways, she’d much rather he just got it out, yelled at her. And once that was over with, she’d be able to talk to her father about what this all meant, about whether he’d ever heard about people like Andar, on his travels, even if he’d never seen anyone similar himself. Clearly, any such conversation would have to wait.
They were nearing the camp. Lupa ran ahead to collide with Kuba’s legs, and he scruffed her round the shoulders.
‘I’ll have to tell the others,’ Remi said sternly.
‘I know,’ replied Tuuli.
Kuba and Lupa were now rolling around on the ground, pawing at each other.
‘Ridiculous,’ said Wren, looking at her brother and rolling her eyes.
‘I see you’ve brought lunch!’ she said to Tuuli.
Tuuli and Remi laid the two small deer down on the ground, close to a campfire that had been lit at the base of a larch, to provide it with some shelter.
Tuuli nodded to Wren, but she was biting her lip and looking worried. Remi walked off to speak to Jutsa. Wren poked Tuuli.
‘You okay?’
‘Well, I told him,’ said Tuuli.
‘What?!’
‘I had to.’
‘Really?’ said Wren, furious. ‘No, you didn’t. There’s a strong possibility we’ll never see Andar again – and now you’ve got yourself into so much trouble…’ She paused. ‘Did you tell Remi I was in on it, too?’
Tuuli rubbed her cheeks.
‘I did. I mean, it’s safer that I wasn’t on my own meeting him after the first time,’ she said. ‘And I think that’s what Papa’s most concerned about. That I might have been in danger.’
‘You should have told me you were going to tell him,’ said Wren, sternly.
‘I didn’t really know I was,’ Tuuli replied. ‘We were talking about other tribes. Papa was telling me how he’d travelled and met other people. It sort of came out.’
‘Well, it’s done now,’ said Wren. ‘And very soon everyone will know about it.’
She turned away. ‘Let’s skin this deer.’
* * *
Working together, the girls swiftly skinned the deer, opened its belly and drew out the organs, and then cut off the legs. They took the muscles off in thick sections. Fanning the ash off the charcoal in the fire, they then placed the slabs of meat directly onto the coals. The bones went on separately; later, they’d smash them open to get at the marrow inside.
Tuuli looked up. Remi was talking to Jutsa, Maatu and Tuuli’s three aunts, on the far side of the small camp.
‘There’s no escaping it now,’ said Wren.
‘This should be fun,’ said Tuuli, surprising herself at just how sarcastic she could be.
After turning the legs a couple of times, the meat was ready to eat. There was a basket of freshly picked sorrel, clover and wild onion to tuck into as well. Gradually, the adults of the tribe congregated around the fire, eating the venison and green leaves. The younger children had either been told to make themselves scarce, or they’d read the mood of the camp and responded.
It was still drizzling. Tuuli had eaten only a small piece of venison, but felt a bit sick and couldn’t stomach any more. She drank some water from her skin, and watched as raindrops fell onto the charred wood of the fire, each one hissing and disappearing in an instant.
The deer’s legs were picked clean. Maatu took the femurs and, using a cobble as a hammer and one of the stones around the fire as an anvil, he smashed open the bones. He passed one to Aski and the other to Garan; they each used a stick to pick out the delicious fatty marrow from the centre of the bone. Remi chopped and cut what remained of the carcass into manageable chunks to roast on the coals.
While everyone else was enjoying the fresh meat, Tuuli sat with her knees hugged to her chest, staring at the fire, while Wren sat cross-legged and stared at the mossy ground just in front of her shins. Neither of them felt like eating. The waiting was torture.
Eventually, when everyone in the circle around the campfire had eaten their fill, Remi broke the silence.
‘Tuuli, I have heard your story. I have told the others. But they deserve to hear it from you. And, Wren, you have a part in this too. So, please, tell us about this young man, this boy, that you have been meeting in secret.’
Tuuli glanced at Wren, then took a deep breath, and spoke.
‘It started the day I fell into the river and lost my pulk and twisted my ankle. When I pulled myself out onto the bank, there was a boy watching me…’
‘We think he was the one we’d seen before in the woods, the lone wolf,’ chipped in Wren.
There was an awkward pause. Everyone around the campfire was silent. Then Tuuli continued.
‘He helped me get to Spring Camp,’ she said. ‘Then ten days later, I told Wren about him and we went to see if we could find him.’
Jutsa was shaking her head.
‘And we did. We did find him,’ continued Tuuli. ‘He was up in the hills. That day he showed us a cave with painted hands on its walls. The next day, we went hunting.’
‘He’s called Andar,’ said Wren. ‘He doesn’t talk much, but he told us his name.’
Starra and Aski exchanged a glance.
‘There’s much about your tale to cause us concern,’ said Jutsa, standing up and speaking very formally. She looked up at Tuuli and then back down at the glowing embers. ‘But there are three things that I want you to think about. Firstly, Tuuli, you should have told us about meeting this boy after your accident. Straight away. Secondly, the two of you then set out to find him again; just the two of you. That was very dangerous. Thirdly, you have both lied. That is not the way of the Swans. You know that. Lies damage the talo and make us vulnerable.’
‘We do not look for danger,’ Remi reinforced Jutsa’s message. ‘And we do not lie to each other.’
There was a long pause, with only the gentle pattering of the rain to fill it.
‘It-it didn’t feel like looking for danger,’ said Tuuli, quietly. ‘It felt like an adventure. And if we’d told you about it, you wouldn’t have let us go.’
‘This isn’t a conversation,’ said Jutsa. ‘This time, we are not in discussion. I am telling you –’ she paused and looked round at the other adults – ‘we are telling you… you should not have gone to meet this stranger on your own. And you should not have lied to us all.’
Tuuli bit her lip. She was now very much wishing that she hadn’t told Remi.
Jutsa continued, ‘We’ll stay here tonight. It’s sheltered enough among the larches. The little ones need to rest.’
Remi was clearly annoyed. He’d wanted to get on, to try to catch up with the others. And when it was wet, he preferred to be on the move, not sitting somewhere, getting damper every moment.
‘We’ll make a bigger shelter, then,’ he acquiesced.
He went off with Maatu to make a start. Jutsa and Garan went off to sit under cover and feed the babies. The younger children wandered off. Tuuli and Wren stayed by the fire, miserably poking it with sticks. Aski and Starra were still sitting over on the other side of the fire.
‘What did you say his name was?’ asked Aski. She sounded more intrigued than accusatory.
‘Andar,’ said Tuuli and Wren together.
Aski and Starra looked at each other again.
‘What is it?’ asked Tuuli, searching her aunts’ expressions. ‘Have you heard the name before?’
Aski took a deep breath.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s the tongue of the Ancient Ones, our faraway ancestors in time.’
‘What does it mean?’ asked Wren.
‘It means “Other”,’ replied Aski.
A PEACE OFFERING
‘There are old stories,’ said Aski, ‘stories from the depths of time. About where we come from and about the feats of our ancestors.’
Tuuli had heard this opening before, but she sat patiently and waited to hear more.
‘But this is not the time or the space to share these stories,’ said Aski, disappointingly.
‘We could cleanse the space,’ said Wren, getting up. ‘We could go and find some crowberry…’
Aski often used smudge sticks of crowberry – setting a small bundle of twigs alight and waving the smoke around to cleanse a place before she did a spirit flight or shared stories of the Ancients.
‘No,’ said Aski. ‘You’ve just been chastised. There’s a bad atmosphere. We must wait.’
Tuuli knew better than to push it. Maybe Aski would be up for some storytelling that evening, when the dust of the reprimand had settled.
* * *
Tuuli and Wren spent the afternoon making beads. It was hardly raining now, but the light, misty drizzle was deceptive – it had the potential to soak into furs and skins and chill the bones. The girls sat under cover, in the front of their shelter. Wren had a small leather pouch full of horse and deer teeth that she’d been collecting. She laid them all out on a skin, arranging them by size and shape. Then she picked one, and holding it down on a flat pebble, started to drill into the root of the tooth with a pointed flint burin. Tuuli got out the bag of mammoth ivory fragments that Petrel had given her, and used a flint knife to divide these up into even smaller pieces, each of which she then worked into a teardrop shape. They chatted quietly as they worked, about the weather, about salmon and reindeer, about Kussa and Leon; about everything except Andar.
As evening approached, a long strip of light appeared beneath the bank of sodden grey cloud and the chink grew taller and taller until the sun peeped out and the larch forest was set aglow with amber light.
Tuuli and Wren had made a pile of beads, and now they threaded them onto twine. Wren’s necklace was made of alternating red deer incisors and ivory teardrops; Tuuli’s was made of a deer canine flanked on each side by three ivory beads.
‘They look good,’ said Wren.
‘Mine’s for Jutsa,’ said Tuuli.
‘A peace offering,’ suggested Wren. Tuuli nodded.
‘Well, I’m keeping mine,’ said Wren.
‘I’m keeping this one,’ said Tuuli, and brought out a simple necklace that she’d tucked inside her tunic: the red scallop shell on a thread.
‘Just don’t tell anyone who it’s from!’ said Wren.
‘No, I’m keeping it close to my chest,’ said Tuuli, tucking it back under her clothes, where it jangled with her little bone bird.
They wandered over to the fire, which had been built up with fresh larch logs. The rest of the talo were gathering to roast and eat more deer.
Remi had kept himself busy that afternoon making a cup out of a birch burl that Kuba and Numil had been excited to find and bring back to the camp. They’d watched Remi carving it, and he’d let them have a go. Aski was gathering up the scraps of birch into a pile, which she set alight, dropping pieces of black fungus into the small fire and wafting the smoke towards Remi to help heal his bruises. Aski and Garan had spent the afternoon down on the riverbank, and had come back with two large baskets full of sedge to line shoes with. Aski had also collected some angelica stems, starflower and birch leaves. Having started the healing fire, she now turned to smashing up these medicinal plants on a large, flat stone, with a birch pestle.
‘How’s your ankle now?’ she asked Tuuli kindly, as the girls sat down near the fire.
‘All the pain’s gone,’ replied Tuuli. ‘But it still feels a little… fragile. If that makes sense?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Aski. ‘It takes a long time to fully heal, even when the swelling is gone. You still need to be careful with it.’
‘Is that a new necklace?’ Starra asked her daughter.
‘Yes, we’ve been making beads all afternoon,’ replied Wren.
‘Very useful!’ laughed Starra.
The bad atmosphere had lifted, it seemed, chased away by the evening sun. Jutsa sat down, cradling Ketki in her arms and breastfeeding him. Tuuli went over and held her hand out in a closed fist, so that Jutsa knew she was being offered something. She held her free hand out, palm upwards, and Tuuli dropped the ivory-and-tooth necklace into it.
‘That’s beautiful,’ said Jutsa. ‘Very nicely carved ivory. Did you make the beads?’
Tuuli nodded and smiled.
‘Thank you.’ Jutsa smiled back at her. ‘Can you tie it on for me?’
Tuuli took the necklace back and tied the ends of the leather thong behind Jutsa’s neck. Ketki reached up with his fat little hands to play with the beads.
‘He likes that!’ Jutsa smiled.
Harmony was restored. Tuuli sighed happily.
And then the pleasant scene, bathed in amber sunshine, was suddenly interrupted. The chatting and laughing stopped. Aski had been rubbing the medicinal poultice she’d made onto Remi’s bruised back, but now he sprang to his feet, dropping his birch cup. Tuuli looked up, just as she heard a very familiar voice.
‘Hey, friend.’
WORLDS COLLIDE
In that moment, Tuuli felt as though two versions of reality had just crashed into each other. There was her own world beyond the camp, her world of adventure which contained Andar, and the cave, and the hand stencils and the deer hunt, as well as Wren. And then there was the talo and the campfire and her parents, aunts and cousins. Now these two realities – unfamiliar and exciting, familiar and predictable – had collided. It didn’t seem possible, and yet it was happening, right in front of her.
Andar looked nervous. Remi was staring at Andar, but saying nothing. Maatu stepped forward, skirting around the campfire, holding an axe in one hand and a spear in the other. You could have sliced the tension with a sharp flint. Tuuli broke the silence, running to Andar and turning back to her people.
‘This is Andar!’ she exclaimed somewhat awkwardly, and certainly redundantly, because no one had any doubt about who this boy was.
Maatu kept his weapons at the ready. Remi had now picked up his spear too. Tuuli stared at them both, pleadingly.
She turned to Andar. ‘This is my talo,’ she said, gesturing with her hand.
‘Talo,’ echoed Andar, anxiously looking around at everyone.
Having given Ketki to Starra to hold, Jutsa moved away from the circle of her tribespeople around the campfire and came up to Andar and Tuuli. Wren came forward too.
‘You’re Andar?’ Jutsa asked, but it wasn’t really a question. ‘We have heard about you.’
Andar was holding his spear lightly in one hand; a snow fox dangled by its tail from his other hand. He held up the fox and nervously offered it to Jutsa.
‘Friend?’ he said. ‘Take?’
Tuuli and Wren watched Jutsa intently to see what she would do. She was bound by their law of hospitality. But would she break those rules and send Andar away? Jutsa was staring at Andar’s unusual features. She glanced at Tuuli and Wren, and then at Remi – something unspoken passed between them.
Jutsa’s gaze settled on Andar again.
She stepped forward, and took the fox. Accepting the gift meant that she was accepting him.
‘Welcome, friend,’ she said.
Tuuli breathed a huge sigh of relief. It was going to be okay.
* * *
The law of hospitality also meant that Andar was invited to sit down and join them for food, before anyone could start to ask him questions. Maatu clearly disapproved but he had to accept Jutsa’s decision. He continued to watch Andar like a hawk. The food on offer included the roasted remains of the deer and a meat-and-herb broth that Garan had prepared in a large skin, for people to dip their bark cups into. Remi, though, used his new birch-burl-cup. Sitting next to him, Andar held out his hand, silently asking to look at the newly made cup. Remi handed it over, and Andar inspected it extremely carefully, as if he’d never seen anything like it.
‘You can drink the broth,’ said Remi, miming drinking. And Andar went ahead and sipped from the cup.
Tuuli sat on the other side of Andar, and Wren beyond her. The two girls were too excited and anxious to eat much. They kept glancing at each other.
Eventually, Andar finished eating and drinking, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Jutsa, sitting the other side of Remi, leaned forward.
‘Andar,’ she said. ‘You are very welcome to join us this evening. You are a stranger to us but we know that you have met Tuuli and Wren.’
Andar also leaned forward, and was listening very carefully, and frowning – as though his brows could somehow help him understand these words.
‘He doesn’t know our language,’ said Tuuli. ‘At least, we think he only knows a few words.’
Tuuli looked round at everyone and saw how they were looking at Andar. She didn’t like it. They clearly thought he looked odd, and they weren’t concealing this reaction very well. The sun had set and now they were all lit by the firelight. Somehow, the flickering flames made Andar’s features seem even more prominent.
