Wolftalker E-Book

Ghillian Potts

• Herausgeber: Arachne Press
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Serie: the Naming of Brook Storyteller
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 255

Beschreibung

The third and final book in the Brook Storyteller Series. Brook is sent by the storytellers to right a wrong, and in the process takes on an apprentice, Cricket. Far more important to her is her 'cousin' Drinks-the-wind, a Wilder wolf. Together the three of them discover a plot that puts all their friends, and even the Overlord, in danger.

Leseprobe

First published in UK 2018 by Arachne Press Limited

100 Grierson Road, London SE23 1NX

www.arachnepress.com

© Ghillian Potts 2018

ISBNs

Print, 978-1-909208-49-0

Mobi/Kindle 978-1-909208-51-3

ePub 978-1-909208-50-6

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Except for short passages for review purposes no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of Arachne Press.

Printed on wood-free paper in the UK by TJ International, Padstow.

WOLFTALKER

Also by Ghillian Potts

The Old Woman from Friuli

The Naming of Brook Storyteller

Book One: Brat

Book Two: Spellbinder

CHAPTER ONE

Storyteller Wolftalker Dragonfriend had found it difficult to persuade her friend to wait for her outside the village of Edgescarp. ‘I’m sorry,’ she told him, ‘but they’ll be scared of you, too scared to listen to me. I’ll be perfectly safe here, you know. It’s only a small place. Just wait till I call you.’

The huge wolf grumbled low in his throat and reluctantly sat down to wait.

Wolftalker clucked to her pony and rode slowly into the village. She must get this story right. At least one youngster’s happiness – possibly his life – depended on it. And she had to tell the village why it had been left so long untold.

She knew she looked too young to be telling the villagers anything important. So she rode casually into the village square that evening, looking confident and calm. She was obviously a storyteller. Her hair was a little short for one of their women but her clothes – ankle boots and riding breeches under a long tunic – were well fitting and of good cloth and she wore a scarf of storyteller-blue around her neck.

Everyone began to gather round, wondering who she was and whether she was really alone and all the other things villagers always want to know about a stranger.

The storyteller sat there on her small rough pony, smiling a little, saying nothing until all the talk died down.

Then, ‘Elders of Edgescarp, may I speak to all the folk?’

There was an odd silence. This was something unusual and small places like Edgescarp don’t like strangeness. Then old One-eye, holder of the best fields around, stepped forward.

‘You have a message, Storyteller...?’

She ignored the little pause left for her name.

The crowd thickened and pressed closer. Storytellers set great store by their names. Here was something else out of place.

The storyteller looked all round her, then began to speak into their waiting silence.

‘For now my name does not matter. I am the Voice of Storyteller Silkentongue, the Storyteller of the Joined Lands,’ she said.

There was a gasp. Everyone knew the name of the finest and most important storyteller in the land, Court Storyteller to the Overlord himself. How had he ever heard of one small, unimportant village?

‘Storyteller Silkentongue wishes to apologise on behalf of all storytellers to the village of Edgescarp and particularly to one family in this village and to one member of that family.’

She paused again, waited for the hissing whispers to die out and went on: ‘To the boy Cricket, to his father and mother and all their family, to all their friends and neighbours in this village, Storyteller Silkentongue and the Guild of Storytellers of the Joined Lands offer this apology for the wrongsaying of Gaingold Storyteller.’ She swallowed, looking around to catch all eyes. ‘We are deeply ashamed that one of our guild should unjustly have scorned and humiliated you and yours and we beg you to pardon us. What amends may be made, I, as the Voice of Silkentongue, am here to attempt, by your leaves.’ She paused, looking from one to another. ‘May I speak first to Cricket?’

Cricket had tried to hang back. He wanted to hate all storytellers but the pull of the storytelling was as strong as ever and he could not walk away. Indeed, his parents pushed him forward through the crowd as soon as the storyteller pronounced his name and by the time she had finished, he was standing at the pony’s side. Wolftalker looked down at him and smiled.

‘You are Cricket, of course. Will you accept our apology?’

He couldn’t speak. He nodded, his teeth in his lip.

Then everyone was cheering and patting the boy on the back, and Wolftalker leaned down to him from the pony’s back.

‘Cry if you need to,’ she said into his ear. ‘I’ll distract them,’ and before he could begin to feel indignant, she had slid from the pony’s back and was asking if she might call her escort.

‘I knew they’d never let a child like that come by herself!’ said somebody.

‘Please, everyone,’ said the storyteller, ‘don’t be scared. I promise there is no danger,’ and she gave a long high call, almost like a hawk’s scream.

Into the square trotted the huge grey wolf.

There was a mass movement away. Someone began to mutter about spears, a girl screamed and a small boy started to cry. Then Wolftalker called to the wolf in Elder tongue and he sat down, looking about alertly and lolling out his tongue. All the dogs of the village were barking hysterically but the wolf paid no attention.

Cricket gave his eyes a quick scrub while everyone was, as the storyteller had promised, distracted and wondered if she had not overdone it.

She strolled over to the wolf and sat down beside him in the roadway, an arm about his neck. The dogs fell gradually silent.

‘This is my friend Drinks-the-Wind,’ she told them. ‘He is a Wildron wolf from Gilden Forest and he travels with me when he feels like it. He will not harm you or your beasts, I promise.’

‘Does he do tricks?’ asked one of the bolder boys.

‘Stars, no! He is his own wolf, not mine. I would never ask him to lower himself. No, I am the one who does tricks,’ and Wolftalker laughed so infectiously that they all found themselves laughing too.

‘I have discharged one half of my obligation,’ she said when they were quiet again. ‘The other half depends upon Cricket.’

She turned to the boy and spoke very soberly. ‘Cricket? You have forgiven us: and we are deeply indebted to you. I must ask you now. Do you still wish to become a Storyteller?’

CHAPTER TWO

Everyone fell silent.

Cricket longed to yell at them, ‘Haven’t you anything better to do than stare at me?’

The storyteller was watching him, too.

It was no use trying to pretend. He felt a huge grin stretching his mouth and suddenly he shouted ‘Yes! Oh yes!’ and found himself being hugged by all his relations, some of whom had barely spoken to him for a year.

When Cricket fell out of the whirlpool of congratulations, he found the storyteller beside him, smiling.

‘I still have to test you, Cricket,’ she warned him, ‘but if Storyteller Spring Rain felt confident enough to promise to sponsor you, I don’t think you need worry.’

Rain! He had not forgotten her, although in his bitterness he had tried to, telling himself that she had only amused herself and was probably glad not to have to bother with him.

Now he grabbed the storyteller’s arm eagerly. Then let go in a hurry as the wolf’s low growl warned him off.

‘Have you seen her? How is she? Gaingold Storyteller said she was senile and would die soon – tell me, please!’ he begged.

‘Gaingold.’ Her mouth twisted as if she had tasted acid. ‘Spring Rain is well and has gone to live in a village called Brownhill. I’ll take you there as soon as I can manage it. She has a tiny house and is as happy as she can be without her husband. Speakwell’s death was hard for her. Her sister’s youngest grandson and his wife live next door and all their children are in and out all day. I went to see her on my way here, so my news is fresh. How do you think we knew where to find you?’

She smiled back at his grin of relief then pulled her face straight. ‘Come, Cricket,’ she said sternly, ‘let us find a quiet corner for your testing.’

Cricket was exhausted by the time she had done with him. He had to tell her tales and stories, in exactly the words of Spring Rain or Speakwell; he had to tell her one of his own tales – he asked her how she knew he had any of his own and her mouth curled into a smile – and finally, he had to tell, to the whole village, a story which she had only just told him. She instructed him to alter the tone of the story without changing any facts at all and without making it in any way untrue.

How Cricket sweated. It was dark when he finished and the bonfire his parents had provided in the square was burning low. The whole village was there to hear him and he peered anxiously from face to face in the flickering red light when he had reached the end, wondering what they thought of him. He did not dare to wonder what she thought.

‘Have you any ale to toast our newest apprentice storyteller?’ she said, laughing. And the congratulations began all over again.

Cricket’s father was a sober man who liked to get every fact straight in his mind. He came across to them and stood staring at the storyteller.

‘Storyteller, I am proud that my son should have been accepted by you but, your pardon, you are a young lass and –’ he hesitated, trying so hard to be tactful that he was dumbstruck.

She looked up at him and said at once, ‘You feel that I may be exceeding my authority, Farmer Broadleaf?’ Her voice was so clear and carrying that everyone listened to her, whatever she said.

So all the village heard her say, ‘I have not yet told you my name. I am Storyteller Wolftalker Dragonfriend.’

Cricket had never before heard a silence like that for any naming.

He knew that everyone here was remembering the story that Gaingold had told them of how Storyteller Spellbinder lost her Name and was given two new ones: ‘Wolftalker’ by the Wilders, and, by the Young Overlord, ‘Dragonfriend’. Gaingold had made a mock of her. He had made them believe she was a shame to all storytellers. And now here she was.

This was the storyteller who had lost her Name.

Much as Cricket had hated Gaingold and knew him for an envious and spiteful creature, he was so used to believing that storytellers always told the truth, that he had never thought to doubt this version of the story.

And indeed, Gaingold had not told them one word of a lie... But there are ways of telling the truth that are as near to a lie as you would wish to come. He had done his best to poison the story for them and for no reason but his own jealous spite.

Wolftalker looked round at them and said quietly, ‘I see that an unfriend has been telling you my Story. May I tell it to you again?’

Cricket was later to hear this Story told many times but never so calmly and so straightforwardly as Wolftalker told it now. She made no attempt to win their pity for the girl child she had been when Arrow, Overlord of Westfold, threatened, not her life, but the lives of little children, storyteller children, unless she did his bidding. She made nothing of the desperate resolve of that child, to die beneath the Dragons’ claws sooner than betray her own people.

‘But when it came to the point,’ she said quietly, ‘and I was face to face with the Dragons, I could not do it. I chose to command them instead. And yet, had I only known it, I was perfectly safe. I would not have died, for the Dragons do not kill. But also, I could not have kept my word to Arrow. The Dragons would never have attacked the Joined Lands. I lost my Name for nothing, for a stupid misunderstanding.

‘Make no mistake, I broke my vow to Arrow and he kept his to me. He freed the storytellers and their children and let them go unharmed, as he had promised. I did break my word. And so I lost the Name that I had pledged.’

Cricket could not hear the smallest tremble in her tone but he couldn’t believe that the most light-hearted among the villagers did not feel the agony of her loss. To lose your name, even one given casually by friends, is bad enough: men had killed themselves for it, but to lose the Name given you by the Storyteller himself, the Name you gained when you were made a Master in your guild, that was to be flayed alive and every day have salt rubbed into the raw flesh.

Cricket hated Gaingold all over again. This time it was for Wolftalker, not himself. How could Gaingold add to her pain by his malice? He found he was clenching his fists as if to smash them into that venomous mouth.

‘But, Storyteller, did the Dragons not attack Arrow’s army and save the Joined Lands? How could they do it if they never kill?’ protested Cricket’s grandfather.

Wolftalker smiled at him. ‘Why, since the soldiers believed that the Dragons would tear them to pieces, they ran in terror as soon as the Air Dragon flew at them. He had no need to touch them. They destroyed themselves.’

‘Serve them right,’ shouted someone from the crowd and everyone joined in, cheering Dragonfriend and the Dragons. She shook her head sadly, then she set herself to smile and be gracious until, all the food eaten and all the ale drunk, everyone went happily to bed.

Next morning, clutching a hastily assembled bundle of clothes and riding behind Wolftalker on her pony, Cricket set out to become a storyteller.

CHAPTER THREE

Cricket felt such a mixture of excitement at leaving, misery at parting from his family and nervousness of the strangeness he was going to, that for a good while he was silent.

They jolted along at a brisk trot, the wolf ranging now ahead, now beside them, then dropping back as if to check for followers. Wolftalker Dragonfriend was as quiet as the boy.

At last, she twisted around and asked, ‘How are you doing, Cricket? You can’t be very comfortable. Shall we walk for a bit?’

Cricket came back to himself with a start. She was quite right: he was very uncomfortable.

‘I’m not used to riding,’ he confessed. ‘I never was on a pony before. We don’t use them for riding.’

Wolftalker pulled up. ‘I thought you’d like to make a grand exit,’ she said, grinning at him over her shoulder, ‘but now we’re well away, we can take it in turn to ride. Hop down and try your legs. Here, give me the bundle. No need to carry it yourself. Marker won’t even notice it.’

Cricket’s legs felt weak and he had to hang on to the saddle for a moment but pushed away quickly, hoping she hadn’t seen. Wolftalker Dragonfriend let the pony amble along slowly until he had limbered up, then they went on as fast as Cricket comfortably could.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked at last. He had no idea, apart from the generally south-westerly direction of this ridge road. He had never before been anywhere but to the market town, Underhill, lying almost due north of Edgescarp.

‘In the end, to the City,’ said Wolftalker. She chuckled at Cricket’s gasp of awe. ‘For now, we are on our way to Scarp-end, to buy you a pony. We should get there in a couple of days at this rate. Unfortunately, there’s nowhere nearer. I could have brought another mount with me but you might have turned me down, mightn’t you? And I did not want to appear too confident.’

‘You mean you were worried I’d refuse?’ He could not believe it. ‘You? Afraid of us thinking...’ Cricket trailed off, confused.

Wolftalker looked down at him, her face serious. ‘Listen to me carefully, Cricket Storyteller,’ she said. ‘Gaingold Storyteller dishonoured all storytellers by his treatment of you. Had you refused our apology and decided not to accept our offer, how could we have made good our honour? Why do you think I was sent, not any other? I am the Young Overlord’s Remembrancer and her Court Storyteller; my great uncle Silkentongue is the Storyteller; I have two Names, both of them honourable even if I did lose my first storyteller Name. I am needed in the City at this moment, yet this mission was so important to our guild that Storyteller Silkentongue insisted that I must come. He would have come himself but that he is ill.’

Cricket stood still in the road and stared at her. He looked around him as if the rock face on the right and the drop on his left, the trees and bushes, even the packed earth beneath his feet might have changed. But they were just the same. It was Cricket who had changed.

He said stupidly: ‘I shan’t be able to ride very fast, I don’t suppose.’

‘Huh?’ Wolftalker shook her head bemusedly, then laughed. ‘Because I said I am needed in the City? Don’t fret yourself. There is not that much haste. You can be learning something of riding on the way to Scarp-end. Most of this road is too rough and steep for travelling at more than a walk anyway.’

On they went. After a little, Wolftalker gave Cricket a riding lesson, walking beside him, telling him how to hold the reins and, more importantly, his body. Marker plodded along and Cricket began to feel secure on his back, even swaggering a little inside.

He fell gradually into a daydream of riding home one day, not on a little rough pony but on a tall horse, which would gallop into the village street; the sort of horse on whose back one could outpace the wind or fight a dragon. He was wondering how it felt to confront a dragon as Dragonfriend had done and whether he would bear himself as well as she had, when she startled him out of it.

‘Hey! Cricket! You can’t daydream on horseback.’

She caught Marker’s rein and Cricket realised that they were right on the edge of the road. The drop below was not all that great, but to Cricket at that moment it looked like a mile.

Wolftalker frowned at him, then, seeing his hands shaking, she said in a milder tone, ‘Well, that’s one mistake you’ll not make again. I should have been more alert myself. Whatever were you thinking of?’

Cricket swallowed. ‘I was thinking about – well, glory. And the Elder Dragons. Shall I ever see them, do you suppose?’ he said in a rush, wondering if she minded talking about them.

‘I shouldn’t think so. They have gone back to sleep and no one would summon them save for a very great need,’ said Wolftalker. ‘It might happen, one day; but it is very unlikely.’

‘Oh.’ Cricket was not sure whether he was relieved or disappointed. ‘Are they very terrifying?’

‘Very. When I first saw one, I was so scared I wet my pants,’ Wolftalker told him cheerfully.

Cricket gasped, choked and then snickered helplessly, all his heroic fantasies vanishing. And Wolftalker Dragonfriend, the Young Overlord’s Court Storyteller, laughed with him.

Between Edgescarp and Scarp-end, Cricket asked hundreds of questions about the storytellers and storytelling; a question for every stone in their path all the length of that rocky mountain road, claimed Wolftalker. She was amazingly patient with him; and he asked even more questions.

He did not know it at the time, but she was teaching him all the things that young storytellers normally pick up from their kin and take for granted. If he had not asked, she would have told him all the same, he learned the faster for asking.

CHAPTER FOUR

They reached the town of Scarp-end in mid-afternoon of the second day, bought some supplies and a pony and its gear and went on.

Cricket had expected a halt in the town, perhaps for Wolftalker to tell some stories, but she barely paused long enough to bargain, paying more for the pony than Cricket was sure the dealer had dreamed of getting. They did not so much as eat their lastmeal at the inn, though Cricket, having never had a meal in a public eating house, was childishly disappointed and sulked silently as they set out again.

Wolftalker noticed the sulking but she paid no attention. Instead, for the first time she gave him a formal lesson.

‘Now that we can converse instead of calling back and forth,’ she said, reining Marker alongside Cricket’s quiet pony, ‘I can tell you the first Story that all apprentices are told. It is never told to any but Storytellers. Listen and remember, Storyteller to be, and in your turn you shall tell this story to your apprentice.’

And she told Cricket the Story of Nameless, the Master Storyteller once named Clevertongue, who was cast out by his guild and by his own mother for telling Stories which were not Stories but lies. He had been totally outcast, for, said Wolftalker, ‘none of the folk, when they had heard the Story of Nameless, would speak one word to him or sell him food or give him shelter. With all his wealth about him, he died in a ditch, of hunger and cold and despair.

‘As for his mother, who for shame had renounced even her Name, she wandered from one group of storytellers to another, always revered and honoured, speaking with them in the Elder tongue but never telling a story until at last she came to the Old Forest in the land of Captal. Here she stayed, living with the Wilders, who speak only the Elder tongue; and here she was given a Name again, for the Wilders, who call the wolves their cousins, Named her Wolftalker because she would sit in the forest and tell tales to the wolves.

‘But no Storyteller since that time has ever been named Clevertongue,’ finished Wolftalker.

‘Is that why you...’ Cricket began. And broke off, abashed.

‘Yes, the Wilders gave me her name. One of them found me in the Gilden Forest telling this very Story to my friend Drinks-the-Wind.’

She nodded at the huge wolf who was ranging well ahead of them, since Cricket’s pony objected strenuously to his presence.

‘He’ll have to get used to Drinks-the-Wind sooner or later,’ she had remarked when they bought his mount, ‘but we’ll let them get acquainted gradually.’

So the wolf kept his distance, staying downwind as far as possible and the pony, a sturdy bay with a white star on his forehead, snorted less loudly and tossed his head less nervously each time Drinks-the-Wind came a little closer or the wind changed and brought him the wolf scent.

‘You have two names,’ Cricket said carefully. ‘Should I use both, or do you prefer one?’

‘In the City I am Dragonfriend, for that is the name The Young Overlord gave me; elsewhere, mostly I am Wolftalker, except amongst my closest friends, of course.’ She grinned and would be drawn no further, and turning her attention to Cricket’s pony announced that he should be Baylock, and when Cricket asked her why she smiled.

‘It is the name by which I first knew Farwalker,’ she told him.

‘Lord Farwalker? The Archer?’ Cricket was enthralled. ‘Will he mind your calling a pony by his name?’

‘No, of course not. Farwalker is not the sort to bother about an old use-name. I’m the only one who ever uses it nowadays, unless Gray still does. I don’t know for sure because I have been in Gilden Forest with the Wilders since the Dragons went back to their slumber and I only returned to court a month ago; and then I was sent to find you almost at once.’

She looked suddenly sad. ‘Farwalker was away visiting his landholding so I haven’t seen him since the proclamation of the new Overlord of Westfold. Nearly a year, now.’

Cricket desperately wanted to know about the new Overlord of Westfold, about living with the Wilders and about Lord Farwalker’s use-name and how Wolftalker had first met him; and who did she mean by ‘Gray’? But he didn’t dare ask.

‘I’ll tell you the story of my meeting with Gray and Baylock tonight when we’ve made camp,’ she told him, as if she had read his mind. ‘We’ll have to stop soon. You can’t make camp in the dark, but you can tell stories.’

CHAPTER FIVE

They were two weeks on the road altogether. In that time Wolftalker taught Cricket the Elder tongue. She forced him to learn very short tales and rhymes in that language. They were baby tales, simple, repetitive and easy to memorise, even before he understood them.

After the first week she refused to speak to him in the Common tongue at all, except to translate each tale once and once only.

By the time they reached the City, Cricket was dreaming in the Elder tongue and could carry on a simple conversation. He had also learned the Story of Nameless in that tongue. He discovered that in telling it to him in the Common tongue, Wolftalker had had to translate as she went.

‘It is told only to storytellers, you see,’ she explained, ‘and so it is always told in our own language. The Wilders, as I told you, are the only other people who speak it all the time. Very few of them even now speak any of the Common tongues.’

‘I didn’t know there was more than one,’ Cricket said, puzzled.

Wolftalker laughed. ‘We of the Joined Lands claim that ours is the original one and all others are distorted versions of it. If so, some of them are very twisted indeed. The lands closest to us have more or less the same speech. You would have no difficulty in following what a Westfolderman said, for instance; but if you tried to talk to the people who live in the Desert Plains I doubt if you’d understand a word. They have so many different names for things that I can’t believe their language ever came from ours at all.

‘Still, words do change their meaning and even their sound over many years. Some of the Great Cycle Stories are very hard to understand. We Storytellers keep them unaltered for ourselves but we have to change some words so that folk nowadays know what they mean. It is a very solemn business, deciding to change even one word of the Great Cycle and there is always a long discussion between all the Master Storytellers and messages have to go to all the lands where they speak our version of the Common tongue and – oh, it is a great bore! I had to attend such a meeting just before I came to fetch you, Cricket. I promise you, if it had gone on much longer I’d have... well, I don’t know what, but something unbecoming and violent. Don’t ever tell anyone I said so, will you? It was a great honour.’

She pulled a wry face that made Cricket snort with laughter and promise never to let anyone know.

‘But I should think they’d guess if you looked like that during the discussions,’ he told her.

The City lay in the valley of the Great River. Above it the river divided, to join again below so that the City sat on an island. It was a tall island; the highest point, where the keep was, stood almost as high as the valley walls.

There was a story about the keep. It was intended to be taller than the valley’s sides so that a lookout might be kept over the lands either side of the river; but the Overlord who ordered it built was a cruel man who was feared and hated by his people. They did not want to be overlooked. When the keep was nearly tall enough, therefore, the stone masons declared that the foundations were not deep enough to support the weight of another course. They refused to set one more stone upon another. The Overlord had their leader killed but still they refused. He tried to make others do the work but everyone believed, or else pretended to believe, the masons and at last he was obliged to roof his keep as it was. It still had an odd, unfinished look.

This was not something Cricket noticed that first time, of course. He just stood and stared down at the river, the bridges, great and small, crossing it, the wharves lining its banks and the City rising directly up behind them in tiers of houses.

‘I first saw it from the other side where the river is wider but not so deep,’ said Wolftalker. ‘There are no wharves there but there are two fords and so, for safety, the City wall runs along the water’s edge. It appears to grow out of the river. But I like this approach just as well.’

She held out her hands as if to cup the City lovingly between them. ‘I don’t regard it as my private property as I think my friend Strongtower does,’ she added, grinning sideways at him, ‘but I do like to come back to it. And Graycat is here. And perhaps Farwalker will be back by now.’