Katherine Langrish - Dark Angels

KATHERINE LANGRISH

DARK ANGELS

HarperCollins Children’s Books

FOR DAVID

*

Warm thanks to: My daughters for reading it and telling me it was all right really

Sally Martin for insightful and tactful editing Michele Topham for level-headed calm and Huw Tegid from Menter Môn for advising on Welsh phrases

Cover

Title Page KATHERINE LANGRISH DARK ANGELS HarperCollins Children’s Books

The Beginning of the Elves The Beginning of the Elves One day, some years after Adam and Eve had been cast out of Paradise, the Lord God came to visit them in the cool of the evening. By now, Adam and Eve had lots of children, too many to look after properly. Some of them hadn’t been washed, and Eve was ashamed of them. “Hide,” she told the dirty ones. “You aren’t fit to be seen by God. Keep out of His sight.” “Are these all the children you have?” asked God, looking at the scuffling parade of clean children lined up before Him. “Yes,” said Eve. “Then what you have hidden from Me shall be hidden from everyone,” said God. The dirty children became invisible to human eyes, and from then on they were outcasts, forced to hide in hills, caves and rocks. This was the beginning of the elves.

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

Praise for Troll Fell

Also by Katherine Langrish

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Beginning of the Elves

One day, some years after Adam and Eve had been cast out of Paradise, the Lord God came to visit them in the cool of the evening.

By now, Adam and Eve had lots of children, too many to look after properly. Some of them hadn’t been washed, and Eve was ashamed of them. “Hide,” she told the dirty ones. “You aren’t fit to be seen by God. Keep out of His sight.”

“Are these all the children you have?” asked God, looking at the scuffling parade of clean children lined up before Him.

“Yes,” said Eve.

“Then what you have hidden from Me shall be hidden from everyone,” said God.

The dirty children became invisible to human eyes, and from then on they were outcasts, forced to hide in hills, caves and rocks.

This was the beginning of the elves.

The first time the horn sounded on the hill, Wolf mistook it for a sheep bleating or a bird crying, and thought no more of it. He had other things to worry about.

There were no proper paths up here. He hadn’t known it would take so long to climb out of the valley. He’d expected to be miles away by now, dropping into the shelter of the woods — not still forcing his way up through waist-high heather towards the long, saw-blade ridge of Devil’s Edge. But there were no proper paths up here. Wolf cursed the boggy sheep tracks that never lasted more than a few yards before twisting the wrong way.

He was picking his way across a brook when he heard it: a faint, mournful wailing, more like a stain on the wind than a real sound. He checked mid-stream to listen, teetered on a wobbly stone, whirled his arms, jumped for the next and missed, and landed on his hands and knees in the brawling water.

“Hell’s bones !”

He waded over slimy pebbles to the bank. By then the sound had faded, and who cared, anyway? A bird , he told himself in disgust. Or an old sheep crying. He was soaked from the knees down, and his long sleeves flapped like wet washing.

Shivering, wringing the water out of his black robes, he looked back. West, into Wales, the hills were half sponged out by rainclouds. In the valley, the river looped like a scrawl of silver ink. And he could still see the dark lead roof of the Abbey of Christ and Saint Ethelbert at Wenford where, just about now, the monks would be lighting the candles and filing into chapel to sing the evening prayers. Without him.

Good !

But his mind flew back there, swift as a bird.

He heard again the biting drawl of Brother Thomas, master of the boys: “You — Wolfstan. Take that smile off your face. I heard you singing in the cloister this morning. Singing like a veritable nightingale! A holy song, no doubt. A psalm, no doubt! Strange that I did not recognise it. What psalm were you singing, Wolfstan?”

Wolf gritted his teeth. It hadn’t been a psalm, and the skinny old devil knew it.

“It was a French song !” Brother Thomas made the words sound like ‘a dead rat’. “About love and springtime and women !” He’d seized the back of Wolf’s neck. “Blasphemous boy!” he hissed. “‘ Timor Domini initium sapienti est.’ Do you know what that means, you villain? ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ And if you will not learn from fear of the Lord, you will learn from fear of me. Pass me the rod. Strip off your robe.”

“I hate you!” Wolf screamed down the hillside.

He snatched up some stones, wincing as his shirt twitched unstuck from his blood-stained back, and hurled one after another down the slope as hard as he could. “I hate you! I’m never coming back!”

He buried his face in his hands. It’s not my fault !

But it was. He, Wolf, had run away from the household of God. And now he would pay for it by spending the night on the hill, alone and shelterless.

But if he went back…

If he went back, the rest of his life would be bound by the Rule, the endless circle of prayers and duties. Walk, don’t run. Pray, don’t talk. Rise when the bell rings. Eat when the bell rings. Sleep when the bell rings. Till one day he’d be an old man shuffling between refectory and chapel, coughing in the dormitory at night and keeping the boys awake.

Wolf lifted his head. It wasn’t dark yet, and when it was he’d find somewhere safe to rest — a dry spot under a gorse bush, or if he was lucky, a shepherd’s hut. He turned to go on.

Above him rose Devil’s Edge, stark against the sky with its crest of jagged rocks like broken castles — like a ruined city where monsters lived and demons lurked. In a clump of bracken nearby, something uttered a deep wheezing cough, and Wolf leaped like a hare. But it must be a sheep. Only a sheep.

He squelched around the edge of a bog. Last year workmen digging peat for winter fuel had discovered a body in one of these bogs. Some unlucky traveller had drowned there — or been murdered and thrown in by robbers — but centuries ago, in the time of the old Romans, maybe. The workmen had carried the body down to the abbey on a hurdle, and Wolf had seen it —creased like old leather, muddy and dripping, stained deep brown from the dark water. Now he wished he hadn’t.

He imagined it, or something like it, with glowing eyes and long, thin arms and huge, dark hands, stalking him through the heather. And why not? There were plenty of scary tales about this hill. Stories of blue elf-fires, burning at the mouths of long-abandoned mineshafts and tunnels. Stories of bogeymen and ghosts.

He took another glance at the ridge. Up on the very top, he had heard there was a road. A road leading nowhere, a road no one used. For if anyone was so bold as to walk along it, especially at night, he’d hear the clamour of hounds and the blowing of horns, the cracking of whips and the rumbling of a cart. And out of the dark would burst the Devil’s own dog pack, dashing beside a black wagon drawn by goats with fiery eyes, crammed full of screaming souls bound for the pits of Hell.