Heir to Sevenwaters (14 page)

On the third evening after Willow had told us the tale of warring clurichauns, Aidan persuaded me to bring my harp down to the hall and we played jigs and reels together. Perhaps such exuberant music was not altogether apt, for Mother had been vomiting and purging, and Muirrin’s brisk manner and capable expression did not fool me into believing all was well. Still, the household seemed to appreciate the music. Our performance lured a group of maidservants and men-at-arms out to dance. As we worked our way through the final jig the pace got quicker and quicker and we almost came unstuck several times. We survived, I flushed and breathless, Aidan laughing and examining his fingers as if to ascertain that they were all still there. The audience applauded heartily. Father, however, was quiet.

“I have another tale for you tonight.” It was Willow’s voice, deep and strong, and as I watched the old woman came forward from her corner, her bony hand clutching her staff. “If Lord Sean permits. It is the second of three I owe, and the right one for this day and time.”

“Of course,” Father said, but it was clear to me his thoughts were elsewhere. I knew he would rather be upstairs with Mother, but he would stay in the hall until the evening’s entertainment was over. Folk liked routine; they liked things to conform to a pattern. That made them feel safe. A chieftain could never put his personal concerns first.

As was her habit, Willow had a good look around the hall before she began her tale. Sibeal was here with Eilis and Coll, sitting on the floor in the front. The departure of Gareth’s party meant Aidan and Cathal were spending a good deal of their time on duty. Tonight, Aidan had the job of keeping close to Johnny, though he had been allowed time off to play for us. Cathal stood further away, near the entry.

“Would you ever believe,” Willow said, fixing Coll and Eilis with her penetrating gaze, “that a mother would abandon her baby in a deep, dark wood at night? Only the most troubled of women would do such a thing. Only a mother too frightened and desperate to offer her child the love that was his birthright would leave him thus to the will of the gods. It happened, and the infant was on the edge of death when the wolf came.” The children stared at her, caught up in the tale already.

“Now that wolf,” said Willow, “was far more of a mother than the frail, confused girl. She had cubs in a hollow deep in the woods and plenty of milk to feed them with. So she took up the wee one, carefully, with the back of his garments in her sharp teeth, and carried him off home with her. She loved him in keeping with her nature, practically, wisely, and she nurtured him long after her little ones were grown and had gone their own ways. She cleaned him with her rough tongue, learning the patterns of his strange, hairless body; she discovered how weak he truly was. She hunted for him, since he could not seem to master it. She kept him warm at night; she made beds of bracken and leaves to shelter him when his garments wore away to shreds. And in time Wolf-child learned to crawl and to scamper and to run, mostly on all fours like his brothers and sisters, but sometimes up on two legs, awkwardly. He learned the smells and sounds of the forest; he learned ways to protect himself. He learned the growls and barks and whimpers of the wolf pack’s language. The others tolerated him because of his mother, for she was high in their order, having whelped many strong litters. The pack leader did not consider Wolf-child a threat, since the hairless one was such a weakling. Among the others, the boy’s singular nature earned him a wary respect.

“Years passed, and Wolf-child was a boy the size of this young fellow”—Willow nodded in Coll’s direction—“with the skill to make his own shelter and to snare a bird when he wanted meat. His mother still watched over him, but she had reared many cubs since the day she took the waif in, and her human son was learning to do without her. Only when the winter bit hardest, in time of storm and sleet, would she let him sleep next to her, curled up against the warmth of her body. It was their misfortune that men came to that part of the forest early in the morning on such a day, men who saw with disbelief the aging wolf rising from sleep and the half-grown boy, naked in the cold, jumping up and spreading his arms to protect her from their hunting spears. They did not kill the wolf mother—their astonishment made them too slow for that—and she fled away soft-footed under the trees. It was the boy they pursued, and it was the boy they finally caught, hardly knowing what they would do with the snarling, thrashing creature they had in their hands.

“Wolf-child was dragged back to the local settlement. He was like any wild creature suddenly captive: bewildered, afraid, furious. He lashed out at anyone who came near. They confined him in a cellar with a bolt on the door. In time, as he grew hungry, tired and dispirited, the boy became quieter, but he growled a warning each time someone came to leave him food. He could not drink from the cup they provided, spilling the water as he tried to lap at it. The cooked meat was alien to him but he devoured it, crouched down over the platter, not using his hands.

“You might ask, why did his wolf mother not defend him out there in the forest? Why did she run, leaving her child to be taken? But to her he was not a child. It was a long time since this strange cub had first come her way. Her tolerance of his closeness had worn thin as she grew older and more weary. She sensed that her time as first female in the pack was drawing to an end. She would have defended a brood of small cubs to the death, but this one must fend for himself.

“For a while Wolf-child was a wonder to be peered at through a chink in the cellar door, a marvel to be entertained by. But the novelty wore thin soon enough. One or two of the villagers tried to talk to the boy, to gesture in a way he might understand, but he responded only with growls or whining, and they soon lost interest in such an unrewarding creature. As for Wolf-child, he was cold, lonely and confused. They had given him clothing to wear, a rough shirt and trousers, and after a little he did keep them on, feeling their warmth. But in the confines of the cellar he could not clean himself as he would in the forest. The stink of the place became so rank that nobody wanted to come near it.

“The villagers saw that they had made a mistake in thinking there might be a place for the boy among them. He was a human being, sure enough. But he didn’t know it, and it was beyond them to teach him. Not wanting simply to let him go, for that seemed no more right than keeping him locked up, they asked the local druid for help.

“Now druids, as we all know, see deeper than the surfaces of things. That’s one of their strengths, and another is the ability to be still and quiet; the gift of great patience. They can sit in one spot all day and never get bored. If a man’s head is crammed full of lore he’s never short of the means to entertain himself. The druid asked the villagers to lend him a cottage with a well-fenced patch of land, and he took Wolf-child there with him and shut the gate after them.

“It took him a long time, but eventually the druid earned the trust of his young companion and was able to teach him certain things. Wolf-child learned to keep himself clean, not in the way a wolf does, by licking or rolling or swimming, but by the use of a cloth and a bucket. The boy learned to drink from a cup and eat from a platter, though he was awkward with a knife or spoon. He learned to sit on a bench, but preferred the floor. The druid encouraged him to stand more upright, to walk on two legs not four, and was partly successful. As for human speech, that was far harder. The druid sensed the boy could understand quite well, but Wolf-child found shaping words with his mouth difficult. One word he learned easily. He would stand by the gate, a gate fastened by an iron chain which his wolfish fingers could not manipulate open, and point toward the forest. ‘
Out
,’ he would say, his tone somewhere between speech and barking. ‘
Out
.’ ”

It seemed to me this story was not going to have a happy ending. I was not sure I wanted to hear the rest of it, but I was not in the best position to slip out of the hall unnoticed without offending Willow. There was no fault in her storytelling. I just wasn’t in the right mood to hear something sad. With Mother lying upstairs so desperate to hold onto her unborn child, and Father looking so weary and grim, I could do without a tale of a boy who was unlikely to do well in either world, that of well-meaning, ignorant humankind or of animals governed by their instincts. I glanced toward the main door as Aidan brought Willow a cup of ale. Maybe I could take advantage of this pause to vanish outside until the story was finished. As my gaze fell on Cathal my heart missed a beat. Stark and plain on that narrow, guarded face I saw the wretched aloneness of the wolf boy. I saw his recognition that he would always be outside, other, never quite a part of the community on whose fringes he dwelt. I saw that it hurt beyond any pain.

A moment later, Cathal realized I was looking at him. With what must have been a formidable effort of will, he relaxed his features, the thin lips forming their usual derisory smile, the expression conveying nothing more than a general desire to be somewhere else. The dark brows rose as if to question my apparent interest in him. I imagined him saying,
Haven’t you got anything better to look at?

Willow had taken a mouthful of her ale and set the cup down. “Of course, the druid had tried to find out whose son this wild boy was, but his enquiries bore no fruit,” she said. “The girl who had left her child out for the wolves was long forgotten. Wolf-child was nobody; a conundrum; a puzzle. The druid, patient man as he was, had a longing to return to his cave out in the forest, his own place where he could sleep under the oaks and make his prayers beneath a canopy of bright stars, unbounded by wall or enclosure. Given years, he might teach the feral child skills sufficient to allow him a place on the very edge of human society. Whether that was right or not was a question one might be a lifetime answering. The boy would grow up neither wolf nor man. His mother had done him no favors that chilly night when she decided to abandon him to fate.

“Now,” said Willow, “there are many possible endings to this tale, and the one that suits you best may not be the one I like. There might be one for a warrior and one for a lady and one for a boy of Wolf-child’s age. So we’ll have three tonight, and you will help me tell them. Let us begin with the warrior, for we have a good supply of those here. What about you, young man?” The storyteller was looking at Johnny.

My cousin smiled. “Aidan is both warrior and bard,” he said. “I delegate the task to him.”

“Very well,” Willow said. “And how would Aidan finish this tale?”

Aidan cleared his throat. He’d been taken off-guard. “I would like to see this boy make something of himself,” he ventured. “In my story, the druid persisted in his patient training of his young charge, and in addition he sought the help of the local nobleman”—he nodded courteously in my father’s direction—“who should perhaps have been the first person consulted by the villagers. When the nobleman came down to see the lad he brought his own son, a warrior in training. They came on horseback, and while the nobleman discussed matters with the druid, the young warrior took his first steps toward befriending Wolf-child, for they were close in age, if not in understanding. Wolf-child growled at the horse, which laid back its ears and twitched its tail. All the same, that day the wild boy learned something he had not quite realized before. In this fine young man he saw a vision of himself as he might be. From that day things began to change more quickly for Wolf-child, for now he wanted to learn, to grow, to become a man. I would leave the story at that point, where this boy so cruelly abandoned found that he had a real future ahead of him.”

Willow nodded. There was no telling what she thought of this ending for her tale. “And you, young man?” she asked, looking at Coll.

“One day the druid left the gate open,” Coll said, instantly taking up the challenge. “Maybe by mistake, maybe not. When he remembered and went outside to chain it up again, Wolf-child was gone. And whether the wolf pack took him back as one of their own, or whether they turned him away because he’d been among humankind for too long, nobody ever found out. But sometimes, at dead of night, when the wolves howl at the moon, folk in those parts say they hear another sound mingling with the wolfish voices—the cry of a man whose heart craves what he can never have.”

A stunned silence fell over us. I eyed my young cousin with new respect. I knew he loved stories, but I had never heard him tell one before. This had been a strong ending. I looked over at Cathal, wondering what he had thought of it, but he wasn’t there. At some point after Willow had cut off her narration so abruptly he had left the hall.

“And you, Clodagh?”

I started in surprise as the old woman addressed me.
One for a lady.
She expected me to provide the third version. The ending that sprang to my mind was even darker than Coll’s, and I would not tell it. “The others were very good,” I said, playing for time. “I cannot better them.”

“Better?” Willow queried with a smile. “There is no better or worse with stories, only different. What would you make of this? How would you resolve it? With sorrow, with gladness, with learning?” That look was in her eyes again, the same I had seen when she told the clurichaun story. It was a look that challenged me to understand, to take from the story some kind of learning that was not obvious. I was unable to grasp what she meant by it. My mind went back to Cathal’s stricken face, his haunted, lonely eyes. He’d been upset beyond anything the tale might have conjured. Why?

“The druid, of course, would learn from the situation, however it ended,” I said. “It is in a druid’s nature to do so.” A shadow moved by the doorway; Cathal was still there listening, but hovering on the threshold as if he was not quite sure whether he wanted to hear or not. Suddenly I was determined to do this well and not to end the wretched tale in the misery and failure that seemed to me inevitable. But I would not make it unrealistic, as Aidan’s version had been. The damage done to Wolf-child could not be so easily undone. “The druid knew he could not continue the way things were,” I said. “It was too late for the boy to go back to his wolf clan. After those seasons away, the pack would no longer accept him as one of their kind. He would look wrong, smell wrong. The boy would miss them, of course. They were the only family he had known. What was the alternative? Perhaps, eventually, the druid might teach Wolf-child to be a man. Was that such a great thing that it merited the erasing of the wisdom this boy had learned among the wolves? His adoptive kin had given him much, and the druid saw that here in this locked enclosure whose high walls shut out the forest, those strengths, those instincts, that bright knowledge would continue to ebb away. Was it right to replace those gifts with skills from a culture of which the boy might never completely become a part? How could such a wild one learn to love, to work, to provide for his own? But Wolf-child could not go back. It was a problem to vex the best-trained mind.