Night of the Wolf (17 page)

Imona and her companions entered the forest. The last sunset light was a red haze in the naked forest. The night’s storm had swept away the tattered remains of summer. Branches that might have held yet a few scarlet, yellow, and dusky brown leaves a few days ago now lifted bare against the glowing sky. Even the last straggler oaks were nude.

The odd-eyed phalanx crowded Imona and the two attending her past one giant trunk that stood like a pillar of the world. The branches above were decorated by fans of mistletoe, green against the brown of barren wood, covered by sprays of white berries gilded by the sunset.

Except for a few of the giant oaks, the forest was low and scrubby. The trees were small, second-growth types. In places, thick brush almost blocked the path and the group had to push their way through.

Then, abruptly, the path dipped into a hollow, partially filled by a dank pond. To the wolf, the water had a peaty, tannic smell, the tannin partially contributed by the leaves of another huge oak leaning over the pool.

Imona spoke loudly in the silence of the winter-blasted forest. “Here!” She paused, then turned, walked to the edge of the pool, and raised her arms in invocation to the last light.

The sun, its orb on the rim of a hill directly in front of her, shone on her face.

The wolf blinked, but Imona stared steadily into the flaming ball as it slowly sank below the rim of the hill.

A terrible moan rose from the black-clad figures around the wolf, a cry, a sobbing cry from the living and the dead.

Imona’s arms fell. The sun was gone, but not the light above the hill. The sky glowed and a clear blue twilight filled the hollow.

Enid proffered a cup to Imona.

The wolf moved up. He was close now, no more than a few feet higher on the sloping bank behind them. It was almost dark. He would challenge anything, living or dead, to find him in the night, in the full dark, under the trees.

His eyes probed the faces around the woman in white. Resolve on some, and sorrow, hope, fear, and awe. A few pulsed with something darker; he marked them. What were they doing?

“No!” she said, pushing it away. “I drank the porridge. That’s enough.” Then she removed the pins from the shoulders of the dress and it fell at her feet. Her body was pale white in the blue gloom.

The chieftain stepped forward from the shadows behind her.

She removed the torque from her neck and handed it to Mir.

Then the chieftain hit her as hard as he could on the back of the head.

The wolf stood frozen, paralyzed by the swift and, to him, senseless brutality.

Mir produced the curved bronze knife and slit her throat.

In the second that the knife passed through her throat, the wolf saw she was doomed. Before blood flooded the wound, he clearly saw the white tendons and larynx, which held the head up and gave shape to speech, part, then the long, dark hoses, which sent blood to the brain and back, swiped in two. Old though he might be, Mir’s stroke was true, and perhaps merciful, though Imona was still moving when her body vanished into the pool at her feet.

Enid turned away, hood up, hiding her face in her cloak.

The chieftain was down on his knees, forehead pressed against the damp earth. The others fell back, the living and the dead, the guilty and the innocent.

Only Mir still stood, his hand shaking now, the bloody sickle sword still clenched in his fist.

The wolf moved down like a piece of the darkness until he stood beside Mir, looking into the tarn.

Enid uncovered her face with a sigh of relief, a relief that didn’t last because Imona’s face reappeared a few inches below the surface of the water. Enid screamed and covered her face again.

A few bubbles trailed from Imona’s lips, drifted up, and broke near a stand of waterweed. Then, her eyes, those gray-green beauties he had looked into so often, opened. They looked into his, just for one second, seemingly in farewell. Then they closed and her face was blotted out by the spreading black cloud of blood from her torn throat.

Sinking down in the pool, Imona had one last plaintive thought,
It takes too long to die.
But it didn’t, because that thought was her last, and she was swept across the bridge of starlight into the final silence.

X

It wasn’t long after Imona’s death that the wolf visited Mir. When he returned from the oppidum the pack accepted him back, but not as leader. The she-wolf—mother of the pack, now heavy with her pregnancy—ran with a survivor of the lowland pack the Romans had wiped out.

This wolf, though battered, was gigantic. One ear was torn and a patch of white fur on his shoulder marked a scar where a Roman legionnaire’s gladius had been driven into his body. One of his front fangs was broken. He was nervous, vicious, and quick to take offense. As a result, he was distrusted and feared by the rest of the pack.

He seemed to see all of the yearling males as rivals. In situations the gray would simply have handled with a look of disapproval, White Shoulder lunged and snarled. In more serious encounters, he slashed and bit—bit hard.

The new leader nearly crippled one of the yearling males over a few scraps of hide. The offender limped for a week after being bitten on the upper leg and neck. After that, the yearling males began to desert the pack, drifting away in search of more amiable company.

The bitch was little better among the females. This was a much more serious matter. They were the best and most effective hunters and responsible, collectively, for most of the kills.

They remained virgin for up to four years: lean, powerful killers who could outpace, when necessary, even the ibex and chamois.

They, too, were slowly being alienated and the gray knew some of them would leave, also. He couldn’t bring himself to care. He could easily have challenged White Shoulder. Once, he would have, but even his pack’s destruction couldn’t seem to move him now.

One night he decided to visit Mir and kill him.

Winter had come to the heights, and the high forest of fir and spruce was choked now with several feet of snow. Game was growing scarce. The day before, the pack had taken a half dozen hare, a few marmots, and several nests of field mice dug from beneath the snow. Not enough, and the wolves knew it.

At this rate, they would starve. Only the gray had an inkling of the real problem: the Romans. It took a lot to feed the three hundred men Caesar had lodged there permanently. There was plenty of bread wheat in the commissary, but meat was in short supply.

The soldiers held hunts. They were not interested in fair play, but efficiency. They constructed an arrangement shaped like a large funnel and stationed pikemen and archers at the lower, narrow end.

The legionnaires then took their positions as beaters, driving game toward the narrow end where their executioners awaited them.

The wolf had watched while hidden in a cover of thick blackberry canes.

They killed, laughing and competing with each other for every creature that came through the opening of the makeshift corral.

Nothing was too small and, certainly, not too large. They stamped to death the smallest mice and drowned dormice in a pail of water. They were a delicacy intended for the officers. The slaughter of the deer was sickening because they came through so quickly. They couldn’t all be killed cleanly.

The white snow became a trampled mass of red where the cripples lay screaming or trying to run, intestines dragging until they were felled with an ax or club. The fawns were ignored until last because they would not leave their mothers, not even when the does lay stiffening in the bloody snow.

The tender young animals were another delicacy intended for the commander’s table. They were hung up by the heels while yet living and their throats cut to drain away blood from the delicate meat.

At some time in the long afternoon while he watched, it had begun to snow again and the small icy flakes began their work of purification on the killing ground, slowly turning the red-stained snow to white. The animals were all dead and the only sound that remained was the cursing and complaining of the butchers as they gutted and skinned their harvest.

Shuddering, the wolf crept away. He returned to the place where Imona’s family had their home. The valley and the forest around it were a white waste.

The wolf eased into the cave where the two of them had enjoyed their summer’s lovemaking. He slept. He woke long enough to drink and relieve himself, then went back to sleep.

Yes, indeed. They were definitely the lords of creation. He didn’t think too much about what he’d seen. He decided he didn’t want to.

On the third day, he came down, ready to rejoin the pack. He circled the area where the house once stood. The old smell of charred wood blotted out other scents. He went to the linden tree. Enough traces remained for him to tell that Leon’s bones still lay tangled with the ruined cloth of Imona’s loom. The loom poles themselves had been carved cedar. They lent their strange, clean odor to what was now a grave. Then he rejoined the pack.

That evening White Shoulder rose from his bed in the snow, shook himself, and headed for the valley. The rest followed. When Maeniel saw the direction of their travel, he paused and laid his ears back.

His thoughts weren’t the thoughts of a wolf. He already knew how dangerous humans were.

He could have settled back in the snow and returned to sleep. Or simply gone somewhere else and hunted. All members, subject to their fear of hunting or surviving alone, were free agents. No one gives orders to a wolf.

So the wolf’s ears flicked back, then forward. A few other members of the pack drifted past. They looked deceptively and equally bored. No one watching them would have believed they might be dangerous.

The wolf flicked his ears again, then shook himself to clear the last of the snow from his coat, gave the equivalent of a mental shrug, and followed the rest.

A few hours later, the wolves rested together in the snow under a canopy of tall conifers clothing the shallow slopes surrounding the fortress.

Had it not been winter and the ground covered by a thin skin of snow, the wolves would have been visible to the sentries walking the platforms along the palisaded walls. As it was, the white and gray snow camouflaged them almost perfectly.

The big gray chewed ice out of his soft belly fur and decided the Romans weren’t stupid. They’d felled all the trees closest to the fortress to build the walls and the stout dwellings inside. This made ambush practically impossible. The soldiers protected anyone entering or leaving the fortress.

So,
the wolf thought,
why are we watching it?
Then he turned ’round and ’round, draped the brush of his tail over his nose, and went to sleep.

He awoke a few hours later because White Shoulder had risen and was stealthily following a small party of soldiers leaving the fortress in a wagon. The weather was growing worse. Even though it was rather late in the morning, the sky grew darker, not lighter, and a few vagrant, tiny flakes drifted down from above. One burned the tip of the wolf’s nose with an icy sting, and he could hear the soft crunch as his paws pushed into the snow, kept loose and fresh by the deepening cold. All the trees left standing near the fortress were tall, long-trunked silver firs, carrying their lowest branches very high up. The tops were caught in the misty cloud mass rolling through the pass.

The wolves followed the wagon, moving near the trail but not on it. The wagon passed a bend in the road and turned downward. The trees crowded in closer. They were out of sight of the fortress and the undergrowth grew thicker.

The wolves moved in closer. They did nothing menacing, but if they took advantage of the cover, they could not be seen and were able to travel alongside the cart.

The snow grew thicker; fine, almost infinitesimal flakes seemed almost a mist in the air.

Prey! The gray had been a leader too long not to want to study whatever he hunted. He increased his pace, staying just out of sight of the cart. He was a bit afraid of being seen, but as he drew closer, he realized there was nothing to fear from the men.

The four legionnaires sat in the back, trying to play at knucklebones, no easy task in the swaying cart, and refreshing themselves liberally, if surreptitiously, from several clay flasks and a heavy wineskin they carried with them. Occasionally they broke off long enough to curse the old soldier driving a cart.

He was a centurion, so called because he was the commander of a hundred men. They were the backbone of the Roman army. Most were hard enough to break rocks with their heads, but not this man.

The legionnaires he ostensibly commanded did as they pleased now. Once, he’d been a magnificent warrior, but now he was an old man and the younger soldiers, out of sight of the camp, treated him rather like they did the horses drawing the cart. They didn’t dare do this in the camp. Too many of the other noncoms remembered Drusus’ prime and would have savagely punished any insolence.

Drusus drove and privately thought the men with him today were fools. He himself was uneasy and was sure they were being shadowed. By what, he couldn’t be sure, but he’d seen furtive movements from the corners of his eyes.

Hirax, a German from the allied tribes, was pretty much the ringleader among these men when any mischief was in the offing, and obviously today he had decided to use a short trip after firewood as an excuse to get stinking drunk. The other three—Marcus, Statilius, and Scorpus—would likely follow blindly because they hadn’t one good brain between them. Once impaired by drink, the average bush was smarter.

Drusus checked his sword. This much remained of an honored warrior. He always kept it sharp and clean.

Another bend in the road passed and Drusus pulled the cart to a stop at the edge of a clearing. Here, during good weather, a large party of men had felled a dozen trees and cut them into sections ready to be loaded on carts and taken to the fortress.

Drusus shivered. The soldiers stood up, lowered the tailgate, got down, and started toward the house-sized pile of logs.

“Build a fire,” Drusus said.

They ignored him.

“You sons of whores! I told you to build a fire. Do it and do it now! If you don’t—” His sword cleared its sheath. “—I won’t bother with a tribunal. I’ll kill the four of you myself.” His eyes locked with his men’s. Theirs strayed away first.

The clearing was filled with deadfalls under its thin skin of snow. It took only a few moments to build a fair-sized fire near the cart. Then the soldiers attacked the woodpile. Each log had to be snaked from the top of the pile, then placed on crib supports and sawed into lengths small enough to be loaded into the wagon.

Drusus climbed back up and sat down on the driver’s perch. He knew what was shadowing them now and felt better. One of the wolves had entered the clearing and left tracks in the snow—big tracks. He’d had them follow him before and knew they probably wouldn’t attack unless they saw an opening that favored them . . . greatly favored them.

He’d met them on battlefields as a young man. The Romans had their own medical units, but they didn’t extend this courtesy to their enemies.

Sometimes the screams from the battlefield lasted almost all night. Horses fell, too, and it was sometimes very difficult to tell if the cries of agony were animal or human.

Drusus wore a heavy mantle, but not the red, uniform cloak of the Roman officer. His was a heavy brown wool mantle edged with embroidered green willow leaves that he’d bought from a Gallic woman a few years ago. It was very warm. He wrapped it around himself more tightly.

His mind kept presenting him with images he’d seen as a young man. He thought then that he would grow harder with age, but he hadn’t. Instead, the horrors he’d experienced over the years—and he had a large collection by now—seemed to disturb him more profoundly than they had in his youth.

He sighed and turned his mind away from the past. His service would be over in a few months, finally and forever. He’d re-enlisted twice and was due a large sum in pay and bonus money. He’d already used some of his gains to buy a small farm in the hills near Terracina.

There were ten acres in vines and olive trees. Enough to give him a good living if he remained frugal. His cousin, Festus, would do the actual work of cultivating and harvesting the trees and vines. Festus and his sons would be more than willing to do this in return for being made his heirs.

Once, Drusus had had a woman, but she and her two children—he was none too sure they were both his—had died while Caesar was campaigning in Britain. He had thought he would learn to stop regretting her as time passed, but he found this wasn’t so. As he aged, he wished more and more for her company. She’d been shrewish, but funny and oddly solicitous about his health and comfort. He missed her constant joking and sharp remarks about his fellow soldiers.

And oddly enough, he missed the child, a little girl, the one he’d been pretty sure wasn’t his. She was the one he missed most. Like her mother, she was always chattering and laughing. She’d been fluent in gobbledygook even before she knew how to form words.

The little boy had been less interesting: quiet, persistent, hardworking even as a very young child. He was olive skinned with the thick, curly hair of a true Latin and he showed signs of being stocky and muscular, as his father was.

But since they were gone, the only family that remained to him was Festus and his two sons. He didn’t care much about the farm now, but he did want to sit in the sun on his own hillside and look down at the lapis and emerald sea swirling around the rocks. The foam was white, white as the snow drifting down . . .

Drusus was suddenly jerked fully awake by the realization that the sound of sawing had stopped. He opened his eyes and saw rotund little Scorpus moving away toward the trees.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he snarled.

Hirax leaned on the saw. “He has to take a dump and pee.”

“Well, go behind a tree. Don’t stray off. There are wolves about.”

“Wolves.” Hirax snorted. “Are they a good reason for letting him stink us all out with his gas and turds? Besides, I don’t see any wolves.”

“No, and you won’t. Not until they want you to, and then it will be too late.”

Scorpus studied the centurion and Hirax with a rather foggy-eyed stare. His nose was large and red and he rubbed it vigorously with one hand, making it look still larger and redder.