Night of the Wolf (26 page)

They were dark blue, not like water or the sky, but lapis or sapphire. The blueness was like that of the berries he’d tasted when he crossed the river to try to rescue Imona. A blueness that tasted and smelled of the color itself. Then they were wells and the black pupils expanded the way a hawk’s will when it looks into distance or profound darkness to snare its prey. Or the raven’s wing mantling bloody meat scraps.

Yes,
he thought,
I killed when I should not.

He remembered them as the fire people, when his kind, the dire wolf, first met them as hunters across the frozen plain. Poor things. At first they were only scavengers of the frozen carcasses abandoned by the gray, his people; the yellow, cats and their ilk; and the brown, the giant bear.

They were weak. Perhaps their very weakness was what made them strong. Desperation was in their cries, and in the blows of rocks and sticks they hurled at their rival killers.

Yes, a pack that fought back might take one, but always they took two or even three. They blinded the yellow tribe with fire and often blinded them in earnest, taking their eyes with sharp sticks, leaving them to wander in agony and starve because they could not see.

The brown, the bears, held them back the longest. Even after, everything in the frozen forest and tundra feared them. But they fell also because, in spite of their great strength, they were solitaries and slept through the dark months.

His wolf’s mind had no concept of the time from the moment of the battle’s inception till its end. No one counted days, months, years, or even millennia then, or marked the brief summers and those times when the ice withdrew and the world was kinder.

Always, always the cold and darkness came back. They died under the fangs of wolves. They died of disease, shivering, their lives burning away during bitter nights in places where they could barely shelter from the killing wind and cold. Cats took their young on the stalk when the shes let their children stray too far from the band. And the giant bear disputed his caves with them.

A hundred times they failed, a thousand. So many times one might spend a lifetime simply counting their defeats, but they never yielded. And it was this fearless spirit that brought the wolves into the gully to lie and warm the few women who were trying to save their own and their children’s lives.

They had forgotten these things and ruled where they had once been outcasts, even among the killers. But their flesh, every ounce of it, remembered every drop of blood in their veins, kept faith with their struggle, as did every atom of bone.

He saw all this in Dryas’ eyes. Like each of them, she was formed for desire and, like each one, for murder, also.

He fell into the darkness he saw there and was swept away.

XV

Winter wore on and the cold deepened. The glaciers reached down from the heights, sending their messengers of snow into the valleys. Rivers froze, except the pool where the wolves gathered. They searched for him there and, for a time, called him, their voices making the mountains ring with their unearthly summons. But he did not either reply or return. So, in the end, as both beasts and men do, they forgot him.

Another leader emerged and the pack went on as before. The days grew shorter and shorter and sometimes the northern lights flared over the mountains. The wolves ran like demonic shadows over the frozen crust and prospered amidst the winter desolation. When all other beasts struggled with hunger, cold, and even thirst as the streams and river froze, they took their apportioned tribute—the young who would never see springtime, those who had been strong now weakened by hunger, and those showing the first traces of age.

Even the Romans were loath to stir out of their fortress in the valley because the days were so short, the cold so intense. So the powerful silver predators roamed even the deep valleys by sun and starlight.

Dryas remained with Mir and his wife.

“No one can remember a winter so harsh. Even I, who am much older than most, would have difficulty remembering one worse than this.”

Dryas sat at his table, spooning a bowl of soup into his little wife’s mouth. The girl sometimes forgot she was eating, and Dryas would have to tap the wooden spoon against her lips to remind her to take the food into her mouth and swallow it.

“You are very patient,” Mir said.

Dryas nodded and continued her task.

“And not just about the girl. Do you think he will ever come around?”

“I don’t know,” Dryas said. “I know because of what I have done that I must try.”

“Perhaps we should have killed him. I wanted to. I tried.”

And he had. Dryas remembered when they brought the man who had been the gray wolf back; they chained him in the lean-to where Dryas stabled her horse. He wouldn’t speak. A wolf, he had behaved as a man; and now a man forever—or for as long as Dryas wore the chain—he seemed more like a wolf.

He made no objection to wearing clothes. He knew human skin was tender and the human body lost heat quickly. They chained his leg to a staple on the wall. It had about six feet of play. One thing she knew, he didn’t foul his bedding. The chain left him enough room to visit a silt trench in the back among the weeds.

It was dangerous to come near him, though. One of Mir’s people got too close, and the unfortunate man was put out of action for the rest of the winter with a broken arm and ribs.

After this, food was placed on a piece of bark and pushed toward him with the
Y
end of a forked stick. Sometimes he ate it, sometimes he didn’t.

No one knew why the final shattering blow to both Dryas and Mir happened, or even quite how. Mir tried to poison him, mixing opium with the mishmash of meal scraps and vegetables he was fed every afternoon.

“I hoped that he would simply go to sleep and never awaken,” Mir said.

But Mir’s little mad wife got the food. They didn’t know that she was the only one he would tolerate near him. They didn’t know that every day she joined him in his makeshift cave. She ate the food. Neither Dryas nor Mir knew until he began pounding on the shed wall with his fist and it began to disintegrate.

They found the child struggling, trying to breathe. It took most of a night and a day to clear the drug from her body, but when she recovered, she seemed worse than before. Now she wouldn’t feed herself. Sometimes she didn’t sleep.

Every evening Dryas went to bring him his food. She pushed it toward him with the stick and then sat on the woodpile at the low end of the lean-to and tried to talk to him.

He ignored her, refusing to speak or to acknowledge her presence. He certainly never met her eyes. They had felled him once and he remembered her power.

There was a window at his end of the lean-to, partially boarded up. Through it and the door so low he had to crouch to crawl through, he could see the wind-barren winter woods.

The skeleton trees’ bare limbs lifted against a misty sky. On the clear days, the snow-capped peaks mantled by the high forests—spruce, pine, and fir—were visible, their summits draped with mists of snow, fog, and sometimes before it grew too cold, long, trailing veils of rain.

Ever after, he remembered the first days of his captivity as the worst of his life. And often throughout his life, he refused to revisit them in memory or imagination. He felt part of himself had been destroyed—as it had. And he had never known that any creature, brute or human, could ever feel such pain or be sunk so deeply into despair.

Only in dreams was he free. Only in dreams could he don his gray coat and wander again with his friends, those he loved. He knew guilt that he had been seduced by the warm, sweet flesh Dryas represented, and a regret so profound it came near to sending him insane in the long, cold watches of the night.

But then Mir’s little wife would come and he would find her huddled against him for warmth and he would stir in the rags that were his bedding and place her small body between himself and the wall. She was seldom quiet when she slept. It was as if she must replay some long, tragic, and unbearably painful story in her mind over and over again.

Sometimes when she moaned or cried aloud, he saw the shadows coalesce into forms of darkness, come to keep watch over her. It seemed that whatever she saw in her dreams caused her so much pain, it summoned the dead from their graves that they might share her grief.

Mir worried about her. “Do you think he might . . .” He wouldn’t finish the sentence, the idea was so terrible to contemplate.

“No,” Dryas said. “I don’t think so. I found in my hunt and when I brought him down, certain signals must be present for him to . . . bring his love to a woman. She must desire him in return. The little one’s injuries are such that I don’t think it’s possible that she could ever present herself to him as a woman. And besides, what will you do? Chain her as he is chained? Imprison her as he is imprisoned?”

Mir didn’t say, “You should have killed him.” He felt he’d said it often enough, but, at such times, he thought it.

So Dryas would go each day and sit on an oak trunk that had proven too tough even for ax and wedge and she would try to reach him. After a time, she ran out of words and they both sat quietly, accepting the vast abyss between them. Sometimes the mad girl would come and share his food while both he and Dryas watched the sunset.

He knew, but she had been too busy all her life to notice, each sunset is the same and all are different. She watched the sunsets come and go, and found that every day they presented some new beauty to the human mind and spirit. Perhaps to the mind and spirit of every living thing.

After the first few times she saw Mir’s wife approach him, she ceased to be afraid for the girl. She felt he treated her rather like an unweaned cub, casually but protectively. He did. She posed no threat to him or, for that matter, to any living thing larger than a mouse or lizard.

When she caught live things and tried to put them into the pot, Dryas gently removed them from her hands. But she boiled pine needles, dead leaves, broken sticks and branches, old bones left scattered in the woods, and the occasional shed antlers of elk or deer.

Periodically, Dryas emptied the pot, cleaned it and washed Mir’s clothes and bedding, then did the same for the girl. On days when it was warm enough to dry them in the sun, she threw them over tree limbs and bushes. She cooked and hunted. Deadly with crossbow and spear, she brought in enough meat to feed the four of them.

On one of the darkest, coldest, and shortest days of winter, the wolf tried very hard to kill Dryas.

Every day she split logs for Mir’s hearth. One day a heavy section of ash rolled to within his reach. He took it and hid it in the tumbled scraps of his bedding. She was too preoccupied with the manifold responsibilities she had undertaken to notice it was gone.

The cold was bitter. The sky had been overcast for a week and there was a smell of snow in the air. She paused before she entered the lean-to and saw the heavy gray clouds hanging over the pass. Their edges were touched with rose as the sun’s ebbing light brushed them with its dying fire.

She went into the lean-to and set the bark trencher on the floor and reached for the forked stick.

The stove wood flew out of the darkness, hurled with the force only a strong man’s arm can give a missile.

He had calculated coldly how best to kill her. Throw it at her head? No, the thing was too heavy and he might miss. The secrets of human battle were a closed book to him. He’d never practiced flinging anything and he wasn’t willing to risk losing the one opportunity to repay her for the pain she’d inflicted on him.

The legs? He’d observed that though wolves were beasts of the foot, humans weren’t. He’d seen them survive truly horrible injuries to the legs—injuries that would have condemned a wolf to death within days or even hours.

No, the legs were no good, but her body was slender, almost fragile. He turned away in shame from the memory of how much he’d desired the slim waist and soft breasts. If he could drive those tidy ribs into her lungs, she would die even as White Shoulder died on the gladius of the Roman soldier.

The flying wood caught her squarely in the chest, breaking two ribs and bruising six others. It flung her turning body back onto the woodpile. Her forehead cracked against the oak trunk that served as her seat. But she wasn’t knocked unconscious or even stunned.

She wore her sword. She was almost never without it, even when she was involved in mundane tasks such as cooking or mending. In a second it was out of its sheath. She advanced toward him, feeling her own mind giving way under the twin burdens of hatred and rage.

He stood facing her, wearing the faded tunic she’d made for him from a worn-out blanket. The dark hatred burned from his face into her mind.

In the last light of day, the sword blade traced a shimmering arc in the air. She aimed to cut his throat.

But Mir’s little wife was standing in the door and she saw the blood on Dryas’ face and the sheer murder on his. And she screamed, a scream of such pain and terror as had to be heard to be believed. It punched through Dryas’ skull the way an awl punches through soft leather. She deflected the sword. It sliced across his chest, leaving a six-inch gash across his flesh and tunic. Dryas, set for a killing stroke, overbalanced and fell, slamming her right hand into the muddy floor.

It took several hours to calm Mir’s wife. In the end, they resorted to opium. Other simples, valerian and sage, didn’t touch the agitation and terror the girl displayed. When, at last, she drifted off, hiccuping with the aftermath of her hysteria, and her breathing quieted, the two sat together and talked. Or rather, Mir talked and Dryas wept.

“I’m at my wit’s end,” Mir said. “I don’t know what to do. Yes, I think it would be wrong to kill him, but I believe that, in the end, we will have no choice. Consider the alternative: turn him loose on the world as what he is, half-man, half-animal.”

“He wouldn’t be a wolf. As a butterfly in a spider’s web, he is caught in man shape. I have changed something that once had a certain beauty about it into a monster. And I have crippled him forever. The only way I can make amends is to try to teach him to make the best of his enslavement to his human half.”

“No, you can’t make amends, if that’s what’s in your mind, Dryas. Cripples seldom prosper. Caught forever in the man shape he would be just as dangerous as a wolf. Perhaps more. He could become a brigand. Ask yourself, do my wretched people, already wracked by Roman taxation, deserve to have his kind prey upon them? I’ve seen enough of him to fear him greatly. He is, even as a man, majestically strong and quick. Once initiated into the use of weapons, anyone within reach of his sword would be in mortal danger. As most would be even within reach of his bare hands.”

“He’s not as strong as he was when I first captured him. He’s losing weight. He doesn’t eat and, at times, sleep. It’s not yet midwinter. Your ‘wife’ gets worse and worse. I have come to believe he is the only thing keeping her alive now. No, Mir, I am certain we will have to dig two graves before spring.”

Mir leaned back in his chair and covered his face with his hands. Then he dropped them and they rested on the table before him. “I’m against letting this evil tale play itself out. Often and often, as a youth, I had such stories told to me. The Greeks collect them: Oedipus, Jason and Medea, Agamemnon. They have an unnatural affection for these hideous narratives. You positively know when the stories begin how they will end. You hope someone will hand a friendly cup of poison to Tiresius, the seer. Or that Medea will show some compassion for her own children. Or that Orestes and Electra will be content to let the murder of their father be punished by the gods, and they will go forward and live their lives in peace. But no, they don’t. None of them do. And this difficulty we’re in strikes me as holding no hope for any of the four of us.”

Dryas understood little of this tirade. “I’ve never heard any of these stories.”

“Well, my dear, if you continue on your present course, we’re going to be keeping each other company for some time to come. So I’ll start telling them to you. And, when you finally decide this is a lost cause, let me know and I’ll try to help you end it with dignity for both you and our erstwhile wolf. But, for now, do as you like. I don’t think either of them can live, neither my wife nor the wolf. But if you must exhaust yourself in a futile struggle, I suppose there are worse ones you might have chosen.”

Lucius hated to admit it, but he found Caesar and Marc Antony were right and he and Philo were wrong.

He found the Senate absolutely fascinating. Not pleasant, not safe, not comfortable, and not even really totally comprehensible, but nonetheless fascinating.

Caesar had, as Antony had been at pains to tell him, packed the Senate. In theory, the surviving patricians could have controlled new legislation, but they seemed to Lucius to have lost heart. Or perhaps they were too much at odds with each other, even now that they’d had their knuckles firmly rapped by a man who now made no secret of the fact that he despised them. The layering that was occurring as a result of the obvious snobbery of all concerned wasn’t helping to put what had been a distinguished and influential body back in order.