Night of the Wolf (48 page)

The shield lay where it had fallen, near the spot where she had entered the arena. She remembered the frog from Mir’s lake.
I am the mouse,
she thought.

The tiger drew closer and closer. Now or never. In a moment it would be too close.

She dove for the shield. Her fingers closed on the rim. She hurled it, spinning, flashing in the torchlight.

The tiger had a choice: the woman in deep shadow or the shield glimmering, glittering in the light. It went for the shield, batting it out of the air.

Dryas ran for the tiger. No, she didn’t seem to run, but to fly, and she leaped, landing on the animal’s back.

The tiger reared like a maddened horse, biting at the muscular legs holding the woman on its back.

Dryas grabbed at the loose neck skin and got a fold in her left hand. It tightened like a claw. With her right hand, she drew the knife, her longest one. The orange neck with its midnight stripes was twisted toward her left arm digging in, holding like death.

She slashed down as hard and deep as she could. She heard the roar, not the voice of the cat, but the air rushing out through the ringed cartilage as it parted.

Then she was flying, head over heels, trying to turn her body into a ball again. She failed, landed on her neck, and found herself paralyzed for an instant. It couldn’t have been more than an instant because she was on her feet so quickly some of the spectators didn’t realize she’d been down.

The tiger was down. It gave two or three roaring breaths and tried to rise, then died.

Dryas felt dizzy. She looked up and saw stars beginning to pick themselves out in the blue gloaming above.

She walked toward the tiger and looked down at it, then raised her arms and looked up at the spectators in the seats.

The crowd went wild.

The plaudits of the multitude,
she thought.

Then she looked down at the tiger again, crouched, lifted the ritual handful of dust given to the fallen who cannot be buried properly, stood, and let it trickle in a stream from her fingers down on the orange-and-black striped shoulder.

The cheering crowd was abruptly silent as Dryas walked toward the doorway. Not everyone understood the gesture she’d made, but enough did to realize she’d just treated them with supreme contempt.

Inside the entrance to the arena, Lucius and Maeniel stood with Gordus. Maeniel held a spear.

She staggered in. The crowd buzzed loudly.

Gordus was laughing. “The first families in Rome might riot over that and kill all of us.”

Lucius grabbed her and wrapped the mantle around her.

Maeniel pointed at the spear. “We were here. You didn’t need it.”

“No,” Dryas said.

“I told you she was good,” Maeniel said.

There were shouts, squeals, and screams from above. “The party’s getting started,” Gordus said. “The dancing girls are here. The wives and mothers are going home. Some of them will party all night at one another’s houses. The Senate doesn’t meet again until day after tomorrow.”

Maeniel and Lucius gazed at each other in the half darkness. “I’m going to kill him,” Lucius said.

“For this?” Maeniel asked.

“If for nothing else,” Lucius said.

“I don’t want to be present during this conversation,” Gordus said.

Dryas said nothing, but sagged against Lucius’ body in a way he found extraordinarily gratifying, even though he would never, by any means, admit it.

Maeniel eased along the dark passage until he found a half-empty room that held spare weapons, a few stage props, and assorted broken and discarded entities—things that collect around all human dwellings: nonfunctional objects, useless but too good to throw away, the “maybe it can be fixed and sometime I might need it” stuff.

The room was pitch-black except to the wolf and it smelled of mold and damp. He hung up his tunic and toga and trotted out on all fours.

He was thinking of Calpurnia. The rain that had been threatening all day came sweeping in in sheets and curtains. The crowd hurrying to their litters dissolved into a pack of fleeing individuals.

The wolf stood in the shadow of one of the arena entrances and watched them.
Just as well,
he thought. The dog tribe accepted the taboo about killing within the pack and he considered humans pack. He had seldom seen so much ineptitude in any group of creatures. Were wolves in any closer association with them now, they would constitute a standing temptation. Ah, well.

The rain slowed. The slaves carrying the litters might get wet, but no one worried about them, and the area around the gates cleared.

The wolf trotted away from the arena. A soldier stationed near the gate to protect the late-leaving and somewhat drunken spectators gave a quick gasp when he saw the wolf ease through and past him in the shadows. The gleam of big yellow eyes flashed and then was gone.

White silk gown
was how he thought of her.
Woman grace.
He moved through the Forum. It was still misting rain and even the shops that normally stayed open late were closed. The few lights that were still lit glowed on the cobbles.

When he reached Caesar’s villa he circled it, baffled. He had the same problem he’d had when he tried to rescue Imona. Locked out.

A uniformed guard complete with helmet, pilum, and sword stood in front of Caesar’s door.

The wolf paused in front of him and sat down.

“Go away.” The legionnaire swung the butt of the spear at him.

The wolf lifted his muzzle to the sky and howled. This set off every dog in the neighborhood for miles around—yelping, howling, barking, whining—creating an unearthly uproar.

The sentry picked up a clod of earth and hurled it at the wolf.

He dodged easily and gave the sentry a big tongue-lolling, tooth-baring smile.

The sentry whispered something obscene under his breath. The wolf howled again. This wail was louder and longer, drawing on the full resources of the wolf yodeling power. All the canines in the vicinity sounded as if they were going insane.

The captain of the guard opened the gate. “What in the name of . . .” This was as far as he got. The wolf dove past him and vanished into the darkness of the atrium.

“It was the dog!” the young soldier said. “He ran into the house.”

His captain looked at him as if he’d grown another arm in an unbelievable spot, say in the middle of his forehead.

“I’ll have the watch look for him. Maybe he belongs to someone inside.”

“I don’t know. I never saw him before.”

“Yes, well, if he doesn’t belong to the house, why would he want to get in?”

“I don’t know,” the sentry said, “but maybe we should ask—”

“Ask who? The Lady Calpurnia is asleep. Caesar’s in the arms of you-know-who at her villa. You just go ask him if it’s his dog and let me come along. I want to watch. I want to watch what happens to you when you do. Now, be quiet and stop upsetting those damned dogs!” Then the door slammed shut, provoking another outburst of barking.

This night was moonless as yet and the house was a maze. Maeniel moved quickly from shadow to shadow. He had no idea where she was. He crouched down, letting his senses inform him.

Male soldier on a pillared walkway. Yes, he had all the indications: metal, perspiration, male, heat, young. Yes, soldier.

More males, not soldiers, in a room, a tablinium office nearby, colder, musty garments, drink, food. He could hear them laughing and talking together. Caesar’s secretaries? Probably.

Lovers, two of the house slaves? Together in an empty triclinium nearby. The smell of sex heated him.

Avoiding the sentry, he drifted along in the shadows of a porch to another courtyard. Roses, yes, those roses. The white ones in jars against the wall. The gates of her own private garden. Their fragrance saturated the damp, still air, almost as if they beckoned, saying, “Come, come.” Yes.

She awakened. She’d had a headache today. It began while Dryas fought the tiger, and this time she’d seen
him.
She knew the ordeal that had been her life would soon come to an end—the ordeal that began when he saw her at the age of eighteen and asked her father for her hand, and continued, day after day, until now.

It had taken him more than twenty years to realize how much she hated him and, even so, it wouldn’t have mattered in the least to him, had she been able to give him a son.

It took a further five years for him to understand that she had destroyed each of her pregnancies in turn and twice came near death in quite successful attempts to prevent others.

Now she was past all of that. Cleopatra had given him a son and tonight, hoping for another, he lay in her arms.

The room was dark and her maids were huddled shapes on couches surrounding her bed. She closed her eyes and smelled the roses. When she opened them, she saw the eyes. They glowed, gathering light and mirroring it back. An animal. A cat? No, too high. A dog? But there was no dog in the house.

She seldom slept in the cubiculum, her bedroom to one side of the porch. She preferred this room. It was round and her husband sometimes called it the Temple of Vesta, not wholly in jest. Pillars of green and white marble alone separated it from her garden.

The floor was decorated with a winged horse picked out in mosaic. Only fragile curtains separated her room from the garden. They drifted to and fro in the night breeze. No, she’d had one cat and one dog. She’d never have another. The dog annoyed him and one day she found it had been buried alive. The small animal must have struggled for a long time before it died.

She hadn’t known how angry he was over the cat, kitten really, until she found it wandering and crying in the garden with the pins sticking out of its eyes.

It was then that she resolved never, never, never to give him any children, and she hadn’t. But in the last few days he’d begun to explain things to her again, and a vast weariness weighed down her spirit like a cenotaph.

The eyes moved toward her. She wasn’t afraid. He had so terrorized her and for so long that simple fear no longer had any meaning.

The animal vanished and a man she recognized stood beside her. “It’s you,” she whispered.

He stretched out a hand, helped her rise.

“How convenient you’re able to be something else, then turn human.” Her voice was so low he could barely hear her. “What sort of animal are you?”

“A wolf,” he said, helping her down from the bed. They slipped out of the room hand in hand.

“I imagine it gets you out of all sorts of inconvenient situations,” she said.

“Yes.” He pulled on a tunic he found. “Yes,” he repeated, “but it creates all sorts of unpleasant ones when I turn at the wrong time.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised. In fact, last night I was sure there was something strange about you. After all, you came into my garden so easily.”

The roses were in front of them. They walked between them, hand in hand.

It was a little after daybreak. The light—rose, fuchsia, violet, and drenched with amethyst—was unutterably beautiful. He could just see her. See her and the world they’d entered.

“This is a different place,” he said.

“I know.” She drew very close to him. The gown, as last night’s, was silk, but this one was so thin as to be almost transparent. “I’ve been here before. I must meet someone here.”

“Now?”

“No, not until the sun is high in the sky. Make love to me.”

“Yes,” he said, and drank at her lips. They were cool and refreshing as the water of an icy spring. Her flesh was soft as a rose petal and as fragrant. They stood near a stone balustrade. A few paces away, three marble steps led up to a stone porch covered by low ground cover with silver leaves and blue flowers. Beyond the porch, there was no house, only a grove of young pines.

They were infant trees with trunks no more than a few inches in diameter. In the early light, the thickly woven branches bearing long needles were green-black. It was dark under the clustering low limbs. They lay together on a thick carpet of brown needles. The rich scent of pine resin wafted around them.

“Does anyone live near this garden?” he asked.

“If they do, I have never seen them.” He’d pulled the tunic off and she ran one hand slowly down from his shoulder, across his chest, then stomach, creating a delightful anticipation. When it reached its goal, they both smiled and lost themselves in kisses, caresses, and the search of one body in another’s for divine delight, as the morning re-created the first day of the world around them.

Afterward, they slept for a time and, when they woke, the sun was driving long shafts of light down among the young pines. The heavily needled branches wove patterns of gold on their skins and the forest floor.

They looked out on parkland of small groves and open meadows sown with a rainbow of flowers. Before them, the world fell away in shallow steps toward a misty horizon and, far away, his wolf’s ear detected the sound of the sea. A summer sea, ebbing and flowing, long, warm, shallow combers landing as lightly as a child’s footstep on a sandy shore.

They walked across a meadow. The flowers burned gold against dark, browning summer grass, then blue in the green growing shadow of long-stemmed hanging Babylonica willow. The trailing branches rested on a gigantic broken urn buried in the turf. Beyond the urn, a cascade of vines bearing scarlet flowers dropped to a blue pool caught in the shadow of the luxurious weeping trees.

Something drank at the pool. Something the wolf couldn’t quite see, but it lifted its head and whickered when it saw his companion, who hurried forward with a happy cry.

They joined each other, laughing and dancing together in the grass and flowers.

The wolf saw a soft, almost black nose and then an eye, shiny and dark, fringed with long lashes. A dark, dappled gray shoulder glowed with a metallic gleam. Then, for a moment, he saw a horn in the center of its forehead.

It reared, a patchwork of substance and shadow, and then wings unfurled. For a moment, they darkened the sun with a massive shadow. The wings of a steed this large must stretch out the span of a racecourse from end to end, almost a mile from tip to tip. It didn’t wear them, but called them from wherever it lodged, as it called the horn, and hooves that could dance on air.