Night of the Wolf (7 page)

“I don’t think she’d care for me,” he said.

Imona shook her head. “She wouldn’t.” Then she pushed her way through the cave’s cover and took her zigzag path down the hillside.

Sometimes she did tend the flax. Its patches of blue flowers lay the way a fine dyestuff would if spilled by a careless hand, soaking into the deeper pine green covering the steep sides of the ridge, creating a patchwork effect up to the hilltop.

During the worst and driest part of the summer, drought resistant as flax is, it needed watering. She carried water from a stream flowing down the ridge from garden to garden, a difficult task even with his help.

Flax wasn’t the only thing she tended. On the driest, hottest, most exposed outer parts of the hillside, she cultivated the herbs she used to dye her thread. Tiny aromatic chamomile, yarrow, elecampane, and a multitude of others he couldn’t put a name to. Some grew wild. All she needed to do with these was to protect and encourage them. Others, like the elder, needed no encouragement, but grew rampantly and required only harvesting at the right season.

Her knowledge of weaving and dyeing was handed down to her by the women in her family—noble women who didn’t do most of the work themselves, but were trained to supervise the multitude of workers attached to their households in the manufacture of large amounts of cloth. These fine weavings were sold or traded as far as Greece on the one hand, and some even crossed the channel to the British Isles on the other.

Here on this farm she was alone, so she was forced to do all the work herself. Yet still her manufactures were always in demand during the quarterly fairs accompanying the great feasts at each season of the year.

Over time, he came to know the whole family—not difficult since they were now very few. All of Kat’s brothers but one had died in the wars that raged over Gaul after Caesar’s invasion. As Clarissa had said, the work was done by Imona, Kat, and Kat’s husband, Des.

Des was a big, quiet man who feared his wife’s tongue and temper. The wolf was puzzled by his industry, sustained labor being as foreign to the gray wolf’s nature as Imona’s weaving skills, until Imona told him that Des’ work in the fields allowed him to escape Kat’s continual hectoring.

Maeniel knew the odors of each. Imona was a collection of seductive fragrances. Kat was sour, as if her frustration with life communicated itself to her clothing in a succession of harsh statements. Des smelled of the work he did, brassy sunlight and perspiration.

Imona’s husband, Leon, was the strangest of all. To the wolf, he smelled dead. Not the raw scent of the newly slain or even the heavy carrion smell of a carcass rotting in the sun, but the dry, moldy smell of a pile of bones lying in the shadows, covered with dark splotches of lichen and gray patches of moss.

When it grew dark, the wolf crept down. He peered through chinks in the walls of the hut. They were eating, gathered near the fire. A rushlight illuminated the round house. Leon ate without seeming to be aware of anything around him. Des appeared to enjoy his food and the company of his sister-in-law.

Kat’s elderly mother, toothless and exiled from the table because of her sloppy habits, sat in a corner, slobbering over a bowl of porridge.

“I like the one you have on the loom now,” Des said to Imona.

She laughed and replied in a low voice. “Red is hard to get. Finding a red dye that will set and not run when it’s washed is the very devil.”

The wolf surmised they were speaking about Imona’s newest weaving. He’d watched Imona struggle long and hard warping the loom. It had taken up most of the last three mornings. And even when she’d been with him, Imona had seemed preoccupied. But when he saw her intentions turned into cloth, he reveled as much as she did in its loveliness.

She’d used the softest flax she had, and dyed it with just enough blue to make it glow with a pearl’s sheen, then added a sprinkling of green threads and, at last, a touch of red, a fiery red to humans, a blood red to the wolf.

“We should keep that one for ourselves,” Des added. “Maybe hang it with the rest on the wall in here.”

Indeed, the wolf noticed the small dwelling’s walls were decorated with brightly colored tapestries. They picked up the firelight and threw it back in glowing colors.

Kat snapped at both of them. “What are you talking about, saving the damned thing for a decoration? We need every sesterce we can raise. You know those Romans will come wanting tribute again and that old fool, Mir, will have to pay them. What’s wrong with you? Imona, playing about for three days with that stupid loom, trying to warp it properly. Who cares any longer for the fancy stuff your mother taught you to weave? Make simple, sturdy cloth. It sells!”

Both Imona and Des cringed back at the fury in her voice. Even the old woman shuddered and tried to huddle into a smaller shape at her daughter’s fury. Only Leon seemed unaffected by his sister’s tirade. He continued eating, eyes fixed on the middle distance, and ignored her.

Des cleared his throat and tried to smile at Kat. “Beloved, even if we must sell it, fine weavings bring a better price than—”

“A better price, a better price,” Kat replied, snarling. “Who, I ask you, has the money for luxuries now?”

“Even so,” Imona spoke up hesitantly in her own defense, “it’s a valuable skill I have. Kat, at the next fair I might be able to attract a few pupils . . . They’d pay . . .”

“Pay . . . pay . . . You talk about payment. How will you ever pay this household for what you’ve taken from us? All the cattle we sent to your father for you . . . and you never able to make a man-child. Two mewling girls . . . and all Leon got from the match when he went to help that brother of yours against the Romans was—”

Then Kat screamed as Leon, who hadn’t even seemed to be listening, backhanded her hard across the face with his only good hand—the left one.

Leon stood over his sister for a moment, then quietly, viciously spat on her prone, sobbing body. He turned, went through the door, and vanished into the evening’s gloom.

Horrified, Imona hurried to a pitcher and wet a clean linen cloth. Kat sat up, sobbing. She pushed Imona away as the blond woman tried to press the cold cloth to her bleeding nose.

“You,” she sobbed, “it’s all your fault. He wouldn’t have lost his hand if he hadn’t married you and gone to help that worthless brother of yours.” Then she turned to her husband. “You’re no man. You won’t even defend your own wife—”

“Hush,” Imona crooned, and pressed the cloth to her sister-in-law’s nose.

“By all that’s holy, Kat,” Des cried, “I can’t see that this is anyone’s fault. Imona didn’t cut off Leon’s hand, Caesar did, and no one poked a spear in Leon’s back and forced him to join in the revolt. He volunteered, hoping to get glory and loot. Well, he failed. As for the children, no one can predict how the dice will fall in that direction. As far as I can see, we’re all doing our best, and your screaming and clawing at us only makes things worse.”

Imona tilted Kat’s head back to stop the bleeding.

The wolf eased away from the house wall.
Well, wolves have their quarrels, also,
he thought,
but not so bitter and long lasting.

He watched Leon wander through the fields surrounding the house and away into the trees. The dark forest wasn’t safe, not because of Maeniel’s people—the wolves—but because it was also the haunt of bear, lynx, and most savage of all, wild boar. Head up, ears erect, the gray wolf watched him depart.
He should be more careful, but then nothing will bother him,
he thought.
He carries an odor of the grave with him. I wouldn’t bother him, so why should any other?

Far away, the pack rose and began their evening song. A silver glow from the rising moon crowned the snow-capped peaks. The voices recalled him to his duty. He felt an odd emotion, one so strange it took him a moment to identify it, then realized it was pity. He pitied her, trapped in the smelly house by night, while he was free to roam joyously in the moon glow beneath the multitudinous stars.

Dryas awoke before dawn, still with the sense of being watched. She looked up at the stars. Her people had studied the skies for four thousand years. She knew that in a few moments the sun would be a glow on the eastern horizon. She threw aside the bearskin, rose, and began walking along the stream flowing through the mountain meadow. At its edge the land dropped off and the freshet fell straight down in a miniwaterfall into another granite basin, becoming a pool.

It was as if something had set guards on it. Blackberries, raspberries, and dewberries twined in thorny profusion at the edges. The long, twisted vines were denuded of leaves, but bore a profusion of fruit—black, blue, orange-red, and the deep purple of an imperial gown.

She remembered the girl’s words. “No one eats them. No one can force their way through the vines.”

Dryas began to strip—her blouse, then the divided skirt, the breast binder, then the white linen loincloth.

She swung out, clinging to the rocks leading down to the pool. The shock of water flow stiffened her muscles and pulled her hair loose, unbraiding it and sending it fan-wise down her back.

The shock wasn’t one of cold, but heat. The water was warm. A warm spring must intrude into the mountain freshet somewhere close by. That also explained the fruit and the lush vegetation around the pool. It must be warm here winter and summer alike.

Her fingers pushed through the moss as she climbed down. A few moments later she stood hip deep in the water, making a breakfast of the berries that glowed like jewels on thick black canes. She found herself reveling in their sweetness.

The light grew around her, brighter and brighter until she could see the vines were only a thin, inner ring around the basin, though a cruel one. Beyond them, a grove of quince and rowan surrounded the water. The lush, yellow fruit of quince bent the still-green branches to the ground and the deep red rowanberries burned like scattered coals against the blue morning sky. Thickly grown with waterweed, the pond’s bottom seemed composed of silk velvet.

The sweetness of the berries was as intoxicating as mead. It seemed she couldn’t get enough of them, picking and eating them as fast as she could. She stretched, reaching for a branch thickly covered with fruit so black it glowed blue. The weed under her feet was as slippery as it was soft.

In a moment her mind was invaded by a vision of a woman with her face and hair smashing her skull into the rocky side of the pool. Her blood was a scarlet stain in the clear water until the falls from above carried it away and left her pale and drained, drifting down and down to the blue heart of the little reservoir, then vanishing into a pile of white bones.

In panic she snatched at a thick strand of blackberry vine. The thorns bit, but she hung on and righted herself She realized she was breathing hard—gasping, really. She clung tightly to the rocky poolside, then let go of the vine and washed her hand. As in the vision, the blood was a scarlet stain, then, diluted by the crystal water, it vanished, leaving the thorn wounds, angry red and white rips in her skin.

The light was bright now beyond the guardian vines, quince, and rowan. The open forest stretched out, long aisles of pale-barked beeches, the ground carpeted with their light, golden leaves.

Dryas was beautiful. She hadn’t thought about that beauty in some years. But if she could trap the wolf with it, the smooth surfaces nature had given her would, at least, be of use to someone.

At that moment, she felt eyes on her again. She stood straight, twisted her long black hair in her hands, and wrung out the water. Her upraised arms lifted her small breasts, perfect cones tipped with strawberry nipples, as her eyes covertly searched for signs of the watcher.

Nothing, nothing she could see. The light was bright now, the water a pale, blue, wavering curtain falling from above, boiling into lacy foam in the pool.

For a moment, just for a moment, the water took on the outline of a woman’s body as if it flowed over an invisible she standing in the sheeting flow.

Dryas’ breath caught in her throat, then the illusion, if illusion it was, faded. She saw the ears on a rock ledge near the top where the waterflow plunged over. Ears, two pointed ones, pricked as if their possessor was absorbed in the view.

Yes, he had come. But Dryas remembered the woman’s form outlined before her.
Something,
she thought,
someone doesn’t want me to succeed.

The Romans came . . .

She was high up on the hill, harvesting flax with an iron sickle. He lounged on his belly in the shade of a broken pine. It was late summer and the scratchy tunic protected his human skin from the burrs clustering thickly in the dried grass.

She lifted the sheaves of flax, throwing them across rocks exposed to the sun where they could dry out and be ready for retting in a pond at the foot of the cliff.

She stood, sickle in hand, looking down at the rath below. She wiped sweat from her brow, then shook out her hair clinging at the neck, temples, and forehead, wet with perspiration.

The wolf saw her face change.

“No,” she whispered, and threw down the sickle.

He reacted without thinking. On his feet in a split second, he had one massive arm around her waist and the other covering her mouth so she couldn’t scream.

Riding up to the farmhouse below were three of Caesar’s light cavalry and one officer. The wolf didn’t know it at the time, but the officer was careless and sloppy. The troopers carried their weapons, but wore no armor and were without their shields. A cart, with the horse led by a woman camp follower, brought up the rear.

Kat and her mother were working in the farmyard. The troopers herded the women to one side and began robbing the granary at the back of the house, filling improvised bags made from clothing and such cloth as they found inside.

Imona bit Maeniel’s arm. He ignored her, but slid his arm back and placed his hand over her mouth. She kicked and squirmed.

Leon came out. He shambled over to Imona’s loom and stood quietly. Des arrived on the run, but stopped when he reached his wife, and made no attempt to interfere with the foreigners.