Night of the Wolf (8 page)

When they’d loaded up the grain, the troopers began going after the livestock, tying chickens and ducks by the legs and throwing them over the high wooden sides of the cart.

Imona stopped struggling. Maeniel removed his hand from her mouth. “Be quiet,” he told her, “or I’ll knock you out. You can’t help them. All your running down there will do is get you into trouble.”

One of the troopers hurried toward the pig wallow. One of the sows was suckling a litter. He jumped the fence and snatched up two of the piglets, then leaped back as the sow reared up to defend her litter.

They whooped with laughter when the trooper, piglet under each arm, cleared the fence with the infuriated sow on his heels.

The laughter ended with shouts of astonishment as the sow charged the fence and it splintered. The trooper put on a burst of speed. The sow was really dangerous.

His two fellow soldiers spread out on either side, Roman cavalry spears at the ready.

The first cast his, but missed. The second made a run at the sow, but she was too fast for him and the spear skidded harmlessly along her ribs.

The still-mounted officer swore savagely and leaped to the ground.

At that moment, the trooper carrying the piglets looked back. He tripped and fell. The piglets let out almost human shrieks of terror and pain as they went flying from his arms.

The sow was a vicious four-hundred-pound juggernaut, saliva spraying from a tusked mouth with teeth that could inflict a fatal wound in seconds.

The officer got between the sow and the trooper. The spear he carried was the Roman battle spear, the pilum. The spearhead was mounted on a three-foot length of steel bolted to a beechwood pole.

The spearhead entered the sow’s chest. The shock brought the officer to his knees, but he held on as the pig ran up the pole and reached the supporting beech handle. There, she stopped. The officer was strong, but her weight pushed him back several feet. Then she shuddered, blood gushed from her mouth, and her legs began to fold under her.

Maeniel was the only one who saw Leon move, and he didn’t understand why.

Leon stood near Imona’s loom. The officer’s back was to him. He stepped forward, snatched the short Roman thrusting sword from its sheath, then, in an eyeblink, he plunged it into the Roman officer’s back.

For a moment the world was still. A frozen tableau. Everyone stared at Leon in stark, unbelieving horror. Then the farmyard exploded into chaos.

The officer screamed, a cry so filled with raw agony that it made Maeniel’s skin crawl. The spear pole fell from his hand as he clutched at the sword hilt protruding from his back.

Perhaps Imona screamed also, but if she did, Maeniel never remembered it. In any case, all other sounds were drowned out by the cries coming from the farm below.

The trooper who still held his spear drove it through Leon’s body. To his credit, Des tried to defend his wife and mother. He turned, pushed them away, and shouted, “Run!”

The trooper who’d thrown his spear still had his sword. It was out of its sheath in an instant. Des was a farmer, not a soldier. All he had was a mattock he’d been using to chop weeds. The trooper’s sword knocked the upraised tool from his hand, sheared through the arm holding it, and sliced into his chest, cut away the ribs, and entered his lung. Des fell, his hands pawing at the massive chest wound as his hammering heart emptied the blood from his body.

The old woman tried to run, but stumbled and fell after a few steps. Kat was able to run, and she did, but in the wrong direction. Instead of turning for the hillside where she might have been able to hide herself among the trees, she fled into the open field with two of the troopers in hot pursuit.

The woman camp follower, the one who’d been leading the cart, ran up. The old woman was still struggling to rise. The camp follower brained her with a rock. Then the remaining trooper and the woman crucified Leon on the dooryard tree that sheltered Imona’s loom. He was still alive, kicking, as the trooper hoisted his body and the woman drove two knives they’d taken from the farmhouse into his hands. The spear hung from his chest. The whole front of his tunic was saturated with blood.

The other two troopers returned, dragging Kat by one arm.

Maeniel wasn’t sure if the Roman officer was unconscious or dead. He didn’t react when the woman pulled the sword from his back. She sliced off his linen tunic with her knife and began bandaging him. The wolf decided he couldn’t be dead.

When the screams began to come from the house, the woman looked up from her task, an expression of disgust on her face.

Imona began to struggle again. “Kat! My God, Kat! They have her in the house.”

Maeniel whispered, “What will you do? Give them another subject for their attentions?”

The camp follower went to a small fire burning in a pit in the dooryard. She lifted a flaming branch and began setting the low-hanging, thatched roof alight. In a few moments, fire began running up the roof blazing near the smoke hole.

Kat’s frantic screaming stopped and the troopers came running out of the house, coughing, eyes tearing from the smoke.

“You piece of excrement,” one of them screamed at the woman. “We aren’t done with her yet.”

“Pig’s brother, dog’s father. Yes, you are! My master’s only wounded. If Lucius dies here, it will be your fault. I swear! I vow! I’ll see you flayed alive if he dies because you wanted to see if you could fuck the little sow to death. Get him in the wagon. Now! There are physicians at the camp!”

The three troopers stood in the doorway of the house, undecided.

Maeniel got to his feet. He ran down the hillside. The noon sun burned his face and arms. He had only the rather poor protection of his ragged tunic. He felt, but ignored, the tearing of thorny vines and bushes and rocky ground cutting into his soles.

He reached the farmyard as the troopers were loading the Roman officer into the cart. The man lay in the bottom, leaking blood on the grain sacks.

They were leading their skittish horses. They gave Maeniel apprehensive looks when he jumped out of the bushes, shouting. The woman standing in the front of the cart laid her whip down hard across the backs of the ponies pulling it. One of the troopers made as if to go back and confront Maeniel, but the woman screamed and cursed him so savagely that he turned around and followed the cart as it bounced off down the deeply rutted road toward the valley.

Fire completely involved the house. The roof was blazing and flames were beginning to spurt from the willow withes that formed the walls.

Kat lay in the center of the room, naked, her body smeared with blood. Bundles of flaming thatch were falling around her. The long poles supporting the roof were on fire.

There was time only for him to snatch the woman up and carry her out, as the roof began to slowly fold down on him. He dashed out just as one wall buckled and the thatch slid into the center room like a blazing haystack.

Imona had followed him down and she threw herself to her knees beside her sister-in-law.

Maeniel looked around. Kat was bleeding, unconscious, and battered, but she was still breathing. The others were beyond all human help.

Des lay curled on his side. His wounded arm and chest were under him. He looked strangely peaceful. But for his pallor, he might have been asleep.

The old woman’s head was a puddle of loose blood and thick brain tissue. In the noonday heat, flies gathered, their buzzing an angry whine in the air.

Oddly, Leon had the same indifferent expression on his face. His head lolled on his shoulder, eyes open. Whatever he found or hadn’t found in death and revenge, it appeared to have left him unmoved.

Imona knelt, cradling Kat’s head in her lap, sobbing. Maeniel stood, listening, hearing the sounds made by the retreating Roman foraging party as they struggled down toward the fortress in the valley.

Imona looked up at Leon and cursed him incoherently.

A breeze blew, cooling Maeniel’s skin. The linden on which they’d crucified Leon was in flower. The heavy scent was almost able to cover the rank stenches of blood and fire hanging in the air. The loom, knocked over at some time in the struggle, lay at the tree’s foot, under Leon, his blood dripping down on this . . . the most beautiful of her weavings.

Imona screamed. She leaped to her feet. Kat still lay unconscious in the grassy dooryard. “They’re getting away,” she shouted.

Maeniel started, his whole body jumping with shock.

Imona ran toward him, caught him by the arms, and began shaking him. “You have to catch them, catch and kill them. If they return to the Roman camp and tell their story, they will attack and destroy us all.” She clawed at her cheeks with her nails and began keening horribly. “Whatever you are, man or brute, go and kill them.”

Maeniel backed away from her, horrified by the hysteria and ferocity she radiated.

She reached down and snatched up a stone from the fire pit. It flew toward his face and sliced across his cheekbone.

Still in shock, he reached up, touched the wound with his fingers, lowered them and saw she’d drawn blood. Another stone struck him in the forehead; a third hit hard on his ribs.

He turned and ran, following the path the retreating Romans had taken. He didn’t have to follow them for very long. One trooper had hung back to cover their retreat. As a wolf, Maeniel was dangerous; as a human, a sitting duck. The road, no more than a cart track, ran along a high cliff on one side and a deep rocky ravine on the other.

The Roman pilum struck Maeniel’s sternum and skidded across his ribs, failing to do permanent damage to his lungs. Maeniel staggered back, fell, and rolled down the rocky slope into the ravine. He landed facedown and lay still.

The trooper didn’t care to follow him across the broken ground to be sure he was finished.
Much too easy to lose my expensive horse to a broken leg,
he thought.
Besides, a human who’d taken such a fall would be no further problem in any case.
He spurred his horse and followed the rest.

III

Dryas heard the voices before she reached Mir’s hut.

“He knows she’s alive and he wants her back!”

“Good God!” The second voice belonged to Mir. “Does he realize the condition she’s in? Hasn’t he done enough . . .”

Dryas saw a bush move a few feet away. Her hand dropped to her sword hilt, then she looked more closely and realized the girl, Mir’s wife, crouched behind it. The sun sifting through the tree canopy above lit her face and shoulders. Dryas realized she was crying silently, tears sliding down her face from wide-open eyes.

“Tell him she’s dead!” Mir shouted.

“He won’t believe me! He knows it’s not true. Now, where is she? Call her! She’ll come to you. Don’t give me any more trouble, old man!”

There was the sound of a scuffle, and a second later Mir emerged from the hut. He was pushed out by a large man. The interloper had his left hand on Mir’s collar and the other held the Roman short sword, a gladius, to Mir’s back.

“I warn you—”

Mir turned and spat in his face.

The other reversed the sword and smacked Mir on the side of his head with the heavy iron hilt.

The old man fell to his knees with a thread of blood running from his cheekbone to his jaw. He looked dazed.

Dryas gasped with horror. No one she knew would lay hands on a man of Mir’s age and venerability. Even in her anger at Blaze she hadn’t thought of touching Mir. The elder members of Mir’s order had been known to stop wars by simply entering the field between the combatants, so great was the respect in which they were held.

Dryas had never seen such a one so much as manhandled by another, much less struck like an insubordinate servant. Even the mad girl looked profoundly shocked.

Dryas snapped her fingers to get the girl’s attention. She turned a tearstained face toward Dryas.

Dryas signaled her to run.

She did, upslope on all fours like a frightened animal until she got her feet under her, then she scampered quickly into the trees.

The stranger was still shouting at Mir.

Dryas drew her sword, then charged the pair standing at the door to Mir’s hut. The man bullying Mir didn’t realize he was being threatened until she was almost upon them, but when he saw her, sword in hand, his response was astounding.

He gave a shriek more reminiscent of an angry and outraged woman than a man. The sword flew one way; he the other at a dead run.

However fast he was, Dryas was faster, rendered more so by the fact that while fleeing and screaming shrilly at the top of his lungs, he picked up the toga and tunic he wore, lifting them to keep his skirts out of the dust.

When he reached Mir’s pole beans at the edge of the clearing, he glanced back and saw her, sword in hand, mantle wrapped around her free arm, only a step behind him.

There was a tree in front of him. He did a more than passable imitation of a terrified squirrel. She was certain he used toes and fingernails to reach the lowest branches. Once on them, he went up as if climbing a ladder.

Unfortunately for him, at some time in the past, the top of this particular scrub oak had been broken off in a windstorm and the terminal branches were only twenty feet or so above the ground. So he paused on the highest branch and successfully imitated a dog howling at the moon.

Dryas sheathed her sword and stared up at him. A second later Mir arrived next to her, wiping his face. An ugly purple bruise stood out next to his right eyebrow, but his eyes were clear and his hand steady. The individual in the tree continued screaming.

“Firminius!” Mir shouted. “Shut up!”

“Firminius?” Dryas said. “He’s a Roman?”

“Sort of,” Mir replied. “Somewhat. A bit. Occasionally. And at times.” He reached down, picked up a pebble, and shot it with unerring aim at Firminius. It connected with the side of his head.

Firminius’ next howl was cut off in midshriek.

“I said,” Mir repeated, “shut up!”

Firminius was silent. He glared down at Dryas, did a double take, and almost fell out of the tree. “Oh, my goodness! She’s a woman! Oh, my heavens. She’s one of those
women.
Oh, by Zeus, by Apollo, by Minerva, by the Three Graces and Nine Muses . . . she’s one of those
WOMEN.
Mir, you have to sell her to me now. Right now. Right now! She’ll be a sensation in Rome. They will love her. Do they really fight naked? Tell me they fight naked. Will she fight naked? Dear me. Oh, my heavens, an Amazon. A real live Amazon!”

Mir gave a low moan and rested his forehead against the tree bark.

Firminius climbed to his feet, balanced on the limb. He began yelling, “Help! Help!”

Dryas was up after him in a second. She didn’t know whom he was calling or even if there was anyone within earshot of his voice, but she couldn’t take the risk.

Firminius saw her climbing after him. He ran out to the end of the oak limb and leaped blindly into the air, rather the way a diver commits himself from a high rock into a pool of water. His body crashed through the low branches of a small pine, continued on through a pear tree, wiped out a rather attractive hawthorn, and landed with a wild crackling in a thick pile of dried leaves. They flew up with a rush of dust and soaring flock of fragments, then settled, covering Firminius’ inert body with a pall of last summer’s autumnal leaves. He lay still.

Firminius needed carrying into Mir’s hut. They had both been relieved when he began moaning.

“He’s excitable,” Mir explained. “He didn’t mean any harm.”

Dryas grunted a reply that managed to imply a certain disgruntlement with the task of carrying Firminius and skepticism at Mir’s testimonial to his good heart.

Inside, with Firminius drinking an herbal potion, Mir set him straight on a few things. He could not sell Dryas for the good and sufficient reason that he did not own her. His wife could not be sent to Rome. She was too crippled and too ill.

“I tell you, the man terrifies me, he absolutely terrifies me,” Firminius moaned. “He terrifies me even when he’s thousands and thousands of miles away, dallying with that Ptolemy bitch-witch Cleopatra. And that is where he is now. At least that’s where I think he is. And, believe you me, my dears, she isn’t one to let a lover like Caesar slip through her gilded fingers. Believe me, she isn’t. I’ll just bet they’re at it night and day—on the floors, the beds, the couches. In the BATHS! Everywhere! Just everywhere!”

Dryas thought Firminius looked a mite envious.

He held out the earthenware cup to Mir for a refill. “What’s in that? No, don’t tell me. I wouldn’t understand anyway. I’m sure I’d just get alarmed and refuse the rest of it. It’s delightful and so relaxing. My headache’s almost gone now. I can’t thank you enough.”

Mir refilled the cup.

Dryas began to believe Firminius’ headache had been transferred to her.

“Now tell me again, Firminius, who are we talking about?” Mir asked.

“Why, Caesar, of course.” Firminius blinked a few times. He’d become a bit glassy-eyed.

“Why does he want my wife?”

“Oh, didn’t I say?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Well, she is related to that awful hairy fellow. The one in Britain. Cunov . . . something or other. He’s thinking—”

“He who?” Mir asked.

“Caesar, of course. He’s thinking when he comes back from the east, he’ll have to do something about Britain . . . You know, conquer it.”

“No,” Dryas said as she paced up and down inside Mir’s hut. “No, I can’t let that happen. Caesar’s been to Britain. You can’t imagine the devastation he left behind.”

“Oh, can’t I?” Mir replied bitterly.

“He must be killed!” Dryas cried.

They were alone. Firminius had departed on a rope-woven litter a few moments earlier. Mir’s potion had taken full effect.

“My dear, my dear,” Mir whispered softly, “if you can think of a way to accomplish that, I would be very grateful. But so far I haven’t been able to think of any plan that would surely accomplish his downfall. He is, as Firminius says, far away and powerful. We are here and very weak. Kill the hunter of the night for me, then go home and warn your people. We can do no more.”

Dryas paused and stared into the brightness outside Mir’s door. Perhaps there was a way. She didn’t reply except to ask, “What will happen to Firminius?”

“Nothing,” Mir said. “He will sleep for four or five hours, then awaken and probably eat a fine dinner provided by his slaves. As to my ‘wife,’ he will do nothing. Caught between the hammer and the anvil, he will find a way to fob off the hammer. But he was uncharacteristically truthful about his interest in you. Watch out. You don’t want to end your career at the slave market in Rome. They would sell you as a woman gladiator. Some would pay a high price for such a novelty. They love novelty. You wouldn’t survive long living such a life. Not long at all.”

The man-wolf lay in the ravine for several hours. He drifted in and out of awareness. The sun high in the sky held the wolf at bay. He struggled to fully awaken and change, beset by the fear that the soldier might return and kill him.

As he slept, he dreamed. He lay on a beach and a gigantic comber towered over him. It seemed to pause at full height, then tilted and fell, foaming around his helpless body, dragging him out to sea. He was man, floating breathless in jade green water, then wolf, his pelt soaked . . . drowning, eyes open, jaws snapping hopelessly at the air and light above him.

The second wave lifted him high and let him breathe. The third dropped him—a heap of matted fur on the beach.

He sank into a deeper sleep and found himself wandering through the mountains. Above, two storms, one from the north, the other the west, came together above a green valley. From the high rock where he stood, the wolf could see the long, trailing rains, like a procession of dark priestesses garbed in gray gauze, moving over the green vales below, crags crowned with twisted trees and the very highest peaks streaked and mottled with ice and snow.

The two storms formed a V—the base at the overgrown valley, the apex open, lined with white cloud tops appearing to be mountains of the air and light, high and drenched with an alabaster purity no earthly mountain could ever know. Beyond, among the storm spires, birds drifted against the pale blue sky.

Suddenly, Maeniel felt self-awareness, thought, and knowledge contract into something so fine, so thin, it could pass through the eye of a needle or be compacted into an ever-changing crystal, its facets glittering in the sun.

He had wings and was an eagle. Wings spread, circling, riding the thermals up and up into the canyons of the stormy sky.

“I” vanished. Thought vanished. An unending joy filled his mind and he entered into a beauty as old as the world. A simplicity so stark, existence was all that was required or ever would be, world without end. Amen.

The wolf’s memories were old, but the eagle’s vastly more ancient. He soared confidently over a world where conifers with trunks ten times thicker and three times higher than the biggest tree any living bird had ever seen ruled the mountain crests, driving down roots that split the living rock like wedges and held their massive trunks like giant claws. Curiously nude, they were, with tiny barbed cones and thousands of small, feathery leaves. They held their place over flowerless, dank, wet defiles and valleys hazed with moisture, oppressed by a green gloom where monsters contended, roaring under a canopy of cycads and ferns.

Maeniel felt again the strange fear of self-loss and drew back from a simple but seemingly immortal consciousness that was older, older by far than the world.

He woke when shadows were pooling in the ravine. He was still a man, but as consciousness spread into his brain, the wolf shape covered him like a thick mantle.

He stood on shaky legs. A considerable quantity of his own blood lay dried on the rocks. He found, however, that the wolf was uninjured.

He climbed easily back to the road. During the day, summer clung to the mountains, but at nightfall, the temperature dropped and a sharp chill pervaded the air.

Even though the sun was gone, the sky was still bright. A deep confusion troubled the wolf. He sensed—no, knew—he’d been drawn deeper into these mad human matters than he’d ever intended to be.

He hurried back toward the farmstead. As the sky darkened, the moon seemed to grow brighter and brighter. It was the only light remaining when he reached the burned-out house and outbuildings.

A thin curl of smoke rose from a few still-smoldering embers. The grain fields tossed and whispered in the rising night wind. They hadn’t burned and perhaps weren’t combustible yet. Not yet brown and ready to harvest, but still green.

The living were gone: Imona and Kat. His nose told him Kat was injured but still alive when they took her away. A cluster of different scents told him that others had arrived to render aid after he left. The ruins had been searched and anything useful that could be salvaged by the rescuers was gone. They would not return.

Only one casualty remained: Leon, nailed by knives to the tree. In the moonlight, his still-open eyes glowed with an ugly counterfeit of life until, on closer examination, the wolf noted the pupils were invaded by the opaque clouding of death. Imona’s cloth and loom remained at his feet.

Far away, the wolf heard the evening call of his pack. They were hungry. A few nights ago, they’d killed an elk and while the feasting had been long and rich, by today all that remained was a gnawed skull, a few long bones, and scraps of hide. Now they’d slept off their feast and their bellies rumbled again.

The wolf stood silent while the call reached a crescendo, each wolf adding its own echoing, unearthly identification to the message carried through the chill air.

In silence, he listened. The abandoned wheat fields whispered their vain message of a fruitful harvest—a harvest no one would come to reap. In the forested hills, owls called to one another. The last embers of the burned-out house flared in the night wind, then died. The tree bore its carrion fruit. The feet hung only a short distance from the ground. Why waste it?