Tails of the Apocalypse (12 page)

“I met him when he was still a cub. His foot was caught in a trap and I freed him from it.”

He looked up at Tom and the others, whose expressions reflected the sadness in his own gaze.

“The dead cloaked one near the camp earlier…” Jonu said.

“Yes. I’m pretty sure that was him.”

Jack noticed the blood on the ground. It was pooling from the wolf’s belly. “He’s bleeding,” he said, unable to stop his tears from flowing.

“Let me take a look.” Jonu moved to the other side and lifted the wolf’s hind leg. He whimpered sharply. The cut was short, no longer than the width of a blade. “He must have been stabbed. There’s no way of telling how deep it is. Here, hold this on the wound with a bit of pressure.”

Jonu gave Jack the piece of scarf, and he pressed it against the wolf’s soft belly. He felt Carrie’s hand on his shoulder as his tears dropped onto the wolf’s head. He hadn’t cried for Manny, wouldn’t allow himself to. He knew that crying for the loss of one would open the gates to his grief for all the others, the stored-away grief of the last two years. In front of Jack, on the barren ground, lay not just a wolf, but a brother, a mother, and a father. His sorrow washed over him, drowning him, and Jack couldn’t stop himself from weeping uncontrollably. Anguish and gratitude for his family’s sacrifice, his wolf’s sacrifice, twisted in his gut as he buried his face in the wolf’s fur and sobbed. He could feel the wolf’s ragged breathing begin to slow. Shallow, short breaths now.

“It’s okay,” Jack whispered. “It’s okay. You’re among friends now. You’re among friends.”

The wolf felt the life bleed out of him, but with it also the pain. He’d killed some of the cloaked ones, wounded all, one of them only a few hundred feet from the boy’s camp. He’d ripped their sword arms or their legs, whatever he could reach, so they could neither move nor strike.

At first, he’d felt fear. But when he’d stepped into the circle of firelight, it lifted from him. Only the boy and his need to protect him remained in his thoughts. When the cloaked ones came at him, swords raised and screaming with their heat and rage, he moved like a silver shadow among them. He struck and withdrew and struck again. He was quick, and he was death to three of the eight.

When the first sword cut him, the pain struck him straight to the ground. But he’d rolled back to his feet and tore more legs and more arms to shreds before one of them stabbed up and into his belly with a short knife. The wolf ripped that one’s throat as well, but he knew by the way the blade had sunk deep into his belly that he would die.

And he’d loped, slowly but steadily, following the boy’s scent until he’d reached his camp.

As he lay on the ground, the boy’s tears falling onto him like drops of warm rain, the wolf felt at peace. For he knew he’d breathed his last breath surrounded by his pack.

Jack and the others reached the stronghold two days later. They’d buried the wolf in a grave made of river stones at the edge of a valley. Into the soil surrounding it, Carrie etched the name Jack gave to the wolf before he died. Rain washed the letters away by the time the moon was full.

But the name was never forgotten. It lived on—passed along as family history by Jack and Carrie to their children; then a half-believed story a generation later; then a myth of survival handed down through the history of an entire people. The telling of the tale, a testament to one whose bravery stands as a lesson of loyalty, captured in the simple name of a wolf who gave his own life so that many might live.

Protector.

Ever since I first read
The Farseer Trilogy
by Robin Hobb, I’ve had an affinity for wolves. A few years back, I had a T-shirt made with three simple words printed on the front: “We Are Pack.” I’ve gotten many positive comments for it. The shirt gave its life in a freak bleach accident during laundry. But the message stayed with me, a shining example of the bond we all share.

Please check out my other works, in particular my fable,
The Three Feathers
—a story of friendship between a young rooster, a war horse, and a grey wolf, and their epic quest to search for three magical feathers deep inside a mountain.

Santiago opened his single eye
and took in the morning on the piazza. The light had the strangest and faintest of orange hues, and Santiago stretched his stiff limbs still wrapped in a drowse. He ran a quick inventory—habit after years of street life. All four legs still in place. Eyesight growing weaker. Hunger faint but present; which was good, because surely he couldn’t be dying if he still wanted breakfast. As his senses came back online, his old heart began to accelerate. There was something wrong with the air. It grasped at his nostrils and forced him unsteadily to his feet where he ran his inventory again, this time checking for the man, who was nowhere in sight. The apartment stood empty and dark, and it occurred to Santiago that he did not even know the man’s name.

He came into the world the son of a stray, who was the daughter of a stray, who was descended from a long line of cats who eked out an existence on the street. After making a wrong turn as a young kitten on the piazza on which he was born, he was ushered into an overly hot home that smelled of cabbage, clinging to the sticky, clenching hands of a child.

He lost most of his tail in that home in an unfortunate incident with a door while attempting to come inside on a particularly rainy night, and although being a housecat was a much whispered-about and longed-for thing on the street, Santiago could not say that it was a particularly comfortable experience. He could not recall the final incident that had separated him from that home. Perhaps he had wandered too far and gotten lost. Perhaps his owners had just up and moved without collecting him. Possibly he had simply set out on his own, carried forward by a quiet
joie de vivre
and a sense that he was not especially wanted or safe.

He spent most of his younger years living in alleys and corners of Pompei, fighting, scrounging, and carousing. It was there he lost his left eye to another ginger tom, a mean and heavy scrapper twice Santiago’s size and who took no prisoners. It was there that he learned the economy of the street, the art of the grab and dodge, and the quick and inevitable slide into violence of the desperate to survive.

But Santiago got along with his smarts and knack with the ladies and enjoyed an acceptable life, as street lives go. Certainly he had outlived most of his contemporaries—the ginger tom who took his eye got run over by a lorry when Santiago was ten—and there were many handsome kittens wandering the streets of Pompei with brilliant orange fur, pronounced stripes, and a certain loft to their tails.

When Santiago crested the last few months of his fourteenth year, a sluggishness settled into his reflexes, and he could no longer zero in as easily on the precise location of mice with his single eye. His once solid and reliable bones had started to feel fragile and delicate. Life had started to get more dangerous; a cat who could not see or run very fast was an easy target, and Santiago’s escapes had become a bit too heart-pumping for his liking.

After a particularly harrowing encounter with a veritable army of spiteful and vicious rats, an antique store on the Piazza di Santa Caterina caught his attention. The crowded, dusty shop with dark corners and shelves of collectibles was manned by a gentleman with a stooped back and a tightly knit fuzz of grey hair that encircled the sides of his head. It was close to the outdoor market, where scraps and essential street gossip could always be had, and most importantly, the door to the shop sat open wide all day in the hope of enticing tourists.

Santiago cased the store for weeks, working his way up to surreptitious wanderings through the brown furniture that smelled of wood, age, and turpentine. At the end of his fourth week, he found a quiet corner behind a bureau with a small shaft of sunlight for warmth and fell asleep, though he made sure he was out before the shop closed for the evening. He came back the next day and the next, always sleeping in the same blanket of light, always being sure to leave before the door got shut for the night.

One evening he did not wake up in time and spent the night meandering through the corners of the shop, strolling over armoires, sniffing old upholstery, and trying not to knock vases off shelves. He caught a mouse that night and quietly devoured the entire thing save for the intestines, which he politely left near the front desk for the shopkeeper as a token of his gratitude for the night’s lodging.

He slipped out before the man found him the next morning, but when Santiago returned for his nap in the sun that afternoon, he caught the man looking at him around the edge of an old wardrobe. He braced to flee, his body taut and low to the ground, but the man simply turned and walked away, leaving Santiago to settle back in the pool of sunshine with a pounding heart. It took longer to fall asleep that day.

Santiago made sure to be out before the store closed that night, a practice he maintained for a while. But as the days went on, he sometimes missed the tinkling of the bell above the door—his cue to leave—as the man brought in the outside displays prior to closing the shop, his hearing having gone as frail as his bones. When he spent the night in the store, he always made sure to dispatch a mouse or sometimes a rat in payment, depositing the appropriate remains near the shopkeeper’s desk. Sometimes the best he could find was a spider or two. Delicately spitting the legs out by the desk often proved to be a challenge, and on those nights he was never sure if the man appreciated that Santiago had done his best in his nighttime patrol of the store.

The first afternoon the man set a bowl of cream by the wardrobe, Santiago bolted in fright, certain it was a trick of some sort. When he returned the next morning, he selected a different spot for his nap, a more secluded corner behind a pale blue dresser. There was no sun, but Santiago made do in his new spot, his body folded around itself amidst the heavy wooden monuments of another time.

After a week in the new location, the bowl of cream reappeared just around the corner from the dresser. Santiago had not heard the man leave it. The mice had been thin for the last several weeks, and Santiago could feel the press of his ribs against the floor whenever he settled down to sleep. He approached the bowl tentatively and drank his fill.

And so the cat and the man developed a routine. Santiago kept the store free of rats, mice, and invertebrate vermin in exchange for a safe place to sleep and a pool of creamy milk every second morning. Once he felt confident that the shopkeeper was okay with his presence, Santiago even readopted his original pool of sunlight for his afternoon naps. After a few weeks, the man started to leave a door that led to a set of stairs open at night, and on the fifth night Santiago crept up the stairs, his heart skittering like it never had in his years of dumpster raiding and nightly sparring. The stairs led to a small set of quarters with a covered deck that looked out on Pompei. Santiago spied the shopkeeper in his undershirt sitting hunched at a table. The man looked up, and Santiago whirled and bolted to the safety of the antique store.

He left the shop before closing the next day and found his way through hallways and a fire escape to the roof of the neighboring house. Then he squeezed through some slats and onto the man’s covered deck, where he spent the night under the shelter pressed against the wall, while the man sat inside in his white undershirt writing in a black notebook.

Days turned into weeks and the summer turned into fall, and both Santiago and the shopkeeper became a year older. Santiago still made his rounds on the streets for a few hours most mornings, inhaling the intricate archive of smells, calling on old cronies, and tracking the ever-shifting landscape of acrimony and alliance among street dwellers. But the stray-filled corners and casual violence of the streets felt dangerous for a one-eyed cat whose bones no longer moved with the suppleness of youth. His years and reputation as a fighter earned him a sort of respect, but always as he sauntered through the piazza, his stubby tail aloft, he felt the eyes of the other animals on him, sizing him up. And soon it no longer felt like a choice to return to the safety of the shop and the man’s deck before nightfall. Now it was a strategy for survival.

It was the man who named him Santiago. He had been called other things before: Gingie when he’d first been snatched up as a bundle of soft, orange fur in the streets by one of the children in his former home. And then more often than not—when his fur ceased to be so soft, and before he left that family—he’d been labeled Nasty Tom or Wretched Beast. On the streets he’d been known as Stubs, and while said mostly with respect, Santiago wasn’t at all sure he liked the allusion to his physical imperfection; as if the other animals might have the occasional laugh or two after he and his failing hearing had walked on past. Santiago liked his new name better. He liked the way it rolled off the man’s tongue, gently, almost reverently, as if they were both aged and hardened warriors who respected one another.