The Dragon Queen (4 page)

Maeniel sat, and from time to time his tail thumped on the ground. He considered his options. Why not? They needed his help. Wolf love was less satisfying than human but, oh my god, the complications involved in human desire. He had other obligations, but he had no idea how to work his way back to France or if he could do so at all. Even if he could, it would take months or years of dangerous travel across a war torn land. If last night’s events were an indication of how things stood on the island of Britain, there was no help to be found here. In addition to owing the she wolf a debt of gratitude, he was very tired of humans.

I want a rest, he thought. I
did all 1 could for the Bagaudae. I have no more
to
give.
I will
remain.

With that, he was decided. He rose when she finished and accompanied her as she left for the den to feed the pups. It will
be nice having a family again.
It’s
been a great many years.
In spite of some soreness and fatigue, he found her company lifted his spirits, and he was greatly cheered.

“You cannot write anything important down.”I told him—my teacher—I thought that was ridiculous. He only nodded, shook his head, and looked wise. I hate it when they do that. We were lying in the grass and heather on a beautiful, warm spring day watching the gates. They loomed high, cloud shadows, or perhaps clouds themselves, not far from the western horizon. On this day they formed a V, open at the top and joined near the water. Birds floated against the high topped clouds massed inside the gates, and the sun on its journey to the western horizon shone onto them and formed a rainbow.

The dragons played on the beach and in the shallows at the foot of the cliff where we were lying, and farther out they caught fish for their young, who were crying in the nests below us. They were beautiful, blue below and silver as the sea at dawn above. As we watched, the males contended in tests of strength. They wound their long necks together and then, heads racing each other, each tried to push the other down. This is the way snakes prove their mettle, and so it is with the serpents of the sea.

The females fished, a wonderful sight. They glided through the water like giant swans, large eyes looking down into the sunstruck sea for schools of fish. When they spotted one, the head would drop like a lance tip, followed by the wide flippered body. If you were lucky and the water was clear, you could follow them in the depths as the fish moved in unison up then down, flashing around rocks and kelp like so many living, shining needles, the shadow terror of the dragon always following, taking her prey until she was gorged. Afterward, they would surface and return to the beach to regurgitate their catch for the tiny ones calling in the nests among the dunes.

“Can you write this down?” my teacher asked. “The way the cool, fresh salt air smells, the colors of the flowers blooming around you?”

“No, I probably couldn’t,” I was forced to admit. “I could try.”

“Yes, and never fully succeed,” the old man said, “and the fascination of the attempt might bring you back again and again, battering your mind, heart, and spirit against the impossible. As the poets do. For that
is
what they do. And indeed a life such as that is no bad thing. But I cannot think it is the life for you. No, the movement of the stars, the flight of the birds, the falling of sticks, the shadows in the water when I looked, all predicted a different fate for you.

“Indeed, I felt you cry out to me in your mother’s womb, and so I brought you here. No, nothing that is important for you to know can be written down. I can tell you what you need to learn, and I can place you on the pathway to knowledge, but the only real way to learn about war is to fight a battle. And even then you will not know all about it, but the choices of command will be a lot more clear to you and the only way that you learn about love is to love and be loved. And then you may count the cost of knowledge too high.

“So for now I bring you to see the dragons and the gates that they may give you happiness as they do me, and because I’m a lazy old man and I want to see the dragons once more before I die. They don’t come to their old nesting grounds now very often, and the gates open only on increasingly rare occasions.”

He was speaking to himself as though he were an ancient, but even as a child I knew he wasn’t really that old, only incredibly learned. And I was often told that I was lucky to have him for a teacher. Dugald was his name. He took me to watch things often. He showed me mother birds caring for their young in the nest. We walked behind the plow, and the plowman told us how he knew the earth was ready for the deep steel horn, how he could feel with his feet if she were warm enough, dry enough, to be plowed so the soil would turn and not scour, and how when he saw the plowshare cut its first smooth furrow, his heart leaped with joy. We visited the armorer at his forge. I learned to ride even if we had no horse, and I began weapons training before I can remember. These were the chief things I needed to know because, as he told me and it seemed I knew even before I was told, I was born for war, and I would spend my life practicing my trade. I knew this to be true, and it has governed my every waking thought for as long as I can remember. How it all began is my first memory, and though I have been told I should not remember that first day, I do remember, and it is not only the first thing I remember but the most important memory I have or ever will have.

He was coming home, his belly stuffed with food for the pups, when he heard the alarm yip. It was high and sharp, really out of the range of human hearing. It brought him up short. He had not been paying as much attention to his surroundings as was his wont, and momentary confusion was the result. Wolves cannot say “what!” All the yip said was
trouble
—
watch out.
His belly was loaded with several pounds of meat, and he thought a few human curse words because he was groggy and slow. But he moved into a thick growth of bracken and the remnants of a fallen pine; had a human been watching, he would seem to have disappeared. None of the fronds moved more than a few millimeters as he went belly down among them.

The den was set just below a hilltop. He and his mate had chosen the spot because the ground was so broken that even the shepherds avoided it, but as far as a wolf was concerned it was a high road. He circled the den coming up on the hilltop. He looked down and saw the child.

She was not a newborn but a toddler, and began to squall and stretch out her arms to the retreating backs of three adults. However, once they were out of sight, she fell silent.

Good
practical intelligence,
the wolf thought.
Why screech when there is no one to comfort you?

As he watched, she turned and crawled toward the den. The warning yip he’d heard had come from inside, where his mate and the pups had taken cover. One of the pups, probably the oddly marked one with the dark leg, had ventured toward the entrance. The baby stuck her head inside and their noses touched.

Both reacted with shock. The child drew back quickly, and he heard a scrabbling sound as the pup crawfished down into the earth, returning to its mother. Then the baby sat quietly—after the manner of good children—playing in the pebbles at the den mouth. She was not a fat child, but one of the lean, rangy ones who learn to crawl early and walk even before they begin babbling because they are not carrying so much weight as their plumper confreres. They behave as though they were in a hurry to reach independence.

She was not particularly pretty.

As he watched, his mate stuck her head out. He loped easily down the hill to join her.

“Why is it here?” he asked in laconic wolf speech.

“Possibly they do not care about it,” she answered.

He gave her a look that expressed skepticism. Wolves are not birds. They do not see the need to chatter a lot. He ducked into the den to leave his belly load of food for the pups. Then he came out again.

“I will see if they are truly gone,” he said. “Don’t harm it.”

The she wolf gave him a razor edged glance of contempt as if to say what am I, a fool that you must instruct me in the obvious? He trotted away, ears down, to track the people who brought the child.

Three of them, two men and a woman, had come directly to the den, climbing up the mountain and then, after leaving the child, gone directly back down. Probably guided by the woman. He knew her: Idonia.

He returned to the den. The she wolf was suckling the three puppies and the human child. He looked long.

“I have plenty,” she said, and put her head down and began to doze in the sun.

After their meal the puppies and the child began to roughhouse. Two other wolves belonging to the pack arrived, and but for a few raised wolfish eyebrows no comment was made. By then the sun was low in the sky and beginning to set. The wolf puppies were weary and began to yawn, as did the child. She turned to the she wolf but was nosed firmly away. Then she crawled hopefully toward the pack leader and found better hospitality.

She began to explore, and a few times he was forced to do what parent wolves sometimes do—place a heavy paw on the toddler to keep her fingers out of his eyes, nose, and ears. But after a time she got two handfuls of fur in her grip, crawled partway up his back, and fell asleep, her head pillowed on his side. The pack leader rested his head on his forepaws and dozed.

The puppies were similarly placed on the female. At dusk, when the wind began to turn cold, she shook off her children, threw an ironic glance at the male and his sleeping charge, and herded her three sons into the den. The pack leader looked annoyed. He laid back his ears, then flipped them forward. Since he was not entirely a wolf, he did not leave his charge alone. One of his brethren might mistake her for supper, a fatal mistake and not just for the child. Whatever powers the priests of these highland peoples were invoking, they would not ignore the child’s death at the teeth and jaws of his pack, however much they would seem to have invited it.

The she wolf came out of the den and gave him another ironic glance—she was a sarcastic bitch—and joined the other two males. It was time to hunt. But she paused for a moment before the entrance to the den, head down, waiting. One of his sons was growing very insubordinate. Sure enough, when a short interval of time passed, the puppy’s nose appeared at the entrance to the den. Surprise, dismay, and apprehension chased each other across the baby wolf’s face. His mother didn’t do anything. She stood there, head down, meeting his eyes; but it was enough. The puppy crept back into the den with a soft whimper of apology, and the three grown wolves started out on the night’s hunt.

The big gray continued to sit in the gathering dusk, the child asleep against his body, until he heard the distant sounds of humans making their way through low trees and scrub covering the mountainside. Then, easing away from the child so slowly and carefully that she did not awaken, he merged with the cover of the pale mauve flowered bushes that carpeted the rocks at the hilltop. A few minutes later the humans arrived, carrying torches, and stood looking down at the sleeping child.

Two men and one woman had emerged from the forest into the clearing in front of the den. One of the men was middle aged with dark hair and beard sprinkled with gray. The other was magnificent: young, blond, lean, and powerfully muscled with narrow hips and waist, broad shoulders, and the pale, fair skin of the northern peoples. The woman, Idonia herself, was old, but the wolf knew she was not as old as she looked. Her face was deeply lined, her eyes sunken and deeply hooded. Her body was lean and spare, her skin leathery and weather beaten. She wore an under dress of deep blue and an overtunic decorated in complex patterns of flame and gold, a rainbow of reds at the bottom fading into deep blue at the top.

The dark haired man went to one knee and picked up the child. She didn’t awaken.

“I cannot believe it,” said the blond man. “She has taken no hurt.”

“Hush,” Idonia said. She extended one brown finger and touched the child’s lips. “Milk,” she said. “She was suckled at a wolf’s teat.”

The woman raised her arms toward the sky in what seemed a ritual gesture, and the wolf saw she held a long blackthorn staff in her right hand.

“She is chosen,” the woman said.

“You are all mad,” said the blond man. “So the wolves didn’t harm her. What does that prove? Those stories are all nonsense.”

“So you say,” the dark man said. He didn’t seem inclined to dispute the matter.

“Hush,” the blond man said softly. “Don’t move, either of you. I’m going to see if I can get a shot at him. He’s watching us right now.” He had a crossbow, a small one, hanging from a loop on his belt.

The wolf knew he’d been seen. The blond man was looking into his eyes. The wolf flattened his body lower against the heather and cursed himself for a fool. His eyes had flashed in the torchlight and alerted the man. He was young and looked fast. In a second his hand was on the bow. The wolf knew he had miscalculated. He’d believed the man would raise the bow to fire, giving him a second or two to leap right or left, giving him a fifty fifty chance to escape the bolt, but the bastard was going to shoot from the hip.

But just as he touched the weapon, the bolt, without any pressure on the trigger, discharged into the ground. The wolf went straight up and came down in a small grove of poplars just below the hilltop. The blond man swore.

“I lost him. My hand must have slipped. Never mind.” He reached down to free the bolt embedded in the soil at his feet.

“Do not reload,” Idonia said.

The blond man looked mightily offended. “Are you presuming to tell me what to do?” The blond man looked dangerous.

“I believe you are a guest of my people,” Idonia said. “Does a guest offend his host?”

“No,” the dark haired man said. “He doesn’t. Not if he’s smart.” His eyes met the blond man’s.

“That was a wolf.”

“That was a wolf,” the dark haired man repeated.

“That was the Gray Watcher,” Idonia said. She reached down, picked up the crossbow bolt, and tossed it out into the darkness.