Wolves of the Beyond: Shadow Wolf (4 page)

“So what do you think, lad?” Duncan MacDuncan’s breath was hot and slightly fetid. It was the breath of a sick wolf. He spoke low and tapped his tail as a signal that the others were to back away. He wanted a private conversation.

“Me? What do I think?” Faolan asked. He shoved his ears forward with new alertness. His tail lifted a very tiny bit. He hadn’t been asked what he thought about anything since he had arrived in the Beyond.

“Yes, what do you think about the gnaw-bone?”

He looked up at the chieftain. Duncan MacDuncan’s eyes were a rheumy green. His muzzle twist was unkempt. Only clan chieftains and members of the Watch were permitted to wear the twisted braid. “Well, my lord, I am sorry to say every scratch, every mark the gnaw wolf Heep carved is true. I violated the order. I am deeply sorry.”

“Oh, I know that, and I’m glad to hear you’re sorry. But what do you think of the workmanship, the craft?”

Faolan was shocked. He slid his eyes up and gazed into the faded ones of the old chieftain. Was a lowly gnaw
wolf like himself really permitted to comment on anything, let alone another gnaw wolf’s ability?

“I…I…” Faolan stammered.

“Now, for Lupus’ sake, don’t say the word ‘humble.’ Just give your opinion, lad.”

“I don’t think it’s that good, my lord. He carves too deep for one thing, and every line is the same—the same depth, the same width.”

“Hmmm” was all the old chieftain said. He sighed and then commenced a racking cough. Cathmor came up to him and began licking his muzzle and lightly stroking his fur with her paw.

“What am I supposed to do with you, lad?” the chieftain whispered hoarsely.

“I don’t know, my lord. I am not a very good gnaw wolf.”

“No! No! That’s not the problem at all. You’re a frinking good gnaw wolf.” Faolan was not sure exactly what “frinking” meant, but he thought it was one of the minor curse words that was shared with the owls, for Gwynneth had used it several times. “But you’re a pathetic pack wolf. You don’t understand, do you? This whole pack, clan business.”

“I guess not, my lord.”

“Guess not? I
know
not. There is no guessing about it.”

“So I must leave.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not a good pack wolf. I guess I’m just a lone wolf.”

“That’s not your privilege. I do the saying around here!” Duncan MacDuncan roared. It was as if a current went through the cave, and every filament of fur on every wolf’s hackles suddenly stood straight up.

In a low, hoarse whisper, Duncan asked Faolan, “Do you know what a
gaddergnaw
is?”

Faolan shook his head.

“We have not had one in several years. It’s a contest to select a gnaw wolf—the best gnaw wolf—for the Watch at the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes. It will be a hard contest, lad. They choose one wolf, and on rare occasions two, and never two from the same clan. So it makes the competition all the harder for you. And for Heep.” He paused. “You have it in you, Faolan.”

Duncan studied Faolan carefully as if he were looking for the wolf that might lurk inside, as if in the bright green light of this young wolf’s eyes he might see the reflection of a traveling wolf from another time. “You
could be selected. You have fine teeth for carving and you have strength. However, you have no sense. But the
gaddergnaw
, Faolan—this could be your chance!”

MacDuncan now staggered to his feet and, lifting his tail painfully, wagged it once, twice, then a third time to summon the other wolves closer.

“The gnaw-bone has been read. There is clear evidence that the gnaw wolf Faolan is guilty of a most serious infraction of the
gaddernock
code as it is applied to the
byrrgis
. He has challenged the order. He has admitted his guilt as well as his profound regret. From my private conversation with him, I can say that he knows deep in his marrow that he can do better, that he can become a clan wolf.”

What private conversation was this? When did I ever say that?
Faolan wondered.

“And so,” the chieftain continued, “from the time of the Ice March, I invoke the privilege of the Sayer. I say that this gnaw wolf shall stay in the clan. He shall resume his lowly position as gnaw wolf in the Pack of the Eastern Scree. He shall be required to visit every outflanker of every pack of the MacDuncan clan, present this bone gnawed by Heep, and perform the third-degree submission and veneration rituals, as dictated by section thirty-two of
the
byrrgnock
code of the
gaddernock
. Following the contrition rituals, he shall gnaw a bone of contrition to be left with the pack outflankers. Thus shall he gain absolution.”

Duncan paused now, his legs trembling with fatigue from standing, his chest heaving from speaking. His mate, Cathmor, touched his flank. “Please, dear, rest.”

He growled, “Rest! There is eternity for resting! I have one more announcement I have to make—an important one. I have received a message from Finbar Fengo of the Watch. We have agreed that another
gaddergnaw
must be held.”

A murmur of excitement swept through the wolves. Tails began to wag. It had been years since the last
gaddergnaw
.

“All the clans shall gather here in the Moon of the Singing Grass. This is what I, Duncan MacDuncan, chieftain of the clan of the MacDuncans, say.”

And let us hope,
Duncan thought to himself,
that indeed the grass will be singing and not still locked under frozen ground
. His eyes were more filmy than before, and a terrible rattling wheeze shook his frail body. He sank onto the pelts, weak from his efforts.

A hush filled the cave. It was very rare that a chieftain invoked the privilege of the Sayer. But Duncan
MacDuncan just had, and the word of a dying chieftain carried great weight.

As Faolan was led away from the chieftain, he took one more glance at the fire. He blinked and hesitated. In the flames, he spied a pattern that was familiar—a swirl of bright orange and yellow buried deep at the base of the smaller flames hovering just above the coal bed.

I see it—the same spiral that marks my paw. By my marrow, I see it in the fire of the
gadderheal!

MHAIRIE SLID DOWN THE SHORT
steep tunnel to her den. She was so happy to have her own private space. The new litter of pups that her mum, Caila, had delivered four months before had made everything so crowded. So she and her sister Dearlea took turns living in this solitary den while the other helped Caila tend the new ones.

The pups were at that most difficult age. Old enough to get into trouble but not old enough to get out of it. They were fascinated—as all young pups were—by the tantalizing whiteness at the mouth of their den. They thought the white light that flooded the opening was a wall and not simply the light of day. Mhairie wondered if she had felt that way when she was their age. But she could hardly remember.

Caila had chosen a whelping den with an especially long tunnel. “Keep them from the light as long as possible,” she said to her mate, Eiric. “I can’t go chasing after them if they get out, and you know they always try as soon as their milk teeth come in.”

Sure enough, when their milk teeth broke in, chaos broke out! Especially with six! The worst part was their howling. Mhairie wasn’t sure why, but wolf pup cries were nothing like the melodious howls of mature wolves. For at least six moons, their howls were sharp barks, like the clash of hard rocks tumbling against one another in a slide. When the earthquake of the previous winter had struck, at first it sounded to her like ten thousand pups storming out of their whelping dens. And then there were the pups’ whiny whimpers when they begged. Not as loud as barks, but annoyingly squeaky.

Mhairie wondered if she would ever be able to be a good mother. It was so exhausting.
How does Mum stand it?
she wondered. But Caila did. And who would have thought that Caila would give birth to six lively pups at her advanced age? Not a
malcadh
among them.

But now Mhairie felt a terrible loneliness and anger. Why had that gnaw wolf gone and spoiled everything for her? When she came back, the wolves, the outflankers in
the MacDuncan clan who had sent her to run with this
byrrgis
, were visibly disappointed. Alastrine, the point wolf of the chieftain’s pack, tried to soothe Mhairie in her thick musical brogue, for she was also the
skreeleen
of the pack. She delighted in using the old wolf phrases that had come with the wolves on the Ice March from the Long Cold more than a thousand years earlier. “Don’t worry, my dear heart. Don’t
greet
.”
Greet
was an old wolf word, which meant “to fret.” “You’re so young. Younger than I ever was when I ran with the outflankers. Another day, another hunt, another
byrrgis
, dearie. Be patient.”

He wrecked everything
was all Mhairie could think.
That moldwarp, beslubbering, canker-livered gnaw wolf.
She dredged up from her brain every vile wolf curse she could think of and was muttering them into the darkness of her den. These were words that would have earned her a muzzle-flinging nip from her mum. She could almost feel Caila’s jaws clamping down on her and hurling her across the cave.

But it wasn’t just that Faolan had demolished her first-ever run with the outflankers. There was more to it, and she was almost as angry with herself as with the gnaw wolf. What was it about this wolf that had gotten under
her pelt like a summer tick and annoyed her almost as much as her younger brothers and sisters? And yet, just as with her younger pup siblings, she felt a need to look out for Faolan. Or to beat him like the wrath of Lupus and turn his bones to dust!

FAOLAN SET OFF IMMEDIATELY
after being escorted from the
gadderheal
. Adair had led him to the edge of the Carreg Gaer’s territory and had given him directions for finding the other packs of the MacDuncan clan, as well as instructions in the rituals of contrition. Faolan listened, but his mind was occupied with something else. The words of Duncan MacDuncan echoed in his ears.

Do you know what a
gaddergnaw
is?…a contest to select a gnaw wolf—the best gnaw wolf—for the Watch at the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes…. You have it in you, Faolan…. You could be selected. You have fine teeth for carving and you have strength. However, you have no sense. But the
gaddergnaw,
Faolan—this could be your chance!

A high-ranking wolf sending off a shamed gnaw wolf normally would have given him a sharp, almost stunning blow to the top of his muzzle, but the slap that Adair administered qualified somewhere between a pat and a thwack. Indeed, it almost missed Faolan’s muzzle entirely, for Adair could not bear to look at Faolan.
He sees moon rot in me, but Duncan MacDuncan didn’t. Duncan MacDuncan saw something else!

“Be on your way, gnaw wolf,” Adair snarled. “Learn from your disgrace! Roll in the scent of your shame. And save any dreams you might entertain of the
gaddergnaw
. For while you are on your trail of shame, the gnaw wolves’ preparation for the competition will begin in earnest.” He paused, then added nastily, “And you shall miss out!”

And so Faolan set off into the darkness with his bone of shame gripped in his mouth.

There is a time of night when the world seems almost empty. There is an overwhelming hollowness after the moon has slipped away to another world, and the constellations have slid to another Beyond. The stars expire one by one like the last small breaths of illumination in the
darkness, and the night goes dead before the first weak glow of the dawn.

Faolan had not traveled far before Alastrine’s first howls scored the night. He stopped in his tracks. So the chieftain had passed. A shiver went through Faolan from his raised hackles to his tail, still firmly tucked between his legs. He fell to his knees and put his paws over his muzzle. This was the first true act of humility that Faolan had made since he had been with the wolves.

Soon braided through the howls of the
skreeleen
was the fine filament of Cathmor’s voice keening the loss of her mate.
What a terrible time to die,
thought Faolan. For during these emptiest hours in the hollow of the night, there was not a sign of the star ladder to the heavenly constellation that the wolves called the Cave of Souls. Those stars had slipped away to the west already and in a few nights would disappear entirely for the three winter moons that would soon be upon the wolves of the Beyond. For those few remaining nights, Cathmor howled her thanks. Had it been the time of the winter moons, Duncan MacDuncan’s soul would have had to wait until spring to climb the star ladder and enter the Cave of Souls.

The
skreeleen
’s pitch changed to howl the summoning, calling all the MacDuncan packs to head to the far west, where the night was still young and the star ladder could be found. They were to travel at triple press-paw speed to catch it. For the next three nights, the wolves would gather there to howl the
morriah
, the lament for their dead chieftain. Gnaw wolves were excluded from this ceremony. Therefore, Faolan’s charge to visit all of the packs and perform his rituals of contrition would be delayed. He had wanted only to get it over with, but Duncan MacDuncan was the one wolf that Faolan had truly admired. In his marrow, he felt a keenness for the old chieftain that he had never come close to feeling for any other creature except Thunderheart.

Thunderheart!
The name exploded in Faolan’s mind. He had not been to the place where he had buried her paw since he had joined the MacDuncan clan. To touch the bone of the paw that had cradled him was now what Faolan wanted most in the world. Just being near that bone would give him comfort.

He veered sharply south and headed toward the river from which Thunderheart had rescued him. She’d told him that the word
fao
meant both “river” and “wolf.”
Lan
meant “gift.” And when she had dredged him up
from the swollen turbulence of the river, she had thought of him as the river’s gift to her. She had just lost her own cub to a cougar, and her milk was still running. So she became Faolan’s milk mother, and nourished him. When Thunderheart died, Faolan had taken the largest bone from his milk mother’s paw and carved on it the story of their golden summer together, of swimming behind schools of trout and standing in the rapids at the time of the salmon spawn and scooping fish from the roiling waters. It was all there on the bone. The kill of their first caribou, the summer den, the winter den. He had buried the bone on a shale slope of a high ridge near the salt lagoons. It was a spot a fair distance from any of the wolf packs. Faolan had not wanted any wolf to see the bone he had carved. It was his story, his memory, and to him it was sacred. The wolves had a code, a law, a rule for everything. This was Faolan’s code.
And by my marrow,
he thought,
it is right!

He arrived just as the first thin, red slash of dawn light bled above the horizon. The sun rose, then faded to pink and dissolved into the flawless blue sky of morning. It did not take Faolan long to find his bone. When he heard
the first click of his dewclaw against the bone, he began to dig delicately with his mouth, sheathing his teeth, and finally using just his tongue to lift the bone from the earth. He licked off the dust, and his eyes filled as he saw the markings on the bone that told the story of what had been his life. He swung his head from the paw of Thunderheart to the bone of shame that Heep had carved. He wanted to fling that horrid bone of shame into the deepest part of the river, throw it into a fire, throw it straight down to the Dim World. But he felt a calm steal over him suddenly. It was as if a phantom paw stroked the fur just beneath his jaws, the most sensitive region on any wolf.

Faolan licked the paw bone, and his finely etched lines stood in beautiful relief against its whiteness. He felt almost outside his own skin, his own pelt, hovering just above himself. He watched himself swim just behind Thunderheart in search of fish, then saw a tiny pup who was supposed to be digging for roots and bulbs begin nosing instead at a small hill of sandy dirt. Seconds later, the cub had uncovered an ant’s nest and was yowling his head off. His muzzle was stinging ferociously. Thunderheart raced toward him and scraped off the nasty creatures with her own rough tongue. He would welcome back the stinging fury of those ants if
it meant he could be with Thunderheart and feel the rasp of her tongue, hear the thunderous beating of her great heart.

And though he sang to Thunderheart, all the while he also thought of Duncan MacDuncan, the wolf who had told him he had no sense but did have a chance—a chance to be a better wolf.

Later, as night fell far from where the lone wolf keened his song for his milk mother, the chieftain’s mate,
Cathmor, wailed her grief into the northern wind. On this the second night of the
morriah,
she saw a luminous gray mist at the very top of the star ladder of the spirit trail that led to the Cave of Souls.

“The
lochin
!
Lochin!
” she called. She knew in her marrow that there was now a gulf between her and the luminous spirit of her mate as deep as any sea, as wide as the distance between the earth and any star. But she would look for that mist every evening as the iridescent spheres of dew drifted down through the pearly light of the moon. The
lochin
was how the spirits of the dead lived on in the hearts of the ones they had left behind, making their marrow tingle until the time when they, too, climbed the star ladder to the Cave of Souls.