Night of the wolf, p.3
Night of the Wolf, page 3
Far away, the wolf met his pack in a grove where a wooden female image held sway. Sometimes, at certain feasts, women cursed with barrenness came here to dance in the moonlight. They asked the Lady—she had no other name—for a child. Supposedly it was death for men to come here, but many braved the gesa and sneaked in, concealing themselves in the trees surrounding the image. They did so because the women danced naked, danced themselves into hot desire, and they would often couple in supple abandonment with those whose voices charmed them into the darkness and whose hot spill of seed might quicken the empty womb. After all, bees in the drunken springtime plunder the dreaming orchards by both sun and moonlight. What couldn’t be earned in the marriage bed might be stolen by starlight. But all this came about in the springtime.
Now it was autumn with the mountain winter hurrying in on its heels. Now only the wolves danced and played here in the chill moonlight. They rolled in the short, brown grass, rubbed their heads and jaws against her pillared image, and, at last, sang to the rising moon before the hunt.
No, she hadn’t been beautiful, but then he’d never understood the canons of human beauty. How quick they were to try to hammer something so effervescent, so changeable into a narrow mold. Catch the wind on a net or freeze the play of sunlight on moving water, then you will know what beauty is, but you still will not have been able to lay hold of desire, the fire in the belly that brings us to triumph, heartbreak, or despair.
He had been determined to make the human she in the grove his last. Her pain had scared him. No bitch wolf knew such suffering and perhaps none found it the gateway to the almost transcendent pleasure she displayed so freely at the last. So he stayed away from the lake and devoted himself to his duty—leading the pack, keeping them fed, ensuring the weaker members were protected, and maintaining proper order. Perhaps if he hadn’t lost his leader counterpart, the she who complemented his powers among the females, he might have escaped the trap awaiting him. But the pack’s great female died under the claws of a bear and, for a season, he had no proper mate.
The winter had been harsh. No individual but he could remember a harsher one. The Romans haunted the valley— though he didn’t know them as Romans, only as heavily armed, mounted men who carried powerful compound bows and wanted wolf skins for some purpose of their own. A pack living in the valley was decimated.
He led his to the heights. The men encamped in the valley slaughtered game with both hands. And, as winter wore on and the snows deepened, prey became more and more difficult to find. So when his pack pursued a lean elk into a snow bank and pulled him down, they weren’t about to yield their prey to a snarling bear who appeared and tried to take it from them.
He and she were the leaders. They knew their duty. As the stronger, he led the attack, circling the bear, snapping at her, distracting her while the wolves fed on the steaming meat and blood of the fallen elk. The ravenous bear, her reserves of fat exhausted by the long winter and drained by her cub, wasn’t intimidated or drawn off by their tactics. She turned back toward the feeding wolves and was nearly able to maul one of the yearling males. The wolves drew away, snarling, from the carcass.
They had to have the food, and the gray knew it. A few of the older members of the pack were already weak. He could tell by the smell of the air that a blizzard was sweeping across the pass. If they didn’t feed now, the wind and freezing temperatures would end some of their lives tonight.
He faced the bear, backing her away from the kill with an open-mouthed roar of fury. She reared on her hind legs and swiped at him. He wasn’t quite quick enough and she left a strip of fine marks all along one side of his body. He circled, trying to get behind her, but she followed him. The she-wolf leaped, diving for a haunch. The bear whipped around, dropped to all fours, and in a movement too rapid for the eye to follow, sent the she-wolf rolling, yipping, spraying blood into the snow. But the pack mother had given the gray his chance. He went for the giant thighbone. The bone crumbled in his jaws. He was able to leap away just in time to avoid a last vicious swipe of the bear’s claws. The broken bone leaped out through the skin like a javelin. The bear gave a cry of anguish, spinning ’round and ’round, snow packing under her paws as her blood pulsed, fountained from the shattered leg and drenched the snow. ’round and ’round she went, snapping desperately at the wound that was killing her until, at last, her struggles ended and she sank down in the scarlet pool and died.
Ignoring the bear’s stiffening body, the wolves returned to the kill. The she-wolf stood, shook off the snow, limped over, stood next to him, and took her share. The blizzard’s first clouds reached them. Snow flurries spattered their fur even as they cleaned the elk’s bones. The bear was only a mound of white near the bloody scraps of the kill when they finished. The she-wolf limped away from the elk and the rest.
He knew where she was going—to the den where she had borne her pups for many seasons. Her head was down, her ears back. She was limping badly now, and looked as if she were in great pain. The rest had another shelter and they would seek it.
He followed her.
The den was beyond the tree line. Up and up she went. The snow flurries had settled into a steady downfall that seemed to grow thicker by the minute. The sky was a uniform deep gray that imperceptibly darkened, washing color out of the world, then slowly strangling light. He moved behind the she over the high windswept waste.
The light was blue-gray when they came to the den. The entrance was choked with snow. She wiggled in and found a corner piled with dried moss. She lay still.
He followed, resting next to her, lending her the only support and help he could. His big, warm body stretched out next to her. He heard her sigh, the same sound she made after sex. The previous springtime’s loving hadn’t taken. She was having a barren year.
Her eyes were closed and her muzzle rested on his back, just below the neck. He curled his body around hers as well as he could. Outside, blue evening became black. The wind howled louder and louder as the blizzard ripped through the mountains, tearing at the naked stony peaks and the glacial heights with frigid fingers, wrapping any unsheltered, warm living thing in a cocoon of icy death. Wailing, sobbing, moaning, and, at last, screaming out the triumph of cold and dark over light and warmth. Of an eternal frozen death over the fleeting loves of a transient springtime.
He didn’t know when she died. All he knew was that sometime in those blackest, wildest, cruelest hours before dawn, he woke to find he could no longer feel her heartbeat and that in spite of his warmth, her body was cooling. When he moved, her head slipped from his back and landed with a soft thud on the moss. She lay on her side, jaws slightly open, the tongue protruding a bit between them, eyes staring unseeingly out into the last darkness. He rested his head on his front paws and awaited the dawn.
When it came, he slipped out of the den. The storm had passed. Sun shone on the snow. The sky was blue.
He returned to the den. She lay where she’d been before. He pushed her with his nose and found her already stiffening.
He turned and went outside. He became human. God, it was cold, but this wouldn’t take long. He pulled at the snow above the entrance to the den. A miniavalanche ensued, sealing the entrance not just with snow, but with rock and pebbles that had been piled on the granite slab that formed its roof.
When he was finished, he turned wolf again and marked the den. He marked in a way humans don’t understand, the way wolves mark traps.
This is a place of death. Stay away!
Wolves don’t grieve. What he had done showed respect for what she had done and been. No more.
Then he left to join the rest under an overhang where they’d found shelter from the storm.
She is young, Blaze thought disapprovingly as she rode up to Mir’s hut. Too young to be what she purports to be. “You are?” he asked.
“Dryas,” she answered. She was mounted on a beautiful blood bay mare. She wore a leather overblouse and a dark, divided skirt that hung almost to her ankles. It was thickly embroidered with gold at the hem. The long brown mantle that covered her shoulders was clasped at her breast by a broach formed of poppy flowers and leaves.
“Did you come through the Roman lines?” Blaze asked. “They patrol the countryside of Gaul everywhere.”
“I wasn’t far away,” she answered. “Most of the ruling men seem to be gone, but a few of their women remain. Some retain power. They wanted my advice on how to survive now that the Roman conquest is complete.” She dismounted, keeping the reins in her hands.
“The answer is, we can’t,” Blaze snapped. “Our only hope is to continue—”
“Oh my, yes,” she said irritably, “and tempt these demons to slaughter and mutilate the remainder of our menfolk and sell more of our women into slavery, a slavery that is only a slower kind of death. Don’t be fools, I told them. Preserve what you can, make any accommodation you must, but live. Teach our traditions to your sons and daughters. The old world is finished. A new has begun, and who knows where it will lead?”
Blaze fixed her with an icy stare. “That is what I would expect of a woman’s counsel. No more. No less. But I didn’t invite you here for a lesson in politics.”
She pulled off her leather cap. A coil of long black hair fell from under it and spread fan-wise down her back, crackling a little with electricity. “I wouldn’t expect you to ask. You men have done so wonderfully well up to now. At least half the people in this wretched realm are dead or carried away as slaves. The rest, their lives shattered, scramble for survival among the ruins of all they once held dear. And you, Arch Druid of Gaul, send letters to me asking that I dispatch one of my women—and you dare to specify an attractive one—to play the whore with a . . . a . . . wolf What nonsense have you connived at?”
Blaze’s face went scarlet with fury. He stepped toward her. To do what he had no idea; he’d never struck a woman in his life. But her words scalded the deepest part of his being, the place in his soul where his people’s agony was his own.
She dropped the cap and the horse’s reins and shrugged the mantle aside. She wore a sword. In less than a second, it flashed in the sun. “Back off,” she whispered between bared teeth. “One more step, I take your hand. Another and it will be your head.”
Mir, who had been standing by quietly, just as quietly stepped between them. “For shame,” he said. “For shame,” he repeated, looking at Dryas. “He is unarmed, and I so old a child could overpower me. And it is cruel to berate a brave man over things perhaps no one could change. My girl, outstanding member of your order that you may be, there is a truth that age teaches. We do all we can, but sometimes fate takes us by the throat and we are helpless.”
Dryas stepped back and sheathed her sword. “Forgive me, my father,” she said respectfully to Mir. “I have been long in the saddle. What I have seen here sickens me.”
At this moment, the girl Mir called his wife stepped through the door and looked at Dryas.
“Oh,” Dryas whispered, taking in the vacant stare and the hideously scarred face. “In the name of all good spirits, you didn’t tell me you had this kind of problem.”
Mir stepped aside. “Do what you can,” he said. “I know that those of your order can often ease the despair of those driven beyond reason by private grief, and sometimes even reclaim the lost. Help her if you can.”
The girl drifted toward Dryas, who took her by the hand and led her into the forest.
Blaze was sitting at the table, having some wine, when Mir entered. “How did you find Dryas?” he asked.
“Very like the men,” Mir answered, taking the seat across from him. “It’s disappointing. Somehow one expects more from women. I can’t think why. But we turn to them when we have exhausted our strength and our solutions, as if they don’t share the same weakness and faults we do. As if they might bring a new eye and finally loose the leashings of our Gordian knots without a sword. But I do believe she will help my ‘wife.’ It is the first time I’ve ever seen the child show trust to anyone.”
Dryas entered just then. She carried her mantle and was freshly washed. She, too, took a seat at the table. “I suppose I should be flattered to be compared to a man, but I can’t say that I am, and I have no solutions for your problems. And you, Mir, as for your wife, there’s little enough I can do for her, trust or no. The damage is already done. I left her a few medicines that will ease her pain and even one that will permanently end it, if she so chooses; and I listened to her tale.”
Mir’s head jerked up in surprise. “She spoke!”
“To me, yes,” Dryas said. “We are known to each other. I met her family; they were a great one. She may be the last remaining living member. The Romans killed or enslaved the rest.”
“Then she’s not mad?” Mir asked.
“Oh, yes, she is,” Dryas said. “But she is lucid about certain things sometimes. She can grow most of the simples I left her in the garden. She tends it, does she not?”
“Yes.” Mir nodded.
“By the way,” Dryas asked, “what is her name?”
“I don’t remember.” Mir avoided her gaze.
“Good,” Dryas said. “Continue not to remember. It’s just as well. Now, if you please, give me some of that wine and tell me about the wolf, in that order.”
Mir and Blaze stared at each other. They both looked uncomfortable. Dryas sighed and reached for a cup and the jug herself
“I believe you are the senior,” Mir said guilelessly to Blaze.
“And I believe you are the best acquainted with the problem,” Blaze returned smoothly.
Dryas poured herself some wine. “While you are each trying to get the other to precede you through the door, I believe I’ll have a drink.”
After the mother of the pack died, the winter did not go well. The oldest female, she who knows always where to go to find prey, failed. She died in the grayness; the stony hardness of midwinter. She lay down to sleep in the snow with the rest and did not awaken in the morning. He was deprived of her counsel as well.
The virgin females fought with escalating fury for the position of pack mother. The most promising two inflicted such dreadful injuries on each other that both died, leaving a third the winner by default. This greatly cut the pack’s hunting ability since they had been the swiftest and most dangerous killers. Their loss taxed all his cunning and ability.
In the spring he was, of course, at the disposal of the winning female. She was a rangy, nervous bitch, very jealous of her prerogatives as pack mother. She constantly harassed the remaining females. This led to endless squabbling and ill temper among the younger pack members.
Despite his feeling of coldness toward her, he would have accommodated her desires. She had, after all, earned the mother right. This was what pack law demanded of him—that he meet her graciously as a mate and then assist in rearing her offspring.
But to his mild surprise, she showed no interest in him at all and took up with two males who were all that remained of the pack destroyed by the Romans. This was also her right, that she choose her own partners if she wished. He might have asserted himself more strongly. Other leaders would have, but he was more relieved than otherwise at her decision and left her alone.
She returned from her forays, finally satisfied, pregnant, and much calmer than when she left, and he found himself pleased not to be bothered about her needs. And besides, he had already met the strawberry-blond woman at the pool.
The woman came from the small village of herdsmen and farmers, down the slope and to the pond to refresh herself in the cool water, bathe, and dress her thick, reddish blond hair. She was wide hipped; her breasts were large, upright with only a slight droop. The nipples jutted invitingly. Her skin was very fair, and he noticed she kept to the shade. That skin didn’t tan; it probably burned. She was covered head to toe with freckles.
He grew accustomed to seeing her each day as he dozed on the flat rock overlooking the waterfall. He thought she looked delectable, but not in the manner of food. Usually she left when the sun was high in the sky. The pool, even at midsummer, could become very cool in the afternoon when the sun’s rays no longer shone on it and the forest shadow crept in.
He found the change difficult and sometimes impossible by day. By the time he felt the long evening shadows pull at his flesh and he could sense a bridge forming between his world and the human’s, she was gone.
Just as well, he thought. A few times he was tempted to slink after her when she returned to the rath where she lived. Once or twice he even entertained the fantasy of entering the circular, thatched dwelling by night. He wasn’t blind in even the deepest darkness. He knew her scents. They were in certain ways more real to him than the way she looked.
Often, after bathing, she took her ease in one of the few sunny spots not choked by undergrowth or shadowed by ancient trees. The big granite rock was buried, but enough of it thrust into the water to create a platform a few feet above the lake. The top was too bare to sustain growth, but it was thickly carpeted with pine and fir needles. It got sun three or four hours a day. The radiant light would peer down, deep down, into the lake’s clear water, flashing on pike, trout, and the occasional small sturgeon that would come and go like ghosts in the gloom.
All year, except during the darkest months, wild flowers surrounded the pine-needle carpet. Mother of thyme would rise from beneath the snow and twine with blue-flowered bergamot mint. Violets bloomed in the springtime, white, deepest purple, yellow. Later in summer wild carrots, the yellow composite daisies, sunflowers, and dandelions lit up the thickening grass. Harebells peered from the shelter of tall pines, hiding their drooping beauty in the shade of tile-barked trunks and thick, clustered needles.
All unknowing she left her mark on the fallen brown needles. For instance, he knew that desire rose in her, answering the moon queen’s magnetism at least three times a week. He didn’t know where she expressed that desire since she came to the lake alone. Her skin had a flowerlike scent. It took him a while to understand the smell wasn’t just satiny flesh, but the oil of roses she anointed herself with after her bath. The smell at her armpits in the heat was mildly oniony—sweet, wild onions wrapped in clay and caramelized by a fire. When she was gone, he drifted down to drink in her complex perfume and sometimes roll on the pine carpet near the trees.
