Alexandria (38 page)

Shapes in the hazy distance catch Jack’s eye and he turns. Several dirty gray wolves carouse down the middle of the road. They dig their muzzles into the earth and sniff around fastidiously, then jog ahead with such grace they are almost prancing. Their advance is unhurried, but deliberate.

Jack grabs Lia and pulls her flush against a leaning half-wall. They crouch down and watch the wolves.

“Are they from the Temple?” Lia asks through a clenched jaw.
“Are they already here?”

Jack flicks his eyes across the roadway behind the wolves. Empty.

“They look wild,” he says. The pack is several blocks off now and gaining. “Come on.”

He hops up onto the low wall and Lia hitches her leg up and climbs on after. They jump down the other side and work their way across an uneven rectangle of toppled posts and weeds and concrete. The far wall has collapsed outward and they stumble across it toward the next street over. As they turn the corner, one of the shabby wolves leaps atop the wall and watches them dash away. It slinks down and sniffs cautiously over the ground they just trod. The rest of the pack soon joins in, stealing out onto the street and sneaking down the way.

Jack leans out and spies them.

“Are they coming?”

“Yes.”

The wolves pick up speed as they weave and lope down the street, matching their pace precisely. He grabs Lia’s arm and races away.

“They’re hunting us.”

He stops in the middle of the street and roars at them and brandishes his blade. They slow down and skulk along the edges of the gutter, watching him dumbly with cocked heads. Lia screams and yells alongside him. The wolves sit motionless and wait for the exhibition to end. Jack advances on them and they retreat a few paces, but as soon as he turns and walks back they rise and follow him.

“All right,” he says, “that’s not working.”

They veer into a narrow channel that runs between rickety storefronts then sprint away as fast as they can. The wolves creep out onto the road and follow at a distance.

Jack pounces on Lia and drags her suddenly to the ground. He lies on top of her, panting and swiveling his head around.

“Jack!”

“Shhh
. I thought I saw someone. A man.”

They slide back into a nest of foliage and look around wildly. The coast ahead is clear, and behind them they see only the steadily approaching wolf pack.

“Where did you see him?”

“Over there, I thought.”

Lia shakes her head, eyes widened with primitive fear. “I don’t see anything.”

“Okay,” he says, heaving himself back to his feet, “let’s see if we can lose them.”

They run ahead and the wolves pursue. The pack plagues them for blocks, pressing the two forward with their relentless advance.

“They’re trying to tire us out,” says Jack through hitching breaths.

“It’s working.”

“We should try to climb someplace they can’t get us, one of those trees maybe.”

“And then what?”

“Wait.”

“I don’t know, Jack.”

“There’s nothing else to do. They’ll kill us.”

They break for another corner, hoping to find good cover or a high place to hide. Sitting at the end of the short alley is another wolf. It scrabbles up onto all fours when it sees the two. Jack looks into its eyes and freezes. He hears a clapping sound from down around the corner and the wolf shoots off out of sight.

They shy away from the alley and keep on the main avenue. The confident wolves are loping ahead and closing the span between them. They run past shaggy palm trees with layers of dried husks hanging from the slender trunks and they make for a stately old oak that grows up through an enclosure of rubble. Lia scales the mound of detritus with quick agility and Jack clambers up and over behind her and they nearly throw themselves at the lowest hanging branch of the oak and start to pull themselves up.

A low roar sounds from the street, too deep to belong to any wolf, and Lia whisks her head around to face Jack.

“What is that?”

“Just keep climbing.”

“There it is again.”

Beneath the baying of a solitary wolf rises the throaty growl of some enormous creature. Jack pushes with his legs and hooks onto a higher limb. From this height they can see out onto the street. It is desolate of wolves. The barking has stopped. Jack bends his neck around and moves a well-plumed branch out of his sightline and looks off the other way. Nothing.

“Where’d they all go?”

“Down there,” says Lia.

A great, brown bear trundles down the roadway toward their hideout. It yawns its mouth wide and sways dumpily as it walks.

“Bears
climb
, don’t they?
Don't they?”

“Yes…”

Here is where panic sets in. Jack fumbles his way across the high branches frantically, electric shocks bolting through his guts, searching for a course that will give them some headway.

“Lily!”
a man’s voice calls out.

Jack grips the bark and Lia seizes his arm. The voice sounds again, low and gravelly.

The bear pauses and looks around.

Footsteps shuffle nearby, and soon enough a man comes into view. He is clad in buckskin from head to toe—rough trousers, sewn together with crudely dimpled seams, and a dark leather mantle around his shoulders, covered in tears and stains and trimmed with fox fur. He looks into the branches of the oak and smiles at the boy and girl that cower there.

“They’re gone,” he says. He is deep-creased and bearded, with hair colored the same dingy gray as the wolves’ and skin as tanned as the various hides he sports. “You can come on down, it’s safe.”

Jack and Lia sit still and look at him.

“B
…
bear…”
Lia manages.

“She won’t bite you. Least I don’t think. Of course you’d be in the jaws of those wolves right now if not for her. You could say
thank you.”

Jack watches in awe as the old man walks right up to the bear and ruffles her light brown fur and throws his arm around her neck. She sways her head around and nuzzles against him and the simple action nearly knocks him to the ground. Jack swings down a few branches to get a cleaner view. The stray wolf is there, too—the one he had seen alone in the alleyway. It looks up at the old man like an obedient servant and the man reaches in his satchel and draws out a length of dried meat and slips it into the wolf’s mouth.

“It’s all right, young man. They’re civilized.” He looks not to have washed in years. The bear seems cleanest of them all.

Jack hops off the lowest limb and climbs atop the rubble pile and looks down at the odd collection of wanderers. The bear watches without a flicker of emotion in her small eyes and the wolf regards him with only slightly more interest. The old man gazes back with a troubling sense of familiarity.

“Have you been following us?” asks Jack, realizing stupidly that he still wears a wreath of flowers on his head.

“I’ve watched your passage,” the man says curiously. “This is dangerous land for young one’s like yourselves. I thought you might be lost, or out of your minds altogether. Which is it? Lost? Or crazy?”

“Neither,” says Jack, pitching his crown into the bushes. “We’re just passing through.”

“Oh. I see. You have a name?”

“Jack.”

“Jack
. That’s a fine old name. Never known a Jack. And your friend, there?”

“I’m Lia.”

“Lia, pleased to know you.”

“What’s
your
name?” she asks, hopping off the tree limb and sidling up next to Jack.

“Called Miles,” he says crisply.

“You
walk
around
with them?” asks Jack, nodding toward the animals.

“Only friends I’ve got.” Miles waves them down off the mound. “She’s Lilith, and here’s Ruck. Come here, let ‘em know you’re friendly. That is, if you are friendly.” He angles his hand toward the machete that hangs at Jack’s hip and looks at him expectantly.

“Stay here,”
Jack whispers, then ventures down into the street and takes a few steps toward them.

Miles leads the wolf forward and lets him poke his muzzle around Jack’s boots. He tentatively reaches a hand down and Ruck drags his warm tongue across it and looks up pleadingly.

“That’s enough, Ruck. Sit down.”

The wolf sits. The bear rises from her haunches and walks a half circle around Jack, then stretches her neck out and touches her pointed snout lightly to his elbow. He turns to wave Lia down and finds her already standing behind him. The bear scopes her out in similar fashion then sulks off behind Miles and looks dully around the neighborhood.

“So…” begins Miles, “passing through, you said? Where you headed?”

“Nowhere really. Just wandering.”

“Ahh, struck by wanderlust. Kindred spirits.”

“Are you headed somewhere?”

“I’ve destinations in mind, but not of the definite sort,” Miles replies. Jack squints at the unfamiliar lingo he employs. “Say, those are some well-made shoes you’re wearing. Haven’t ever seen any like that. Where are you two from?”

Jack inhales but makes no comment, recalling how their boots almost got them killed. He looks at Lia and finds her just as speechless.

“Don’t care to talk about it? Just as well,” agrees Miles. “None of my business where you’re from or where you’re going. Just making conversation.”

“Do you live here?”

“I live everywhere.”

“How long have you wandered?”

“A long time, Lia.”

“And they go with you?”

“For several years now. Raised them since cub and pup.” He scratches his fingers through his straggly beard and looks up at the sky. “I’d come upon a terrible sight, three dead wolves, ripped to pieces, and a lone pup curled up next to them. Then I saw the bear, crying and bleeding out. They’d killed each other protecting their young, you see. I found the little bear cub not far off, crawling around scared and I couldn’t bring myself to leave her, so I took the babes and raised them as my own.”

“I’ve seen tame wolves,” says Jack, “but never a bear. How do you know she won’t kill you?”

“I don’t.”

Their conversation lulls and each party merely stands and drinks in the strangeness of the other. Boy and girl, bruised and bloodied, facing the old man with beasts for companions.

“Gonna be dark soon,” says Miles. “I’ve got some fish strung up at a little spot not far from here. It’s not much, but I’ll share it.”

“Thanks… but we should probably keep moving.”

“Now I suspect you’re crazy again. You’re already beat to hell, both of you. I don’t care to think what’ll happen to you out here alone at night. There’s more than wolf packs in these parts, you know.”

“How do we know you won’t steal from us?” Lia asks.

Miles laughs, a hoarse cackle. “What would I steal? Shoes that won’t fit me? A sword I have no use for? I offer you a hot meal and a safe night’s sleep. All I ask in exchange is a little company. Take it or leave it.”

They confer softly and decide that if the old man wanted them dead, he could have simply let the wolves kill them and saved himself the trouble.

“Okay,” says Lia. “We’ll go.”

Miles nods an affirmation. “Follow me.”

They set out through the labyrinthine ruins, conversing about all manner of things relative to their separate journeys, and the bear and the wolf walk easily down the avenue alongside them.

Arana paces across his parlor, cold sober and obsessed with the discrepancy he sees in front of him. The buckhide map has been pulled from the wall and spread out flat on the dark-stained dining table with a ring of candles around it, and it shows new markings over a far-off southern desert region, unknown to the Temple, culled forth from the bloodied Renning while young Phoebe cried and cloaked her face against his chest. A smaller map lay crumpled on top of the larger one, returned to the Temple by Cirune, with a hastily scribbled star drawn in along the southern coast. The markings on the separate maps do not match. Arana revolves around the table, observing the plots from every angle as if some minor overlooked detail will resolve the disparity.

Thin vertical shafts of light track across the chamber as the sun wheels toward the ocean, and when the thin orange crescent sinks beneath the surface, the pale light darkens and disappears with the dawning of night and the parlor illuminates with dirty hearth fire.

It begins at sunset.

Arana leaves the maps behind and stills himself before the flames. He sits on his lounge as unmoving as a stoneworked bust of himself, and he does not stir even when the terrified screams float through with the night breeze and become general on the grounds. There is no use risking an escape by doing it softly, he reminds himself. Their methods are becoming more effective by the day.