Dreams (11 page)

And I rose, not by design but by the inevitable competition of courage and strength and skill that settles the social order of the wolves, to the moment when I was the second leader of our pack. And then one day I felt myself overcome by strange urgings, irresistible urgings. I felt my hairs stiffening, my tongue lolling, my nostrils twitching to the stimulus of a scent like none other: that of the wolf-bitch in heat.

I rose from my place and trotted across the glittering ice. Soon I found the source of that all-powerful stimulus. It was the mate of the leader of our wolf-pack. He was an old and wise wolf who had seen many winters. He had mated as a young hunter, and as do wolves, he had mated for life. But after years of companionship and litters of whelps, his bitch had died, and after a period of mourning—yes, wolves mourn!—he had mated again, this time with a young female of glittering eyes and long, luxuriant fur.

But now her scent called to me and I could no more resist that call than a fir can resist the call of the springtime sun. I trotted to her side. She lay on a bank of soft snow, looked up at me, licked the fur of my muzzle.

I issued a challenge, a mighty howl that said as clearly to the wolves of our pack as ever human speech said to human ear, that I was claiming the mate of the leader. With her, I claimed the leader¬ship of the pack itself.

By the law of the wolves—and, yes, the wolves have law!—the old leader could choose one of three courses. He could accept my challenge and fight me, fight me to the death. He could yield to my claim, yield to me both his mate and his leadership of the wolf-pack, and become a submissive follower. Or he could leave the pack to wander the ice-floes, a loner, a rogue wolf, hunting such small prey as he could bring down alone, picking at the offal left by others, perhaps attacking the despised Man.

He chose to fight.

There are few preliminaries in the life of the wolf-pack. The challenge had been issued. The old leader had accepted. The rest of the pack assembled, ringing us, the leader's bitch settled to one side of the circle of wolves while the old leader and I stood glaring and snarling at each other in the center.

He was older than I. Larger. Immensely strong. But he was an old wolf, his reflexes not as rapid as once they had been, his stamina less than it had been years gone by.

While I was—ageless.

He must, somehow, have sensed that difference between us. He knew that his sole chance for triumph was to carry a rapid and decisive attack.

He charged across the hard-packed snow until he was a half-dozen strides from me, then launched himself into a flying lunge, his bared yellow fangs directed at my throat.

I timed my response, ducking my belly onto the snow and lung¬ing forward just as he descended to complete his attack.

He missed my throat, skidded across my body, his belly sliding over my hind-quarters as he tumbled onto the snow.

In a flash I reversed myself and caught him from the rear, nipping him on a hind haunch as he scrambled to recover from his failed attack.

With a coughing growl he came back to his feet and stood glar¬ing at me. He was hardly injured by the nip I had taken from his haunch. A tiny dribble of blood trickled down his fur. He edged sideways, trying to circle into a more advantageous position to use against me. He had been humiliated, and he did not wish to be humiliated again.

He growled a challenge to me, urging me to attack, but I refrained, taunting him. I edged myself into position before his bitch and urinated into the snow beside her, marking her as my possession with my spoor. With one paw I cuffed her gently, not to hurt but to show that she was my mate now.

The old leader almost choked on his snarl. He charged across the circle at me, this time making a low approach so as to lunge upward at my throat. This was a far more dangerous attack than his earlier, almost contemptible, flying leap.

I skipped sideways with my hindquarters, backing a half-step so that the trajectory of his new attack lay at right angles—what men would call right angles!—to my own position.

He tried to correct his attack, and partially he succeeded.

We lunged and snapped simultaneously, our very fangs clashing as we collided. We both went sprawling; I rolled onto one side as he skidded to a halt. He was on me before I could regain my feet, and his teeth would have closed in the soft flesh of my neck ending the challenge—and my life—save for the thickness of my heavy coat and the force of our previous clash, which had badly hurt his lower jaw.

So instead of my gushing jugular, his only trophy of the attack was a mouthful of thick fur and a single gobbet of my flesh.

This time I growled my fury and resentment, and backed away, belly down, trying to regain my lost advantage.

My opponent spat and sputtered, clearing his mouth of the fur he had ripped from my throat. I uttered a snarl of fury and circled. My opponent had placed himself before the bitch who was both the symbol and prize of our combat. He stood over her, growling his warning to me.

At that moment I almost uttered the brief syllables that would turn me into a man, armed with the bronze mechanical arm of Dar'ah Humarl, prepared to aim some spring-driven blade or spiked ball at my foe, to destroy him as a man destroys a wild, dangerous animal. But no, I was myself an animal, as wild as my opponent and, if anything, even more dangerous.

I resisted the urge to snarl those syllables, and instead threw my bulk into a murderous charge against my opponent. Not ten paces from the bitch I feinted as if I would leap past my opponent to the left. Instead I shifted my course to the right as if I intended to pass him on that side and seize the prize, the bitch, for myself.

The old wolf spun first one way, then the other, trying to compensate for my feint and my change of direction.

Another calculated movement and I had my opponent trying to maneuver in three directions at once. He reared above me, fore-paws flailing for balance, hind feet scrambling on the snow for purchase.

I launched myself with all the power of my iron-hard sinews. I aimed my attack not at my opponent's throat nor at his unprotected belly, but at his mighty chest.

My jaws were opened wide, my head twisted to one side to bring my upper and lower jaw together on the two sides of his ribcage. My razor-like fangs cut through the thick fur and the muscular flesh of the old leader as if they had been the soft wool and tender flesh of a newborn lamb.

As the mighty muscles of my jaw snapped shut I felt and heard brittle bones of his ribcage snap. My teeth met in the middle of his chest. I wrenched my head, tearing away the prize of my successful attack. I had ripped the very heart from my opponent, and tugged it away; his body fell, lifeless, to the snow. He did not even twitch.

I dropped my prize on the snow and pawed at it. I stood over the body of my defeated opponent while the rest of the tribe stood in their positions around us. I made a little summoning whimper to the leader's bitch and she minced temptingly toward me. She licked the little wound on my neck. I made the low, whimpering sound that gave her permission to sample the fresh carrion before her.

She sniffed at the flesh of what had been her mate, pulled away a gobbet of steaming bloody flesh and carried it to her place to be consumed.

One by one the remainder of the wolf-pack advanced to make obeisance to me, their new leader, and to receive their share of the flesh of my defeated predecessor.

Once my dominance of the pack was formalized and accepted by all I strode from the circle, growling to the others a warning that none might follow me.

I walked alone across the snow and ice until darkness fell. The sky was black but clear, the stars and moon bright in the crisp, almost polar air. They cast a bright glow that was reflected from the white surface, giving the world a ghostly semblance of daylight.

Now I muttered the syllables I had learned from Telordric before I killed that white magician. They were brief and simple; they must be, to be made by the vocal apparatus of a wolf, apparatus designed for the making of growls and snarls and whines and eerie howls but not for the making of human syllables.

I felt my body shifting, my hind legs growing longer, my forelegs turning into arms and my forepaws into hands. My muzzle shrank to the nose and jaws of a human. My pelt was absorbed, leaving only the poll and beard and coarse body-hairs of a normal if hirsute man. I threw back my face and glared into the sky, shouting my challenge to my enemy, mentor, patroness and tormentor, Ythillin the first daughter of the Ice Gods.

"Bitch," I shouted. "Bitch! I have won the leadership of the wolves! I have won the beautiful wolf-bitch for my prize! Is she not a token of yourself ? What more must I do? Whom else must I conquer? Why can I not die, Ice-Bitch!"

A terrible wind rose and spun glittering crystals of snow and ice around me. Prism-like, they broke the spectrum of the moon- and starlight into a shimmering rainbow that bathed and burned me until I felt like a living, chromatic flame. I was swept from the ground, raised by that icy whirlwind like a sailor caught up in a waterspout or a dirt-grubbing farmer snatched from the earth by a cyclone's whirling black funnel.

I was carried high into the air, spun topsy-turvy until I could not tell whether the glaring white disk and the twinkling specks that whirled past my eyes were the true moon and stars or their icy reflections glittering at me from the frozen slopes beneath. The wind howled in my ears and in it I heard the voices—I thought I heard the voices—of those gods and mortals with whom I struggled these terrible, toilsome years.

Gudrun and Genseric were there, old Bragi and the four broth¬ers I had slain, Raki and Sigismund, Alwin and Obri. Harolf was there, the Aesir chieftain and Hetlund his son, Tjarvakka the Aesir priest and Hialmar my companion in arms. Oderic and Guthric, Nald and Cudric, warriors all, of the Vanir, and Hengist Ironarm my uncle and Tostig Bearslayer my cousin.

Gl'erf was there, leader of the half-human Mi-Go, and Klu'do the she with whom I had tried—and failed—to mate.

Agha Junghaz, king in Turan, and the beauteous Jahree the chiefest of his wives. Ushilon and the Stygian sorcerer Mentumenen, Kaius Valkonnus of Aquilonia and Lamaril the Invincible—who had proved, before my attack, to be anything but what his title claimed.

And Lord Garak, king in Belverus, capital of Nemedia, and his sons Tashako and Yashati and his daughter, my wife the Lady Shanara of Jelah and our child.

The wind howled and howled. Somewhere wolves howled. And somehow the howling turned to a terrible baying, the baying of the Hounds of Tindalos.

They were around me now, their eyes shining redly against the black of the sky and the white of the snow and ice. The Hounds who came, once they were summoned, through the very
angles of space.

I could see the Ice-Bitch Ythillin, and for once she gazed upon an earthly scene—no, upon an unearthly scene!—not with her expression of detached and supercilious amusement, but with one of concern, of alarm, of—I could not believe my own perceptions—fear!

"Ghor!" she cried. "Ghor!"

"What is it, Bitch?" I replied.

"Come with me! Flee, flee the Hounds, for we are not finished, you and I! We are not finished!"

I laughed and laughed. I tugged at my wondrous arm of bronze that had been made for me by Dar'ah Humarl of Zaporakh, tugged at it and hurled it from me to tumble and tumble onto the ice-fields below.

"Escape with me, Ghor!" Ythillin cried again. "Mortal man, beast, Lycanthrope, killer and king! I will make you one with the immortals, one with the very Ice Gods themselves! Come with me!"

She swept toward me, rushing through some transdimensional realm that neither ancient man nor modern scholar can ever hope to comprehend. In some inexplicable way she seemed to move through planes of existence, to approach me without traversing the finite loci that separated us.

She did not move through the volume of space, but through its angles.

The baying of the Hounds rose in triumph, and before me I saw Ythillin the Ice-Bitch surrounded by their panting, slavering throng.

Too late she turned to retreat.

The Hounds had her, dragging her down by the long shards of her raiment, rending her flesh, spilling her blood, blood that flowed not red like that of any earthly creature I had known but an icy pale blue. A drop of that blood—a single drop!—spattered on my flesh.

Here, right here, where you see the scar.

It burned me and froze me, tormented me with unbearable anguish at the same instant that it transported me to realms of ecstasy indescribable.

I lost consciousness. I lost life. All was over. All.

All.

All.

***

The back-log in my fireplace above San Francisco's streets hissed softly. Through the nearest window I could see the river of fog flowing weirdly back through the Golden Gate, to disperse with the morning's warming sun onto the gray Pacific waters.

"And that was all you remember," Abraham Steinman asked me, "until your present life as James Allison? Ghor?"

I realized to my own surprise that I was panting and disheveled, drenched with perspiration that soaked my formal shirt and dark tuxedo jacket. Like a man bewildered—or, I thought, like a wolf emerging from an icy stream—I shook my head and gathered up my wits.

I looked around the room. Steinman and Senator McPherson and Yuriko Yamash'ta sat in their Morocco chairs, waiting for me to answer Steinman's question.

I drew in my breath and mopped my sweat-laden brow with a silken handkerchief.

"By no means, Abraham," I answered him at length. "Oh no, by no means is that the last I remember. Long after Ghor was dust and dried parchment, I lived the life of a warrior-priest in Atlantis. I was a Pict in ancient Britain. I lived in Khitai—you remember fabled Khitai in the East, surely! Ah, there I witnessed events and myself committed acts that you would never believe, had I the temerity to tell you of them.