Night of the Wolf (11 page)

He struggled to move and pain overwhelmed his mind, washing out thought in a torrent of red. He lay still and the pain receded. He knew he must call the change or he would die.

He opened his eyes and again looked into the shadowy, frightening trees. The darkness increased. Beyond the forest a waterfall fell from a great height. From where he lay, the wolf couldn’t see from whence the pour-off came, but only a sheet of white water, so brilliant it seemed to be lit from within, a pale shimmering glow against the deepening forest gloom.

Spray rose high at the foot of the falls, drenching beds of moss and fern. They glowed like emerald sculptures in the water’s light.

The wind blew and the ancient trees sighed . . . a profoundly timeless sound. It spoke to corners of the wolf’s brain the man hardly comprehended. “You belong,” it said. “We are one. We have been here for eons before there was man and will be here for eons more when he is gone.”

The trees were quite dark now, the waterfall a dazzling curtain of light. The wind blew again. A mist of droplets covered the wolf’s face, blinding him for a moment. He sat up a man.

He could see himself. It was as if he were separated from the muscular figure outlined against the silver light, watching from behind. As a human he was impressive. Short, brown curly hair. Skin on the dark side. A strong face filled with resolution. The figure of a person in his first youth.

Then the spray whipped out again. The forest spoke its ancient cry of earthy possession, and the wolf woke, shaking himself and coming to his feet by day among the scrubby second-growth forest and barren rocks of an old avalanche. The dark forest and waterfall were gone.

The prey he’d sought were lying among the rocks. At least a dozen of the chamois had failed to clear the falling snow. Enough to feed the pack for a week.

He raised his muzzle to the sky and called them. The wolf found himself ravenous. As pack leader it was up to him to choose his portion. When the rest arrived, they found him feeding.

He’d expected to be mobbed. The most usual response to the reappearance of a beloved companion is a greeting: licking, noses touching, the kisses and recognition of friends and family. But the gray was surprised and disappointed. The risk he’d taken had passed beyond those expected of the sane. And deep suspicions were aroused in their hearts.

He was offended and then indifferent. His thoughts were taken up with Imona and her fate. So, when twilight came, he left the pack sleeping off the burden of meat they’d gorged and set out across the mountain.

He passed through the territory of the other pack where he’d killed the ducks. The food he’d taken allowed him long travel without the necessity of killing.

When he was beyond the ken of the neighboring pack, he began to cast about for human dwellings. The first he found was abandoned, home only to an angry badger living in the tumbledown remnants of a mountain farm. The Romans had burned it long ago and, besides the badger scent, the wolf’s nose could still detect the faint effluvia of blood and fire from the battle.

The badger reared on his hind legs and challenged the wolf. The badger is a tough and dangerous little animal. Not even a wolf cares to quarrel with one without cause. The gray wolf took his leave.

The light was brightening in the east and it was almost morning. The wolf found a narrow ledge close to the tree line. He fitted himself into the spot between the stone and the ground and fell asleep with his bushy tail over his nose. So well hidden was he that no one passing nearby would have seen him. He awakened at dusk. The trees were brown sentinels caught in the evening mist.

He traveled on as the day turned into night and light faded from among the pillared pines around him. Above, a hazy overcast darkened the moon and stars. The soaring pinnacles of higher mountains glittered above, sheathed in ice.

He left the tree line behind, moving through a wilderness of scree slopes and mountain meadows, their grazed-down stubble glittering in the cold. These high pastures were empty now and would be until the shepherds who inhabited them moved their flocks back up in the springtime.

The house they’d left behind was an empty, fireless hole, abandoned to the wind, with ice already forming on the walls. But she’d been there. Her scent was faint in the sleeping hut, but stronger in the barn and sheepfold where some warmth still lingered under damp straw glittering with frost crystals.

The wolf went downhill, following the herds driven to lower pastures to escape winter’s icy grip on the heights. This farm was a big one, almost like the villa in Mir’s valley.

The weather here was not so balmy as in the sheltered valley. The houses were stone, the walls chinked with mud against the cold. The roofs were tall, steeply pitched, and heavily thatched. The wolf paused, looking down at the gathering of buildings huddled as if for warmth in their niche in the mountains.

The animals—cows, sheep, and goats—were gathered in close pastures or folds around the houses for protection. Dogs barked in the yards. It was the biggest human settlement the wolf had ever encountered. True, the Roman fortress in the valley was larger, but the wolf, mindful of the fate of the lowland pack, had not cared to ever approach it.

The fur of his ruff lifted. A snarl muttered in his throat.

Below, a dog barked again and then was joined by a chorus of yelps and howls. Wind ruffled the wolf’s ruff again. It was at his back, blowing toward the lowlands as the tall rock spires above gave off their day’s heat. The wind brought his scent to the dogs.

The gray wolf had a choice. Lie down now and wait until the lights glimmering faintly through the parchment windows of the house flickered out and men and dogs slept, stupefied by the thickest, darkest slumber of the night. The wind would drop and the air be as motionless and silent as the star blaze above. Then he could slip soundlessly from his perch, moving as elusively as a wisp of smoke or the low clouds settling over the mountains, and investigate the farmyard and the barn, and cut close to the dwelling to find out if she’d been there.

But though he’d learned a great deal from human beings, those he met had not taught him the superior virtue of the beasts’ patience.

He ignored the wolf and let the man have his way. The gray dropped into the underbrush to circle the farm and approach with the wind in his face.

He was successful at first. Moving up quietly on a large, open yard, he eased past a cow byre without alarming the beasts. Most were milk cows whose calves had been slaughtered, their bodies going dry in the bitter autumn, weary after their journey from the heights and grateful for their winter rations of hay and oats.

The sheep were a different matter. They were coming into their thick winter coats. Most were ewes with half-grown lambs. They were much closer to their wild relatives than the later, rather stupid breed.

A half dozen dogs were chained in the yard, including two who gave the wolf a distinct frisson of terror. They were huge, each fully two hundred pounds or more with massive teeth and jaws. Each outweighed him by at least forty pounds.

One of the sheep saw him, but the yearling didn’t know what he was and gave him a vacant stare through the wicker side of the fold. But she nudged her mother, an older ewe who gave a soft mutter of alarm; the sheep began to mill uneasily in the enclosure.

The wolf drifted away from them toward one of the barns. The gray knew as soon as he entered that she’d been there. The barn was drenched with her odor. But from here, where?

There was a noise behind him. The wolf turned. Smoothly and silently, his belly pressed against the straw, he crouched, motionless.

A woman stood in the open doorway, her hand shading a taper from the wind. It had very nearly been blown out. All her concentration was on nursing the tiny, wavering flame back to health. Once inside, out of the wind, it flared again behind her hand, illuminating the barn.

“Aaah,” she said, pleased, and then she saw the hulking, gray shape crouched against the tumbled hay on the floor.

The resulting scream was enough to waken everyone and everything for miles around. Horses neighed wildly, cattle lowed, the sheep chorused in fear and displeasure.

The wolf tucked his tail down, laid his ears back, and fled. He bolted past the girl in the doorway and the livestock pens like a stone flung out into the night.

But before he was completely out of earshot of the hornet’s nest he’d stirred, he heard the shout, “Loose the dogs!”

The wolf settled into his run, fast but not fleeing in fright, sure he would be able to outrun the most powerful dog ever born. No cruelty had awakened in him yet and he didn’t know his own strength, but then he didn’t understand what pursued him, either.

These were the dogs of war, man killers, meant to be loosed on the enemy in battle and used to harry and murder retreating forces or create chaos in the enemy’s baggage train.

The gray fled upward, sure the steep slopes, the poor footing, and the increasing altitude would take their toll on the dogs. They were, after all, creatures belonging to men, lazy and dependent on their masters.

He was the one inured to flight and pursuit, tested by nature since the day of his birth.

So, inadvertently, he trapped himself. He topped the last rise and looked down into a rocky moonscape that gave no hope of any quick escape. The footing was treacherous. The clouds that wrapped the peaks had settled moisture on the long, downhill slope toward a misty valley. The moisture had begun to freeze. It would be like walking on glass. The wolf turned and ran along the edge of the escarpment.

The two dogs far ahead of the pack sensed he was slowing. Bloodlust quickened their pace. He realized they were only a few steps behind and, practiced killers as they were, they were coming up on either side of him.

Just ahead, he saw that the open grassy area ended in a blunt point with a steep drop on either side. If the two dogs caught him in the open, they would kill him. He might have run on blindly, turning onto the icy, uncertain footing of naked rock where the two war dogs would have pulled him down and dismembered his corpse.

But the man in him spoke. For the first time, words echoed in his brain.
Stop! Fool! Turn at bay. Remember what you are! Remember what you know, what you learned on the dark, frozen continent long ago.

He stumbled forward a man, his right hand groping as if it had a life of its own for the first advantage the shambling half-ape from long ago knew—the first advantage the dark, ancient mother of life gave him to be his and his kind’s forever more—the weapon.

His right hand closed on a rock.

The two massive dogs came, one from the right, the other from the left. He dropped forward to one knee, his left arm lifted to protect his face.

The one from his left overshot him, skidding away on the frozen grass stubble. The jaws of the second closed around his forearm. He expected to feel the bone crumble, but oddly it didn’t. He realized no matter how strong these dogs were, they couldn’t match the power of a wolf forged in the fiercest fire of all: survival.

He brought the stone down with all his strength on the dog’s skull. It splintered like rotten wood. The jaws slipped free of his arm as it died.

But the other one had regained his footing and was charging in, its target the softer belly and groin.

His right hand was numbed by the blow he’d delivered to the dog’s skull. The stone fell from his nerveless fingers.
Wait until he leaps,
a cool voice in his brain commanded.

The dog’s forequarters left the ground. Maeniel, the man, pivoted, dropping his leg over the massive animal’s back. He stood it straight up, one arm around its body, his left hand buried in its throat. His fingers found the delicate rings of cartilage that form the air pipe to the lungs and . . . crushed them.

The animal fell, dying, and Maeniel, wolf again, struggled down the rocky slope toward the dark, forested valley beyond.

Philo took over Lucius’ life. He didn’t do it with loud, shouted commands or nasty aggression. Lucius found his new slave was a master of tact, suggestion, and indirection. He was gentle but firm; polite, but he could give a mule lessons in obstinacy; and he could never be distracted from his objectives by threats, tantrums, pleas, or even outright bribery and gentle or violent evasion.

Lucius’ maid was Alia, who had saved his life by returning him quickly to the Roman encampment. She’d also become a free woman at that time, a token of Fulvia’s gratitude for having saved her brother’s life. She was a good servant, humble and hard working, but Alia had the intelligence of an oak stump, the personality of a bronze lamp, and a face like a snapping turtle. To Lucius’ utter and absolute astonishment, Philo got on beautifully with her.

After lunch on the day of Philo’s arrival, the bearers who carried Lucius’ chair returned him to his cubiculum. The room was luxurious—the furniture ornate and decorated with gold—but it stank and was absolutely filthy.

The sheets on Lucius’ bed obviously hadn’t been changed or washed in weeks. No one had bothered to empty this morning’s deposit in the chamber pot and it also lent its contribution to the fragrant air. The most overpowering odor was one of rotting meat and burnt charcoal from the braziers in each corner of the room.

Alia stood in the center of the floor, looking embarrassed. Two of Fulvia’s maids stood giggling in the opposite doorway. The bearers set Lucius’ chair down and straggled away toward the servants’ quarters to begin their afternoon siesta.

Lucius snarled at Alia, “Get me some wine!” She rushed to obey. The two girls continued to stare at Philo and Lucius and continued to giggle. “They’re supposed to take care of me, but one’s an Egyptian, the other was captured in some godforsaken place in Arabia. Neither of them speaks a word of Latin, and I don’t speak much else, just Latin and a gentleman’s smattering of Greek. Alia’s a Gaul. I can speak enough of that tongue to ask for water, wine, or sex. Beyond that, I haven’t a clue.

“Every night I pollute one of the pools in my sister’s elaborate baths, then return to my room and drink myself into a stupor. Most days I can persuade someone to change my bandages, usually one of the chair bearers. But sometimes I don’t care and just lie here and stare at the ceiling. The worst is, I’m rotting away alive from the stinking, open wound in my back. Fulvia knows it, that hyena, Hippos, knew it, and so do all the servants.”