Night of the Wolf (6 page)

“Yes, and that always stuck in your craw, didn’t it?” Clarissa shot back. “Well, now it doesn’t matter. Only the gods know what happened to her people when the Romans came.”

Both women were silent, glaring at each other. The gray wolf thought,
It was the very mention of the word
Roman
that sent a thrill of fear through the air.

Kat made a sign against the evil eye. “Don’t mention them,” she whispered. “They burned a town in the valley last summer. This year everyone is afraid they may come here again.”

Clarissa shivered. A small cloud covered the sun and the thick pine woods grew darker around them. “Kat, don’t be a fool. Try not to see whatever it is Imona is doing. Your farmstead needs every pair of hands you have right now. Your mother and Leon are useless. You, Imona, and Des are the ones carrying the main burden. Without her, you might all starve. We have too many enemies to begin clawing at each other.”

Even though Clarissa’s tone was conciliatory, Kat didn’t seem mollified. “You vicious old carrion crow. Lay hands on me again and I’ll claw your eyes out.” Then she turned and stalked off toward the lake below. Clarissa followed, shaking her head.

The cloud passed. Sun warmed the forest and lark songs began. The gray wolf carried the leather sack until he reached the same grotto. He sniffed the air. Dampness. Rain must be falling on the pass through the mountains.

Drop the sack,
something in his mind told him.
Leave it here . . . Go. Find the pack The hunting will be good in the high passes. Lead them away from here. Away, far away . . . to the glaciers where the snow never melts. The high timberlands will be filled with game clustering around lakes frozen for all but three months of the year. In forests so thick the sun on the brightest day never breaks through to the ground, you can remain hidden from man forever. Go!

The wolf felt again the pull of desire. He could imagine her, a graceful sprawl of sleeping woman lying in the cool shade among the delicate fronds of spring ferns. The wolf shape seemed a thick, uncomfortable garment, the heavy fur overheating him as the sun rose high in the sky. He cast it off as one will a thick woolen mantle on the first warm spring day, and rose to his feet . . . a man.

When he returned, she extended her arms to embrace him. “I was afraid you’d gone and left me,” she whispered, stroking his hair.

He studied her face as they lay together side by side. He wanted to tell her about her sister-in-law’s bitter envy and Clarissa’s defense, but he found he hadn’t the words. A wolf would remember these things, but not necessarily communicate them to another wolf.

For a few moments he puzzled over what and how much to tell her, but by then her nearness began to rouse him and he forgot what he considered to be the spiteful bickering of jealous whelps. The lower-ranking females and males were very protective of what little status they had and spent a lot of their free time snapping and snarling at one another. These adolescent spats rarely caused injury, as the participants almost never came to blows. He was sure it was something like this that he’d heard. The strong among the pack would ignore them unless the young ones made too much of a nuisance of themselves. Then he usually settled matters with a loud snarl and a few nips on the backside.

The surging tides of desire wiped the memory from his mind. In his arms he had a woman naked, helpless, and compliant, more than willing . . . starved for the attentions of a man. He could explore this body, an unending engine of mad delight, a heap of flowers yielding new colors, fragrances, textures, and vivid emotion with every experiment suggested by an imagination, driving hands, lips, and sex.

By the time the sun slipped behind the western peaks, they were both exhausted. For the first time, he tasted human food, sharing bread, cheese, and a little wine with her.

She drank most of the wine and ended up weeping on his shoulder, her arms clinging around his neck.

“What’s wrong?” he asked between kisses. “Did I do anything to you . . . you didn’t want done?”

She hiccuped and pulled herself to her feet, then slid the dress on over her head. “No . . . no . . . no . . . no. You’re wonderful. I love you.” She wiped the tears from her cheeks with her fingers.

He reached out and picked her up. She felt featherlight to him. He carried her into the growing shadows under the trees. The sky above was suffused with sunglow. Golden light poured down through the broken pines. The shadows of rock, brush, and trees were inky. The gold of sky and forest seemed to burn like molten metal splashed on charcoal.

He scented the reptile before he saw it. A viper lay sunning itself high on a rock in the day’s last radiance, its skin mottled to match the brown pine needles and dusky dead leaves where it rested.

He saw it as it raised its head to strike and he interposed one massive shoulder between the woman in his arms and the snake. She gasped. A low deep snarl rumbled in his chest. If the sound had been speech, it would warn, “No, not if you’re smart, you won’t.”

The reptile pulled back its head, dropped, and vanished into the shadows and leaf litter on the forest floor.

She sighed, a long breath of relief. Above, the light was fading, the shadows around them deepening. “You’re not a man, are you?” she asked.

“No.” He set her on her feet at the path.

They could both hear the women chattering as they returned to the village above.

“Whatever you are, don’t let them catch you. And come back, come back . . . please.”

He felt the wolf pulling him away into the darkening wood, but he carried her hand to his lips in brief, tender farewell before he slid into the night.

Still shaking after her climb, Dryas crossed the mountain meadow, looking for a sheltered spot to sleep.

Deadfalls from the few dwarfed, twisted trees surviving on the slopes nearby littered the clearing, weathered bone-white by the unending wind and cold.

She found a spot near where the spring appeared from the rock. Such places were always sacred. Anyone found polluting the purity of the water could be punished with death. She made an offering of bread and wine, only a few crumbs of one and a sprinkle of the other, then set up her camp with her back to the cliff. She built a fire with dried wood from the meadow.

The broken limbs had rested so long in the thin grass they contained no more moisture than driftwood baked by sun on a shore. They flared into a fire, burning white-hot; one moment a fierce conflagration, the next dark red coals winking like demons’ eyes in the darkness.

Dryas piled on the fuel. The fire warmed the rock and the resulting radiant heat would keep her warm through the night. When only coals glimmered where the fire had been, she rolled herself into a bearskin and slept.

As usual, she dreamed.

Once, and not long ago, dreams had been so much of a torment that she drank herself into a stupor rather than allow a natural rest to fall upon her.

But that bad, very bad time had ended, and though she sometimes woke with tears on her cheeks, the nightmare and her nine-fold could no longer wrench her heart by presenting the dead as still living and the eternally lost as hers. Even in the deepest sleep, she knew her grief and accepted the pain and emptiness.

She was Dryas, the warrior, the teacher of sword, shield, and spear. Expert in methods by which an unarmed man could overcome even a well-armed one. Mistress of the hero’s salmon leap with all its lethal permutations. One who could read the trajectory of an enemy’s sword swing and leap over it to decapitate him. Mistress of the battle spell and the battle madness. Keeper of knowledge, forgotten by even these Gauls. Reader of stone circles and chamber tomb patterns whose origin was lost in the mist of time.

She had accepted the task Blaze set her. She must stop this man-wolf who so savagely harassed Mir’s people, trap him. While Mir and Blaze were speaking, she had roughed out a plan for dealing with this menace. Tonight she’d taken the first steps to carry out her plan, but she certainly didn’t want this supernatural wolf to guess her aims and ends.

No, that wouldn’t do at all.

She woke once as she drifted off to sleep. All that remained of the fire were coals, glowing and blinking in the shadows. Above, the stars in absolute splendor arched over her head. Their cold fire mapped the past, present, and future to an eye able to read them, tracing mystery of time’s beginning and end for all eternity.

Her stomach knotted. She was sure someone was watching her. The wolf or simply one of the dark denizens who guarded the eagle’s temple above.

She didn’t know, couldn’t guess which, but then it didn’t matter, not really. Either could kill her if they chose to do so. She was the bait in her own trap. All she could do was trust in her judgment and press on. This wolf wouldn’t be conquered by sword and javelin, but by stealth and trickery. And while she was uncertain of her skills in this direction . . . she must discipline herself to show no fear. So she simply yawned, turned to one side, and drifted off to sleep.

The Romans came . . .

The women covered the steep slopes surrounding the more level meadows with flax. Resistant to both drought and cold, it grew rampantly, each year reseeding itself. In autumn, the weavers harvested as much of it as they cared to. Imona was one of those weavers. She would move her warp-weighed loom to the dooryard of the rather humble dwelling, feed the chickens, ducks, and geese clustered in the farmyard, then begin work on her latest project.

Summer brought plenty of game with it. The reason, though the wolf didn’t know it, was a bit sinister. The Roman garrison in the valley had felled trees to build its walls and palisades, then burned other forest cover to prevent revolts and ambushes.

Elk, deer, and even hare and wild fowl found these particular clearings filled with an abundance of forage.

So the wolves prospered, taking prey easily and quickly among the old and young in the herds moving up toward the high pastures. Even the most desultory hunt yielded enough food to allow the pack to feast to repletion and then doze and play through the beautiful early summer nights.

At dawn he drifted away and took shelter among the rocky overhangs above her farmstead. He slept off his night meal and, even before the pinkish glow began to burn in the eastern sky, he would watch her movements through the wicker walls as she built up the fire and began to cook the flat breads and porridge that constituted the morning meal.

Later, after sunrise, he would watch over her as she stood before her loom under the ancient linden tree, shuttle flying to and fro as she created one or another strip of brilliant-colored cloth.

By noon, the breeze dropped. The sun beat down mercilessly. The rest of her family retreated to the round house or other shady spots to sleep through the afternoon’s heat.

This was his hour. She wandered up the mountainside, “to tend the flax,” as she told Kat, and they met. She didn’t know how or why he was always able to find her. She only knew he did, and that seemed sufficient for her.

By now he’d managed to acquire some minimal clothing—a worn tunic he’d stolen from a Roman soldier who’d spent an afternoon bathing in the river. It was doubtful if the man regretted his loss long or deeply. The wretched thing was old, faded to a dull gray and ragged beyond belief. The wolf noticed none of these things. One garment was the same as another to him. This one was long and thick enough to protect his epidermis. He’d found, after an unhappy encounter with a tangle of blackberry vines, that human skin is tender.

In any case, he wore it only long enough to reach her, pull it off, and enter her embraces. Because that was what they did—make love, eat, and sleep away the long afternoons. Sometimes they talked. In fact, they talked often. Or rather, she talked and he listened. After the first and only question she’d asked him about his humanity, she never asked another. He didn’t expect her to, realizing instinctively that she feared to disturb the delicate balance that preserved the happiness between them, an almost unearthly happiness.

When their daily lovemaking ended, she unpacked the food she always brought. She was an excellent cook. At first, he didn’t understand this. Wolflike, he simply made it disappear. But human teeth and jaws, shaped by thousands of years of savoring and sharing, don’t lend themselves easily to a wolf’s method of tearing and swallowing whole.

After he nearly strangled himself for the third time, he learned to savor his food as humans did. He became aware of her skill. She made flat bread with flour, enlivening its flavor with honey, hazelnuts, and even hard cheese. He learned to love the taste of ham and bacon she’d smoked through the long winters. The innumerable sausages she made from pork, venison, and beef were an unending gustatory delight. And then there was wine and sometimes mead. Ahhhh . . .

He found a cave near the top of the ridge overlooking her house. It was small with a sandy floor, but deep enough to be cool on the hottest days.

They went there during the dog days, when even the overhangs sweltered in the summer sun. There, in the dim quiet place, she taught him the joys of becoming a bit fuddled by strong drink and the languorous relaxation of a summer siesta taken together before and after lovemaking.

When the tree shadows grew long, Kat began calling her. Imona quickly knelt and pulled on her dress.

“Odd,” he said one day. “She never comes looking for you?’

“She doesn’t want to find me.”

“No?” he asked.

“No,” she replied, coming to her feet and peering through the gooseberry bushes that choked the entrance. “She knows what’s going on, but she needs me. The cheeses I make and my weavings bring in what little money we have.”

The wolf remembered Clarissa’s words.

“Besides,” she added as she kissed him good-bye, “I believe she’s a little afraid of the unknown. You know: Who could he be, this man? By now, she’s probably certain you aren’t anyone from the families in this little enclave. Yes, I’m sure she’s satisfied about that. She’s not sure she wants to meet you.”