Songs of Love & Death (37 page)

“Third time’s the charm!” Rolande cried.

Cries of agreement echoed across the meadow.

One again, the trumpeters gave their brazen call; once again, we clapped heels to our mounts’ sides and sprang forward.

I
KNOW WHICH
is worse.

Remembering; oh, gods, by far. Dying is easier.

....

I
WAS A
Siovalese country lordling, and I knew mountains. I rode a sure-footed
horse for a reason.

I’d made sure Rolande did, too.

Not his standard-bearer. When the lad’s mount caught a hoof in a crevice and went down with a terrible scream, left foreleg broken, there was nothing I could do but check my mare.

Uncertainty rippled down the line.

While Rolande raced to engage the Skaldi, men and horses in the center of the vanguard hesitated.

Those on the flanks, men under command of Percy de Somerville and Benedicte de la Courcel, had farther to travel.

Rolande plunged alone into the ranks of unmounted Skaldi, his sword rising and falling.

His standard-bearer’s mount rolled and squealed in agony, crushing her rider, sowing chaos. Cursing and sweating, I yanked my mare’s head with uncustomary viciousness and rode around them, putting my heels to her.

Too late.

I saw Rolande surrounded, dragged from the saddle. I saw the crude blades rise and fall, streaked with blood.
His
blood.

I fought.

Others came and fought, too. Too few; too late. Oh, it was enough to seize the pass, enough to guarantee a victory in the Battle of Three Princes. Still, it came too late.

As soon as the line had pressed past us, a handful of soldiers and I wrestled Rolande’s ruined body across my pommel, retreating with him. My good mare bore the burden without complaint.

Behind the lines of skirmish, I wept with fury, unbuckling his armor, trying in vain to staunch the bleeding of a dozen wounds. “Damn you, Rolande! You promised! Don’t leave me!”

Beneath the blue sky, his blood soaked the green grass, drenched the starry white blossoms. A faint sigh escaped him, bringing a froth of crimson to his lips. “I’m sorry,” he whispered in a hoarse voice. One gauntleted hand rose a few inches, then fell back to the ground, limp. “Anafiel. I’m sorry.”

And then the light went out of his blue, blue eyes, just as it had faded from Edmée’s.

He was gone.

....

W
HY COULDN’T YOU
have waited, Rolande? You always had to be first into the fray.

Why?

I
T WAS A
bitter, bitter victory won at the Battle of Three Princes.

For a long time afterward, I wished I had died with Rolande. Once the initial crushing weight of grief had faded, I flung myself into excesses of debauchery, making a circuit of the Thirteen Houses of the Night Court, sampling the highs and lows of all that carnal pleasure had to offer as though to mock the vow I’d never wished to be free of, now broken with Rolande’s death.

It was the other vow I’d sworn that kept me alive; the vow to protect his daughter, Ysandre, now the infant Dauphine of Terre d’Ange.

For Rolande was right, intrigue surrounded her; from the moment of his death, a dozen challengers set their sights on the throne. Slowly, slowly, I gathered my grief-addled wits and began to assemble a net of spies, informants, and a few trusted allies. I remembered words spoken to me long ago by Master Strozzi in Tiberium.

Whores make some of the best spies.

I set out to cultivate them, aided by goodwill generated during my period of debauchery.

I kept my finger on the pulse of the world, learning that a well-placed word at the right time could thwart the most ambitious plot. The only one I failed to foil, I did not regret. In a fitting twist of irony, Isabel died by poison at the hand of one of Prince Benedicte’s scheming offspring; but her daughter lived, which was all that mattered to me.

Here and there, I had dalliances—always with women, for no man could compare in my eyes to Rolande.

None were serious, except mayhap for Melisande Shahrizai. Beautiful, calculating Melisande, with a hunger for life’s sharper pleasures, the only person clever enough to guess what I was about with my intrigues. In a moment of weakness, when the black grief was upon me, I told her of the Unseen Guild and how I regretted betraying Rolande’s trust to this day.

She understood. We were ill suited in many ways, but Melisande understood me.

....

T
OO WELL, MAYHAP
.

Even now, I cannot believe Melisande would have wished me dead… but I have been wrong before.

The Skaldi have found a leader who thinks.

And Melisande knew his name.

T
HE WHOREMASTER OF
Spies.

Even as I wove my net among the pleasure-houses of the Night Court, I never set out to become such a thing; and yet it happened. It began with the best of intentions.

There were six years of peace along the Skaldic border after the Battle of Three Princes. When reports of renewed raiding came, I did not volunteer. Instead, mindful of a promise Rolande had made, I journeyed to the Camaeline village of Trefail, where I found the widow’s son Rolande had promised to care for. His mother was dead, and his half-Skaldi nurse was preparing to desert him.

I took him home, the Skaldi sacking his village in our wake. In the City of Elua, I adopted him into my household and gave him my name—or at least my mother’s name, if not the one I was born with.

Alcuin; Alcuin nó Delaunay.

When I began training him in the arts of covertcy, I’d not thought to employ him to serve my ends. It was merely a set of skills to teach him. But ah, gods! He was so bright, so eager to learn, so grateful to have been rescued. From the beginning, Alcuin simply assumed he would aid me in my work in whatever manner possible when he was grown.

Somewhere along the path, I began to assume it, too. I hardened my heart against any remorse.

Phèdre was another matter. From the beginning, I knew what she was and why I chose her.

W
HERE ARE YOU
, my
anguissette
? Kushiel’s Chosen, marked by the scarlet mote in your eye, bound by fate to experience pain as pleasure. No wonder Melisande delighted in you so.

I am grateful you were not here today.

Anafiel Delaunay’s last pupil.

I pray I taught you well; and that I was meant to do so.

M
AYHAP I SEALED
my fate when I paid the price of Phèdre’s marque and took her into my household. It can be unwise for mortals to meddle in the affairs of the gods; but I was the only one who recognized her for what she was.

What else was I to have done?

Alcuin and Phèdre, my beautiful boy and my god-touched girl. I did not mean to use them; and yet I did.

I should not have used them so, especially Alcuin. I should have seen that the work did not suit him, that he merely wished to please me. When all is said and done, Naamah’s Service is a sacred calling. But the goddess absolved him of any transgression, and still, and still, Alcuin found it in his heart to love me in a manner I never expected nor deserved; one desperate mouthful of sweetness at the bottom of a bitter cup. I owed him a better life than I gave him.

So many strands, so many threads unraveling!

It is all falling apart. A sharp sword can cut through the most intricately woven of webs. I will die without knowing who plotted my death, without knowing what it means that the Skaldi have found a leader who thinks, without knowing if Ysandre found a way to cross the deadly Straits and wed the Alban prince to whom she was betrothed.

But I kept her safe, Rolande. Your daughter, Ysandre. She is a grown woman now. I kept my oath. When she came to me for aid, I gave it to her; and yet there is something I missed. But I can do no more. Now it is in the hands of the gods, and their chosen.

Did I cross the will of the gods? Here at the end, I pray I have not offended mighty Kushiel, punisher of the damned, in taking his chosen as my pupil; I pray he will use Phèdre to administer his cruel mercy and bring justice to those who have murdered me; to continue the task of keeping Ysandre safe.

I obeyed Blessed Elua’s precept, of that I am sure. I loved you, Rolande. While you lived, I loved you with all my heart; you, and you alone.

Even dying, it is true.

All I can do is pray into the falling darkness, hoping to find you on the other side…

And die.

“’Till Death We Do Part” says the familiar vow—but what about
after
that? Once your lover is gone, might your love be strong enough to draw them
back?
And would you want it to?

Lisa Tuttle made her first fiction sale in 1972 to the
Clarion II
anthology
,
after having attended the Clarion workshop, and by 1974 had won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer of the year. She has gone on to become one of the most respected writers of her generation, winning the Nebula Award in 1981 for her story “The Bone Flute”—which, in a still controversial move, she refused to accept—and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1993 for her novel
Lost Futures.
Her other books include a novel in collaboration with George R. R. Martin,
Windhaven;
the solo novels
Familiar Spirit, Gabriel, The Pillow Friend, The Mysteries,
and
The Silver Bough;
as well as several books for children; the nonfiction works
Heroines
and
Encyclopaedia of Feminism;
and, as editor,
Skin of the Soul.
Her copious short work has been collected in A
Nest of Nightmares, Spaceship Built of Stone and Other Stories, Memories of the Body: Tales of Desire and Transformation, Ghosts and Other Lovers,
and
My Pathology.
Born in Texas, she moved to Great Britain in 1980, and now lives with her family in Scotland.

The wolf was standing on the grass behind the library. It wasn’t one of those big, powerful, northern timber wolves you see in the movies, but the much smaller, leaner, actually kind of scrawny-looking gray wolf that was long ago native to Texas.

At least, I’d
thought
they were extinct… but then I remembered stories the students told about panthers, bears, and other dangerous animals that had survived in patches of woodland they called the Big Thicket, and the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. I just
knew
this was a wild animal, nobody’s pet.

And yet I wasn’t afraid. Instinct might have made my heart beat faster and charged my muscles, but I didn’t want to flee
or
fight: I was purely thrilled by this strange meeting, feeling as if I’d been allowed to walk into a different world.

I took a step.

“Lobo! Here!” A man’s voice rang out, sharp as a whip crack, and the animal turned away. My heart dropped, and then I was annoyed.
Of course
somebody owned this animal. Some stupid, posturing fool.

Hitching my heavy book bag up my shoulder, I folded my arms across my chest and checked him out.

I’ve heard it said that people resemble their pets, and there
was
something a little lupine about him—maybe it was his lean, rangy body, or the way he stood, as if ready to take off running, or leap to the attack. He wore a plain gray T-shirt, shorts, and running shoes, but nothing else about him looked either casual or modern. His dark face had a keen, hungry edge, emphasized by the narrow blade of his nose. His age I guessed to be near my own, in that shadow line between youth and age. He certainly wasn’t a student, and I didn’t recognize him as a member of the faculty or the support staff. I’d never seen him before, and he didn’t look like he belonged. He was as out of place here as the wolf.

Speaking quietly, he said, “He won’t hurt you.”

“Do I look scared?” I snapped. “And what do you mean by calling a Mexican wolf ‘Lobo’? Doesn’t he deserve his own name?”

He smiled without showing his teeth. “What makes you think he’s a Mexican wolf?”

“Because there haven’t been wolves in Texas for a long time—unless they wandered across the border.”

“We’re a long way from the border here, ma’am.”

Of course we were. And the wolf hadn’t exactly walked here by himself. I realized that I was still clinging to my fantasy of a wild creature, and embarrassment made me lash out.

“Yes, of course, you could have bought him anywhere—Houston, New Orleans? These hybrids are popular because
some
people think they’re too special to just buy a dog. Gotta take a walk on the wild side. What’d they tell you, he’s ninety-eight percent purebred
canis lupus
? So you call him ‘wolf,’ like that’ll make it true.”

“I didn’t buy him. I don’t know
what
anybody says he is, and I don’t care. Why shouldn’t I call him Lobo?”

“It’s… insulting. Imagine if people called you
hombre
.”

The tight smile again. “They call me wolf-man.”

I’d heard that name before, from snatches of overheard student conversation, but didn’t know its significance, so I shrugged. “Maybe, but you have your own name. Doesn’t Lobo deserve as much?”

The wolf gave a small groan, and I saw that he was quivering as if longing to break free.

The man laughed, a short bark, and gave me a measuring look. “What’ve you got in that bag, barbecue?”

I frowned. “Books. Why?”

“I’m trying to figure what’s the big attraction.”

“Maybe he senses that I care. Why don’t you let him come?”

For a second, I thought that he would refuse, but he snapped, “Go free.”

Immediately, the wolf sprang at me. I kept still, not from fear, but simply careful, as I would be with any strange dog, not to alarm him with any sudden moves. And he was equally careful, sniffing at me gently, almost daintily, before moving closer, inviting me to stroke his head.

“He’s very friendly,” I said.

“No he’s not.” At my look, he went on. “I don’t mean he’s aggressive—he’d
never
attack a human being, and only fights dogs if he’s forced to defend himself. But he’s always kept his distance, from everyone—everyone but me.”

Lobo had relaxed. Now he was leaning into me as I scratched behind his ears; he was loving it. I laughed. “You’re kidding. Look at this big baby! He’s starving for attention.”

“He gets plenty. I know you think I’m some kind of stupid bad-ass hick, but I
do
look after him.”

The real hurt in his words took me aback. “Of course! It’s obvious you care about each other.” As I spoke, I looked up, straight into the man’s eyes. They were brown, mostly dark, but flecked with a lighter color: the flashing gold of the wolf’s eye, and I was suddenly breathless in the unexpected intimacy of his gaze. I didn’t even know his name. Gathering my wits, remembering my manners, I put out my hand. “How do you do? I’m Katherine Hills.”

The barest flicker of hesitation, then he gripped my hand. “Cody. Cody Vela. Listen, I can’t hang around. I—Lobo’s waiting for his afternoon run.”

The wolf’s ears pricked.

“Oh, well, sure. It was nice meeting you,” I said, feeling flat.

“Want to come along?”

My heart leaped like a crazy thing, but I grimaced and gestured at my long cotton skirt and sandals. “I’m hardly dressed for running, even supposing I could keep up with you two.”

“Come along for the ride. I’m going into the Thicket. Ever been there? No? Really?” He sounded astonished. “Then you have to.”

I rarely acted on impulse, and hadn’t gone off with anyone “for the ride” since I was fifteen, but I agreed, and followed after the lean, dark man and the lightly stepping wolf as if it were a perfectly natural thing to do.

His car, a big, black, new-looking SUV, was parked a short distance away, on the street. It wasn’t a spot convenient to anywhere, hidden away behind the blank, limestone back wall of the library, and since the visitor parking lot was never crowded on a weekday afternoon, I wondered what had brought him here.

“Do you work on campus?” I asked as I buckled up.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you employed by the college?”

He laughed sharply. “Oh, definitely not!”

“Related to one of the students?”

Shaking his head, he started the engine and pulled away from the curb. “Are you saying you’ve never heard of the wolf-man?”

“I only moved here in August. So I haven’t had time to learn about all the local characters, or go into the woods.”

“
Tsk-tsk.
What
have
you been doing with your time?”

“Planning my classes, teaching…”

“What department?”

“English.”

“You like books.”

There was an understatement! Literature was the great passion of my life.
I murmured a restrained agreement, and gazed out the window as we left the quiet, shady college grounds, expecting he’d change the subject.

“What’s your favorite book?”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly name just one.”

“Favorite author?”

That was easier. “Virginia Woolf.”

“Of course.” He turned his head, and I met his gaze quickly, nervously, before he returned to watching where he was going, smiling to himself.

“What do you mean, ‘of course’?”

“I knew you reminded me of somebody. That long, graceful neck, beautiful, deep eyes, full lips…”

I felt a warm flush of pleasure at his admiring words.

“People must have told you that before? Don’t they call you the Woolf-woman?” He grinned. “That should be your nickname on campus, around the English department, at least.”

“I don’t have a nickname. Not that I’ve ever heard.” Nobody here was interested enough to give me a special name, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. That he knew something about Virginia Woolf intrigued me. “So who’s
your
favorite author?”

“Dostoyevsky. Although I like Stephen King a lot. And James Lee Burke. There, I’ve surprised you. You probably thought I dropped out of high school—well, I did, but that doesn’t mean I don’t read. I like reading.
Good
books, that is.”

We passed the city limits sign, and he picked up speed.

“City limits”—it struck me as a sick joke to apply the name of city to a town with a population that only brushed six thousand when college was in session. Almost every day I asked myself what I was doing here.

“So what brought you to this neck of the woods?”

“I needed a job; the college needed an English teacher. It was all kind of last-minute; we’d both been let down.” I didn’t feel like going into detail.

“You’re not from the South.”

“Chicago.”

“Wow. I’ve never been there. It must be different.” He went on to ask questions that were easy for me to answer without touching on anything too personal. As I talked about weather and food and Oprah, he took the highway heading south, driving past the turn-off to the poky little trailer I called home. A few minutes later, he turned east, onto a road I’d never taken because it didn’t
go
anywhere except deeper into the woods and swamps of rural east Texas.

“Do you drive out to run in the country every day?”

“Pretty much. Sometimes we stick closer to home, but I prefer places where we won’t meet anybody. He needs at least two good runs a day. It’s not natural for a wolf to be stuck inside a house or a car all day, even if I have to be.”

“You take him with you?”

“We go everywhere together,” he said. “Wolves are pack animals. That thing people say about a lone wolf, it’s just wrong. Maybe, if I had some others, and a big enough yard… but I won’t make him live like a prisoner.”

I’d had a dog when I was a kid, but not since. One thing I’d had in mind when I moved to Texas was to rent a place with a fenced yard and a landlord who wasn’t opposed to pets, and it was the detail that my new home had previously been used as a “hunting cabin” and included a sizable kennels, that made me agree to a year’s lease, sight unseen. But when I saw the kennels—the concrete floor, the high chain-link fence—they looked like Guantanamo.

“You got a problem with that?” He challenged my silence.

“Not at all. I’d love to have a dog, but I couldn’t leave it alone five days a week. I guess it’s even more important, if you’re going to buy a wolf—”

“I didn’t
buy
him.”

I gazed ahead at the empty road, dappled with long shadows, and the dark depths of the forest on either side. “You found him?”

He made a noise that might have been agreement, and I said, “A full-grown wolf? He must have belonged to somebody. Couldn’t you find his owner?”

His face showed nothing, but his hands tightened on the steering wheel. “If I could find the bastard who had him first, I’d kill him. Slowly. I’d make him die in agony, do to him what he wanted to do to my wolf.”

The icy malice in his voice chilled me. “What happened?”

“It was just after I’d gotten back from”—he hesitated—“well, that doesn’t matter. I’d been away, and then I came back. About two years ago. I grew up in these parts, and when I was a kid, I used to go hunting and fishing and camping in the Thicket, but not after I grew up. I hadn’t set foot in the woods for ten years, at least, until that day I suddenly got this urge. I just wanted to get away from everybody and everything, away from civilization, so I drove east, into the woods, and turned off the highway onto one of the old timber routes, and drove until it was too rough and grown over to drive any farther, and then I left the car.

“I kept to the trail, of course. Everybody who grows up in these parts knows how easy it is to get lost if you don’t. There are stories about people getting lost for days within a couple miles of the road, that’s how thick and tangled it is. You can be in the middle of a swamp before you know it, with that kind of
mud that sucks you down.

“I knew how it was. I’m not stupid. But after I’d been walking for about an hour, I started feeling that this old road wasn’t going to take me where I had to go.
Had
to go. I didn’t know why, or where it was, but I felt more and more that there was some point to this trip, and if I kept to the trail, I was never going to find out what it was.

“So I left the trail. I used my knife to mark my path, so I could find my way back. I’d done it before, only back then, I’d had a reason—a deer I’d shot but hadn’t killed, a duck or a quail I’d brought down into the brush—and this time the only thing I was following was some kind of instinct or intuition.”

He shook his head, gazing out at the road ahead but seeing, I was sure, the forests in his mind. “I’m not somebody who gets ‘feelings,’ you know? I never believed in that woo-woo psychic spirit stuff. I still don’t, except…” He scowled, gripping the wheel harder, and behind us, Lobo gave a deep sigh.

“I can’t explain why I left the trail and slashed my way deeper into the woods, why I went that way and no other. But I did, and I reckon I walked at least a mile, to a place so far off the map you’d swear nobody else had been there in about a century, except that there was this wolf, chained by the neck to a tree, and he damn sure hadn’t done that to himself.

“I thought he was dead, at first. I thought I’d come too late. But then as I crouched next to him, I felt his heart still beating. It was a near thing, though. God knows how long he’d been stuck there, with no chance of freeing himself, with nothing to eat or drink.”

Angry tears started to my eyes. “Who’d do such a thing?”

“A
person
.” He almost spat the word. “In the old days, people told their kids stories about the big, bad wolf, and men who were especially cruel and horrible were said to be like animals, maybe werewolves. But the things ordinary men do every day are a million times worse than anything a wolf would do. A wolf would never torture another animal to death, or lock it up. They kill out of instinct, in order to survive, because they
have
to—not because they just feel like it, not because they’re evil. Not like
us
. Man is the scariest animal on the planet, but from the beginning of time, the wolf has gotten the bad rap. We’ve tried to pretend that evil is out
there
, lurking inside animals beyond the campfire, and not where it really is, in here.” He tapped his chest.