The Wolf's Hour (41 page)

Nikita was dying, of course. But not fast enough. Not nearly fast enough.

Mikhail lowered his face and stared into the mud. Pieces of Nikita’s body, stippled with wolf hair and human flesh, lay around him like tattered pieces of a magnificent puzzle. Mikhail heard Nikita groan and closed his eyes; in his mind he saw a dying deer beside the tracks, and Nikita’s hands gripping the animal’s skull. He remembered the sharp twist Nikita had given the deer’s neck, followed by a noise of cracking bones. It had been an act of mercy, pure and simple. And it was no less than what Nikita now asked for.

Mikhail stood up, staggered and almost went down again. He felt dreamlike, floating; in this sea of rain there were no edges. Nikita shivered and stared at him and waited. At last Mikhail moved. The mud caught his feet, but he pulled free and he knelt down beside his friend.

Nikita lifted his head, offering his neck.

Mikhail grasped the sides of the wolf’s skull. Nikita’s eyes closed, and the low moan continued in his throat.

We could fix him, Mikhail thought. I don’t have to kill him. We could fix him. Wiktor would know how. We fixed Franco, didn’t we?

But in his heart he knew this was far worse than Franco’s mangled leg. Nikita was near death, and he was only asking for deliverance from pain. It had all happened so quickly: the downpour, the train, the steaming tracks… so quickly, so quickly.

Mikhail’s hands gripped tighter. He was shaking as hard as Nikita. He would have to do this right the first time. A dark haze was falling over his vision, and his eyes were filling up with rain. It would have to be done mercifully. Mikhail braced himself. One of Nikita’s forelegs lifted up, and the paw rested against Mikhail’s arm.

“I’m sorry,” Mikhail whispered. He took a breath, and twisted as sharply as he could. He heard the cracking noise, and Nikita’s body twitched. Then Mikhail crawled frantically away through the rain and mud. He burrowed into the weeds and high grass, and curled up there as the torrent continued to beat down on him. When he dared to look at Nikita again, he saw the motionless, cleaved torso of a wolf with one human arm and hand. Mikhail sat on his haunches, his knees pulled up to his chin, and rocked himself. He stared at the carcass with its white-fleshed arm. It would have to be moved off the tracks, before the vultures found it in the morning. It would have to be buried deep.

Nikita was gone. To where? Mikhail wondered. And Wiktor’s question came to him: what is the lycanthrope, in the eye of God?

He felt something fall away from him. Perhaps it was youth’s last flower. What lay beneath it felt hard-edged and raw, like a seething wound. To get through this life, he thought, a man needed a heart that was plated with metal and pumped cinders. He would have to grow one, if he was going to survive.

He stayed beside Nikita’s body until the rain ceased. The wind had gone, and the woods were peaceful. Then Mikhail ran home, through the dripping dark, to take Wiktor the news.

3

Petyr was crying. It was the dead of winter, the wind howled outside the white palace, and Wiktor crouched over the child, now seven months old, as Petyr lay on a bed of dried grass. A small fire flickered nearby; the child was swaddled in deerskin and a blanket Renati had made from the travelers’ clothes. Petyr’s crying was a shrill quaver, but cold was not the child’s complaint. Wiktor, whose beard had started to show streaks of white amid the gray, touched Petyr’s forehead. The child’s skin was burning. Wiktor looked up at the others. “It’s begun,” he said, his voice grim.

Alekza, too, started to cry. Wiktor snapped, “Hush that!” and Alekza crawled away to be by herself.

“What can we do?” Mikhail asked, but he already knew the answer: nothing. Petyr was about to go through the trial of agony, and no one could help the child through that passage. Mikhail leaned over Petyr, his fingers busy at the blanket, folding it closer simply because his fingers wanted something to do. Petyr’s face was flushed, the ice-blue eyes rimmed with red. A small amount of dark hair was scattered over the child’s scalp. Alekza’s eyes, Mikhail thought. My hair. And within that frail body, the first battle of a long war was beginning.

“He’s strong,” Franco said. “He’ll make it.” But his voice had no conviction. How could an infant survive such pain? Franco stood up, on his single leg, and used his pinewood staff to guide himself to his sleeping pallet.

Wiktor, Renati, and Mikhail slept in a circle around the child. Alekza came back, and slept touching Mikhail. Petyr’s crying swelled and ebbed, became hoarse and still continued. So did the wail of the wind, beyond the walls.

As the days went on, Petyr’s pain increased. They could tell, by the way he shivered and writhed, by the way he clenched his fists and seemed to be striking the air. They huddled around him; Petyr was hotter than the fire. Sometimes he screamed with silence, his mouth open and his eyes squeezed tightly shut. Other times his voice filled the chamber, and it was a sound that ripped Mikhail’s heart and made Alekza weep. In periods when the worst of the pain seemed to ebb, Alekza tried to feed Petyr bloody meat she’d already chewed into a soft paste; he accepted most of it, but he was getting weaker, shriveling up like an old man before their eyes. Still, Petyr clung to life. When the child’s crying would become so terrible that Mikhail thought God must surely end this suffering, the pain would break for perhaps three or four hours. Then it would come back, and the screaming would start again. Mikhail knew Alekza was nearing a crisis as well; her eyes looked like hollowed-out holes, and her hands trembled so much she could hardly guide food into her own mouth. She, too, was becoming older by the day.

After a long and exhausting hunt, Mikhail was awakened one night by a hideous gasping sound. He sat up, started to move toward Petyr, but Wiktor pushed him aside in his haste to get to the baby. Renati said, “What is it? What’s wrong?” and Franco hobbled on his stick into the light. Alekza just stared, her eyes blank pools of shock. Wiktor knelt beside the child, and his face was ashen. The baby was silent. “He’s swallowed his tongue,” Wiktor said. “Mikhail, hold him from thrashing!”

Mikhail gripped Petyr’s body; it was like touching a hot coal. “Hold him steady!” Wiktor shouted as he forced open the mouth and tried to hook the tongue with his finger. He couldn’t get it out. Petyr’s face had taken on a tinge of blue, and the lungs were heaving. The little hands clutched at the air. Wiktor’s finger explored the child’s mouth, found the tongue, and then he got a second finger clamped around it. He pulled; the tongue was caught in Petyr’s throat. “Get it out!” Renati yelled. “Wiktor, get it out!”

Wiktor pulled again, harder. There was a popping noise as the tongue unjammed, but Petyr’s face was still turning blue. The lungs hitched, couldn’t draw in air. Sweat sparkled on Wiktor’s face, though his breath came out in a gray plume. He lifted Petyr up, held the baby by the heels, and whacked him on the back with the flat of his hand. Mikhail winced at the sound of the blow. Petyr still made no noise. Again Wiktor struck him on the back, harder. And a third time. There was a whoosh of rushing air, and a plume of it exploded from the child’s mouth. It was followed by a wail of pain and fury that made the storm’s voice sound feeble. Alekza held her arms out to take the baby. Wiktor gave him to her. She rocked the child, grateful tears creeping down her cheeks, and she lifted one of his little hands and pressed it against her lips.

She pulled her head back, her eyes wide.

Dark hairs had risen from the white infant flesh. The body in her arms was already contorting, and Petyr opened his mouth to make a mewling noise. Alekza looked up at Mikhail, then at Wiktor; he sat on his haunches, his chin resting on his clasped hands, and his amber eyes glinted in the firelight as he watched.

Petyr’s face was changing, the muzzle beginning to form, the eyes sinking back into the dark-haired skull. Mikhail heard Renati gasp beside him, a sound of wonder. Petyr’s ears lengthened, edged with soft white hairs. The fingers of both hands and the toes of both feet were retracting, becoming claws with small hooked nails. Little popping noises chimed the shifting of bones and joints, and Petyr made grunting noises, but his crying seemed to be done. The change took perhaps a minute. Wiktor said quietly, “Put him down.”

Alekza obeyed. The blue-eyed wolf pup, its sinewy body covered with fine black hairs, struggled to stand on all fours. Petyr made it up, fell, struggled to stand, and then fell again. Mikhail started to help him, but Wiktor said, “No. Let him do it on his own.”

Petyr found his legs and was able to stand, the little body shivering, the blue eyes blinking with amazement. The stub of a tall wriggled, and the wolfen ears twitched. He took one step, then a second; his hind legs tangled and he went down once more. Petyr gave a short whuff of frustration, steam curling from his nostrils. Wiktor leaned forward, held out a finger, and ticked it back and forth in front of Petyr’s muzzle. The blue eyes followed it-and then Petyr’s head lunged out, the jaws opened, and clamped down on Wiktor’s finger.

Wiktor worked his finger out of the pup’s jaws and held it up. A little drop of blood had appeared. “Congratulations,” he said to Mikhail and Alekza. “Your son has a new tooth.”

Petyr, at least for the time being, had given up the battle with gravity. He squirmed across the floor, sniffing at the stones. A roach burst from a crack under Petyr’s nose and ran for its life, and Petyr gave a high yip of surprise, then continued his explorations.

“He’ll turn back, won’t he?” Alekza asked Wiktor. “Won’t he?”

“We’ll see,” Wiktor told her, and that was all he could offer.

About halfway across the chamber Petyr stubbed his nose on a stone’s edge. He began yelping with pain, and as he rolled on the floor his body started changing back to human form again. The fine dark hair retreated into the flesh, the muzzle flattened into a nose-one of the nostrils bloody-and the paws became hands and feet. The yelping was now a steady, full-throated cry, and Alekza rushed to the baby and picked him up. She rocked him and cooed to him, and finally Petyr hiccuped a few times and ceased crying. He remained a human infant.

“Well,” Wiktor said after a pause, “if our new addition survives the winter, he should be very interesting to watch.”

“He’ll survive,” Alekza promised. The glint of life had returned to her eyes. “I’ll make him survive.”

Wiktor admired his bitten finger. “My dear, I doubt if you’ll ever be able to make him do anything.” He glanced at Mikhail, and smiled slightly. “You’ve done well, son,” he said, and motioned Alekza and the baby back into the fire’s warmth.

Son, Mikhail realized he’d said. Son. No man had ever called him son before, and something about that sounded like music. He would sleep that night, listening to Alekza crooning to Petyr, and he would dream of a tall, lean man in a military uniform who stood with a woman Mikhail had all but forgotten, and that man would have Wiktor’s face.

4

At winter’s end Petyr was still alive. He accepted whatever food Alekza gave him, and though he had the habit of changing to a wolf pup without warning and driving the rest of the pack crazy with his constant yapping, he stayed mostly within human bounds. By summer he had all his teeth, and Wiktor kept his fingers away from the baby’s mouth.

Some nights, Mikhail sat on the ravine’s edge and watched the train go past. He began counting the seconds off as it roared from the western tunnel into the eastern. Last year, he’d run the race halfheartedly with Nikita. It had never really mattered to him how fast he could change. He knew he was fairly quick about it, but he’d always lagged behind Nikita. Now, though, Nikita’s bones lay in the Garden, and the train-an invincible thing-breathed its black breath and shone its gleaming eye through the night. Mikhail had often wondered what the crew had thought when they’d found blood and bits of black-haired flesh on the cowcatcher. We hit an animal, they’d probably thought if they considered it at all. An animal. Something that shouldn’t have been in our way.

Toward the middle of summer, Mikhail began to lope along with the train as it burst from the tunnel. He wasn’t racing it, just stretching his legs. The engine always left him in a whirl of sour black smoke, and cinders scorched his skin. And on those nights, after the train had disappeared into the tunnel, Mikhail crossed the tracks to where Nikita had died, and he sat in the weeds and thought, I could do it, if I wanted to. I could.

Maybe.

He would have to get a fast start. The tricky part was staying on your feet as your arms and legs changed. The way the backbone bowed your body over ruined your balance. And all the time your nerves and joints were shrieking, and if you tripped over your own paws, you could go into the side of the train, and a hundred other terrible things could happen. No, it wasn’t worth the risk.

Mikhail always left telling himself he wouldn’t come back. But he knew it was a lie. The idea of speed, of testing himself against the beast that had killed Nikita, lured him. He began to run faster, alongside the train; but still not racing it, not yet. His balance still wasn’t good enough, and he fell every time he tried to change from human to wolf while running. It was a problem of timing, of keeping your footing until the front legs could come down and match the speed of the hind legs. Mikhail kept trying, and kept falling.

Renati returned from a hunt one afternoon with startling news: to the northwest, less than five miles from the white palace, men had started cutting down trees. They’d already made a clearing, and were building shacks out of raw timbers. A road was being plowed through the brush. The men had many wagons, saws, and axes. Renati said she’d crept in close, in her wolf form, to watch them working; one of the men had seen her, she said, and pointed her out to the others before she could get back into the woods. What did it mean? she asked Wiktor.

The beginning of a logging camp, he thought. Under no circumstances, he told the pack, were any of them to go near the place again, in either human or wolf form. The men would probably work through the summer and leave. It was best to let them alone.

But from that point on, Mikhail noted that Wiktor became silent and brooding. He forbade anyone to hunt except at night. He was nervous, and paced back and forth in the chamber long after everyone else had settled down to rest. Soon, when the wind was right, Mikhail and the others could recline in the sun outside the white palace and hear the distant sound of axes and saws at work, gnawing the forest away.

And the day came.

Franco and Renati went out to hunt, as a crescent moon hung in the sky and the woods thrummed with the sound of crickets. Little more than an hour had passed before the noise of distant gunshots silenced the insects and echoed through the corridors of the white palace.

Mikhail counted four shots as he stood up from Alekza’s side. Petyr played with a rabbit bone on the floor. Wiktor dropped the book of Latin he’d been reading to Mikhail and rose to his feet. Two more shots were fired, and the sounds made Mikhail flinch; he remembered very well the noise of gunfire, and what a bullet could do.

As the last shot faded a howling began: Franco’s hoarse voice, panicked and calling for help.

“Stay with Petyr,” Wiktor told Alekza, and as he strode toward the stone stairway he was already changing. Mikhail followed, and the two wolves left the white palace streaking through the darkness toward Franco’s wall. They had gone not quite a mile when they smelled the gunsmoke and the odor of men: a bitter, frightened sweat smell. Lanterns glowed in the woods, and the men were calling to each other. Franco had begun making a high, frantic yipping noise, an aural beacon that led Wiktor and Mikhail directly to him. They found him crouched on a bluff, amid dense underbrush, and before them lay a circle of tents around a campfire. Wiktor rammed his shoulder into Franco’s ribs to shut him up, and Franco lay on his belly in a submissive posture, his eyes glittering with terror-not of Wiktor, but of what now occurred in the firelit clearing.

Two men with rifles slung around their shoulders dragged something out of the woods and into the light. There were six other men, all armed with either pistols or rifles and carrying lanterns. They gathered around the form that sprawled in the dust, and thrust out their lanterns over it.

Mikhail felt Wiktor shiver. His own lungs seemed full of icy needles. There on the ground was the carcass of a wolf with russet fur, pierced by three bullet holes. Renati’s blood looked black in the lamplight. And there, for all to see, was a dead wolf with one human arm and a human leg.

My God, Mikhail thought. Now they know.

One of the loggers began to pray-a coarse, ranting Russian voice-and as he reached the end of his prayer he put the barrel of his rifle against Renati’s skull and blew it apart.

“We heard the men,” Franco said when they’d gotten back to the chamber. He was shaking, and sweat gleamed on his skin. “They were laughing and talking around their fire. Making so much noise you’d have to be deaf not to hear them.”

“You were stupid to go there!” Wiktor raged, spraying spittle. “Damn it to hell, they killed Renati!”

“She wanted to get closer,” Franco went on dazedly. “I tried to turn her back, but… she wanted to see them. Wanted to get right up and hear what they were saying.” He shook his head, fighting shock. “We stood at the edge of the clearing… so close we could hear their hearts beat. And I think… something about them, so close, hypnotized her. Like seeing creatures from another world. Even when one of the men looked up and saw her, she still didn’t move. I think…” He blinked slowly, his brain gears sluggish. “I think… that for just one minute… she forgot she was a wolf.”

“They’ll leave now, won’t they?” Alekza asked hopefully, holding the squirming child. “They’ll go away, back to where they came from.” No one answered her. “Won’t they?”

“Pah!” Wiktor spat into the fire. “Who knows what they’ll do? Men are crazy!” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Maybe they’ll go. Maybe seeing Renati scared the shit out of them, and they’re already packing up. Damn it, they know about us now! There’s nothing more dangerous than a frightened Russian with a rifle!” He glanced quickly at Mikhail, then at the child in Alekza’s arms. “Maybe they’ll go,” Wiktor said, “but I won’t count on it. From now on, we keep a constant watch up in the tower. I’ll go first. Mikhail, will you take the second watch?” Mikhail nodded. “We’ll have to divide it among us into six-hour shifts,” Wiktor continued. He looked around at Alekza, Petyr, Franco, and Mikhail: the surviving members of the pack. He didn’t have to speak; his expression spoke for him, and Mikhail could read it. The pack was dying. Wiktor’s gaze wandered around the chamber, as if in search for the lost ones. “Renati’s dead,” he whispered, and Mikhail saw tears bloom in his eyes. “I loved her,” Wiktor said, to no one in particular. And then he gathered the folds of his deerskin robe about himself, abruptly turned away, and went up the stairs.

Three days passed. The sound of saws and axes at work had ceased. On the fourth night after Renati’s death, Wiktor and Mikhail crept to the bluff that had overlooked the circle of tents. The tents were gone, and the campfire was cold. The stench of men was gone as well. Wiktor and Mikhail went northwest, following the swath of stumps, to find the loggers’ main camp. It, too, had been cleared out. The shacks were empty, the wagons gone. But the road they’d cut into the forest remained, like a brown scar on the earth. There was no trace of Renati’s carcass; the men had taken her with them, and what would happen when the eyes of the outside world saw the body of a wolf with a human arm and leg? The road pointed the way to the white palace. From Wiktor’s throat came a low groaning noise, and Mikhail understood what he meant: God help us.

The summer moved on, a trail of scorching days. The loggers didn’t return, and no other wagons cut ruts on the forest road. Mikhail began to go out to the ravine at night again, and watched the train roar past. Its engineer seemed to be going even faster than before. He wondered if the man had heard about Renati, and the stories that would surely follow: in those woods live monsters.

He raced the train a few times, always pulling up short when his body began to change from human to wolf and his balance was in jeopardy. The iron wheels hissed at him, and left him behind.

The summer ended, the forest turned to gold and crimson, the sun’s rays slanted across the earth and the morning mist turned chill and lingered, and the soldiers came.

They arrived with the first frost. There were twenty-two of them, in four horse-drawn wagons, and Wiktor and Mikhail crouched in the underbrush and watched them setting up camp in the logging shacks. All of the soldiers had rifles and some carried pistols, too. One of the wagons was full of supplies, and along with crates marked Danger! Explosives! there was a bulky-looking gun mounted on wheels. Instantly a man who must have been in charge posted sentries around the camp, and the soldiers began to dig trenches and put sharpened wooden stakes at the bottom of them. They unrolled nets and hung them in the trees, with trip wires going in all directions. Of course they left their smell on all the traps, so those nets and wires were easily avoided-but then half of the soldiers took two wagons and went along the logging road to the place where the tents had been set up, and there they set up their own tents, dug new trenches, and strung up more nets. They took the crates of explosives and the wheeled gun off their wagon, and when they test-fired the gun it sounded like the end of the world and slashed thin pines down like the work of a dozen axes.

“A machine gun,” Wiktor said when they were back in the white palace. “They brought a machine gun! To kill us!” He shook his head incredulously, his beard full of white. “My God, they must think there are hundreds of us in here!”

“I say we get out while we can,” Franco urged. “Right now, before those bastards come hunting for us!”

“And where are we going to go, with winter coming? Maybe dig holes and live in them? We couldn’t survive without shelter!”

“We can’t survive where we are! They’re going to start searching the woods, and sooner or later they’ll find us!”

“So what shall we do?” Wiktor asked quietly, the firelight ruddy on his face. “Go to the soldiers and tell them we’re not to be feared? That we’re human beings, just like they are?” He smiled bitterly. “You go first, Franco, and we’ll see how they treat you.” Franco scowled and hobbled away on his staff, much more proficient on three legs than he was on one. Wiktor sat on his haunches and thought. Mikhail could tell what was going through the man’s mind: hunting was going to be much more difficult with the soldiers and their traps out in the woods; Franco was right, sooner or later the soldiers would find them; and what the soldiers might do to them when they were captured was unthinkable. Mikhail looked at Alekza, who held the child close. The soldiers would either kill us or cage us, Mikhail thought. Death would be preferable to iron bars.

“The bastards chased me away from one home,” Wiktor said. “They won’t chase me from a second. I’m staying here, no matter what.” He stood up, his decision made. “The rest of you can try to find somewhere else, if you like. Maybe you can use one of those caves where we hunted the berserker, but I’ll be damned if I’ll crouch and shiver in a cave like a beast. No. This is my home.”

There was a long silence. Alekza broke it, her voice thin and grasping false hope: “Maybe they’ll get tired of looking for us and leave. They won’t stay very long, not with winter almost here. They’ll be gone with the first snow.”

“Yes!” Franco agreed. “They won’t stay when the weather turns cold, that’s for sure!”

It was the first time the pack had ever longed for the icy breath of winter. One good snowfall would clear the soldiers out. But, though the air turned cold, the sky remained clear. Dead leaves fell from the trees, and from the underbrush Wiktor and Mikhail watched the soldiers as they roamed the woods, tight knots of men with rifles aimed in all directions. Once a group of them passed within a hundred yards of the white palace. They dug more trenches, put sharpened stakes at the bottom of them, and covered the trenches over with dirt and leaves. Wolf traps, Wiktor told Mikhail. The snares were of no consequence, but the soldiers were searching in expanding circles, and one terrible day Mikhail and Wiktor watched in agonized silence as the men stumbled upon the Garden. Hands and bayonets went to work, digging up the graves that had been repaired after the berserker’s death. And as those hands pulled the wolf and human bones from the earth, Mikhail lowered his head and turned away, unable to bear the sight.