Night of the Wolf (2 page)

“Oh,” Blaze said.

Mir shrugged. “She belongs here with us. She needs protection. She isn’t dangerous and she’s warm at night. I could do worse. I will designate someone to take her when I am gone. But I didn’t call you here to talk about the half-wit, but the wolf.”

“Ah, yes,” Blaze said. “The wolf. This wolf that behaves like a man.”

The next night the big gray left well ahead of his pack. It was his duty to do so. He had attacked humans, thereby risking the lives of his companions. Humans did not discriminate. They saw all wolves as ravening killers and would destroy, sometimes after torture, any wolf they could catch.

A retreating glacier had carved the pool eons ago. It was part of a small stream fed by snowmelt in the summer and by native artesian springs in winter. Somehow the water never froze. The wolf had long wondered about this and had been puzzled by his own bent toward curiosity. His kind seldom bothered about such things.

The first people to come to the valley called it the Lady’s Mirror. The Lady in question was already ancient by then, clouded by a host of other deities, but still remembered, especially during her hours, dawn and dusk. At those times, the inhabitants of the valley avoided the place, fearing they might see her walking there and be accosted, to who knows what end. The Lady was revered, respected, loved, and feared. Meetings with her could be very unlucky, and besides, who knows what a goddess is thinking? Perhaps they also avoided the place at such times because they knew it was the haunt of wolves moving down from the mountains at dusk to hunt in the valleys below. At dawn they gathered again, returning to their dens beyond the tree line.

The sun was sending up long rays from beyond the western peaks when the wolves came to drink. The sunset forest sighed in the wind’s passage.

The water, true to its name, mirrored the dark forest of spruce and fir, the sun-flushed evening sky. The pool ended in a falls flowing in shining smoothness over a flight of black basalt steps into another smaller lake. From there it became a torrent cascading down a steep slope into the roaring flood racing through the valley below.

He approached the pool cautiously, searching through all the nearby coverts where bowmen could hide. He feared an ambush. He found nothing. Oh, someone had been there all right. An old someone with a light step. He sensed this and saw no cause for alarm.

When he reached the pool he found it deserted by all but swallows skimming for insects over the glasslike surface. The women who bathed below the falls had been there and were gone.

Women reminded him of those tender parts of prey animals, and reduced him to something as close to guilt as a wolf could ever feel. Yet he found them irresistible. A female wolf at midwinter, all fangs, her belly swollen with whelps, eyes blazing yellow with fear for her unborn young, was often her mate’s best argument for celibacy.

But human women were a walking seduction. They covered their naked pink and brown skin with cloth almost as soft as fur was. Hairless, they felt like flower petals, velvet, silken, and fragrant. The hot places of their bodies misted the air at their groins with a variety of odors, some enticing, intoxicating, and, finally, as they approached orgasm . . . maddening. But most succulent of all was their surrender. At the finality of desire, they yielded bonelessly, melting around his body, into his arms, and into their own boundless pleasures as though they yielded to death. Indeed, when the first he embraced reached the culmination of her desire, for a moment he feared she had perished in his arms. Only the loud, persistent drumming of her heart reassured him that he had not, in his own urgency, destroyed her.

They are slaves, he thought at first, shaped by the torrent of their own males’ desires the way the water-smooth stones in the riverbed were sculpted by the unending flow. Drawn by Eros himself from the earth’s womb and shaped only for the delight of the savage killer mates who surrounded them and sought madly to possess them as often as possible. They were created head to toe to madden. There was nothing about them that could not inspire pleasure.

Small, high-arched feet, narrow ankles, curving smooth legs, silken thighs, velvety buttocks, a spine one could follow to the nape of the neck with lips and tongue while they squeaked with delight, writhing and purring with ecstasy like wild cats. And the breasts. Ah, God, those things. Wolves are born blind, struggling against each other for their mother’s teats in the dark. Those breasts as he cupped them with his hands and sucked with his lips brought back the memory of that first triumphant spurt of milk into his mouth. The soft globes, shaped almost like cups, were a reminder of a giving world where a man might drink and fulfillment pour into his loins, heating his whole body the way that first warm taste of life had told him he would live. Haunted by the first fear of independent life that he would not reach warmth, food, and love—the abject terror that he would not survive. That first taste told him that he would—it tracked its way into his stomach and the warmth filed his whole body.

The dark wolf huntresses concealed their endowments except when they needed to feed their pups. The women didn’t. They pushed their soft beauties into plain sight, reminding men of woman power, making them sit up and beg. Yes, at first he thought women slaves, playthings of their savage mates. Why not? Didn’t these women know even the fiercest of beasts go in terror of man? Surely they were slaves to this endless unstoppable male lechery. Or did they first create it, then encourage it until the obsessed and goaded male became a creature of his desires rather than the possessor of them? A creature of the woman who gratified him.

He had encountered her in a dark wood, she who changed his mind about men. To his nose, the aromatic signals their bodies were giving off would have attracted him in preference to food.

The men were clustered at the edge of the wood, and raw sexuality and violence hung about them like a thick mist. At the other end of the wood, the sacrificial victims were gathered. The dozen young girls, standing with the dark-robed priestesses, were grouped near a pile of smoldering logs. They were naked and their skins gleamed with oil. Some green herb had been thrown onto the fire and the women were dancing slowly, uncoordinatedly, in the thick fumes, half steam and half smoke, rising from the sputtering fire.

The wolf knew the rite. He had seen it before. He also knew men fought among themselves for the privilege of joining the chase.

The procedure was a simple one. When the rising moon’s tip touched the top of the standing stone, the girls would be driven into the grove. The men would follow. The girls were sixteen, at most, and all virgins. They would not be virgins when they emerged in the morning. Some would be weeping. All would be bleeding because if they didn’t bleed when entered, they would be flogged by the men until the blood came. And some, not a few, would be crowned with flowers and have strange smiles on their faces.

The gray wolf found himself drawn into human shape by the powerful magic hanging over the grove. Every hair on his body had stood up like a cat’s. Then, as though drenched with icy water, he was a man, the spring night air cold against his skin. He gasped, shivered all over as the canine in him tried to shake off what felt to it like a waterfall of ice. He stood shivering violently, his eyes fixed on the women.

The priestess who had been watching the moonrise shouted something to the group guarding the girls.

He heard the slap of a switch on flesh. The girls milled near the fire like frightened mares; one screamed. They tossed their heads, long hair flying. The priestesses held long, flexible willow canes. The women twisted and turned, screaming, trying to escape the blows. But still they fought, refusing to enter the wood, less afraid of what, after all, amounted only to a switching rather than face what awaited in the darkness under the trees. It wasn’t until they saw the men coming full tilt across the meadow—charging silently, fists clenched, eyes wild—that they broke and ran.

The one he’d chosen, a lithe, black-haired girl, flew through last year’s autumn leaves like a wounded deer. Fast as she was, he could have had her in seconds, but with the deliberate skill of a predator, he held back until they were deep in the grove, enmeshed in thick, black, velvet night. The only light from the stars, dense, brilliant, glowing dust everywhere the sky could be seen through the branches above.

He caught her.

She screamed.

His wolf senses told him about a bed of ferns. He threw her down, knocking the wind out of her for a second.

Not for a wolf was the savage penetration. She was already screeching and kicking, clawing at where she hoped his face was in the darkness. He wanted to smell, to touch, to taste, and, finally, to drink her substance. He buried his head at the most exciting spot his wolf’s brain could find. A place whose emanations outstripped all the rest. Her groin. He lapped vigorously. Her screams and struggles changed to something else. She lay still. He found structures not existing on wolves. Delve . . . the place was soft with a rich taste.

She was kicking violently, but not at him. Something else here to suck. She gasped, moaned, laughed wildly, then howled, giving rent to such noises as he felt might shame a bitch in heat. Arching her body back with her buttocks pounding the ground. He tried to pull away. She caught his head between her thighs, his hair in her hands. He found himself wanting to drink her dry. He tried.

She was swollen, normal; wolves also did this. Other things were not so normal. She heated like a branch charring in a fire until she seemed one burning with fever. Her heart thundered. It went on and on until she reared up and shouted, “Quench me! Do it now!”

“Pain,” he said. The unpracticed word was almost a snarl.

“By all the gods!” Her body shuddered; her nails dug into his back, scoring his skin. “Do you think I give a damn about pain?”

But she did. He found out when he forced admission to her intimate domain.

She fell back, biting the side of her open hand so as not to scream, her body suddenly drenched with perspiration.

“Wait,” she whispered, placing her other hand palm open against his chest. She was breathing rapidly, deeply, not quite panting. “The sacrifice is a good one. I feel the blood. He takes his tribute, the male spirit, the bull of the woods. A woman’s pain, her terror, her blood belong to him. I have given him mine, as I was chosen by lot to do?’

Maeniel, now more man than he had ever been, tried to draw away. His mind chased the words through the blind pathways of his brain and couldn’t find them. He wanted to say, “No more, you’re hurt, bleeding. Your god should be content.” But he couldn’t fashion the thought into speech. “No,” was the only reply he could manage. He tried to free his member from her body.

She embraced him, pressing his lips to hers. Her teeth met through his bottom lip.

Red rage wiped out all wolf and all humanity. For a second he was, as she wanted him to be, a conscienceless primal being. He completed the act of penetration brutally, vengefully, finally.

Her skin went cold, her heartbeat faltered. For a moment he thought he’d killed her, but then she stirred. She wept, but her skin was warming faster and faster. Seemingly almost against her will, a deep throbbing began. “Oh, no,” she sobbed. “It will hurt. I can’t stand it again.”

“Not now!” he said.

For a moment she was balanced perfectly between pleasure and pain, then pleasure tripped the scales and they were both caught up in a firestorm of mutual desire that burned away caution and hesitation.

They explored each other’s bodies passionately, constantly, with unceasing energy, as the night wore on. The moon set and then the Pleiades. All that remained were the cold, lonely stars when the dawn wind began to blow.

She was melting with exhaustion when she surrendered to him for the last time, the final pulsations of her body drawing him into flame. She lay in the ferns, a rag of flesh, breathing the deep, strong inhalations of sleep.

He found another, a man, also sleeping, clutching a half-f wineskin and wearing a woolen mantle. He woke when Maeniel took both. A blow of the gray wolf’s fist returned him to the arms of Morpheus.

She swallowed the wine without waking, snuggled under the mantle. He found a bay tree nearby and crowned her with the victor’s laurels. The mist was a silver glow among the trees as he left her for the sun to find.

Memory faded. Over the mountains the sun was sinking into the clouds. The wolf circled the lake, then trotted down the falls themselves, breasted the water in the lower pond. Helpless, his head clearly outlined against the perfectly still water, he invited attack if any huntsmen were concealed in the trees. None came.

The wolf reached the shore, puzzled. Men were vengeful creatures. The wolf was sure they would greet him here. But no. He reached the soft, beige sand beach at the edge of the lake, loped out of the water, and shook himself dry.

He owned them his superiors in cunning and, for that matter, in cruelty. He couldn’t imagine what they might be planning. Some incomprehensible madness like the one that had taken her?

Guilt. A feeling known by dogs and wolves as well as men. None enjoys the emotion. The gray wolf didn’t either. He didn’t like remembering her. The memory of the fleshy passion they’d shared was tainted by the image of her ending.

For a moment, the wolf felt terror that he sometimes walked on two legs. They were cruel with an inventiveness and a delight he couldn’t comprehend. Yet he partook of their nature. In fact, he was being tempted away from his wild innocence more and more often. This frightened him, but she and others of her kind drew him onward.

It would take him a hundred years to find out she really hadn’t been beautiful. She hadn’t been young, either. She had borne three children; one died in infancy. She brought up the other two; they were grown when he had met their mother. After the gray wolf found out about this, he was grateful. Grateful they hadn’t met earlier and she had led a good long life before they had their chance encounter.