The Wolf King (13 page)

Hugo rose to his feet, trembling, weak with absolute and uncontrollable physical and emotional exhaustion. His mantle lay beside the fire. He staggered over to it, lay down, and sank at once into deep unconsciousness.

In the weeks to come, Hugo showed an energy that anyone who had known him in the past would have found most uncharacteristic. In truth, he was afraid to disobey his “guest.”

He awoke, or rather his brain awoke, staring out at the sun just beginning to rise over the sea. The surf was quiet and the wind in his face cool. “What?”

“Be quiet, fool. I’m watching the sun rise.”

“It does that every day,” Hugo complained.

“Yes, a miracle that you and your kind cannot comprehend.”

Hugo managed to drift off to sleep again while the thing was using his body—somewhat to the amusement, the very secret amusement, of his guest.

When he was awakened again, his guest took him in search of more coin hoards. There were two neither as rich as the first, but enough to give him a good start in the first town he reached after his walk along the coast.

Gimp followed, walking along silently. He could talk, but apparently his voice had been affected by the stabbing, and besides, the spirit ordered him to be silent.

The money enabled Hugo to buy horses and clothes and to sojourn at the best lodgings available for travelers. The best were none too good. On the third night, they were sleeping at an inn in a tiny place called Corvo. For the first time since their agreement, his guest had let him drink himself into a fog, and he and Gimp staggered up to bed. He was awakened in the small hours of the morning by his guest, conscious that he had a dull, throbbing headache and a raging thirst.

Hugo tried to moan, but his guest warned him to be silent. There was a sound and movement in the darkened room. There shouldn’t have been either one. Hugo had not been so drunk that he had left the door unbolted, and the windows were both narrow and covered by iron grills. “Sit up,” his guest commanded him. “Strike a light.”

Hugo did. In the first flare of the wax light, he saw the innkeeper coming across the floor at him, upraised ax in hand. Hugo tried to scream, but couldn’t because his guest gave vent to a roar of laughter.

The chamber pot rose into the air and discharged its rather considerable contents directly into the innkeeper’s face. Piss stings when it lands in eyes, and the man was both blinded and infuriated. He reached forward and swung the ax at Hugo—or rather at the bed where Hugo was sitting.

This time Hugo did scream and he jumped away, swearing frantically. His guest laughed again and threw Gimp’s body at the innkeeper’s knees. The innkeeper toppled over Gimp’s back, but the ax continued its downward progress. Instead of embedding itself in the straw tick, it swept clear and came down to cut off two of the innkeeper’s toes.

The innkeeper gave a scream of agony and fell writhing to the floor.

The wax light flew out of Hugo’s hand and landed on the mattress. It took a few seconds for the cloth covering to scorch through, but then it burst into flames.

“Run,” Hugo’s guest ordered. “He’s bound to have friends. This is his town.”

Hugo gathered up what few possessions weren’t already in his saddle bags and followed Gimp, who had reached the courtyard near the stable. They found the horses saddled and waiting—a fact that gave Hugo pause. He had not known his guest could function so efficiently without him, but he didn’t spend more than a split second considering the matter because the whole town was buzzing like a hornet’s nest. Men were shouting, women screaming; and flames had already spread from the window of his room to the dry, thatched roof. Hugo put spurs to his horse and, headache or not, he fled.

By dawn they were miles away and already turning off the coast, hugging via Aurelia inland toward Florence. Hugo was allowed to pause by a mountain stream to get a drink of water and wash his face.

“You shouldn’t drink so much,” his guest said. “Especially the rotgut they serve in taverns like the last. Fool, he was trying to drug you.”

“Fine time to tell me,” Hugo muttered.

A powerful kick in the rear sprawled Hugo facedown in the stream. “That will clear your head,” his guest said.

Hugo rose, sputtering. The water was icy.

No one could have kicked him. Gimp was standing near the horses, wide-eyed and ten feet away.

“How do you do things like that?” Hugo asked, bewildered.

“I don’t know. How do you see blue?”

“You mean you can’t?”

“Only when I borrow your eyes.”

Hugo staggered over to the horses and leaned against his saddle. “How do I get some peace?”

“Make me a god, Hugo. Make me a god,” his guest said. “I once was one, you know.”

“A god?” Hugo muttered. “You aren’t a god, you’re a ghost.”

The subsequent kick lifted Hugo an inch off the ground. “Ever met a ghost who could do that?”

“No. Ow.” Hugo crawled into the saddle, where he felt at least his backside would be protected. “If you were a god,” he sniveled, “you’d know how I see blue and you wouldn’t need to kick people.”

“You’re probably right. I hate to admit it, but you are probably right.”

Just then something—his guest, Hugo was sure—slapped the horse’s rump and it took off at a gallop.

Regeane sat beside the trail in the misty half-light of dawn when Maeniel passed by. He’d slipped out of his bed before dawn and felt sure he’d left her sleeping.

He
had
left her beside him.

He stopped and gave her a long, thoughtful look—one she’d seen before. He had directed it at Gavin when his worthy captain was found gnawing a big meaty elk thighbone on one of Maeniel’s fine Persian carpets. It began a chase that had ended when Gavin took refuge behind Regeane and began whimpering piteously.

Regeane, who had been in human form, had said, “Please, my dear—” And Maeniel had turned human.

“Get out,” he had ordered Gavin. “Get out before I fetch my horsewhip.”

“You own a horsewhip?” she had asked.

Gavin took off like a crossbow bolt.

Maeniel had thrown on his robe, grinned, and said, “No, but Gavin doesn’t know that.”

However,
Regeane now thought,
lam not Gavin
. She threw Maeniel a haughty look and continued to sit by the trail, her nose slightly elevated.

The stare between them continued.

Regeane refused to be intimidated.

Finally Maeniel resumed the traveling wolf’s bicycling gait and made no objection when she fell in beside him.

The sun never troubled them, and Regeane was surprised; as a young and inexperienced shapechanger in Rome, she’d believed day and night limited her access to the wolf. Yes, light tugged at the woman, and sometimes she felt dizzy, as if her human half wanted to take charge and made a strong push to do so, but at those times she sought the deep coverts, heavy with thick brush and tall trees, and avoided the open where the sun might catch her; soon the wolf was able to reassert herself strongly.

Maeniel broke trail for both of them, leading her along paths she was sure no human foot had ever trodden. Along Roman roads and outposts, winter was only just losing its grip on the heights, so he kept to the valleys now. They were warmer; flowers had begun to bloom, yellow and white daisies, and the trees were leafing out green-gold and green. Higher, the evergreen spruce, fir, pine, and even the few remaining cedar perfumed the air. The grass, new and emerald green, was filled with violets, purple and white, and even yellow clusters.

They came to the lake in the later afternoon. His first impression was that it was smaller now. Had it really been that long? Reaching back into his memory, he knew it had been.

The rock where she used to rest after her bath was on dry land now, where, long ago, it had projected out into the water. The waterfall remained, but now it appeared that much less water ran down the black basalt steps, and even from where he stood, he could tell the lake above was much smaller, and saplings from the encroaching forest surrounded it.

The lake beneath the falls was silting up. Greenery from the shallow margins extended far out into the water. Hemlock, with its innocent-appearing white flowers; pickerel weed, with its spikes of indigo blue; tall cattails overlooking beds of sweet, sharp, yellow-flowered cress. Beyond the cress some vagrant thing with fuzzy white flowers and long spear-shaped leaves; and toward the center, wild lotus and water lily opened perfect cups of white, yellow, mauve, and pink, and round olive green pads floated on the surface.

Both wolves slipped into the lake; sunlight shimmered on the ripples their bodies made in the still water, sunlight that would have blinded any watcher. Suddenly they were both human.

“It’s beautiful,” Regeane whispered, not wishing to disturb the afternoon’s silence.

“Yes,” he said. “Even after all these years and so much grief.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Oh, yes, many, many times—but that was a long time ago.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“When?”

“On the night we were married. You were making love to me, I think, right here.”

He held quiet, listening.

“Do you hear something? Someone?”

“No. Only wind in the forest, the music of the waterfall and the sound of your heart beating.”

“You can’t,” she said softly.

“I can. I do.” He embraced her then and kissed her.

When they broke to breathe, he spoke. “Let’s make you prophetic vision come true.”

“Yes.” It was a sigh as much as a word.

Hugo was quiet for the next few days. To his guest’s and Gimp’s surprise, he didn’t drink to excess at the taverns and inns where they stopped. He watered his wine and ate well going to bed replete, his stomach full, and waking without
z
headache in the morning.

He said little to his guest, only asking one question when he was about to go to bed the second night.

Gimp was gone, relieving himself behind the inn on a brushy hillside.

“How does Gimp fit in with your plans?” Hugo asked rather acidly.

“I promised him life. I keep my promises even when my priests are madmen and my adherents from the gallows.”

Hugo nodded.

“You will not abandon him.”

This Hugo clearly recognized as an order.

Hugo had spent most of his adult life in an alcoholic fog— adulthood being recognized as occurring at age twelve. But he had a brain, and when dried out it worked fairly well. He remembered Gundabald’s life before their descent into abject poverty: good food; warm, soft, comfortable clothing; the finest wines; servants to pick up after him; and at least passably attractive women at his father’s beck and call. And when Hugo grew old enough, at his also. He and his father had been treated with respect by tradesmen and even the lesser nobility. But Gundabald had courted disaster by trying to buy his way into the inner circle of great magnates surrounding the king. He was overly ambitious. His estates were simply not large enough, and the amount of land and money able to keep all of them in comfort went to gild a rat hole created by the promises of the outer fringes, the impecunious hangers-on,
&the royal court
. But to the end of his life, Gundabald believed the golden prize of royal preferment dangled just out of his reach. The lion’s share of loot from the Frankish king’s conquests went to line the coffers of the greatest of his courtiers. To be among his intimates was to be rich beyond even Gundabald’s dreams of avarice.

Forcibly sobered, then voluntarily sober, Hugo considered all of these things. As a man he’d never liked his father, and thinking over his ambitions, he came to the realization that Gundabald had been a fool. The man had abused and terrorized Regeane by his insistence that she fall in with his plans for murdering her husband. Gundabald had driven her at last to rebellion, all so he could gather more money to further gild the rat hole.

No, Hugo thought. That road was not for him. Thanks to his father, he was a hunted man, cut off forever from the world of the Frankish aristocracy he’d been brought up in. But now, now there was a chance to recoup his fortunes. Sober, he began quietly to consider how to do so.

His chance came on the road to Florence.

His guest had directed him to the site of an abandoned villa. Or perhaps it had once been a town; the site was so ruined, it was impossible to tell. This trove was very rich in silver. His guest directed him to pry a brick from one of the walls. The box behind it had been a fine one. The jewelry inside had been carefully wrapped in silk and, though dark, was still in good condition, as were the silver coins—probably hoarded over a lifetime—in the bottom.

On his way back to the road, he saw the brigands. He was looking down on them because they’d hidden themselves in a cut-rock ditch overgrown with wild roses. The hiding place was a good one because the rose canes were so thick it was easy to overlook the fact that the ditch was even there.

“Why?” he asked his guest.

“A caravan of merchants is coming.”

“This is our chance.”

“Chance to do what?”

“Start you on the road to becoming a god,” Hugo said, feeling superior for once. “Tell that fool Gimp to become mute from now on.”

The brigands’ plan was very simple: to burst from the thicket of rose canes, snatch a laden mule from the merchants, escape into the rocky thickets of scrub oak and broom. The caravan was escorted by a party of mercenaries. They and the merchants would be mounted and could not take their horses into the rocks on the hillside, at least not quickly enough to keep the thieves from stripping the laden mule and vanishing without a trace into what was now a wilderness of broken ground, stunted trees, weeds, and thick briars.

The brigands were unarmed or poorly armed. All Hugo had to do when they snatched the mule was ride in front of them and shout. One, more stubborn than the rest, kept hold of the mule’s bridle. The rest scattered.

Hugo drew his sword but a well-thrown rock cracked into the side of the man’s head.

The mule brayed, reared, and kicked. The last holdout panicked and ran off with the rest. Hugo took the mule’s dangling rein and led it back to the road.