The Silver Wolf

THE SUN WAS GOING DOWN. THE FIERY CIRCLE shone past the acanthus-crowned columns of a ruined temple. They cut the incandescent ball into slices of red radiance.
Almost night
, the girl thought, then shivered in the chill autumn air blowing through the unglazed casement.

The window was barred—heavily barred. One set running horizontally, the other vertically. The bars were bolted into the stone walls of the tiny room.

She knew she could close the window. Reach out through the bars. Pull the heavy shutters shut, and seal them with the iron bolt. But she pushed the idea out of her mind with a sort of blind obstinacy. The sight of freedom, even an unattainable freedom, was too sweet to give up.

Not yet
, she told herself,
only a little longer. Not yet
.

The air that raised gooseflesh on her arms was sweet to her nostrils. Oh no, more than sweet. A speaking thing. Each vagrant increase in flow, each slight change in direction, each passing movement sent images to the deepest part of her mind.

Somewhere a patch of thyme bloomed. The tiny blue flowers let down their fragrance into the chill evening air. This delicate scent was mixed with the heavy smell of wet marble and granite. These and many others stood out against the tapestry of odors given off by the flowers and greenery that cloaked the ruined palaces and temples of the ancient imperium.

The vast restless spirit of this, the greatest of all empires, seemed at last brought to rest at the soft hand of the great green mother herself.

Regeane didn’t know what she’d expected of the once-proud
mistress of the world when she’d come to Rome. Certainly not what she found.

The inhabitants, descendants of a race of conquerors, lived like rats squabbling and polluting the ruins of an abandoned palace. Oblivious to the evidence of grandeur all around them, they fought viciously among themselves for what wealth remained. Indeed, little was left of the once-vast river of gold that flowed into the eternal city. The gold that could be found gilded the palms of papal officials and the altars of the many churches.

Regeane’s mother, desperate to save—as she saw it—her daughter’s soul, pawned what few jewels she had left. The money was sufficient to pay the bribes necessary to obtain a papal audience and finance the equally expensive papal blessing.

Regeane had gone into the awesome presence, her body drenched in a sweat of terror. If her ailing mother said the wrong thing to the church’s leading prelate, she might find herself being burned or stoned as a witch. But as she approached the supreme pontiff, she realized just how foolish her fears had been.

The man before her was a ruin. Ready to be taken by age and sorrow. She doubted if he understood much of anything said to him. Weeping, her mother implored the intercession of God’s chief minister on earth with the Almighty. As the ever-dutiful Regeane knelt, kissed the silken slipper, and felt the withered hands pressed against her hair she caught a whiff of a scent other than the thick smell of incense and Greek perfume that pervaded the room: the musty, dry smell of aging flesh and human decay.

God, it was powerful.
He is ready to die
, she thought.
He will go speak on Mother’s behalf to God in person very soon
. She knew this blessing, as all other blessings her mother, Gisela, had traveled so far and squandered so much of her wealth to gain, would do no good.

This was the end. Regeane knew it. She was frightened. If the pope himself could not lift this strange gesa from her and let her live as a woman, to what earthly power could she turn? More to the point, to what power could her mother turn?

Gisela was fading as quickly as the only-too-human man on
the chair of Peter. Though a comparatively young woman, she was worn down by the string of fruitless journeys she had taken with Regeane and by some secret sorrow that seemed to fill her mind and heart with a bottomless wellspring of grief.

Regeane lied. Her mother believed. And for the first time in many years, Regeane felt the tiny woman who had traveled so far and borne so many burdens was at peace. Regeane’s lie carried Gisela through till the end.

Three days after the papal audience she had gone to awaken her mother and found Gisela would never wake again. Not in this world.