The Silver Wolf (16 page)

Basil and the men with him advanced on Regeane and Lucilla.

Lucilla caught Regeane by the wrist and whispered urgently, “It’s no good. I can’t hold them. Where in God’s name are my men? Run!” She darted toward the back of the garden, pulling Regeane along with her through a door.

The abrupt change from the light of the torches to the darkness of the passage blinded Regeane. When she could see again they were stumbling across the furrows of a kitchen garden. Ahead, she could see the tree limbs, an orchard, and then a wall.

Basil and his men erupted from the passage in a blaze of torchlight.

Regeane’s foot kicked against something. Lucilla bent down and snatched it up—a hoe.

The nearest of Basil’s men was less than six feet behind them. Lucilla turned and drove the handle of the hoe with a straight thrust into his groin. The man doubled over, howling.

“Run, girl, run!” Lucilla called to Regeane.

The rest of Basil’s soldiers hung back, perhaps a little intimidated by the fate of the first. Then another leaped forward and
snatched at the hoe in Lucilla’s hand: a mistake. She fetched him a crack across the side of the head with the handle that sent him to his knees, clutching his skull. Then she chopped viciously at his face with the blade.

Regeane couldn’t bring herself to leave Lucilla. She was sure Basil would kill Lucilla.

Basil drew his sword, leaped past Lucilla, ignoring another swing of the hoe. He grabbed Regeane by the arm. She screeched and tore free, staggering, and fell on her face in the soft earth of the garden. Basil’s sword chopped into the furrow near her face, showering her head with mud.

Regeane came to her knees, clutching a handful of soil. Basil caught her hair with one hand, stretching out her throat, positioning his sword up and back to cut off her head.

Regeane let fly with the mud. Wet filth caught Basil full in the face. He gave a shout of fury and let go of her hair to clear his eyes.

The darkness of the moon flooded Regeane’s brain. She was wolf. Shocked and terrified, she staggered. The light of the torches dazzled the wolf’s eyes more than it had the woman’s.

In the wake of her shock and terror rushed a triumphant fury.

Basil was still pawing at his eyes with one hand while hacking at Regeane’s discarded dress with his sword. He believed she was still in her clothes.

The silver wolf lunged for him clumsily. He kicked her in the ribs.

The woman’s will, still alive in the wolf, was overwhelmed by rage. The wolf made an eel-like turn around the legs in front of her, teeth slashing for a hamstring. Her fangs laid open the calf of his leg.

Basil shrieked and chopped down at her with his sword. But the silver wolf leaped clear.

Three men struggled with Lucilla, one holding her around the body, two grappling with her for her quarterstaff hoe. For the moment they had their hands full. A fourth stood back, torch in hand.

“You damned fool,” Basil shouted. “Drive off that mad dog.”

The fire flared in the silver wolf’s eyes, blotting out everything as the torch was thrust down toward her face.

“Jesu mercy!” the man screamed. “That isn’t a dog!”

She went back on her haunches. The woman commanded the wolf.
The torches! Get the torches! In the darkness you are the stronger
.

The wolf backed, twisted away from the flames. The man holding the torch was trying desperately to draw his sword.

The wolf, maddened by rage and fire, thought only of two things—throat and groin. With the merciless logic of a killer, she went for the groin. The throat was too far. She wasn’t sure enough of her powers.

She uncoiled, driven upward like a striking snake. She missed the groin, but her teeth snapped shut in the soft tissue of the upper thigh. Blood, salt, and thick stinking of raw meat flooded the wolf’s mouth and nose.

The man gave a piercing scream of pure agony, tore free, and bashed at the wolf’s back with the torch.

The wolf dropped off, rolling.

The man staggered backward, crashed into Lucilla and the other men struggling. They all went down in a heap. The torches fell clear and lay flickering, half extinguished by the damp soil.

The garden was suddenly in darkness.

The wolf lunged with a roar of fury at the men on top of Lucilla. They scattered, scrambling, crawling in all directions.

Basil dived for a torch as Lucilla came up fighting, the hoe still in her hands. She slammed one man across the chest; a few of his ribs snapped. She caught another across the back, driving his face down into the mud.

Screams and cries rang out from behind the wolf. More torches appeared. “The pope’s militia!” someone shouted. “They’re coming!”

The garden blazed. Lucilla’s servants mustered to defend their mistress.

Basil and his men ran. The wolf barrelled along behind them. She broke through a low screen of pomegranate bushes and raced among the tree trunks of the orchard toward a low wall. Basil and his men were up and over it in seconds.

The wolf hesitated, then gathered herself. She had never
really run free. One easy leap took her over the barrier. Basil and his men were already mounted and galloping away.

For a second she stood still in the darkness; flanks heaving with exertion until a thunder of hoofbeats sounded from behind and sent her diving for cover.

A company of the Roman civil militia swept past, riding hard after Basil and his men.

Silence fell. The silver wolf slipped out of the brush and stood, paws in the dust of the road, dread and terror churning inside her.

Beyond the walls of the villa she could hear voices. She moved off down the road quickly, instinctively, seeking the comfort of darkness, the obscurity of the night.

There was no moon, only the dazzling streamer of the Milky Way arching above her. A road of light. She didn’t know what Lucilla or Basil had seen. Basil had a face full of mud. Lucilla was fighting for her life.

One thing the silver wolf did know. She didn’t want to go back. The silver wolf was free, bewildered, frightened, and yet aquiver with frantic joy.

She was free.

She trotted on, dropping into the mile-eating lope of a creature that makes nothing of a fifty-mile hunt.

The wolf’s heart sang. Old memories called out of the ebb and flow of the blood in her veins. Memories not her own. Oh, there were forests the wolf’s heart remembered: tall forests that clothed mountainsides, trees of pine, fir, and spruce, a landscape bejeweled by the blue lakes filled with fish. Lowland forests of oak, ash, beech, and elm, swarming with the dark antlered shapes of deer. They fed in clearings drenched by moonlight.

She hunted them, age upon age long gone. She was the swift-footed, sharp-fanged mistress of the night, taking her blood tribute in the silver glow. She fled across sun-drenched plains where the smoke of grass fires hung sharp in her nostrils. She ate her fill of beasts fallen in panicked flight from the flames.

She tracked her prey across frozen, lifeless wastes. Her belly rumbled with hunger. Her paws, frost-crusted with splinters of ice forming between her pads, left bloody footprints in the
snow. Her heart yearned for the warm, blood heat of the kill, a full belly, and sleep.

She was all these things and more—strength, courage, and a defiant beauty.
Am I wolf or woman?
she wondered, then stopped on the crest of a low hill to feel the stillness, the aliveness, the perfect solitude of the night. It enfolded her as a mother’s arms enfold a child and protect it from harm.

The wind was cool, refreshed by the scent of dew just beginning to settle on green growing things. It ruffled the fur of her neck and face pleasantly. The woman would have been cold, but the wolf, protected by her pelt, was warm.

The legion of stars shed a faint light on the landscape. On one side, the dark hills rolled away, sloping gently into the plain of Campagna; on the other lay the city of Rome, its lights a cluster of fireflies flickering around the smooth, black snake of the Tiber. The breeze from that direction carried the stench of an open sewer.

Am I wolf or woman?
she wondered again. Both the wolf and the woman were in accord with each other; each would be incomplete without the other. Yet the open spaces of the hills and even the desolation of the war-shattered Campagna called out to the wolf’s heart. She wanted to turn her face into the clean wind, to vanish into the tall grass and remain a beast among beasts forever.

But the woman knew better. The woman knew morning would come and she would find herself naked and defenseless and alone. For better or worse, her destiny was forever linked with sleepers whose lights flickered like dying embers in the valley below.

Neither wolf nor woman
, she thought,
but something more than either one, or less, different and so, perhaps, damned
. Would she end hated and accursed, dying in flames at a stake, condemned by the church? Or perhaps stoned by humans fearful of her powers? She remembered with icy fear the funeral party’s quick acceptance of Silve’s accusation. Others might be as precipitous as they.

That she had lived this long was a challenge to the accepted order of her world—a challenge to death. And live she would
until life was torn from her. Live and never yield the woman to save the wolf, or the wolf to save the woman. She would live to be herself, to be free or be dead.

She trotted to the center of the road and sniffed the air. Amidst the smell of horse and sweat, animal and human, there was the scent of blood.

The wolf dropped her nose to the ground. She’d wounded one of Basil’s men. He was still bleeding. She set off in pursuit.

Basil and his men hadn’t returned to the city. They’d circled its outskirts, traveling out across the Campagna toward the sea.

On the rich plain of the Campagna, nature had once smiled beneficently on man. Blessed with the fertile soil of volcanic peaks, mild summers, and gentle winters, it once overflowed with milk and honey. Now, no more. Four centuries of warfare over that pearl of prizes, the imperial city, had turned it into a wasteland of swamps and ruins.

Unlike most of rocky Italy, it was not locally defensible and no power remained strong enough to protect it. The fortress of Casino, towering alone above the plain, offered refuge to those few travelers who braved its fear-haunted darkness. Only armed parties of men traveled here alone at night. They, and the silver wolf, drawn by she knew not what.

She moved with the easy lope of a hunting wolf, following the trail of blood, the scent of horses and men clear in her nostrils now.

Her nose caught the tang of woodsmoke, even before she saw the fire. She increased her pace.

It had once been a temple of Apollo, a sanctuary of the god of light. Now, the tall columns were fallen and the cella was an empty shell. Even the statue of the god was gone. Only the face of the dread monster brooded from the pediment—her hair snakes, her tongue protruding from her mouth as if to lap up the blood of sacrifices.

Basil and his men were camped in the ruins. They were gathered around their fire blazing on the broken porch of the temple.

The wolf stole up through the black poplar trunks of what once had been the gods’ sacred grove. She stopped, face screened by the tall grass, listening and watching. The wolf was
disappointed. Basil had many more men with him than he’d had at Lucilla’s villa.

Far too many for a lone wolf to challenge.

Basil stood on the stained marble steps to the temple, speaking to someone hidden by the firelight. “There’s no rescue for you, and none for that brother of yours. Not now that I have him. Whatever path he takes leads to his destruction.”

“Do you hate him so much then?” a voice asked from the doorway into the ruined cella.

The wolf knew the voice.
Antonius
. She eased to one side, where her eyes weren’t blinded by the flames, and saw him, robed in black, the mantle, as always, covering his face.

“Hate him?” Basil asked. “Christ, no. I don’t give a damn about him. When I take the city, he can stay pope as long as he does as he’s told.”

Pope! That rocked even the wolf’s mind. Regeane had known “Stephen” had power. But she hadn’t guessed quite what kind or how much. That Stephen might be Pope Hadrian himself hadn’t entered her mind.

She drew closer. She peered through a leafy screen of low bushes and tall grass at the men gathered before the porch of the temple.

“I can’t think I’ll be of much use to you,” Antonius said with angry bitterness. “I’m a dying man, and I hope my brother has more sense then to let you blackmail him with threats against my rotting carcass.”

“A very apt description, my friend. The stench of the charnel house does hang about you,” Basil said. “But you were a young man when you were taken with the disease, and I’ll lay odds you’d last a long time tied to a cross.”

The two eyes, all that Antonius ever showed the world, closed slowly. The shoulders under the black mantle slumped in resignation. He got to his feet, went to the fire, and fished out one of the flaming branches.

“I assume,” he said to Basil with quiet dignity, “that you wouldn’t begrudge even a captive a fire against the cold.”

Basil drew away as if afraid of contagion. “No, I wouldn’t, and you’ll have food if you want it.”

“I don’t.”

“As you wish,” Basil said indifferently. “Now crawl into your hole and give the rest of us some relief from the sight and stink of you.”

Whack! An arrow quivered in the trunk of a sapling near the silver wolf’s shoulder. In seconds she was twenty feet away, deep in the darkness. It took all the woman’s strength to master the wolf’s reflexes.

She heard Basil shout, “What the devil!”

“Eyes!” one of the men shouted. “The eyes of some animal, watching us from the darkness beyond the fire.”

The silver wolf stood trembling among the tree trunks.

“Build up the fire then, and stop shooting at shadows,” Basil snarled.

The silver wolf crouched and then moved farther away as men with torches approached the spot where she’d been hiding.

Some laughed. “Look, Drusis. You killed a tree.”