The Silver Wolf (32 page)

She met him with a roar of such primal fury that it seemed to shake the very walls around them. For a second, Regeane wanted—with an absolute purity of purpose unknown to humankind—to feel her teeth meet in the soft flesh of his throat.

Gundabald drew back. His face had blanched even in the torchlight. He fled the way he came, to the safety of the triclinium.

THE WOLF RAN TOWARD THE LATERAN BASILICA. It smelled cleaner than the palace. The raw fury and pain in her heart swept the woman aside as though she’d never been. She fled trying to find the clean, green hills beyond the city.

In a few moments, she was trotting among the tall columns supporting the church roof. They seemed a forest of marble to the wolf’s eye.

The giant church edifice was drenched in the scents of candle wax and incense mixed with the cool, musky damp of a building hidden from sunlight for a long time. As much a place of innocence as the forest glades that haunted the woman’s dreams. And then abruptly the torchlight from beyond the portals of the cathedral flashed in her eyes.

Rage still burned hot in the wolf’s heart. She ran toward the torches seeking she knew not what—an enemy to fight, freedom to be won?

She skidded to a stop in the shadow beside Hadrian where he stood facing the Lombards. He made his stand alone. The woman, a remote figure in the wolf’s mind now, hadn’t warned him in time.

The square was filled with mounted Lombard troops, all armed to the teeth.

Hadrian had his arms raised to command silence. “Why do you come here?” he shouted. “Why do you dare to threaten the vicar of Christ himself?”

The troops seemed to pull back, huddled together, abashed by the pope’s words.

But Basil rode to the forefront. “Your day is done,” he shouted back at Hadrian. “We have taken the fortress of Nepi, Palestrea, and Piastem, and now Rome is our prize. Yield to me before we put you to the sword.”

From the shadows, the wolf could see Hadrian’s profile above her. He was a head of Caesar on a silver coin, unyielding, jaw tight, mouth firm below the sharp-bladed nose, his eyes were like stone reflecting the torchlight. Churchman and warrior both. Threaten him with the sword or not, the wolf knew he would never yield.

The wolf heard a smash, the sound of rending timber and stone. Shouts came from the deep, shadowed darkness surrounding the square. Lights sprang to life in every window and balcony. A mob, culled from every quarter of the city, gathered. The Romans were preparing to protect the pope.

The mounted men behind Basil cast uncertain glances at them, but Basil rode toward the slender, white-garbed figure.

The wolf lunged forward in front of Hadrian. In the torchlight she appeared almost a creature without substance, a silver shape composed of moonlight and black shadow. But her head was lowered and her ivory fangs gleamed golden in the flaring lights.

The wolf heard a whisper travel through the mob. “Lupa, the wolf of Rome, herself.”

For a moment the crowd and the soldiers were absolutely silent. The horses stirred and the soft click of their hooves on the cobbles was the only sound.

The wrong sound
, the wolf thought.
There should have been a drumming
.

It was so when she had hunted them before. Ah, the plains had been a sea and the long, wind-tossed grasses sang with the music of freedom in a boundless land where soft, white clouds
hung in masses casting long, cool shadows on the green eternity as they passed. The horses had run in herds so vast as they thundered over grassy expanse that they rivaled the very clouds above. Brown and roan, black and red, their coats shimmered in the sun, prey, and yet companions in freedom. The hunter and the hunted tethered to each other by an unquestioned necessity, challenging each other forever in their need, and the freedom of their hearts.

The stallion Basil rode reared and screamed a challenge. The wolf knew he’d fought her kind before. He was blind with rage and the desire to destroy her. The wolf leaped forward like an arrow leaving the bow. The stallion’s hooves came down, striking at her skull. But the woman was gone. The wolf was present and she understood with a savage intensity what she had to do.

At the last second before the first slashing hoof struck her skull, she dodged and lunged for the stallion’s hamstrings. The stallion lashed out with his heels.

One hoof caught the wolf on the shoulder. She was kicked into the air, flying for a second, then falling, rolling over and over the cobbles.

The risk was a nasty one, really dangerous. Left to herself, the wolf would have run. She staggered, in terrible pain from the kick in the ribs. A few felt as if they might be broken. The woman was in command again. If she could enrage or terrorize the horse, he might throw Basil on the ground. The man would be at the mercy of her fangs. She wanted to kill him. She could still feel the bite of the iron collar around her neck. With cold, conscious ferocity, she charged the stallion.

The horse reared, and with a whistling shriek, met her halfway. She leaped up, going for the soft, sensitive nose.

The stallion, enraged, with incredible swiftness in an animal so big, slashed at her with his fore hooves, ready to follow up his advantage and trample the wolf into bloody scraps of fur and bone. But the man on his back hampered his efforts.

The stallion bucked, throwing Basil to the ground. He landed at the base of the steps to the Lateran basilica with a crash of armor and a howl of fury. The stallion charged the wolf, striking sparks from the stones as he galloped toward her.

The wolf barely had time to get her feet under her before the stallion was upon her. The hooves slammed down on the cobbles like a rain of bludgeons aimed at her face, turning her back away from the pope and Basil.

Damn him
, the woman thought,
I want that human bastard who is even now trying to shake off the stunning effects of the fall
.

Basil was screaming at the top of his lungs, “Kill the unnatural bitch … kill it … kill it!”

But the Lombards were having problems of their own. Fear spread among horses the way lightning flashes across the sky; their mounts were a milling, rearing, dancing mass.

The stallion was a maddened juggernaut. No one and nothing wanted to be in his path. The wolf was. Woman and wolf melted into one. Locked in the logic and commitment of battle. Now, there was no more running away. It was kill or be killed.

The wolf lunged at the horse’s hocks again and again, trying to hamstring him. Round and round they went, a wild melee of horse and wolf, spinning toward the empty center of the square as Basil’s men and the mob both drew back before the furious animals.

Dimly, the wolf was aware the mob around the square was chanting, “Lupa! Lupa!”, cheering her, egging her on.

But the horse was too fast, too powerful.

Every time she lunged toward him she met flying hooves, flailing heels, and bared teeth, and she had to leap back to avoid death beneath them.

The wolf knew sooner or later one of them would make a mistake.

The stallion’s foot slipped on the wet stones. He didn’t lose his footing, but he staggered.

In a flash, the wolf was back on her haunches. A second later she was in the air. She landed on the stallion’s neck. Teeth met with a crunching snap in the spine where it is thinnest, just below the head.

The horse reared and plunged, flinging the wolf back, then down toward the stones.

The torchlight whirled before her eyes. The wolf spun as she was flung wildly from side to side. The world vanished. Fear vanished. Nothing was left but her grip at the back of the horse’s
neck. A wolf’s jaws can break a man’s thighbone, the longest, strongest bone in the body. She closed them. The spine snapped under her fangs. The stallion’s death scream was a horror.

The wolf was flung free and again she slammed down gasping, aware her mouth was filled with a wave of blood, this time not her own.

But wolflike she’d landed, rolling, realizing even as she got her footing that Basil’s men were bunched at the end of the square beyond the dead horse, still trying to control their frightened mounts.

The wolf didn’t hesitate. Lowering her head, her muzzle dripping blood, her pelt glowing golden in the torchlight, she went for Basil’s cavalry like a streak of flame. Whatever discipline had held them down before, snapped.

Madness flowed through the horses like the ripples spreading from the center when a stone is cast into a pond. In seconds, they were all over the square, bucking, plunging, rearing, screaming in a frenzy of mindless, animal fear.

At the same moment, more torchlight flared at one of the entrances to the square. Dimly the wolf knew the papal guard was arriving and, because of her, they had come in time.

They smashed into Basil’s demoralized cavalry the way a battering ram strikes a crumbling gate and the mob followed them.

All around the wolf the square exploded into violence. She found herself twisting and turning and dodging a barrage of flying hooves as pain-drenched horror and exultation warred between beast and human in her heart.

She fled into the welcoming darkness of the Lateran church. She didn’t afterward remember how the wolf found her dress in the dark corridor. She only knew that after a short time, her paws scrabbled on silk and the scented cloth that had been in contact with the woman’s skin.

The wolf fought her, wanting, desiring the night, dreaming of running free. A sweet hunger pervaded her mind. An image of endless grasslands, drenched and freshened by rain, beckoned her. They flowed away like a vast sea as she ran under a bowl of starry heavens untainted by human light. The wolf dreamed, but the woman knew. This time, the woman won.

With the wolf’s heart-hunger echoing in her veins, Regeane
found herself kneeling on the rags of her dress. Feeling hideously naked and vulnerable, she scrambled into the obligatory three layers of clothing worn by a respectable Roman woman.

She was overwhelmed by pain. Her face and mouth were covered with blood. Shivering in the darkness, she wondered how much was splattered on her dress. It seemed as though blood drowned the world. The taste was hot and sweet in her mouth. Enough of the wolf was left in her to relish the taste and revel in the sense of power the killing brought, but the woman felt defiled.

She had killed. She had taken life. The horse’s blood stank and steamed on her face and hands.

Dimly, even through the heavy stone walls, she could hear the sounds in the square as the people and the pope’s men drove out the Lombards.

She stumbled to her feet, reeling, and leaned against the wall. She struggled through the empty silent corridors until she found a courtyard where a fountain danced and played.

She washed out her mouth and scrubbed her face and arms. She could see by the faint starlight that water poured from a Gorgon’s head into a scallop-shell basin. Spray from the fountain watered a patch of sweet fennel and she fell to her knees, her cheek against the cool, marble basin, feeling the feathery touch of fernlike leaves against her face. The gentle licorice scent of the herbs drove the anguish and confusion from her mind and set her quivering nerves to rest.

The wolf rose in her mind gently, quietly this time, not trying to change or control her, but simply present, reveling in the peace of the dark garden. Away from the battles and perplexities of humankind. The wolf’s nose told her there were other herbs here, their perfumes drifting in the moist, dark air. The thick sweetness of mint and the sharp scent of thyme at her feet.

The woman wanted to question her dark companion, but the wolf didn’t reply to questions. She simply was and, as always, brought all her being to bear on the moment’s problems. She sensed the woman’s suffering and wished to bring her to peace.

Here, together at last in this little splinter of wilderness,
caught amidst the vast matrix of human works, unthreatened and alone, they became one.

To the wolf there was no right or wrong, good or evil. There was only the pattern and she was part of the pattern. To judge as the woman did was as foreign to her nature as were hope and despair.

To the wolf, the world was a tapestry of things given—sunrises scarlet, then gold; sunsets arrayed in purple shadow and bloody light; plains awash in tall grasses and mountains drifting against blue skies; and gray storms that rose, coalescing seemingly out of nothing in the upper air, then roaming at random, drenching the earth with rain. Spending their fury in wild bursts of lightning.

Life was part of the pattern and death, too, as were blood and pain. She herself had struggled uncountable times, sodden with suffering, down the long, dark path into starless night. But this, too, was part of the pattern, part of the seamless tapestry of light and darkness whose only assurance was in its own endless, ever-changing repetition, always different, yet the same forever.

The pattern was beauty, somehow always in everlasting harmony with itself. Beauty was! Ugliness, sadness, despair were human judgments imposed by lesser, frightened minds on the whole shining spectrum of reality whose boundaries the wolf couldn’t even dimly comprehend.

She knew only that it was, and she was part of the pattern and content with being itself and engulfed by endless and everlasting love for her reality and her world.

The wolf’s mindset faded slowly as she slipped into silence, leaving the woman’s mind fully awake, still questioning, but at peace.

She rested quietly on her heels beside the basin, listening to the musical sound of falling water, drinking in the sweet air cleansed by the storm a few hours before.

I am human
, Regeane thought stubbornly,
and more than the wolf is. Or am I less?
She couldn’t answer her own question, and didn’t care to try.

The wolf’s ears, ever alert, told her someone was coming. The woman’s mind knew the step.

Lucilla.

LUCILLA RAISED THE TORCH, ILLUMINATING REGEANE kneeling by the fountain. “My, but you’re hard on clothes,” she said, giving a disapproving look to Regeane’s gown.