The Silver Wolf (45 page)

She stood and spun in joy, looking into her mirror. “I am myself again.”

Herophile, sitting on her throne, sighed deeply. “Come, Adraste,” she said. “It is as you have long desired?”

“Yes,” Adraste whispered, but she couldn’t seem to tear her eyes from the mirror in her hands. “All my beauty is returned to me. I have it now for eternity.”

Regeane curled her injured hand and clutched it close to her breast. Waves of pain ran up her arm, jolting her right to the edge of consciousness.

“Tell me, Adraste,” she whispered, through dry lips. “How may I save Antonius?”

“Find Daedalus’ garden,” she said, almost absently. Her gaze riveted on the mirror. “Cross the waste until you reach a river of fire. Many ghosts flit along its banks, unable to cross. Some of the ghosts will not see you. Many will not care even if they do. But you must search there until you find one willing to carry you across. But take care when you do. If you exchange one word with that vagrant throng, or answer when they speak or if they answer you, then you are doomed to wander among them forever. Beyond the river is Daedalus’ garden.”

“Antonius saw you as you were, didn’t he?” Regeane asked. “I mean when he painted you with the glass in your hand. He was just another mirror to you.”

For the first time Adraste tore her gaze from the mirror and directed a malevolent glare at Regeane.

“That’s all love means to you, isn’t it?” Regeane asked. “To see your loveliness mirrored in the pleasure of another’s face and eyes. Because of that, you took him for your lover and your victim.”

“Unnatural thing,” Adraste shrilled. “Not beast and yet not human, who are you to condemn me? You who are destined never to know love unless it leads to death.”

Then she turned back to the mirror in her hand and smiled, crooning softly to herself in a comforting way. “I have my beauty. It’s all I ask, and if I doubt, I can always look into my mirror and see it there.”

Slowly she began to drift away; but even as she did, Regeane saw her body was begining to fall into the ruin of the grave
again. Yet the reflection in the mirror remained unchanged—a face young and beautiful forever.

Then, from the timeless current of air that blew across the waste, a zephyr took her and she drifted like a fallen leaf taken by the wind into the immense reaches of eternity.

“She is in hell and doesn’t know it,” Regeane said to Herophile and Crysta.

“I cannot say,” Herophile answered. “In time she might come to know herself better.”

“But there is no time here,” Regeane answered.

“True,” Herophile answered. “No time, but many mysteries. So there is hope that one day she may forswear self-love for compassion and regret. But to do so would bring pain, so she would rather stay as she is. Know well, Regeane, that the price of paradise is pain. Now if
you
have the will, go seek it and heal Antonius.”

When she ceased speaking, she also seemed to cease to be. Wherever Herophile went she took Crysta with her, and Regeane found herself alone. She heard only the endless moan of the wind and the roar of the fires at the top of the pylons.

Whatever compulsion had kept Regeane woman was lifted also, and she found herself wolf again. She started out across what Herophile had called the ruined land. Every time her forepaw touched the ground, the pain was like a red hot iron slicing into the sensitive pad of her foot, but the wolf, controlled by the woman’s will, held to her task and drove on.

The ruined land was rock and sand, the sky a dark starless pall, and Regeane found her way by the light of burning cities. As she drew close to each one, she found they were inhabited, filled with the senseless cruelty and blind tragedy that has afflicted man since time began.

In the streets, illuminated by flames pouring over burning rooftops, leaping from the windows and doors of dying dwellings, wives wept over their fallen husbands, men cried out against heaven as they stared down at ravished and murdered mothers and daughters.

In places the gutters ran red with the blood of the slain and the victors rioted drunkenly amidst the slaughter even as they, too, were felled by disease and ran themselves on each other’s
swords to escape the pain of water running from their bowels and lumpish swelling of armpit and groin that drove them wild with misery. Others were beset by torture, flaying, branding, blinding, burning and they writhed in agony even as they turned on their torturers and sent them by the same road.

All these visions tormented the wolf as she dragged herself onward. Her suffering consisted in wondering if she saw actual spirits locked in an endless repetition of cruelty, pain, and despair. What little comfort she felt lay in believing they were only shadows of what had been, and somewhere the souls of those enduring so much agony, suffering were free.

The last city was only rubble filled with bloated corpses eaten by dogs and flies. Ahead of her she saw a forest and through the forest ran a river of fire.

The wolf stumbled into a painful lope, her heart hungry for the trees, for the coolness under the heavy boughs. The ash was a torture almost as intense as her wounded paw. Perhaps in the forest she could find clean water to drink and she would smell something besides smoke dust and burning flesh.

But when she drew closer to the forest she saw it was a ruin also. Charred dead trees lifted a tracery of leafless branches against the sullen sky. A sky reflecting the bloody light of burning cities. In a few moments she was among the skeletal undergrowth at its edge. She felt the dead branches snap against her body as she passed. They were brittle and rotten.

Down the slope she struggled, toward the river of fire. Many trees were fallen, shattered into tangles of sinister branches and thorny growth, the deadfalls traps for her tired feet.

The only water she found there stank of mold and was heavy with the tannins released by rotting wood. Bark hung in strips from the trunks of trees still standing like flesh falling from the bones of a corpse. The forest was no sanctuary. Still she struggled on down and down toward the river. Its fires glimmered through the trees.

At the rocky bank, Regeane found the ghosts of which Adraste had spoken. Some of them she could see, but even the wolf turned her eyes from them. Some walked unseeing, lips moving in silent communion with themselves. Others wept or raged, teeth clenched, spitting out the bile and fury of a lifetime
at the empty dark. Others were only sad, lonely voices drifting on the wind. Their words were a torment to her ears and seemed to demand she speak if only to offer them what little comfort she could.

They cried out of the heart-wrenching tragedy of being human. And Regeane, soul locked in the wolf’s body, wept silently that her wolf shape could not weep with them.

“I died in childbed …” one moaned. “Oh, the pain—the pain.”

“I was captured and taken as a slave,” a man’s voice cried in anguish. “My life was impossible without freedom. I died under torture after the third time I ran away.”

A child’s voice wailed, “I died of hunger. My mother starved me after my father left her.”

No
, the wolf thought.
No
. And despite the wound in her paw, she began to run along the rocky river bank away from this cauldron of human pain. The fires blazed from the water, scorching her side.

The voices followed like a swarm of furies dinning their misery into her ears.

“I adored my sons …” one voice whimpered, “but they poisoned me for my gold.”

“I was strangled,” another screeched. “My husband accused me of adultery. I was guiltless, but he had me strangled anyway because he wanted another richer than I.”

No
, the wolf thought, trying to return to the poor shelter of the dead trees. A heavy thicket of thorn bushes drove her back.

Then abruptly she was a woman again. The hot rocks near the river seared her feet. There was blessed, blessed silence.

The figure of a man stood before her. He was only a shadow backlit by the flames. Strangely, he alone, of all the shapes that wandered by, seemed to see her.

“I am Wolfstan, the wolf stone,” he said.

Father
, Regeane wanted to say, but didn’t. She didn’t dare let the words pass her lips.

“Hush,” he said. “Be silent as Adraste warned you. Only one of us can be heard here.”

He turned slightly. The fire illuminated him, and Regeane
saw the broad wound made by the crossbow bolt that let out the life from his chest.

“How many sunsets and sunrises has it been, Regeane, since you leapt in your mother’s womb? I have followed you from the time you first opened your eyes on the day. I remembered and loved you, and I have waited here.”

Regeane was woman now and she could weep. She walked toward him, the tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Cup your hands,” he said, “that I may drink and feel my mortality again.”

Regeane cupped her fingers. His lips touched her bloody palms. He solidified before her into a man.

The first thing he did was undo his mantle and wrap it around her body to cover her nakedness. Adraste’s warning was forgotten. Many words choked Regeane’s throat. Her loneliness was a bitter ache that held her to silence.

“Hush and be still.” He pressed a finger to Regeane’s lips. “Do not speak.

“I have followed you all the days of your life. Not just through sunrise and sunset, but through the hours of the night when the stars turn in silence about the world. Through the days when the sun burned hot on your back, and the fields baked a golden shimmer in its glory.

“I heard your voice on the summer wind, and through the lonely nights of winter when great trees crack with cold and snow blankets the earth in silence.

“I knew your dreams and fears. I peered with you and puzzled over the words in books. And I, too, struggled with you in your loneliness and pain. My daughter, my beloved daughter, you have never been alone.

“I looked through your eyes in the springtime when new growth was a green mist on the trees and meadows, and in the autumn when the bright leaves were a gay chorus of color against the brown land.

“All the days of your life have I followed and loved you. And I have waited, walking here, denying my own peace that you might know how much.”

Regeane felt his arms lift her. He carried her into the flames, roaring up from the burning river. She could feel the heat rise
around her, stifling, furious, malevolent, almost a living thing reaching out tentacles of fire to pluck her from her father’s arms. Then they were across and walking through a meadow aglow with the new light of a rising sun.

Wolfstan set her down on the grass and took her face between his palms, and she looked up at him. He was a big man with a thick thatch of sandy hair. She wondered that his face was so ordinary. He had a kind, strong man’s face with a heavy nose broken more than once in combats, scarred by the battles he had fought.

“Your mother,” he said, “never understood my double nature. She hated and feared it. God forgive her! For your mother, the Almighty always wore Gundabald’s face.

“But here on the riverbank, this chasm between self-delusion and eternity, one must leave not only the griefs of the dust but its injustices before one can seek the light eternal.

“So here I leave my love betrayed, my loss, and my bitter sorrow.”

Regeane tried to speak and felt again his finger on her lips.

“Hush, for I have seen your tears and they are stars that will light my way on all my journeys … forever.”

Then he was gone and a giant gray wolf stood where he had been. The wolf turned and ran to the edge of the meadow where the greenwood began. He turned once and stared back at Regeane and then was gone. His abiding, eternal love washed over her in a wave.

Regeane stood quietly by the edge of a forest of living green, scented by the clean pure air of morning.

She trembled with both grief and joy for a long time. Wolfstan’s mantle was made of coarse, heavy woolen stuff, edged with a narrow band of gold embroidery. It might have been part of a king’s hunting dress. She wrapped it around herself and started forward without looking back.

The grass was soft and cool under her feet and slightly damp with the morning dew. At the top of the hill, the sunrise glowed in a scattering of mackerel clouds. Her hand bled. Her blood sparkled and glowed in ruby droplets on the green grass.

Following the path the wolf took, she reached the forest. The
light there was gray. The soft moss on the barks of the trees glowed deep emerald. In the morning stillness, no bird sang.

The forest floor was carpeted with fern. The crisp, dark fronds bent under her gentle footfalls, then sprang back again, leaving no trace of her passage. The forest belt was narrow, and Regeane left the trees atop a high hill and looked down into a garden. It was cradled between the rolling forested hills like a child on the breast of its mother. She understood she had, at last, reached her goal.

She paused for a moment and stared out into the distance. The sun was over the horizon’s rim and something even brighter shone in its first rays. Was it a fair white city that gathered all light into itself? She didn’t know and couldn’t be sure because the sunrise was too bright for her eyes.

She started down into the garden. She almost cried out with pain when she reached the edge. It was fenced by a hedge of brambles—the soft four-petaled white flowers scattered over hard, black, thorny stems.

Regeane paused for a second. She was so tired. Her hand ached with a cold, dull pain. She didn’t know if she had the strength to bear any more suffering, but she stretched out her torn hand toward the rigid, dark-green stems and they parted easily at her touch.

She found herself on a flagged path walking toward a distant fountain. The path was bounded by flowers. They bloomed everywhere, riotously, indifferent to the season. Some of them Regeane knew and could call by name. Rank on rank of velvety purple lavender, thick clary sage, clover white, yellow, and purplish red, hugged the path as a border.

Behind the lower plants stood tall foxglove and abundant lilies. Ah, and such lilies as she had never seen. White with stripes of lavender, heads drooping, heavy with the dew. Other, taller ones behind them lifted crisp petals twisted back, orange and scarlet as though they waited breathlessly for the sun.