The Wolf King (29 page)

“No,” Regeane answered, laughing a little despite her somber mood. “How could that be so?”

Dorcas nodded. “Yes.” She gave a rather grim smile. “Are you not afraid of your… strange… lord?”

“No,” Regeane said. “Nor he of me. In fact, if you knew him, you would find him more amiable and gentle than the majority of men.”

“God, that’s the truth. I can remember a time or two when we were first married that I bore the marks of my man’s displeasure.”

“He struck you?”

“Once. Once I complained to my father and mother but they laughed at me.”

“What did you do?”

“The second time he did it, I told him he’d best not sleep in this house, so he left. There was a terrible to-do.” Dorcas laughed. “My parents visited me, then the priest who quoted scripture. I told him I never saw it in the scriptures where a man had a right to give his wife a black eye.

“The town was without bread, but my husband returned and said he would do me no more violence and gave me his word. I took it and we lived together in peace and joy until he died. You see, I could not see wherein I had earned his displeasure. I was doing my best and working hard. He simply didn’t care for his supper. I had not cooked the meat long enough. I told him, my mother and father, and the priest I would not live with a cruel tyrant. I would rather die or take myself off to the roads and earn my bread begging at church doors or spreading my legs for all comers with the price.”

Regeane nodded. “A victory. By such victories women make their lives tolerable.”

“Itta never saw it that way,” Dorcas said. “She let her husband rule her in all things. That’s why I didn’t lend her the money to set up shop here in the town. I wouldn’t put my hard-earned cash into his hand. He’d just as likely have frittered it away on nonsense, drinking, gambling in the taverns, trying to impress his friends. So all I have now are my regrets for what I have lost: my closest friend and Robert’s future wife.”

She began weeping again and Regeane did what she could to comfort her. “Don’t blame yourself so,” Regeane whispered. “How… oh, how could you know? Besides, those men are the ones responsible.”

Dorcas dried her tears. “They’re dead men.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Dorcas answered quietly.

“How will they go about it?”

“Tonight the tavern keeper will drug their wine, then Robert and some of the other men will bind them and take them to yonder church.” She pointed across the alley.

Regeane turned and looked through a crack in the shutters.

The church appeared dark and empty, but the wolf’s ears heard movement in the alley and inside the building.

“They will remain there until the king calls the assembly to deal with your husband the wolf. Then we will give Desiderius one more chance to be a king to us. But one way or another, these men will die. They will fall either to private vengeance or to the king’s justice. Robert and the other men are determined upon it.”

“My husband?” Regeane asked.

Dorcas looked away and would not meet her eyes. “He will have his chance to speak in his own defense. The law guarantees him that. More than that I cannot promise.”

The cold night wind fanned Regeane’s cheek through the shutters. “I see,” she said.

“No, no, you don’t,” Dorcas said. “I have procured a quiet night’s sleep for you, but that is all.” This time she met Regeane’s eyes directly. “Should you try to escape this room, well, Robert and some of the other men will be just below us. There is a sentinel present now.

“You and your husband come to aid our enemies. Yes, the men here are loath to kill a woman, especially one only trying to do her duty to her wedded lord—whatever he may be. But should you cause a disturbance or try to escape, they will do what they must. Understand?”

“Understood,” Regeane said.

“Now, let us sleep,” Dorcas said. “If we can. If I can. Blow out the candle.”

Regeane extinguished the candle on her side of the bed. Regeane settled herself into the bed with its down mattresses and comforters. Soft, softer even than her bed in her chamber in the mountains. She was asleep almost the moment her head touched the pillow.

But Remingus and his dead legionaries walked with her through her dreams, and together they spoke of many, many things—about life, death, desperate loss, and the rise and fall of empires, cities, and men. Regeane remembered the night as one long conversation, but when she was awakened by the cold gray predawn light creeping past the shutters, she could remember nothing of what was said.

“My thoughts are with you,” she whispered.
My only love. I must try. Forgive me, but I must try
. Then she rose and, donning Mona’s clothing, began to braid her hair, readying herself for this important day.

Dorcas was already up and gone. Regeane descended the ladders down to Dorcas’s bake shop. The woman was waiting. Time for a bit of breakfast.

Regeane didn’t feel like eating, but another of Matrona’s lessons was that she needed more nourishment than most humans commonly require to fuel the energies that allowed her to change from wolf to woman and back. And she might need all her strength today. Sops of bread and wine, a pottage of beans with snails and garlic.

Then Dorcas lent her a heavy brown veil. “With luck they will not know who you are,” she said as Regeane wound it around her head and shoulders. “Now I must bring food to the men in the church.” She lifted a basket in the corner and left, going to the alley at the back of the church.

Regeane stood alone. Dorcas hadn’t shut the door behind her—an open invitation to flee, Regeane thought.
I will not leave him to his fate. He would not leave me to mine
. She turned and saw Remingus standing in a corner, finishing the last of the pottage. “You are here,” she said.

“I am here,” he answered. “For you.”

He was no longer the empty-eyed ghost that had first confronted her, but the man she’d seen yesterday. She remembered sharing a drink from his helmet. “You are dust,” she said.

“Not so anyone would notice,” he replied. “We will go together to the square. I will accompany you and Dorcas—she will see me.”

“What will happen?”

“I don’t know.” He tipped the pot and swallowed the liquid in the bottom. “Very good. Dorcas is an excellent cook; the snails were a nice touch. You see, my magnificent hunter, death does not confer omniscience.” He was swathed from head to foot in a dark burgundy and brown mantle.

Dorcas returned and was surprised to see him. “Who is this?” she asked.

“A friend,” Regeane said.

She stared fixedly at Remingus. “I didn’t know you had any friends in the city.”

“I don’t,” Regeane replied. “Remingus is from somewhat farther away. He lived near a lake in the wine country near Rome.”

“Yes,” Remingus replied. “I did. Yes, once long ago. But let us be on our way. The sun is up and burns away the morning mist. Soon the king will be in the forum.”

He was right. When the three reached the ancient forum, they found it already crowded and more people arriving every moment. The sellers of fried bread and vegetables and others with wineskins and beer loaded on muleback were already doing a brisk business at the outskirts of the crowd. All one needed was a cup and a few coppers.

The morning coolness was fading in the bright sunlight, and the people were imbibing freely of the refreshments offered by the food and wine vendors. Regeane felt uneasy. This was, despite the party atmosphere, not a happy gathering. Too many men were drinking heavily, too much, too early. A significant number of men clad in heavy mantles weren’t drinking anything at all.

Regeane felt the hair rise on her neck as the wolf informed her almost every adult male was armed, and not a few of the women also. Dorcas had two heavy, long, carving knives in her belt. They were, as with most of the rest, concealed by her mantle. Most folk were milling around, greeting old acquaintances and passing the time of day. Regeane knew almost no one here, so she and Remingus drifted toward the outskirts of the crowd. The forum was surrounded by colonnades on all four sides. Two colonnades were the porches of shops and warehouses where the rich produce of the countryside was stored and business was transacted. The third was the portico of the king’s palace, and the fourth the entrance to the sometime temple of Roma, now a Christian cathedral. Its high steps and massive portico towered above the rest.

“He is there,” Regeane said.

Remingus had no need to reply. The wolf found traces of Maeniel on the stones, the steps, and on a gust of unaccountable wind that lifted her veil and tugged at her braided hair. A terrible bottomless sense of loss tore through her entire being, even as the wind lifted dust from the cobbles under her feet and set the clothing of what was now a mob to flapping and snapping in the blast.

“They are going to riot,” she whispered.

“I think so,” Remingus answered. He steered her between the shops across from the church to the edge of the forum. The wind died, and the air was oddly still.

When they reached the end of the alley between the warehouses, Regeane found she could look out over the rooftops of the town and the countryside beyond. She sniffed the wind. In the darkness of her deepest mind, the wolf rose.

Go,
her nightmare sister whispered.
Go. He was mad to have involved himself in the doings of these foolish kings. He will pay the forfeit. Run! Smell the rain carried by the wind. They will burn nothing today. Change. Leap out. The tile roofs and stone walls will bear your weight easily
.

Regeane’s hair shifted on her head. The braid unraveled itself, and her hair fell unconfined to her shoulders. Then there was a shout from the forum.

“The king. The king is coming.”

The veil slid away from her face to her shoulders. “No,” the woman whispered. “Whatever happens, whatever fate he meets, he will not journey forth alone. In life or death, I vow I will be at his side.”

“The horizon is darkening,” Remingus said.

“The air is still,” Regeane answered.

There was another louder shout, “The king.”

In the church the bishop, servants, and the captain of Desiderius’s guard threw a rope ladder into the pit.

Maeniel came up.

They had ten crossbows trained on him. One wrong move, and he would be a sieve. He calculated the wolf’s chances of survival under those circumstances and found them nil. He was ordered to kneel, and chains were fastened at his wrists, ankles, and neck. He was still nude, but the captain of the guard took pity on him to the extent of cutting a hole in a worn-out blanket and dropping it over his head. Then he was prodded along at spearpoint up the stairs, through the church, and past the door until he stood on the portico.

The square was filled by now. Most were gathered near the church as the trial had been announced. He was the most celebrated prisoner and enemy of the Lombard kingdom the king had ever taken. His warrior prowess was legendary even over and above his reputation for sorcery.

Maeniel stared, with the feral gaze of an absolute wolf, at the people pushing and shoving for a good look at him. His face held the defiance that is at the same time indifference, as if to say, You are lucky I am chained but it doesn’t matter because you cannot frighten me with fire or the sword. I know who and what I am, and in life or death I am free: the absolute self-assurance of the beast that is absolute innocence and cannot be forced into guilt or regret as lesser human creatures can.

He studied their eyes and then looked out toward the haze of the horizon’s rim. He saw the building storm, felt the heat, saw dust rise over the newly plowed fields of the royal estates near the city. Then his guards prodded him down the steps and across the square toward the king, who was sitting along with the bishops and other Lombard notables in the shade of the palace portico overlooking both his prisoner and the throng.

Regeane pushed in with the rest toward Maeniel. She hadn’t thought how the sight of him would affect her, so close and yet a world away. But she was practical, too. In this situation, he would need all his strength and confidence to save his life. So she must not unman him. He must not guess her presence among the crowd.

In a half-frozen forest in the upper reaches of his wild domain, he would have known if she drew within a dozen miles of him, but here among the press of perspiring humans, her presence was masked by the thousand odors generated by men and women and all the items of commerce in the shops and warehouses around the forum, compounded by the bellicose mood of the males in the crowd.

To the wolf their raw fury and aggression was a strangling reek. Left to himself in this atmosphere, the wolf would have tucked his tail between his legs and fled at as fast a run as he could manage and, moreover, not stopped until he reached a much cleaner place. The man thought darkly that someone was in for a lot of trouble today. Was it himself?

No. No. His guards were able to shove the throng aside easily, and when the males, the most dangerous ones, looked at Maeniel, all the wolf saw in their faces was mild curiosity. He was being properly humbled, barefoot, wearing an old blanket as a tunic. His hair a rat’s nest, his body smeared with silt from the stone floor of his damp cell, he wearing a steel collar around his neck and chains dangling from every limb.

If anything, he seemed to arouse pity in the hearts of the women; the men were indifferent. He sensed they were preoccupied by other urgent concerns.

Just ahead he saw the king sitting comfortably in the shade of the palace portico. This time Desiderius didn’t allow the bishop to present himself almost as an equal, as the prelate had in the church. The king was seated in the center of the porch, his court standing around him. The bishop, in deference to his age, had also been given a chair but lower and to one side of the king, whose throne was placed on a dais.

Maeniel suppressed a smile as his guards reached the foot of the three steps leading to the portico. He was thrust to his knees by the captain of the guard, while the mercenaries rather brutally cleared an open space before the king.