The Wolf King (35 page)

But instead of the man she felt the wolf, and he slid from the bed and drifted as silently as starlight toward the tent flap and the night outside. She sat up enraged, so enraged it frightened her. She began screaming and throwing things at him. When he turned human in astonishment and fright at seeing his formerly compliant wife turn into a shrieking virago, she’d dissolved into a storm of weeping.

In under a moment the tent was full of wolves. All of them blaming him for doing something terrible to her, or trying to comfort her and abate her hysterics. Matrona entered then, carrying a flagon. She persuaded Regeane to take a few sips. The stuff tasted dreadful but it warmed and soothed Regeane no end.

“What is it?” Regeane asked when she could speak again.

“A little something I picked up among the isles, back of the north wind.”

No one said anything. No one knew where that was.

“It cuts the chill,” Matrona said. “There they need it because it is always cold.”

“What did you do to her?” Gavin asked Maeniel accusingly.

Most of them were human now because they wanted to talk, and wolf speech was far too laconic for the range of emotion flowing. Gavin was tastefully draped in a blanket, Gordo was wearing his mantle as a sarong, Matrona was clad in a shirt, one of Maeniel’s. Silvia wore her skin only.

“He must have done something to her,” Silvia said, “because I’ve never before heard her scream like that. What did you do?” She glared at a slightly bemused Maeniel, who had gone back to wolf.

“Yes, what did you do, my leader?” a somewhat horrified Gordo asked.

“It must have been something terrible,” Silvia said. “Matrona, take her to your tent. I will stay with you. Have no fear, little one, we will protect you.”

“Now wait a minute,” Gavin said. “I’ve known him since I was thirteen years old and we met in that Irish forest and I’ve never known—”

Maeniel became human, and Matrona dropped a tunic over his head. “Be quiet,” he commanded, and was obeyed.

Silence fell.

“Regeane, what’s wrong?”

Regeane, now ashamed, opened her mouth to say, “Nothing,” but Matrona caught her eye. “Tell him,” she said.

“I’m so tired…” she whispered.

“Ah, I see,” Matrona said. “Out. Everyone out. Leave the newlyweds alone to settle this.”

Maeniel sat down next to her on the folding cot and took her in his arms. With a weary sigh, she rested her head on his shoulder.

“Next time,” he said, his lips on her hair. “Next time don’t try so hard to please me.” She nodded, and as they both lay down, he said, “Promise?”

She was drifting off to sleep when she answered, “I promise.”

Yes, she had promised, trusting him then as she must now. Tell him the truth.

She tested the depth of water around her by turning human and standing up. It was shallow, up to her waist. The forest of reeds around her murmured in the dying gusts of the storm winds. Odd, she stood not on mud but on stone.

Maeniel paused. He became human also, but his feet trod mud and he struggled toward her, landing his footing at last on the same platform her feet rested on.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“How you worry,” he replied. “Somewhere in the Po valley.”

“How should I not worry? I can’t see dry land anywhere around. Nothing, not even a tree, only water plants, reeds, cattails, and long grass, grass with sharp edges,” she said, looking down at a shallow cut she’d just gotten on the palm of her hand.

“Hush,” he said, and put his arms around her.

She let him kiss her. As he did, a particularly hard gust of wind struck them, chilling her. In a second, her skin was covered with gooseflesh. She pushed him back.

“I’m cold. Night is coming on. We don’t know where we are. We’re lost and you want to—”

He kissed her again.

“You might at least apologize.”

“Yes,” he said. “I apologize.”

“Apologize and mean it.”

“No,” he told her, and kissed her again. “I still think I was right. But you were lucky and so was I. Had the treacherous Lombard king not been a stubborn fool, we might both have perished, but we didn’t, and so I will waste no more worry on something that almost happened. I did underestimate you, though. And you must be content with that admission and not ask for more.”

Regeane gave a little cry of exasperation.

But then he kissed her again, and she found she was no longer cold. “Oh,” she said. “It seems years since I saw you, but the water is too deep here.”

“Too deep for what?” he asked.

“You stop. Stop teasing me.”

“Shush. Look.”

A cloud covered the sun for a moment, and to the west of them an abandoned villa emerged from the sparkling reflection of sun and the water.

“See,” he said. “I knew something would turn up. It always does if only you relax.”

“I don’t like it,” she said. “Remember the bear.”

“What? Are you going to lose faith in your senses because they fooled you once?”

“Fooled you,” she snapped, “not me.”

“Yes,” he said ruefully. “And in Rome, a certain tomb—”

“Point well taken,” she said.

“Let’s swim for it.”

They did, threading their way among the hammocks of cattails and reeds until they reached a long, straight stretch of open water bounded by stone walls that had been a canal built to bring water to the fields from the river. The whole of the ground floor was underwater. Here and there what had been magnificent mosaics shone up through the water where they were not covered by streaks of silt. Two gladiators fought to the death in one panel, their names emblazoned beside each. A Mirmillo battled a Retiarius, and the portrait showed the Mirmillo entangled in the Retiarius’s net while his sword was plunging deep into his opponent’s body.

Regeane paused and looked at this one, thereby earning a disgusted look from Maeniel. Beyond, a peristyle garden looked up into the sky along with a blue pool filled with fish. The real trees and flowers of the garden long extinguished by flooding, their counterfeits shimmered on the drowned paving. Beyond, the rows of a kitchen garden—eggplant, onions, celery, parsley, cabbage, sage, and thyme—spoke of a joyous prosperity lost long ago to the river; fish picked at the tesserae that formed the images.

A few rooms on the second floor, mostly roofless with crumbling walls freestanding to only a few feet, offered the only shelter they had yet encountered. They dove in from the canal bank and swam to where the walls projected only a few feet above the water. Someone else must have taken shelter here long ago, because a substantial mound of dry straw covered the floor.

Regeane became human and a second later Maeniel stood beside her. “I see you met the bear,” Regeane said. “What did he want with you?”

“The same as I think he wanted from you. Control.”

“No,” Regeane said.

“He has some dream of restoring the world to what it was before man, cities, farms, empires, and kingdoms fought among themselves and laid waste the land. To a world where there were only animals.”

Regeane frowned. “Really?”

“Yes. He believes that with our powers combined, he might wipe out humanity. I believe him to be—if not deluded—at least, shall we say, overly ambitious. As far as I’m concerned? Ah, if it were only possible. But I’ve had a rather lengthy association with mankind, and I have found them a lot tougher than he believes.”

“That would be a dreadful thing, to destroy one of the great kingdoms.”

“Great kingdoms?” he asked.

“That’s what Matrona calls them,” she answered. “Birds, the kingdom of the air; fishes, the kingdom of the waters and the sea. Plants, the kingdom of silence.”

He was standing behind her; the late afternoon sun shining down had warmed her, and he had his arms around her and was nuzzling her neck. “Will you stop?” she asked, half laughingly.

“It’s all right. We’re married. Everyone, even the church, approves.”

“I doubt very much if the church would approve of anything about us.”

“Still,” he said. “The bishop shows the inability of even the most nonsensical institutions to silence the good-hearted. You just like him because he took my part about the ransom. But my love, the worst moment in my captivity came when you pushed back your veil and revealed who you were.

“Desiderius tried to drown me, Hugo tricked me into revealing myself before the high altar of the cathedral, and the bear threatened me with death if I didn’t yield myself to him. But none of those ugly experiences frightened me the way the realization of your vulnerability did. I love you. If you met with some mischance, I do believe it would kill me. Yes, it’s true. I underestimated your abilities, but you must remember the feelings of one who loves you to distraction when you take risks.”

“Gundabald wanted to lock me in a cage with a collar and chain,” Regeane shot back. “Is that what your love is, a collar and a chain?”

She turned in his arms and looked into his eyes, giving him the direct stare that he himself used so often on the others. The wolf stare, the evaluation of a creature that doesn’t know how to lie. He found he had to look away, remembering that the mother of the pack is a leader in her own right, and not simply the leader’s consort. Then Regeane was wolf. She leaped from their nest. Nearby, the tops of some columns that had once supported the peristyle porch protruded from the waters, little islands. She chose one and dropped into the stillness of a hunting wolf.
Fish
, he thought.

From her perch, she silently scanned the waters. The moment, when it came, was lightning fast. The fish flapped little, if at all. She’d snapped its spine with her fangs. She rested the body at her feet on the column’s crest, and her look invited him to join her.

He did.

Later they returned to the nest and made love, man and wife. He told her of the experiences of his captivity; she narrated her journey.

“I met wolves, real wolves,” she said. “But from what Matrona says, they shouldn’t have attacked. I was mystified and angry. I thought there were rules.”

He nodded. “There are, but likely the mother of the pack caught sight of you and sensed a strangeness. She feared you might become a rival. Like all rules, none are hard and fast, and some will break them if it suits their convenience.”

Regeane digested this and said, “Somehow I can’t see myself as the mother of a lowland pack, whelping cubs every year.”

“You could be, if you wanted to,” he said.

They were lying twined together comfortably. He saw her eyes widen in the reddish glow of the sunset light. “Really?”

“Yes, both lives are open to you, should you choose to exercise your gift in that manner.”

“I simply can’t imagine myself… The idea is frightening— yet somehow almost attractive. But I feel the same way about living as a wolf and only a wolf as I did when my mother described sex to me: I was sure I wouldn’t want… that! But look at me now, and by the way, why don’t I get pregnant? What is it now, almost eight months and… At first I didn’t confide in you—”

“I know,” he said. “But you were worried about it. Matrona told me.”

“Oh…” Regeane replied. “She simply said we rarely have offspring from love undertaken between ourselves. Most are the product of mixed marriages like I am, but you are a… wolf.”

“Yes, and only a wolf.”

She nodded. “So what sort of child might you father?”

“I don’t know. As far as I can tell, I have never had one, and I have known—carnally—many human women.”

She shook her head. Her hair was still wet and showered his face with droplets. “Oh, hell,” she said, “so much damned water… and it’s getting cold.”

“Change,” he said, “and let’s sleep.”

“You just don’t like the way the conversation is going.”

“I won’t deny I don’t care for it. It explores areas I’d rather not talk about. At least not now.” He embraced her more tightly, pulling her against his warm body.

She gave a little purring sound, not wolflike at all.

“Ah, that’s my beauty. That’s my honeyed love, sweet as fruit plucked ripe from the tree, or berries in autumn. Stop worrying about what cannot be changed and go to sleep.”

Regeane drifted off, but opened her eyes one more time. “Does no one come here?” she asked.

“No one,” he reassured her. “I would know if they did.”

Then she drifted down peacefully into dark water, the pool of silence.

She changed as the last rays of sunlight became a fan of brightness on the western horizon. Then he, too, sought his patient brother, the wolf, and slept.

Lucilla knew as soon as she saw Stella’s face. Her hand was at her throat and there was horror in her eyes. “I hate being right,” Lucilla whispered to herself.
He is here
, she thought,
and now Stella is frightened of what she has done
.

Lucilla tried to remember what she’d heard about Desiderius’s son. Hard, inconsistent, aggressive, and cowardly at the same time. But above all a fool, an egotistical fool, one stricken with the worst disease of power, the belief that his birth alone entitled him to greater privileges than any other man. There he stood.

She bowed gracefully. “My lord.”

He smirked at her. “Ah, at last we meet. You are, I believe, the famous—or is it infamous?—Lucilla.”

Lucilla would have liked to slap the smirk off his face, but she summoned an exquisite smile and replied, “Whichever you like, my lord. I believe both words indicate a career of some distinction.”

The smirk grew broader. “We will have to explore your, I understand, quite amazing talents.”

Lucilla felt a thrill of fear.
I’m going to be this man’s hostage, and he isn’t evil. He’s worse than evil, he’s stupid
.

“I see you’re dressed for riding,” he observed. “Good. We will need to leave quickly. I have,” he explained to Stella, “only a few men in my entourage, and I think I will not stay until your lord returns.”

Yes,
Lucilla thought,
because you know he would object to this outrage, the kidnapping of a helpless woman under his protection
. Lucilla simpered, “I wouldn’t want to keep your highness. Shall we go?”

He studied her, his eyes opaque, for a moment. Lucilla could feel the perspiration at her armpits and the palms of her hands.
Damn, damn
, she thought.
I caused this idiocy by my own folly
.