The Wolf King (8 page)

Gilas opened her mouth to ask what they were doing, but she caught the Saxon’s eye and closed it immediately. The Saxon lifted the sword quietly from his sheath. Regeane drew her ax, and Matrona pulled a nine-inch knife from her full sleeve.

“The back!” the Saxon whispered.

The rest nodded and moved as silently as possible. They approached the rear of the tent.

Otho was still alive, though he was certain not for long. At this point he was almost beginning to wish the creature who’d captured him would kill him. His whole body was a furnace of pain. Knives driven through his wrists and ankles pinned him to his once spacious and comfortable bed. He’d been given no food in four days, and no water in the last two, but he still clung to life. He was gagged, but the gag was so soaked with blood from his lips and cheeks and occasional bouts of vomit from his belly that it no longer functioned. Still, that didn’t matter, because his mouth and throat were so swollen he could no longer utter a sound. Mercifully, he had begun to drift in and out of consciousness a few days ago.

Yet he still clung to life. Otho was corrupt to the marrow of his bones. He had decided as a young man that money was the only thing worth having in life, and he’d sought wealth with a single-minded energy and diligence that totally surpassed the rather feeble and sporadic efforts of those who were drawn by a desire for other, more mundane forms of gratification, such as sex, drink, food, or the more complex considerations of love, family, professional or even artistic endeavor. In a surprisingly short time he’d found himself very, very rich. It wasn’t enough. Too much is not enough for any spirit motivated solely by avarice. In fact, adding to his bodily torments was the knowledge that his own greed had landed him in his present situation.

When the stranger had come to his tent a few days ago, Otho had initially refused to see him, but the present of a heavy gold bracelet, an almost pure gold bracelet, changed his mind. He had agreed to admit the stranger and made the fatal choice. He took the stranger’s money, a lot of money, making the sums he’d extorted from Maeniel seem paltry by comparison. He had listened to the stranger’s accusations. He went to visit the king, repeating the stranger’s accusations into his ear.

When he had returned to his tent in the king’s encampment, Otho had tried to dismiss the man, if indeed man it was. When the creature merely laughed and refused to leave, Otho ordered his servants to throw him out…

They had failed; hardened gang of mercenaries that they were, they had failed. Oh, how they had failed. In fact, their remaining intact weapons were what pinned Otho to the bed. The only reason he still lived was that it wanted him to suffer. Otherwise, it was content. Prowling the tent night and day in one horrific form or another, it waited. For what, he couldn’t guess.

So Otho tried to wait, struggling against death because late in life he had added another passion to the desire for wealth that ruled his life, and this passion was fully as overwhelmingly strong as the first. The second was absolute loyalty to the king. Charles, whom men were already beginning to call the Great, was the central love of his life. And Otho was convinced that in tale bearing for this creature, he had somehow betrayed him.

About the same time, Antonius and Maeniel were led before the king. He was surrounded by a dozen other nobles. The gray wolf had heard that Charles did not wear elaborate or distinctive clothing. In fact, he was often surrounded by men who made a more ostentatious display of wealth than he did, but Maeniel knew him as soon as the man entered the room; knew who and what he was. Only once before had he ever seen an individual with that look in his eyes, and without even asking Antonius to point him out, Maeniel went to one knee.

Charles was not the best dressed nor the eldest or even the most impressive man present. He was like Maeniel, thickset, muscular, with dark hair, and he wore a short beard—possibly in deference to his wife Hildegarde’s wishes that he not present himself close-shaven to the Langobards who were, after all, famous for their facial hair, being called Long Beards. She wanted him to show he was man enough to cover his chin with hair also.

He stretched out two strong, callused hands and raised both Maeniel and Antonius to their feet. “Please, no ceremony. If the tales that have been brought to me are found to be false, then I should embrace you both as brothers. If not, then… we will have to see what measures must be taken.”

So saying, he seated himself in a folding camp chair. The nobility of the Frankish court clustered around him. “I will be brief. Information has been brought to me that you and Antonius conspired in the murder of your wife’s uncle Gundabald and his son Hugo. And that, further, you robbed the monastery at the foot of the pass guarded by your stronghold, murdered the inhabitants, and then burned the buildings, including the church.”

Antonius opened his mouth.

“No,” the king said. “Let him speak for himself.”

Maeniel nodded.

“First Gundabald and Hugo.”

“They were men of somewhat licentious habits,” Antonius began.

“Antonius,” Charles said. “Are you having problems with your memory? I told you, let him answer for himself.”

Antonius raised his arms, and the chains clinked.

“Antonius, you can make bad sound like good, day sound like night, morning sound like afternoon, and, in short, by your circumlocutions, thoroughly confuse an army of lawyers, judges, and scribes and bury major crimes in such obfuscating legalese that even a hardworking king and his equally hardworking scholars cannot sort it out. As I said, let him answer for himself.”

Antonius sighed deeply.

“Very well,” Maeniel said. “I will be brief. To be blunt, Gundabald was a wastrel and a sot. His son was an apprentice wastrel and sot. So unpleasant a pair were they that his holiness saw fit to remove my wife from their company and place her among holy nuns until we were married.

“Though they were not the most charming company in the world, I respected them as my wife’s kin. I settled a large sum of money on them at the time of our wedding.

“The results of my generosity were entirely predictable. Within days after the wedding, they both vanished without a trace and were never seen again. His holiness Pope Hadrian did me the courtesy of looking into the matter himself, but neither one could be found. Antonius here will attest, as he was privy to the matter. Probably their throats were cut and then their purses, or vice versa. Likely their bodies wound up in the Tiber, as it’s done duty as a Roman cemetery since the city was seven hills of farmland.

“Now as far as the monastery is concerned, it had its own rather considerable demesne, and those lands do not touch mine in any place. While my wife and I journeyed here, an avalanche occurred. It wiped out a long stretch of the road the Romans built over the pass. We were obliged to take a detour and saw smoke. We investigated and—”

Someone screamed, “Fire! Fire!”

The king ran to the door and pushed the flap aside. Fire painted the low clouds of the night sky. Antonius turned toward Maeniel. Chains were lying on the floor. The gray wolf was gone.

The Saxon cut a long slit in the canvas. Fortunately the tent had something of a list to it, and the fabric was loose. The first thing he saw was a cocked and loaded crossbow pointed at the entrance to the tent. The second, third, and fourth things he saw were corpses.

One looked as if it had been butchered. The second was neatly decapitated. The third was the reason the tent pole was loose: it had been pulled out and driven through the man’s body, back into the ground.

Then he saw the figure on the bed. It moved. The Saxon stepped through the slit into the tent and looked down at Otho. The open, staring eyes looked up at him and blinked. The Saxon reached out and jerked the two knives out of Otho’s arms and the two swords out of his legs.

Somehow Otho managed not to scream. He could have screamed in that extremity, even though his throat and tongue were so swollen they almost blocked his air passages. The pain was so dreadful that he could have screamed. But he managed to suppress any sound as he lost consciousness.

As he was pushing Otho’s legs through the tent slit, the Saxon sensed the thing behind him. He turned, sword upraised. The shape was a bear this time, but no living bear was ever this big.

It swung one set of hooked claws at the Saxon’s face, and he parried with the sword, chopping deep into a foreleg. The thing gave a scream of sheer fury, but the sword couldn’t stop the forward motion of the blow. The paw caught the Saxon on the side of the head, sending him spinning.

But Regeane was wolf and into the tent, a streak of dull silver in the halflight. The thing was partially turned, recovering from the blow it struck the Saxon. She slashed at the thigh, going for the deep arteries, but failed, though she inflicted a respectable wound to the muscles of the upper leg. Blood sprayed everywhere.

It roared again in fury and went after the silver wolf on all fours, crowding her toward one corner of the tent where the powerful clawed forelegs could literally rip her to shreds.

Matrona, a black wolf, landed on its back. The neck was too thick and powerful for her to bite, so she went for one massive shoulder and felt her canines grate on bone.

This time the thing screamed in agony. It spun around, trying to reach the black wolf. Failing that, it began twisting from side to side in an attempt to throw her off.

Whap.
The black wolf’s body was snapped almost like a whip. Matrona wondered if her back would break, but hung on, her teeth buried to the gums in the giant bear’s shoulder.

The silver wolf got her feet under her and charged again, this time going for the lower leg. If she could snap a bone, the battle would be over for good and all—or so she thought.

Behind the knee. It would take a few seconds for it to get to her. She lunged and connected perfectly. Another scream as her canines severed tendons and sank into the gristle of the knee capsule itself. But both female wolves had forgotten what they were fighting.

Abruptly it changed tactics and snatched up the crossbow. The silver wolf couldn’t disengage quickly enough. She’d just managed to get her jaws open when the crossbow bolt tore through her body.

Death!
and everything stopped. The world became a pall of silence. The woman stood over the dying wolf; she was birth naked. She’d split herself once before when she went into the other world to obtain healing for Antonius. She looked into the bear creature’s eyes and felt the pull of its loneliness. The long, solitary, aching ages of silence and despair. She was in both places at once, trapped in her dying body, struggling for breath as the bolt tore her lungs to fragments and destroyed her living heart, clutching at consciousness as it fled down the darkening corridors of her brain. And woman, aware of the thing and its endless wailing, sobbing sorrow over what had been and would never be again. Feeling her form of flesh—arms, legs, hands, stomach, breasts, legs, and even the soles of her feet—pressed against the dusty cloth floor of the tent, and she saw the gray, his jaws closing on the wrist of the thing’s forepaw in a desperate attempt to deflect its aim.
Oh, my love
, she thought.
That I should leave thee thus
…

Something slapped into her outstretched hand. She knew the shape and feel of it and remembered always she who carried it. A blackthorn stick.

She struck out with it. Not to kill, because she pitied the thing for all its monstrous darkness.
Banish it. I will banish it. Begone
, she cried, but only in her mind.

Now I die,
she thought.
As my father died at the hands of Gundabald and my mother
.

Then she fell, folding into the wolf shape below her, became a woman, conscious now that the wall of the tent was a sheet of flame. Looked down in shock at her own nude but unwounded and intact body. Became wolf again as the flames raced over the dry canvas roof above. Then, scrabbling desperately, she was on her feet, fleeing into the wild commotion and confusion in the night beyond.

Maeniel and Regeane sat in their tent and talked things over later that night. She was wearing the silk nightgown, but he wanted to talk and found her too distracting in silk, so he made her put on one of his long woolen nightshirts.

She also sometimes wore his ordinary linen shirts, but she was even more distracting in those since she didn’t wear anything under them. Sex is fun when one is young and in love, and she was. He wasn’t young any longer but it was fun for him, too, and always had been.

“Why didn’t you kill him?”

“I don’t know that I could,” she answered. “If Hildegard hadn’t come, he’d have killed me. But somehow she made time stop and then handed me her blackthorn stick. I knew it must be powerful; everything connected with Hildegard is. I chose to use it to banish him.”

“I don’t like it,” he said. “Hildegard belongs to Christ. We don’t. I salute Christ—so do you, I notice—but we don’t belong to him.”

Regeane shrugged. She was sitting in a camp chair across from him. She pulled the nightgown up, baring her legs.

“Stop that.” He looked away.

She grinned, then became serious. “I don’t know who people like Hildegard belong to. The first time we met, she defended me against a ghost—”

“And the second time she got you thrown out of the convent where you were living.”

“No,” Regeane said. “I left of my own accord. I had things to do. She came to warn me and the nuns that the pork roast was poisoned. I already knew. I could smell it, but they didn’t and some of them might have eaten it. Hildegard is good. She’s almost the definition of what goodness is. I didn’t want to kill even so evil a thing as he is, not with anything of Hildegard’s.”

“I don’t know how you can be sure about Hildegard. In heaven’s name, the woman was dead when you first met her.”

“Yes,” Regeane said. “She was.”

For a short space they were both silent.

“I almost lost you tonight,” he finally said. “It wasn’t one of my happier moments.”