The Wolf King Read online

  The wolf touched noses with him again reassuringly. We are all mortal. I trust you did what you could.

  The whole mountain fell. The horse was in distress. The trail vanished from beneath my feet. The rest fled. Antonius tried to lead them to safety. Audovald moaned, a single terrible sound from a horse. I cannot know if he succeeded, but she’d pushed the others ahead and we were too far back. I tried to ride it down. I failed. He stretched his neck out, rested his chin on the snow pack, and closed his eyes.

  The wolf began to dig.

  All my legs are probably broken.

  Horses are pessimists, the wolf thought. He paused in his labors and asked, Are you in pain?

  No.

  Then we will try. The wolf continued digging.

  She heard it coming. So did I, the horse continued. The problem was the ice fall was so big we didn’t believe our own senses, but she turned, pushed them past us, and cried out a warning. Antonius acted quickly. But by the time it was upon us, she and I were last in the column and were swept away. I do not know what happened to the rest.

  The wolf freed the horse’s other forehoof. Audovald tried to lunge forward, but then cried out in pain and fell back.

  Don’t struggle till I ask you to, the wolf said.

  Yes, my lord, the horse replied. The wolf noted, however, he seemed heartened.

  The Saxon saw her open the door. By some miracle the rest of the midnight court didn’t. The abbot had just jerked the torch away from his side, and he and the corpse gang were avidly watching their victim’s responses. The Saxon sagged back and lay on his side, eyes half closed, gasping for breath. She was a spot of pure beauty in a dark universe. Briefly he cursed her guardians again. How had they let such as she—certainly a noblewoman—fall into such utter peril? He hoped that seeing what they were doing to him, she would run. She should be terrified by this ghastly crew, but she didn’t seem frightened. Instead she reached around and drew her knife.

  A table knife, he guessed despairingly, but no, this thing counted as a short sword, a single-edged sax, and deadly.

  “Leave him alone,” she commanded.

  Blessedly, they did.

  The Saxon went through guilt that they’d concentrate their attentions on her, wild joy that she’d distracted them for a few moments, then hope that she was good enough with that pigsticker to hold them off until he could free himself. He’d tested the ropes during the earlier melee, and he was sure he could free himself, if only he could get a few moments alone.

  True, he was injured and, if he’d spared thought about it, in pain, but he was boiling with fury and an absolutely blind thirst for revenge.

  The whole crew surged toward her in a wave.

  He rolled on his back, drew his knees up toward his chest, and thrust his bound hands up over his feet. When they were in front of him, he snatched at the ropes at his ankles. They gave with a hard pull. Half rotten, like everything else in this filthy place, he thought, and then he was on his feet.

  Odd had a sword of sorts. It didn’t look like a very good one; it was crusted with thick rust. Coming up behind the man, the Saxon ripped it out of his hand.

  Odd spun around, surprised.

  The Saxon swung the sword one-handed. Gods of my people, it’s good to have a sword in my hand. It’s been so long, he thought as his downstroke tore through Odd’s shoulder, sliced through his ribs, and finished slicing his torso in half just above the hip.

  Not such a bad sword, after all, the Saxon thought. It must once have belonged to a true warrior. Wherever you are, he spoke to the warrior’s spirit, I will avenge you. So saying, he sliced the abbot into four pieces.

  To his horror, they lay on the floor, wiggling, trying to draw together, rather the way a sundered snake thrashes and coils long after it is dead. Blood bubbled in the dead man’s throat, pouring out on the stone floor. Blood, more blood than could have been in a man’s body, came spurting from the hacked corpse, spraying in every direction.

  Regeane saw the terror in the Saxon’s face. She had her scramasax out. Heedless of the thing’s value, she wrapped the white brocade mantle around her left arm. The man whose head hung at a strange angle struck at her with a spear. She parried with her mantle-wrapped arm, facing the spearhead up while she jabbed with the knife at his abdomen. She succeeded better than she’d hoped. A second later, he was tripping over his guts.

  The Saxon seemed paralyzed with horror.

  “The torch,” she screamed. “Use fire. They are afraid of fire.”

  She was remembering Rome, black wasps on a woman’s face, and a tomb that was there and then not there. She’d fought this thing before.

  The Saxon lunged forward, snatched up the torch, and flung it at the wooden rood screen in front of the altar. The wood was old, brittle, and must have been tinder dry, and matters were helped by the fact that there were linen curtains on the bottom of the screen. They roared into flames, and, in a few seconds, the chapel was lit like day. What Regeane and the Saxon both saw was horrific.

  The Saxon decided these must be the abbot’s trophies. The choir stalls were lined with corpses. Some recognizable, dead possibly only a few months; others were only garments and dried skin, teeth, hollow eye sockets, and brown bone. What was very clear was that they had all died horribly. One recent corpse seemed unmarked, but from the expression of insane fear on his face and the position into which his hands had stiffened, it was clear he had been buried alive.

  Regeane looked. Next to him was a woman. She was naked. She was nailed to the wooden chair by a dozen spears, none through a vital spot. She might, Regeane thought, have lived for days.

  The remaining members of the corpse gang fled toward the altar.

  Not a wise thing to do.

  It reared up ahead of the corpse gang from the defiled altar, visible only because the flame racing over the rood screen outlined and defined it. A bear, but the biggest bear Regeane or the Saxon had ever seen. A bear with a pelt of flame. It roared and the walls seemed to shake. The corpse gang fell to the floor and groveled at its feet.

  “Killed,” it roared. “You have killed my votary, my worshiper, my priest. I have kept him and his creatures living for a hundred winters while I dwelt here.”

  “Yes,” Regeane shouted. “He was a stench in the nostrils of all that is good.”

  “What care I how my creatures entertain themselves?”

  The pleas from the corpse gang only seemed to annoy the bear creature. “Die,” he said, and they did, collapsing to the floor in a heap. “I found you on the gallows. Go back.”

  They vanished.

  “Pity I cannot make you do the same,” it shouted, “but perhaps my minions can.”

  Both Regeane and the Saxon watched in terror as all around them the corpses in the choir stalls began to move.

  It took the gray wolf almost an hour to free the horse’s hindquarters. They both suffered, fearful one leg would turn out to be broken. Then neither one of them would have known what to do.

  The gray wolf didn’t know how he could bring himself to kill a friend—even to save him terrible suffering. And the horse knew a shattered leg would be the end of him. Even a human with such an injury stood little chance of recovery. Blood loss and infection took a terrible toll even among those lightly injured. But as luck would have it, when the wolf had freed all four legs, Audovald found himself able to stand comfortably.

  I cannot think, he told the wolf as he tested each leg by stamping and bending, how I did not take mortal injury. But it appears I didn’t. Now let’s see if we can make it down into the valley. I must search for the rest.

  They were both balanced on the steep fanlike surface of the slide. By now the snow had stopped and the sky was clearing. The moon shone brightly. Both horse and wolf had no more trouble seeing than they would have at midday.

  They may be miles from here or buried deep, Audovald said.

  Horses are pessimists, the gray wolf thought again. He was about to begin cir
cling when he heard a sharp yip from above.

  Here and there some small bits of the trail remained. A black wolf was on one of them. Her tail waved back and forth in a graceful gesture, not an enthusiastic one.

  I am alive, come.

  He did. They were in a shallow cave, a natural grotto. Antonius was lying down, his head pillowed on a saddle. Gavin was tending a small fire. The black wolf—Matrona—and Maeniel both turned human. Maeniel borrowed some of Gavin’s clothes, a heavy wool tunic and trousers. Gavin looked guilty and miserable at the same time.

  “We lost her,” he said, and began to weep.

  Antonius opened his eyes once, shook his head, then closed them again. Matrona dressed in a white silk dalmatic and brown suede divided riding skirt.

  “We will mourn later,” Maeniel said firmly. “When we are sure. She is one of us, and we are difficult to kill.”

  Antonius’s eyes opened. “You mean you think she might still be alive? But did you see what a drop—”

  “As I said,” Maeniel repeated. “When we are sure one way or the other, there will be time enough for grief and recriminations. In the meantime, we search. Antonius, can you ride?”

  “Yes.” Antonius was on his feet in a moment.

  “Good,” Maeniel said. “Audovald is making his way here.”

  “The horse survived?”

  “Yes, I freed him. We—” “He indicated Gavin and Matrona. ”—will go as wolves.” They dropped their clothing.

  Moon dazzle filled Antonius’s eyes, then they were gone into the night.

  A nightmare. This was a nightmare, Regeane thought as she brushed her hand over her eyes. “Might we be dead?” she asked the Saxon.

  He nodded. “I have thought so myself. Dead in the wilderness without offerings and unmourned by kin. Without the proper sacrifices and lauds to tell the gods we were both noble and wellconducted, we have been consigned to the wilderness as outcasts.”

  “I have always been an outcast,” Regeane said. “I am not afraid.”

  “As it happens, so have I,” the Saxon answered. “Being reduced to the lowest slavery possible, sold only for my bodily strength, working chained in the Lombard wheat fields, I once took the part of a horse and drew a plow.”

  The conversation was very calm.

  Blank-faced, jerking like a marionette, the first of the corpses, the one whose face was a mask of terror, began coming toward them. Meanwhile, the flames that had, at first, seemed to be confined to the altar screen and the cupola above it began slowly creeping over the beamed ceiling above.

  “We should be having trouble breathing,” Regeane said. “Instead, the smoke is being drawn out of the room.”

  They were both backing away from the oncoming dead man.

  “I imagine there are holes in the roof,” the Saxon said. Then he cried out in terror and disgust when he was seized from behind by something composed only of blackened bone with a few tattered remnants of flesh and cloth.

  The head was half covered by a hooded cape. With a courage she didn’t know she had in her, Regeane slammed her fist into its skull. The thing struck the floor and the Saxon stamped it to bits with his boots. Then he sliced the oncoming corpse into three pieces with his sword.

  A second later, Regeane screamed.

  The abbot’s head, shoulder, and one arm were still together. Glaring malevolently, he seized Regeane’s instep with his teeth and bit down hard.

  The thing among the flames consuming the altar laughed loudly. “There is still some life in my creature and much malice.”

  “Stand still,” the Saxon commanded Regeane. Then he sliced the top half of the abbot’s skull off. “Not any longer,” the Saxon said as the remains rolled across the floor.

  “We must,” Regeane whispered through stiff, pale lips, “find some strategy for dealing with these things.”

  “Yes,” the Saxon answered.

  And so they did.

  Above, the fire was slowly consuming the beamed ceiling. Flaming brands and embers were filling the air around them. The choir stalls caught with a flash and a roar, incinerating the dead too decomposed to be of any use to the evil thing at the altar.

  Regeane and the Saxon were forced backward into the hall. By now it was clear all that remained of the monastery was burning down.

  “I’ll cut,” the Saxon said. “You burn.”

  “Yes,” Regeane said, and kicked two torches out of the crumbling door frame as they moved away from the inferno through the ancient, doomed structure.

  Everything in the ruin not exposed to the elements was tinder dry. He mowed down the horrors surrounding them. She set afire sheets of mummified flesh, rags of cloth, and dry bone.

  The Saxon was an iron man, and his “Courage, woman, courage” kept Regeane going through the long night of pain, terror, disgust, and exhaustion.

  The worst moments were when the thing from the bed in the first room to which Regeane had been taken rose and attacked them. The putrefying corpse was too wet to take fire from Regeane’s torches, so she tore down the bed hangings, threw them over the foul thing, and set them ablaze, then added the ticks and linens. By then the whole building was engulfed, the roof of the chapel fallen in.

  Regeane and the Saxon fled past the gate and out into the snow-covered countryside. To their surprise, there was light in the east and it was morning. They paused across from the gate, taking deep breaths of the clean, cold air. The Saxon sagged against a stone pillar set before the abbey, but then started up when he saw three wolves coming toward them at a dead run.

  He wasn’t terribly afraid. He’d fought wolves before and knew these three who looked full fed and in good condition would probably run from two adults, one of them an armed man.

  “No,” Regeane said. “Don’t attack them. That’s my husband and two of his friends.

  “I told you,” she said, clutching his wrist. “I told you I have always been an outcast.”

  III

  “I suppose . . .” the Saxon said later as Antonius was freeing his neck from the iron collar. “I suppose I am not dead?”

  Antonius’s eyebrows rose. “Indeed, did you believe this?”

  “Yes,” the Saxon answered hesitantly. “I did for a time last night. Are you a priest?”

  Antonius’s eyebrows rose rather higher. “No,” he said. “Though my stepfather was a pope.”

  The Saxon said, “Unla?”

  Antonius took pity on what he saw as a rather bewildered barbarian. “I am my lady’s chamberlain. Her lord rules a duchy here in the mountains. He would not call it a duchy, but in size, prestige, wealth, and power it is.”

  Then the Saxon asked the question that had been burning in his mind ever since Regeane greeted a huge mountain wolf with a sloppy kiss and a hug. “Am I captured again?”

  Antonius knew well enough what the collar meant, and the same for the question. “No,” he answered at about the moment that the collar slipped free.

  For a few heartbeats it looked as if the Saxon might cry. Antonius turned away quickly, not wanting to see such a massively powerful creature break down.

  “But the collar?” the Saxon asked.

  “What collar?” Antonius said.

  “Come,” Matrona said. She was clad in a long black silk gown with a gold and garnet necklace, an elaborate construction decorated with winged sphinxes. Like much of Matrona’s wealth, it looked impossibly old.

  The Saxon indicated it with one forefinger. “What . . . ?”

  “One hot night in Babylon,” she said, “I loved a king.”

  Then she reached toward his cheek, where the abbot had burned him. He flinched, but when she touched him the pain went out of his wounds—all of them. While she was tending him, he fell asleep, but he dreamed he was back in the slave pens on the great Lombard estate. He woke with a wild start and swung at Matrona, but she caught his wrist with a grip he knew could easily have broken it, had she chosen to do so.

  “Who is god?” the Saxon as
ked.

  “The mother,” Matrona answered.

  “The mother is all powerful,” he said.

  “I’m glad you know that. We will get along.”

  Regeane walked toward him. She had some clothing and the bearskin over her arm. “I have fresh clothes. Hold up his mantle, will you, Matrona, while he dresses?”

  “Perhaps I will,” Matrona said. “But then, perhaps I won’t. I’d like to see what else he has.”

  Regeane blushed, but the Saxon blushed even more violently. His clothes were in rags. He colored all over his skin.

  “Matrona, you’re terrible.” Regeane laughed.

  All around them the sun was shining brightly, so brightly it had begun warming the air and melting the snow. The road was clear, and many of Maeniel’s people were investigating the burned-out monastery.

  “What are they finding?” he asked.

  Regeane shuddered and clasped her body with her arms as if cold.

  “Nothing, or at least nothing new. Bones, scraps of rotted flesh. They must once have thought about booty, for there is some gold and silver there, but we will not take it. We will bury it with the human remains in the cemetery within the enclosure.”

  “The old monk, the women?” the Saxon asked.

  Regeane shivered again. “I think they were not real but shadows of the bear spirit. His servants. They all tried to keep me from helping you.”

  The Saxon nodded.

  “Now get dressed,” she directed. “We are going to Geneva to tell the Frankish king that his best road over the Alps is in ruins. You must look like a warrior of our party, a gentleman, so that your presence will not be questioned. We will protect you. And you may resume your journey when it is possible, if you wish.”

  He took the bearskin and the clothing from her. She turned and walked away.

  “Dress,” Matrona said, holding up the bearskin. “Your delicacy does you credit. Some chastity—not too much, mind you, but some—is attractive in a young man.”

  “Now I understand.” He was pulling off his shirt and pants. “Now I understand,” he repeated.

  “Understand what?” Matrona asked from behind the bearskin.