by Tanith Lee
“I’m sorry. It can’t still hurt you, can it?”
“It doesn’t.”
Rem dressed. Raldnor had stopped talking, standing naked at his back, clothed only in blamelessness.
9.
BEYOND THE HILL was another hill. You climbed it and there was another. They piled behind each other, and then there were the distant mountains.
Rem had gone back through the wood, nodding to the dice-playing servants, and away. He meant to give himself the half of one halved hour, then return. Things would be as they had been, then. Except, obviously, they had been this way from the start.
One of the mountains was moving. Like a great ship, it came sailing toward him, filling the horizon. The top of the mountain was smudged by a sunset many hours away. Lower, the hillside rock opened on a solitary ink-black nostril—the wolf’s lair? No, not that.
Nearby, there was a hovel in a wretched field. A woman came suddenly out of the hut. She seemed to see him; she waved to him and hurried up. She moved in a coquettish way, but, coming close, he saw her dirt, her age and her pathetic idiocy.
“Would you like to come in the house?”
The world exploded like a shattered mirror. Pieces of vision fell down.
“Would you like to come in the house?”
He could see again. He could see the mountains far off in their correct order, the light of primal afternoon on the hills. There was no cave, although there was a field, and a small cot overhung by fruit trees.
“Lord?” the woman said. “Lord?”
And the woman was still there. But she was hardly old, and not dirty. Her looks were plump and pretty, her black hair held back by a red scarf sewn with beads.
Rem looked down at her. Her welcome was unnerving. It was almost more natural when her face fell, lapsed into terror. She turned and ran from him, screaming.
Out of the hut burst a great brute of a man. As he raced through the field, the woman darted to him and he caught her, held her, glaring at Rem.
“What did you do to her?” the man demanded. “She means no mischief. She’ll have offered you hospitality, that’s all. Out here, most are glad of it.”
Rem said, “I don’t know why she cried out.” The hills were slowly moving, not a vision now, only vertigo.
“You must’ve hurt her. Did he hurt you, Berinda?” the man asked her with urgent tenderness. “Tell me if he did. I’ll do for him.”
The hills steadied. The sky was cut above them as if by a knife.
Rem walked toward the man.
“She surprised me. I may have looked angry. Not meant. She’s gentle, isn’t she?” It was the dulcet Lannic word for simple, and the man, accepting its use, grew less belligerent, though no less protective.
“Well, so she is. But she’s been a good woman to me. She’s given me children, a host of them. Nothing wrong with their wits, either.”
Rem went closer. He offered a handful of coins.
“My apology.”
The man brushed the coins away. Money was not always wanted in the hills, barter was more use, but the symbol he allowed.
“See, Berinda,” he said, “a mistake. Smile now, sweetheart. Smile for me.”
And Berinda looked up at the man, smiling.
All these years, searching for her. And he had not known her. Though she had known him, some dark shadow from her unhappy past. Yes, that would be the cause of her terror. Rem was the fall from the ship, the cruel water, the unloving coast—And now, contentedly here, loved and valued at last, a day’s ride from Amlan. All these years—
“Berinda. That’s a Karmian name.”
“Ah.” The man did not care.
They walked together toward the cot where she had borne the host of children, all alive. Was one of them—
No. No, this much the gods might give, but no more.
“Berinda,” said Rem. She glanced at him, and he smiled at her, without recognition, but friendly, and saw her mislay who he had been in her life.
“We have wine,” she said, “honeyed wine from soft fruits.”
The man smiled, too, showing off her housekeeping. “She’s a rare one for hospitality.”
• • •
Rem had forgotten the wolf, the hunt, forgotten Yannul’s son.
He sat in the clean little house, where two small children came in and out—strange he had not heard their voices, as now he did, ringing round the slopes—and one more crawled on the rugs, and a fourth purred at the breast.
He had seen her last, this way. Feeding a child. Not that child now. None of them were that child.
There was not much talk, the time went thick and slow and timelessly. They made no move to indicate the door to him. Of course, he did not go. The man and he exchanged a few commonplaces. Rem mentioned he was up hereafter wolves. Something odd, then. The man casting a look at his wife. “Yes, they’re wolves round about. We get no harm from them.”
As the sun began to go, the man asked for supper, and laughing she put down her sucking child and ran about preparing a meal, like a child herself playing with toys. But it was tasty when it came, if Rem could have got any of it down his throat.
“Eat,” said the husband. “We’ve plenty.”
But he could not eat, as he could not leave them. Just as he could not ask her for the past.
Shadows began to come, and a brown candle was lit.
The husband fell asleep. The woman rocked her youngest child, the other children, who had settled indoors like pigeons for the food, grouped sleepily at her skirts.
“Tell us,” said the elder girl, “the story about the wolves.”
And Rem, a mature man who had lived by three or four trades of death and by the hard edges of his brain, felt his heart stop.
She told them.
As she spoke, in the way of her child, he pictured it. The images came, conveyed by her murmuring. And sounds, and scents, all of it. All.
• • •
When the white wolf appeared like a thing of snow on the rock above her, she had screamed and help had been far away, unhearing.
After a while, the wolf came toward her, and she tried to run, but the wolf and its fellows caught her up. They loped around her, shutting her inside a wall of their own bodies. All through this she held the baby, and all through this, as she shrieked and wept and ran and fell to her knees, the baby remained quiet. Finally, the wolves nudged Berinda. They nudged her in such a way that she knew she had to get to her feet. So she did. Then they began to nudge her again, and she discovered they were unroughly pushing her toward some other place.
In abject horror, she obeyed. After a distance of rocks and uplands, twisting, climbing, the heat of the wolves’ mouths soaking through her clothing every time they nosed her on, there was a cave. It was a wolf cave, and it stank of wolves and the things wolves had killed. But it had begun to rain, and the cave was out of the rain. Berinda went into the cave and here she sat down for sheer fatigue, and dropped into a sort of dreadful doze.
When she woke, the wolves lay against her. She watched, some slept. The warmth of their bodies was a comfort. The stench in the cave seemed less now that she was more accustomed to it. Berinda, who had grown up in squalor at Xai, had spent her earliest years among the stink of humans, where disease had augmented poverty. The wolves themselves did not smell bad, for they had health. There was the difference.
Later, other wolves trotted in. Berinda was afraid, as if these newcomers might not show the same consideration as the first wolves. But they seemed indifferent. More, they had brought in a kill. Growling, the pack savaged the bloody carcass into parts. At length, a piece of the raw meat was brought to Berinda. She could not stomach it the first day. But the next, when again she was brought something, she did eat it.
By then, she was feeding the child, sitting there in the midst
of them. They seemed to respect this duty, and some would stare, wagging their tails like dogs.
With nudgings and tuggings and pullings and whines they managed to conduct her where there was a stream. When the spring began to open the land, she found fruits under the ice and ate them. She offered them to the wolves also, and the wolves ate from her hands.
She was grateful for their warmth in the cold of the nights. She was solaced by their bodies’ liveness against her. She had long ceased to be afraid.
For Berinda, “gentle” as she was, was also a wild thing. To her it came, with more facility than to most, to be at one with the wolves. She reacted with the straightforwardness of a child.
And the child too, accepted and accepting, bloomed in the midst of the cave, or slept in Berinda’s lap in the weak sun of the hillside. She would even leave the baby among them for short intervals, as she wandered with the wolves or by herself.
When the summer came, four of the wolves showed her that they were leaving the cave and she and the baby were to go with them.
She was sorry, but the call of the summer running of the wolves infected her, and she did not hang back. They went south. She did not say this, but it was apparent. Also the impressive distance.
All the way, the wolves fed her and companioned her, as ever. Perhaps she had unremembered mankind. It seemed so from her narrative. Certainly the wolves had generally been nicer to her than men.
Thus, when one of the wolves urged her to a spot where a village could be seen among grain fields, Berinda evinced no special wish to approach it.
But the wolf wanted to approach the village, so they went together, playing through the tall stalks of the young grain. The child had been left behind on the slopes.
All at once the wolf and Berinda emerged into a thicket of people, who shouted, either retreating or hurling things. The wolf ran, and Berinda turned to run—and the people took hold of her, rushing her to the shelter of the village.
In vain she tried to free herself. In vain she tried to tell them how she must go after the wolves, to her baby. Her human speech had suffered. They took her noises for hysteria. When, the backlands of Lan being what they were, they did understand and believe her, it was too late. The wolves and the child were gone. Gone forever. She ran about the hills crying for them, to no avail. Washed clean of the wolf smell, her arms empty of love, Berinda wept in the village street and slept in it, refusing kindliness, bereft.
It was here that the man had found her. He was kinless and wifeless, and Zastis was near. The pretty aura of Karmiss was not all faded from Berinda. Something in her despair, besides, touched him. He wooed her in some way, maybe merely by caring particularly and only for her.
She went home with him, timid at first. But his goodness was not an act, not a fluke. Then the magic was achieved, the magic Kesarh had worked with her, better than Kesarh’s magic, for this child lived. Her arms were full again of love.
And here she was now, her bright eyes bathed with it, and laughter lines about her mouth.
“And when,” said the older girl, gazing up into Berinda’s face, “did you find me again?”
It was plainly a ritual question. The dark child believed she was the baby the wolves had taken, who had somehow sorcerously been reinserted and brought forth a second time.
When Berinda replied, it was sure that she thought so too.
“When my womb swelled, it was you.”
“But where had I been till then?”
“Riding the air,” Berinda said. And the children and Berinda laughed.
Something in the phrase arrested Rem, even through all the rest. The air-borne soul outlawed, waiting—like the ancient Dortharian belief that some souls returned at once, through the medium of their fleshly got unborn children, or the children of their kindred. Hence that insanity of the Storm Lords that not the eldest son, but the last son conceived before a King’s death, must be his heir. The foible which had granted Raldnor Am Anackire a right to the Koramvin throne.
The dark child looked over at Rem, infallibly guessing he had been an assenting party to the whole outrageous tale.
“In winter,” she said, “wolves come to the door and we feed them. From our hands. We’re not afraid. Nor they.”
He assented to that, too.
The world had given way. To feed wolves like poultry was a little thing.
“There’s someone in the field,” the elder boy said.
Berinda turned, unflurried, to look at the doorway.
Rem got up.
He went to the door and out, and saw a man sitting a zeeba, leading another, against the whole pane of violet hill sky, staining crimson in the east from star-rise.
“I’m glad I found you,” said Lur Raldnor. “We didn’t get the wolf, but there’s wolf-scent everywhere up here, the dog’s almost mad with it.” His face was like a stone.
“How long have you been looking for me?”
“Since I went back from the pool and no one could see you. The dog helped.”
“But this isn’t far from—” Rem hesitated.
“About two hours’ riding. We’ve been longer, circling, trying to get the dog to sort you out from wolf.”
“I didn’t realize I’d gone so far.”
“No.”
“Where are your father’s men?”
“Just up there. I think we should leave here now, if you can manage it. They’ve about had enough.”
“And so have you, I take it.”
Lur Raldnor went on looking down at him. He said flatly, “Whatever I did to offend you—”
“You didn’t do anything. Give me a moment, and I’ll be with you.”
The sour exchange had amused Rem in a way he recognized in himself, a shield up against all that had happened.
He felt empty. Even his awareness of the boy did not mean much now, just something else he must control.
He returned into the cot, perhaps to bid them farewell like any other passing traveler. But they had already dismissed him from their scheme of things. The girl child was playing with her mother’s hair, the other children, the baby, the man, slept.
Rem left them, mounted his zeeba, and rode up the slope with Yannul’s very polite and very angry son.
• • •
Everything was finished. As it had not, somehow, been finished in the surety of death, in the face of mythos somehow it was. The child might have lived. Now, still it might. But he had heard here of what they called wolf children. There had been similar prodigies rumored in Karmiss; everywhere, maybe. Orphans adopted by wolf-packs, reared like wolves, running with wolves.
And so, if she lived, that was what she was. More conceivably, superstitious hunters had come on her, rending sheep or orynx or men. Killed her. Long ago.
He could of course go on trying to find her. If he ever did, she would be a wolf.
Eight years of dead ends. And then this ultimate dead end.
It was finished.
They made a makeshift camp somewhere in the hills, slept a few hours, and went on. Beyond terse civilities, Lur Raldnor and he did not exchange a word. There was nothing to say. Rem’s quest had been private and stayed private in its solution.
When the villa-farm emerged at the edge of the dawn, he realized what came next. It was the only step which was clear in the aftermath.
“They may be concerned,” he said to Raldnor. “They probably looked for us last night.”
“Probably.”
“My fault. I’m sorry. I’ll speak to your father.”
“Don’t you think I can speak to him myself?” said Lur Raldnor, and for the first time his tone and his look cut like a razor.
Rem shrugged.
“If you prefer.”
• • •
“He can’t learn any more from me,” he said later
to Yannul. “You’d already taught him enough to pass very well. Otherwise, he’s got presence and a good head. If Raldanash gives him a command, which I take it is what you’re predicting, he’ll handle it. Better than most.”
“And you abruptly found this out during your nonexistent wolf hunt?” said Yannul, bringing him a cup of wine Rem thanked him for, set down and ignored.
“You’ve paid me generously. Don’t throw your money away when you don’t need to. He can work out with the young servant—I forget his name.”
“You’ve taken against my son,” said Yannul. He seemed quite serious, unhurried.
Rem said nothing, fretting for the door.
“I’m concerned,” said Yannul, not looking concerned. “I thought we’d brought him up to be a credit.”
“Sir,” said Rem, “He’ll shine for you in Dorthar like a torch. But I’ve my own dealings in Amlan—”
“I trust you,” said Yannul. “Why don’t you trust yourself?”
Rem stopped dead. Everything stopped.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. He stared Yannul out and was stared out in return.
“Is it,” said Yannul, “that you think he won’t be able, well-mannered lad that he is, to say ‘No’ loudly enough? He would say no, Rem. There’s no Ommos blood in my son.”
Rem felt the lash of that as if the man had struck him.
The land of Ommos, narrow of scope and heart, cruel predator while able upon the Lowlands, had a name now worse than offal. And at the same time that name of Ommos, whose cult was the sexual union of male with male, had become synonymous with the proclivities of men like himself. Logically, illogically. The Lowlanders had hated Ommos. Yannul would hate it. To Yannul it was perversity and filth. All of it, and everything about it.
“I speak my mind,” said Yannul. “But think. You’ve been in my house some while. With my son. And I knew inside a day.”
Something slipped from its moorings inside Rem’s spirit. He was worn out. Truth was making a fair bid to revolt him.
“Yes,” he said. “Very noble. Well, be pleased I’m leaving.”