Guardians of The Flame: To Home And Ehvenor (The Guardians of the Flame #06-07)

by Joel Rosenberg

  Andy crouched down and reached out to stroke one. It nipped at her, then nuzzled at her hand, probably trying to nurse. "Or you could slit their throats."

  Tennetty knelt down beside the rock. "I'll do it. Not fair to leave them to starve." She drew her bowie and reached for the nearest of the cubs.

  Jason grabbed her wrist. "What's your rush?"

  "They're hungry." She shrugged her hand away. "They're no enemy of mine; I don't need to see them suffer."

  He held up a hand. "Just put it away for a minute. Let's think this out."

  I already had. Damn, damn, damn.

  Sometimes, coming from the background I do is a burden, and it looked like Jason had inherited some of it from Karl. In a primitive society, people don't tend to be suckers for cute animals; interspecies empathy is a luxury, and people who are scratching for existence can't afford it. You can't, say, raise all the puppies that your bitch breeds, and you don't have the expertise to spay her. So you have to either drown in litters of pups, or drown most pups.

  Look—I've had to be hardhearted at times; there's situations where it's necessary to say that something's just natural, that there's nothing you can do about it. Cute baby animals die all the time out in the woods, and in a lot of cases it's just part of nature. And I've run into a lot worse than that.

  But this wasn't part of nature. Boioardo had brought the mother of the cubs down out of the hills, and we had killed the pack, and that left the orphans with us. With me.

  Ellegon's bulk loomed off in the distance, through the trees. *It would be awfully convenient if we had to take to our heels now.*

  It would also be convenient if we had a proper canine milk source back at Castle Cullinane.

  "Jason," I asked, "any chance there's a nursing bitch in the kennels?"

  "No." He shook his head. "Not mine. Bren insisted on showing me the inventory, and that didn't mention it. On the other hand," he went on, "there's got to be a village warden somewhere around with one. You ever know a warden not to keep dogs?"

  "There's the cows," Ahira said. "Cow milk might be worth a try."

  Tennetty spat. "Silly idea. Just make it quick; that's the best you can do."

  Jason shook his head. "I don't think my father would have, do you?" A thin smile played across his lips for just a moment. He reached into the den and scooped up one of the cubs. It nipped and wriggled as he handed it to me. It wasn't interested in sitting still.

  He grabbed the other one and, ignoring its yipping and wriggling, headed down the path toward Ellegon. "Anybody who wants to come with me had better move it; we're heading back to the castle, on the double."

  I looked down at the pup in my hands. Its fur was harder, denser than I would have expected a puppy's to be, and its eyes were glassy with hunger and thirst.

  Shit, shit, shit. "Let's roll it."

  "Okay." Ahira shrugged his pack onto his shoulders. "Let's give the boy a hand."

  "I thought you wanted to leave them to starve to death and worry about it later."

  "No, you didn't."

  * * *

  By the time we got back to Castle Cullinane, Aeia, Bren, and their entourage had left for Little Pittsburgh.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In Which, Surprisingly,

  Neither My Wife Nor I

  Are Urinated Upon

  To sleep, perchance to dream.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  Bill, your mother swims after troop ships.

  —WALTER SLOVOTSKY

  The complex problems sometimes have simple, easy solutions—it's the simple problems that drive you crazy.

  Like feeding the wolf cubs. The complex one was What the hell do you feed them?

  The way I'd figured it, there was a huge chance that we wouldn't be able to find the cubs enough to eat, and that we'd have to put them out of their misery. I wasn't looking forward to that, mind, but it would have made things simpler.

  But it turned out that what to feed adopted wolf cubs was already a solved problem, and so was taking a shot at domesticating them. It had been done before, in the old days, and the methods had been passed down by the dogkeepers. Some of the literate ones—and, in the old days, dogkeeping was a respectable profession, often taken up by petty nobility—had kept notes on the subject.

  It was Fred (don't blame me; that's his name, okay? It's a variant of Fredelen, a common Holtish name) the dogkeeper's firm belief that the Nyphien sheepdog was a mixture of the blood of wolf and the large Holtish dog called a kalifer, the oversized canine I always think of as a hairy mastiff.

  Still, there were differences. According to Fred, a dog bitch would have done for the first few tendays, but after that, the pups would have savaged the poor thing's teats. Takes a mother wolf to keep baby wolves in line.

  The standard baby wolf food was goat milk and whey, with the addition of one part bull blood for every ten of milk, and some herbs that Fred wouldn't identify.

  . . . and more attention than a newborn human baby gets. If you want them coexisting with humans, you'd better have them smelling them constantly.

  The next ten days were not fun.

  * * *

  The nightmare is always the same:

  We're trying to make our escape from Hell, billions of us pushing our way through the damp curtains that hang down from infinity, obscuring the endless surface.

  Everybody I've ever loved is there, along with faces familiar and strange.

  Behind us, sometimes visible down the endless rows of curtains, the screaming pack of demons pursues. I don't want to look at them, and I don't have to, not anymore. We're almost out, almost safe.

  But almost is never good enough.

  The exit is up ahead, clearly marked with glowing green letters. And some are pushing their way through, thankfully. I think I see my wife and kids go through, and out.

  I hope so.

  The demons are approaching too quickly, and they're going to catch some of us. And then I see him: Karl Cullinane, Jason's father, standing tall, face beaming, his hands, chest, and beard streaked with blood and gore.

  "We're going to have to hold them back," Karl says. "Who's with me?"

  He smiles, as though he's been waiting his whole life for this, the fucking idiot.

  "I'm with you," somebody says, and he waves whoever it is into his place next to Clint Hill and Audie Murphy.

  "It's your turn," Karl says, turning to me. He's covered with blood, some sort of yellow-green ichor, and wolf shit.

  He tosses his head to clear the blood from his eyes. "Your turn, Walter."

  * * *

  "Your turn, Walter," Jason said. He shook me again.

  I woke up slowly, half in the here and now, half in the nightmare, still watching Karl's face superimposed over his son's.

  Didn't like that at all—somebody in my line of work is supposed to wake up quickly, and before being touched at all. I don't care if my hindbrain thought me safe in bed next to my wife; the door was open, and an armed man had gotten in and next to me.

  Not good, Walter.

  Fast asleep, Kirah lay on the far side of the bed, curled under her blankets into a fetal position, her feet poised to push me away.

  A dirty, smelly woolen shirt and pants lay on the floor next to me. Clothes to feed wolves in. Shudder. I levered myself out of bed, and shrugged into my wolf-feeding clothes—they were still vaguely moist with wolf drool—and a few oddments of weaponry before following Jason out into the hall.

  My mouth had the metallic taste it gets when I don't get enough sleep. For some reason, I hadn't gotten enough sleep in the tenday we'd been back. Funny about that.

  I stopped at the top of the stairs to look out the window.

  Ellegon lay on the cold stones in the courtyard below, sleeping, his massive legs tucked underneath his body, his huge head resting on the cold stone, like a cat. Cute as a bus.

  Too bad. I could have used the company. Being up and alone at night isn't any fun.

 
Jason handed me one of his two lanterns. The castle tradition, probably going back to the siege, was to keep too few wall lanterns burning in the middle of the fucking night, and everybody had to carry his own light sources with him.

  "How are they doing?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "Nora's been hiding under the stove; Nick's been eating enough for three of them." He raised a hand in farewell. "And I've got to get some sleep," he said, padding down the carpet toward his room, not bothering to throw a glance over his shoulder.

  * * *

  I made my way down into the inner ward, and the shack we were using as a wolf-kennel.

  "Back-back-back, you vicious beasts," I said, as I unlocked the wire-mesh door and hung the lantern on the hook.

  Obediently, the two pups bounded out of their hiding places, Nora almost making it through the door before she bounced off my foot and ran, yipping, back into the shed; Nick snuffled around my feet silently as he wagged his tail.

  The locked cabinet held a fresh jug of Fred's foul-smelling wolf-baby food mixture; I took down a clean wooden bowl, and poured some for Nora. Nick hadn't gotten the idea of lapping out of a bowl as quickly as his sister; by the time I got some into one of the feeding bottles and a rag half-stuffed into the mouth of it, he was whimpering.

  Another week or so and he'd be able to eat out of a bowl.

  Or I'd wring his thickening neck.

  I plopped myself down on a pile of straw—stupidly but harmlessly (this time) trusting Jason to have cleaned out the place before he left. The little monsters could have—and certainly would have—dirtied it up, if they'd gotten around to it.

  Nick couldn't keep himself still; I had the usual trouble getting the pup tucked under one arm and getting the bottle to his mouth.

  He ate greedily, like he hadn't been fed in minutes.

  Basically, as Fred had explained it, the way you have a fair chance with wolf cubs or wild dogs is to catch them young enough—which he thought we did—and to spend all your time rubbing against them.

  Make them members of your family, he'd said. Imprint them, he might have meant.

  We'd see how it went over the long nights.

  I understood why Fred didn't want to have to do it—the smell of the pups scared Fred's dogs shitless. I was beginning to think that a spray bottle of wolf urine would be a wonderful invention for marking a territory as offlimits to domestic dogs.

  I'll tell you, this would have been the perfect time for young Baron Cullinane to exercise a bit of baronial authority and tell one of the scullery girls she had a new job, as nurse to a pair of cubs.

  But the Cullinanes are a stubborn breed—this was additional work, not expected, and Jason wasn't going to dump it on the castle staff, not if it wasn't absolutely necessary. No, that was for those of us who had taken on the responsibility: him, Ahira, his mother, and me.

  Look: I like dogs, I like playing with dogs, I like hanging out with dogs for a few minutes now and then. Throwing a stick and having a dog fetch it is one hell of a lot of fun, the first couple of dozen times you do it.

  But I didn't like spending six hours out of every day endlessly feeding and petting a couple of puppies, mucking out their kennel, and missing sleep.

  Shit.

  I had until dawn; Ahira would take over then. Hours of misery ahead.

  Still, they were kind of cute.

  I leaned back against the wall. Nora, always the less affectionate, retreated back into the shadows when she finished eating, while Nick kept sucking and licking at the bottle and the rag until he whimpered a bit, and fell asleep on my lap.

  A long shift lay ahead, with nothing much to do but reflect on how the universe sucked.

  Where had I gone wrong with Kirah? Was it something in how I touched her that had ruined sex for her? I don't mean to brag, but I've had relatively few complaints over the years. It isn't always unmeasurably wonderful or anything, but I'd always thought that I had more than a vague idea about what-goes-where.

  No, I was being silly.

  I rubbed at Nick's head, and he stirred for just a moment, then fell back asleep.

  It's amazing how the same life can look good during the day and like a black cesspit in the middle of the night.

  During the day, it was more important that I was living and working with friends who I cared for, and who cared for me; that the work we did was important to more than ourselves; that I had two beautiful, healthy daughters, both of whom were fond of me; that I was in good health and managed to keep up good spirits . . .

  . . . and, at night, all I could think about was that my wife wouldn't let me touch her.

  I guess I fell asleep, but I came awake suddenly. Nick, awake in my lap, had stiffened into immobility.

  The drill is always the same: you get yourself armed and ready, and then you decide whether or not you're going to have to use it. I dumped the pup to one side and had my dagger out of its sheath—

  "Walter?" It was Kirah's voice.

  "Yeah." I slid the knife back in its sheath. "Just me," I said, bending to give the puzzled puppy a pat.

  Balancing a serving tray on the palm of her one hand, she let herself in and knelt in front of Nick, who decided that she was okay, and demonstrated by wagging his stubby tail vigorously, then nipping gently at her face when she picked him up with her free hand.

  "Hi there. What are you doing up?"

  "Feeding you." She handed me the tray: half a loaf of U'len's garlic bread, in slices thick as my thumb; a huge mound—easily a pound—of cold, rare, roast beef, sliced thin enough for carpaccio, accompanied by a white clay mortar (as in " . . . and pestle" ) of freshly ground mustard and horseradish sauce; a wedge of blue-veined goat cheese surrounded by apple slices (try it!); a mottled brown pot of steaming herb tea, with two mugs.

  My wife knows how to scrounge in a kitchen.

  "I couldn't sleep alone." She smiled, aware of the irony. "I missed you, I guess."

  "What time is it?" I asked, spreading a huge dollop of mustard and horseradish sauce on one slice of the bread, then heaping a restrained half of the beef on top of it before setting the tray up on the table. I'd leave some for her. At least until I finished my sandwich.

  "Half past first hour." She set Nick down, and he immediately started chasing his tail.

  "Pull up a seat," I said. I'd come on at midnight. "I've only been on for a bit more than an hour." Enough time to get seriously depressed, that was all.

  I bit into the sandwich. The horseradish brought tears to my eyes, but it was worth it. There's something to be said for cold roast beef, thinly sliced, seasoned with just a little bit of salt, some cracked pepper, and mustard and horseradish sauce, served on coarse brown bread with little bits of garlic scattered through it . . . but I'd much rather eat it than say it.

  Kirah seated herself just out of my reach, then leaned back, tugging at the hem of the light cotton robe she wore over blousy pants and slippers.

  Nick went hunting for Nora, who just huddled deeper into her improvised nest in the far corner of the shack. Kirah started to get up, but desisted at my head-shake.

  "Leave her be," I said, from around another mouthful. "Won't do any good to go chasing after her; she'll come out in her own time. Or not."

  When something that can't be helped is bothering you, one cure is to think of something else that can't be helped that bothers you.

  So I wished for a good Other Side reference book. Common sense and old records can only go so far. I remember something about most wolves deferring to alpha males, and that the way a human successfully deals with them is by persuading them that he's sort of a super-alpha male, but how did you do that? Growl and nip at them? Slap them on the snout? Pin them down with one arm and make them behave? Or was gentle firmness the way to go?

  Common sense doesn't make it; all animals—homo sap definitely included—have their ways, and you violate them only at your peril. Doesn't matter how much you reason, or threaten—you can't get a cow to walk down
stairs, a cat to point out game, or a horse to fetch.

  I did remember from an ag ecology class that wolves mainly live off rodent pests, and that farmers who hunt them aren't doing themselves any favor. Back when I was working for King Maherralen in Endell, I'd stopped the dwarf wolf-hunt cold. (Okay, okay: I strongly recommended to the King that he stop it, which he did.) There were much better things for the king's people to do, no matter how much bad blood there was between dwarves and wolves.

  Would it be possible to return these guys to the wild? Damned if I knew.

  Nick came over and started nuzzling and nipping at my hand. I tried to pet him into quietness, but it didn't work—he just kept at me. Sharp little teeth. "No. No biting."

  Kirah giggled. "That's exactly the way you used to say it to Jane."

  I laughed back. "I probably did." I gestured at the tray with my free hand, offering to make her a sandwich.

  She shook her head. "No. I made it for you.—What do you think this Boioardo of yours was?" she asked.

  I shrugged. "Something from Faerie. Something dangerous."

  She pulled Nick over to her; he settled down in her lap and went promptly to sleep.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  "You just have to know how to talk to them," she said. She tossed her head to clear the hair from her eyes.

  I spread a blob of goat cheese over a slice of apple and bit into it. It's one of those combinations that seem ridiculous until you try them, like prosciutto and melon, or raw oysters and hot sausage—the sweetness of the apple softened the bite of the ripe cheese, and the crunch of the apple complemented the gooeyness of the cheese.

  I made another one, and offered it to Kirah, who surprised me by accepting it.

  "I was talking to Andrea about it, about him," Kirah said, licking at her thumb for the last of the cheese.

  "Nick?"

  "No. The fairy."

  Sometimes, I know just what to say to a woman: "Oh? She have any ideas?"

  "No." Her look said that one of us was an insensitive idiot who would probably need both guesses to figure out which. "I do."

  "Well? What do you think?" Gee, maybe I could have sounded a bit more stilted, a little more condescending, if I'd tried. I don't know. When a relationship goes sour, there's nothing right to say.