“Stand what, sir?”
“Stand the change. The sickness that’s going to come over you.” Wiktor released his chin. “Don’t eat, then. It would be a waste of good food. You’re finished, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Mikhail admitted, and shivered as a chill passed through his bones.
“I know. I’ve learned to recognize strong reeds and weak ones. A lot of weak reeds lie in our garden.” Wiktor motioned outward, beyond the chamber, and Andrei suffered another spasm of coughing. “All of us are born weak,” Wiktor told the boy. “We have to learn to be strong, or we perish. A simple fact of life and death.”
Mikhail was tired. He thought of a mop he’d once watched Dimitri use to swab the carriage, and he felt the way that wet old mop had looked. He lay down again, on a pallet of grass and pine straw.
“Boy?” Wiktor asked. “Do you know anything about what’s happening to you?”
“No sir.” Mikhail closed his eyes and squeezed them tight. His face felt as if it were made of the candle wax he used to dip his finger in and watch harden.
“They never do,” Wiktor said, mostly to himself. “Do you know anything about germs?” He was addressing the boy again.
“Germs, sir?”
“Germs. Bacteria. Virus. You know what those things are?” Again, he didn’t wait for a response. “Look at this.” Wiktor spat in his hand, and put the spittle-pooled palm in front of Mikhail’s face. The boy looked at it obediently, saw nothing but spit. “It’s in there,” Wiktor said. “The pestilence and the miracle. It’s right there, in my hand.” He pulled his hand away, and Mikhail watched him lick the saliva back into his mouth. “I’m full of it,” Wiktor said. “In my blood and my insides. My heart and lungs, my guts, my brain.” He tapped his bald skull. “I’m infested with it,” he said, and he stared forcefully at Mikhail. “Just as you are, right now.”
Mikhail wasn’t sure he understood what the man was talking about. He sat up again, his head pounding. Chills and fever played through his body, malicious partners in torment.
“It was in Renati’s spit.” Wiktor touched Mikhail’s shoulder, where a bandage of leaves and some kind of brown herbal paste Renati had mixed was pressed to the inflamed, pus-edged wound. It was no more than a glancing touch, but the pain made Mikhail wince and draw a breath. “It’s in you now, and it’s either going to kill you or…” He paused and shrugged. “Teach you the truth.”
“The truth?” Mikhail shook his head, puzzled and hazy in the brain. “About what?”
“Life,” Wiktor said. His breath wafted into the boy’s face, and it smelled of blood and raw meat. Mikhail saw flecks of something red in his beard, which also held bits of leaves and grass. “A life beyond dreams—or nightmares—depending on your point of view. Some might call it an affliction, a disease, a curse.” He had sneered that last word. “I call it nobility, and I would only live one other life, if I could be reborn: I would know the wolf’s way from birth, and be ignorant of that beast called a human being. Do you understand what I’m saying, boy?”
One thought was paramount in Mikhail’s mind. “I want to go home now,” he said.
“My God, we’ve brought a simpleton into the pack!” Wiktor almost shouted. He stood up. “There is no home for you now but here, with us!” He nudged with his sandal an uneaten piece of meat that lay on the floor near the boy’s pallet; it was rabbit flesh, and though Renati had passed it over a flame a few times, it still oozed a little blood. “Don’t eat!” Wiktor thundered. “In fact, I command you not to eat! The sooner you die, the sooner we can tear you to pieces and eat you!” That sent a shiver of pure terror through Mikhail, but his face, glistening with sweat, remained impassive. “So you leave this alone, do you hear me?” He kicked the piece of rabbit meat a few inches closer to Mikhail’s side. “We want you to get weak and die!” The coughing of Andrei broke his tirade. Wiktor turned away from the boy to go across the chamber, and he knelt at Andrei’s side and lifted the blanket. Mikhail heard the breath hiss between Wiktor’s teeth, and Wiktor grunted and said, “My poor Andrei,” in a quiet, subdued voice. Then, abruptly, Wiktor stood up, shot a dark glance at Mikhail, and stalked out of the chamber.
Mikhail lay very still, listening to the sound of Wiktor’s sandals scrape on the stairs going up. The little fire popped and spat sparks, and Andrei’s breathing was like a rumble of freight cars on a distant track. Mikhail shivered, full of frost, and stared at the bloody piece of rabbit meat.
I command you not to eat, Wiktor had said. Mikhail stared at the meat, and watched a fly buzz slowly around it. The fly landed on the meat and crawled happily over it, as if searching for a tender place from which to draw the first sip of juice. I command you not to eat.
Mikhail looked away. Andrei coughed raggedly, twitched, and then lay still again. What was wrong with him? Mikhail wondered. Why was he so sick? His gaze slid back to the rabbit flesh. He thought of wolf fangs, distended and dripping, and in his mind’s eye he saw a big pile of bones licked clean and white as October snow. His stomach mewled like a kitten. He looked away from the meat again. It was so bloody, so… awful. Such a raw thing would never be found on the gilded plates of the Gallatinov dining table. When was he going home, and where were his mother and father? Oh, yes. Dead. All dead. Something gripped tight in his mind, like a fist around a secret, and he couldn’t think about his parents or his sister anymore. He stared at the rabbit flesh, and his mouth watered.
One taste, he thought. Just one. Would it be so bad?
Mikhail reached out and touched the flesh. The fly, startled, buzzed around his head until he swatted it away. Mikhail drew his fingers back and looked at the faint smears of scarlet on the fingertips. He sniffed them. The odor of metal, a memory of his father oiling a silver sword. Then Mikhail licked his fingers, and tasted blood. It was not a bad taste, nor a particularly good one. It was faintly smoky, and a little bitter. But even so, it made his stomach growl louder and his mouth water more. If he died, the wolves—and Wiktor was one of them—would rip him to pieces. So he had to live; that was a simple truth. And if he wanted to live, he would have to force down the bloody meat. He waved the persistent fly away again and picked up the rabbit flesh. It felt slick and slightly oily between his fingers. Maybe there was a little bit of fur on it, too, but he didn’t look too closely. He squeezed his eyes shut, opened his mouth. His stomach lurched, but it needed to be filled before it could be emptied. He pushed the flesh into his mouth and bit down.
Juices flooded over his tongue; they were sweet and gamy, a taste of wildness. Mikhail’s head pounded and his spine ached, but his teeth worked as if they were the masters and everything else was servant to them. He tore hunks of flesh off and chewed them; it was a tough old rabbit, thickly muscled, and it didn’t want to be swallowed without a struggle. Blood and juice trickled over his chin as he ate, and Mikhail Gallatinov—six days and a world away from the boy he used to be—tore the flesh between his teeth and swallowed it with famished relish. When he came to the bones, he scraped them clean and tried to crack them open to get at the marrow. One of the smaller bones burst apart, red marrow exposed. He thrust his tongue into the broken bone and dug out the congealed blood. He ate as if it were the grandest meal ever served on a gold plate.
Sometime later, the hollowed-out bones fell from his bloody fingers, and Mikhail sat on his haunches over the little pile and licked his lips.
It hit him with a frightening force: he’d liked the bloody meat. He’d liked it very much. And that was not all. He wanted more.
Andrei suffered another fit of coughing that ended on a strangled note. The body stirred, and Andrei called out weakly: “Wiktor? Wiktor?”
“He’s gone,” Mikhail said, but Andrei kept calling for Wiktor in a voice that rose and fell. There was terror in that voice, and an awful weariness, too. Mikhail crawled across the stones to Andrei’s side. There was a bad smell over here, a sour and decayed odor. “Wiktor?” Andrei whispered, his face
hidden in the folds of the cloaks, only his pale brown, sweat-damp hair showing. “Wiktor… please… help me.”
Mikhail reached down and pulled the cloak away from Andrei’s face.
Andrei was perhaps eighteen or nineteen years old, and his face—gleaming with sweat—was as gray as a well-used dishrag. He looked up at Mikhail with sunken brown eyes and gripped Mikhail’s arm with skinny fingers. “Wiktor,” Andrei whispered. He tried to lift his head, but his neck wasn’t strong enough. “Wiktor… don’t let me die.”
“Wiktor’s not here.” Mikhail tried to pull away, but the fingers clenched tighter.
“Don’t let me die. Don’t let me die,” the young man pleaded, his eyes glassy. He coughed once, softly, and Mikhail saw his thin, sallow chest lurch. The next cough was stronger, and the one after that made Andrei’s body shake. Andrei’s coughing turned into strangling, and Mikhail tried to work his arm loose but Andrei wouldn’t let him go. There was a terrible rattling deep in Andrei’s chest, a wet, thick, sliding noise. Andrei’s mouth opened wide, and he coughed violently with tears streaming from his eyes.
Something oozed out of Andrei’s mouth. Something long and white and wriggling.
Mikhail blinked, and felt the blood drain out of his face as he watched the worm writhe on the stones beside Andrei’s head.
Andrei coughed once more, and there was a sound of a heavy mass breaking apart in his lungs. And then they flooded out of his mouth. The white worms tangled and entwined around each other, the first hundred or so clean and ghost white, but then the next ones dappled with crimson lung blood. Andrei shivered and retched, his eyes staring at the shock-frozen boy, but he couldn’t open his mouth wide enough for all the worms to get out. They began to ooze through his nostrils as well, and Andrei strangled and choked as his body expelled its cargo. And still they surged out, now dark scarlet and sluggish, and as they spilled onto the stones Mikhail screamed and wrenched his arm loose, leaving bits of his skin under Andrei’s fingernails. Mikhail tried to rise, stumbled over his own feet and fell backward to the floor, landing hard on the base of his spine. Andrei reached for him, trying to find his hand, and lifting up out of his bed of cloaks, with blood-black worms frothing from his mouth. Mikhail began to choke, too, and as he scuttled away across the stones he felt the rabbit meat rising; he swallowed it down again, thinking of wolf fangs tearing him to shreds. Andrei got to his knees, and then with a terrible lung-ripping cough he expelled a black knot of worms the size of a man’s fist. They streamed from his mouth and down his chest, and were followed by dark ribbons of pure blood. Andrei fell onto his face. He was naked, his body already the yellowish-gray of a corpse. His wiry muscles jittered, his flesh rippling and seething under a sheen of sweat. Mikhail saw darkness spreading across Andrei’s back: brown hairs, bursting from the pores. In a matter of seconds hairs covered Andrei’s back and shoulders and were creeping down his buttocks and thighs, darkening his arms, bursting from his hands and fingers. Andrei lifted his face, and Mikhail saw it caught in the change, blood still drooling over the lengthening jaw. His eyes had retreated further under a protruding brow, his scalp hair sleek and shining, his throat banded with dark hair. Andrei shivered as his spine began to crack and contort, and he opened his fanged mouth to shriek—a hideous commingling of animal and human anguish.
A hand gripped Mikhail by the scruff of the neck and lifted him off the floor. Another hand—the fingers rough and purposeful—twisted his face away from the grisly spectacle. He was pressed into a shoulder, and he smelled the musky odor of deerskin. “Don’t look.” It was Renati’s voice. “Don’t look, little one,” she said, and put her hand firmly against the back of his head.
He could still hear, and that was bad enough. The half-human, half-wolf shrieking went on, coupled with the noise of bones popping. Someone else entered the chamber, and Renati shouted, “Get out!” Whoever it was quickly retreated. The shrieking turned into a high, thin howling that made Mikhail’s skin crawl and drove him to the edge of madness, and he squeezed his eyes shut as Renati gripped the back of his skull. Mikhail realized then that he had put his arms around her neck. The agonized howling echoed through the chamber.
And then there was a choking whine, like a machine losing power and dying down. A last few fits of raspy breathing, and silence.
Renati put Mikhail down. He kept his face averted as she walked to the corpse’s side and knelt down. Nikita, the almond-eyed Mongol with coal-black hair, came into the chamber, glanced quickly at Mikhail and then at the woman. “Andrei’s dead,” he said, a statement of fact.
Renati nodded. “Where’s Wiktor?”
“Gone hunting. For him.” He jerked a thumb at Mikhail.
“Just as well, then.” Renati reached down, scooped up a handful of bloody worms and tossed them on the fire. They writhed and crisped. “Wiktor didn’t want to watch him die.” Nikita came forward to stand beside Renati, and as they talked—something about a garden—Mikhail’s curiosity pulled him across the chamber. He stood between Nikita and Renati and peered down at Andrei’s corpse.
It was the carcass of a wolf with brown fur and dark, sightless eyes. Its tongue lolled in a little pool of blood. Its right leg was the leg of a human being, and at the end of its wiry forelegs were two human hands, the fingers gripping at the stones of the floor as if trying to wrench them apart. Instead of horror, Mikhail felt a stab of pain in his heart. The fingers were pale and skinny, and they were the same fingers that only a few moments ago had been clutching his arm. The absolute power of death hit him with full force, somewhere between the chin and the crown of his head. But it was a blow that cleared his vision, and he saw at that instant that his mother, father, and sister were gone forever, and so were his days of dreaming on the end of a kite.
Renati looked at him and snapped, “Get back!” Mikhail obeyed, and only then did he realize he’d been standing on worms.
Nikita and Renati wrapped the carcass in a deerskin cloak, lifted it between them, and took it away, into a part of the white palace where shadows reigned. Mikhail sat on his haunches next to the fire, his blood moving in his veins like ice-clogged rivers. He stared at Andrei’s dark blood on the stone. Mikhail shivered and held his palms toward the fire glow. You’re going to be sick soon, he remembered Wiktor saying. Very soon.
Mikhail couldn’t get warm. He sat closer to the fire, but even its heat on his face didn’t thaw his bones. There was a tickling in his chest, and he coughed, the noise as explosive as a gunshot between the damp stone walls.
2
The days merged, one into the other, and in the chamber there was neither sunlight nor moonlight, just the fire’s glow and spark as someone—Renati, Franco, Nikita, Pauli, Belyi, or Alekza—fed pine branches to the flames. Wiktor never tended the fire, as if it were understood such a menial task was beneath him. Mikhail felt heavy, and slept most of the time, but when he awakened there was usually a piece of barely cooked meat, berries, and a little water cupped in a hollowed stone beside him. He ate without question or hesitation, but the stone was too heavy to lift so he had to bend over it and lap the water up. Another thing he noticed: whoever was cooking the meat was gradually letting it remain bloodier. And it wasn’t all flesh meat, either. Now and again it was something that was red and purplish, as if torn from a creature’s innards. Mikhail at first refused to touch those grisly tidbits, but nothing new was placed beside him until he ate what was there, and soon he learned not to let anything—no matter how raw or horrid—sit there too long or the flies would come. He also learned that throwing up was futile; no one cleaned it up after him.
Once he awakened, shivering cold on the outside and burning beneath the skin, to a chorus of wolf howls somewhere in the distance. They terrified him at first. He had a few seconds of mad panic when he wanted to get up and claw his way out of the chamber, run through the woods and back to where his parents lay dead so he might find a gun and blow his brains out; but then the panic passed like a shade, and he sat liste
ning to what he heard as music, the notes soaring up into the sky and entwining around each other like summer-passioned vines. He thought even that for a short time he could understand the language of that howling—a strange sensation, as if he’d suddenly learned to think in bits and pieces of Chinese. It was a language of mingled joy and yearning, like the sigh of someone who stands in a field of yellow flowers with the blue sky limitless in all directions and holds a broken string where a kite used to be. It was the language of wanting to live forever, and knowing that life was a cruel beauty. The howling brought tears to Mikhail’s eyes and made him feel small, a fleck of dust floating on a wind current over a land of cliffs and chasms.
Once he awakened and found the maw of a blond-furred wolf over his face, the ice-blue eyes steady and piercing as they stared at him. He lay very still, his heart pounding, as the wolf began to sniff his body. He smelled the wolf, too; a musky, sweet scent of rain-washed hair and breath that held the memory of fresh blood. He shivered, lying as if bound, as the blond wolf sniffed slowly over his chest and throat. Then, with a shake of its skull, the wolf opened its mouth and dropped eleven uncrushed blackberries onto the stones beside Mikhail’s head. The wolf retreated to the edge of the firelight, sat on its haunches, and watched as Mikhail ate the berries and lapped at the hollow, water-filled rock.
A dull, throbbing pain began to build and spread through his bones. Moving—even breathing—became an exercise in agony. And still the pain built, hour after hour, day after day, and someone cleaned him when he voided and someone else folded the deerskin cloaks around him like an infant. He shivered with cold, and the shivering fired the pain that raced through his nerves and made him moan and weep. Through the hazy twilight, he heard voices. Franco’s: “Too small, I tell you. The small ones don’t live. Renati, did you want a child so badly?” And Renati, angered: “I don’t ask a fool for his opinions. You keep to yourself and leave us alone!” Then the voice of Wiktor, slow and precise: “His color’s bad. Do you think he has worms? Feed him something and see if he’ll take it.” A piece of bloody meat was pressed to Mikhail’s lips; Mikhail, adrift in a sea of pain, thought, Don’t eat. I command you not to eat, and he felt defiance rachet his jaws open. Fresh agony seared him, made the tears stream down his cheeks, but he accepted the food and gripped it with his teeth lest it be snatched away. Nikita’s voice drifted to him, and in it was a hint of admiration: “He’s stronger than he looks. Watch out he doesn’t snap your fingers off!”
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