The Wolf Age

by James Enge

  The guards laughed and mocked him. In a chorus, man and wolf, they sang an obscene song at him; Morlock wondered if it was a version (or inversion) of one of Rokhlenu's songs; there was some mention of three moons aloft.

  Rokhlenu was breaking his teeth trying to gnaw through the bars.

  The guards raped the female werewolf, one by one. The senior guard, Wurnafenglu, the one with the grizzled fur and the multitude of honor-teeth, went first; the guards wearing the day shape went last. Even headless Khretnurrliu held his severed head high, as if to see better, and gruntingly thrust against the empty air with his decaying phallus.

  In the end the she-wolf lay without moving on the stone corridor. Morlock wondered if she was dead. Two of the man-form guards dragged her away. The others turned and started barking insults and mockery at Rokhlenu again. They said they could bring in a she-wolf again every night, if Rokhlenu had enjoyed the show. They said that he probably couldn't have done much if he had made it through the bars-as they themselves would have done, in his place. They described the visceral pleasures of forcing the she-wolf in grunted songs that, again, seemed to be parodies of love poetry. They said a great many things that Morlock did not understand and made no effort to understand.

  Rokhlenu kept battering himself against the bars. Whatever reason he had, it was not at his command.

  Morlock hated to see it. He hated to see the guards laughing at his friend, mocking him in his moment of weakness. So he jumped forward and strangled him. He wrapped his right arm around Rokhlenu's neck as tightly as he could, and ignored the wolf's savage claws tearing at his flesh, scattering fuming fire-bearing blood on the stones of the cell and the corridor outside.

  The guards roared with excitement. This was the game they had long waited to see. They called down the hallway to the other guards. They demanded that Hrutnefdhu bring his bag of betting slips-where the ghost was Hrutnefdhu whenever they needed him?

  Morlock clamped down on Rokhlenu's windpipe as hard as he dared and held until the werewolf stopped scrabbling and clawing to get free.

  He stood straight up, holding the motionless werewolf's body aloft by his neck. From the grinding sensation under his fingers, at least one bone was broken.

  The guards in the hallway applauded him. They called him the beastkiller. They said he had earned much bite, and could earn much more.

  Morlock threw the dead werewolf into the square of moonlight on the cell floor.

  He turned toward the cell bars. He found the senior guard and fixed him with his gaze. He snarled at him in Moonspeech. He could see by their faces that this shocked the guards; even Khretnurrliu seemed dismayed, to the extent that Morlock could see expression on the severed head's face.

  Morlock snarled that, if they wanted bloodshed, one of them should come into the cell. In the day shape or the night shape. With weapons and armor, or naked as the bald-faced bastards of ape-legged brachs that they were. He jumped up to the cell gate and shook the bars with his bleeding hands; the guards all instinctively recoiled. He laughed and turned his back on them.

  Rokhlenu was reviving in the white-hot pool of moonlight. He rolled groggily to his feet. His eyes found Morlock, dripping blood and fire near at hand, and shied away from the sight. He didn't look at the hallway, still crowded with eager guards. He slunk over to a lightless corner of the cell and curled up on the floor.

  Morlock went to the opposite corner and sat down with his back against the wall. He didn't expect to sleep, but he must have, eventually. After a dreamless interval he woke up and saw that it was past dawn. His wounds had mostly dried up, but one on the wrist was still dripping persistently.

  Rokhlenu, now wearing the day shape, was sitting crouched in his corner, his hands across his face. He had not yet put on his loincloth, which was normally the first thing he did after transition.

  Morlock rose and limped over to the loincloth. He picked it up with his left (unbleeding) hand and held it out to Rokhlenu. "Here."

  "Get away from me," Rokhlenu said, not moving.

  "Here," Morlock said, more insistently.

  Rokhlenu struck the filthy cloth away from him. "Don't you understand?" he screamed. "The bond is broken. There never was a bond. I'm not one of you. I'm one of therm. I know it now. They know it. Why don't you know it?"

  Morlock stooped and picked up the loincloth and held it out. "There is you and me," he said patiently. "There is them. You and me against them. No bond is broken. I say so."

  Rokhlenu silently took the loincloth and wrapped it around himself. As Morlock turned away, the werewolf reached out his hand and grabbed Morlock by one shoulder. "You and me," Rokhlenu said, "against them. I'll remember this, Morlock."

  Morlock nodded and went back to the other side of the cell, where he was less likely to bleed on his friend.

  orlock didn't bother binding his wounds; he guessed the Sardhluun would be reluctant to let their beast killer die until they had wholly given up on finding ways to use him.

  He was right. Presently Hrutnefdhu came slinking down the corridor in man form, the jar of healing salve in one hand, a roll of bandages in the other. He stood in the corridor, not looking at the guards as one opened the gate while the others nocked arrows and aimed them at the prisoners. Hrutnefdhu stepped into the cell. He didn't look at Rokhlenu, either, but went straight to Morlock with the salve.

  "Thanks," Morlock said, slathering on the ill-smelling goo.

  "I'll bind them," Hrutnefdhu said, unrolling a stretch of cloth and tearing it with his sharp white teeth.

  Morlock thought this unwise, as his blood would likely cause the bandage to burn. But then he realized that Hrutnefdhu knew about this, and said nothing as the werewolf deftly bound up his wounds. The cloth absorbed the salve and Morlock's blood and did not burn.

  "This salve and the cloth have been dephlogistonated," he said to Hrutnefdhu.

  "I don't know what that means," the werewolf said.

  "A powerful maker made them," Morlock said. "Who was it?"

  "I don't know-the Goweiteiuun practice magic. Or maybe Ulugarriu made them."

  "Ulugarriu?" Morlock asked. "I thought nobody saw him?"

  "Nobody does," Hrutnefdhu said. "I didn't mean it. If any great wonder has been worked, they say that Ulugarriu did it. It's stupid. Never mind."

  "Do you know what happened to the she-wolf?" Morlock asked.

  Every muscle in the mottled werewolf's flexible body seemed to freeze. "What do you mean?" he asked finally.

  "Did she die? Will she recover? They hurt her very badly."

  "Yes." Hrutnefdhu swallowed painfully. "She is not dead. She is not well, but will recover. She is my mate, Liudhleeo."

  His mate. Morlock did not understand how a castrato could have a mate, but that was not the most important thing, perhaps. "I am sorry," he said quietly. "I hated them for what they did. I hate them more now. I know that doesn't help."

  Hrutnefdhu closed his eyes, opened them. "It's not nothing. There is you and me. There is them."

  "There is Rokhlenu, also."

  "I suppose there is."

  "Will you bind his wounds also?" Morlock asked.

  Hrutnefdhu's pale eyes focused on Morlock for a moment. Then he nodded impassively.

  Rokhlenu had no visible wounds. But the smeared ointment would look like dried blood. And Morlock hoped that a rope maker's son could unobtrusively fashion the bandages themselves into respectable strangling cords.

  The months passed and the deadly heat lessened slightly. It was autumn, presently, and from then on the nights were moonslit: great Chariot, the major moon, would be aloft until the last day of the year. But Rokhlenu often practiced the discipline of not changing into a wolf at night. When he did assume the night shape, he usually avoided the transformation into the day shape on the next morning.

  It was a sort of self-discipline, he explained to Morlock. To wear the day shape by night or the night shape by day was, as Morlock had been told, an act of low status-larg
ely because many could not make the full transition into or out of wolfhood. But for someone who could make the transition, it was a challenge to maintain the wolf-form by daylight: the wolf-self drew sustenance from the silver shadows in moonlight. And to resist the change by moonlight took yet another skill-the skill to decline power and the call of the beast in one's own blood. Rokhlenu wanted to know that he, not the Sardhluun, was the master of his spirit and his will.

  Morlock was facing similar challenges, but not voluntarily. He was trying to retain a thread of his sanity untainted by the rising tide of madness in his mind. For long stretches of the day and night he could not see or hear anything that made sense. He would sit with his back against the wall amid a cloudy chaos of nothingness that masked the world. There was pain also: a steady knifelike pain radiating from the spike in his head, and cascades of dull aches in his joints that came and went.

  If he had been himself in the midst of these distortions, it might not have been so bad. But, increasingly, he was not. Day after day he became more concerned that his fingers were growing backward into his hands, his hands withdrawing into his arms. He spent hour after hour measuring his hands against the bricks in the cell walls. He always seemed to get different results-sometimes encouraging, sometimes not.

  There were times he knew his obsessions were just that: the madness working its way into his mind. But, in a way, that made it worse. There was nothing he could do to stop the madness. If he ever made it free from the cell, he would still be a prisoner of the madness.

  He wondered, too, if he had the courage to leave the cell anymore. Khretnurrliu was outside all the time, now, very close to the bars. Often he held his severed head through the bars, and the rotting lips whispered silent threats and unspeakable curses against the man who had killed him. The only way Morlock could escape was to not be that man somehow. The madness, the cell, became his refuge. He feared the ghosts and the freedom that lay without.

  Hate could help him with this, and sometimes he drank deep of it, trem bling with the desire to kill his tormentors as he had killed Khretnurrliu. But this, too, had its dangers. Like any strong drink, like any drug, the rage left behind it a cold absence, a weakness that only the return of rage itself could heal.

  In the arena of his mind, in the chaos of his heart, he fought thousands of battles every day. Sometimes, through the dim distorting vision of the world-as-it-was, he saw Rokhlenu peering at him with deep concern. He would have allayed his friend's concern if he'd known how.

  Fortunately, Morlock's obsessions, his endless internal war, the fog he lived in day and night-all these things made him a very boring prisoner. Occasionally he engaged in low-voiced conversations with Rokhlenu, but apart from that he sat by the cell bars day and night, rocking back and forth and flexing his muscles to keep from cramping. The guards kept close watch on him at first, but eventually they grew used to seeing him there and they relaxed their vigil.

  It was necessary to sit by the doorway for a simple reason. Khretnurrliu was always just to the left or right of his field of vision. If he stayed by the door and refrained from looking into the cell, Khretnurrliu could not enter. It was a simple and reasonable solution to keep the ghost from entering and destroying them. Rokhlenu, when Morlock explained the matter to him, eventually agreed, although they didn't have many conversations after that. More often, Morlock saw him in low-voiced converse with Hrutnefdhu on the other side of the cell door.

  Morlock had long ago twisted his old bandages into a strangling cord, wrapping it around his wrist as if it were a bracelet. He didn't doubt he could use it effectively against the guards, or at least one of them, if he could somehow get into the corridor. Rokhlenu could take care of another. If they were quick enough, each might use a fallen guard's weapon on another guard. All that was possible, if they could get into the corridor.

  But what could they do against Khretnurrliu? That was the real question, and Morlock gnawed at it alone through the lonely days and hours, as Rokhlenu didn't seem interested in discussing it. Morlock knew little about trapping or combating ghosts, and what little he knew involved the Sight that was now lost to him.

  He had once seen the execution of a criminal in the Anhikh Komos. After expulsion from the city communion, the malefactor was beheaded and his limbs bound with a light thread to keep the ghost from roaming about, malefacting even after death. Morlock had pointed out to a local that the thread wasn't much of a bond, and the local had told him it wasn't meant to bind the dead body but the ghost. Perhaps that was what he could do about Khretnurrliu: bind the ghost with a rope of light thread.

  Morlock thought he could probably make a thread from his own hair, which was getting pretty long. He chose the grayer hairs on the grounds that they were more likely to baffle the grayish rotting ghost: like is always frustrated by like. He knotted a great length of the grayish hairs together over a number of days, working with his hands behind his back or under his legs so that the guards and Khretnurrliu could not see.

  He tested his first attempt and it broke on the first tug. That annoyed him, and it also raised the latent maker in his madness. He could make a better thread than that-and did, though it took many days and many wild hairs. In the end he had a long thin string of grayish twine that was fairly strong. He himself could break it, but he didn't think Khretnurrliu could, not with his muscles hanging off his bones in greenish strands.

  It was a trivial accomplishment, in a way, but it gave him a fierce satisfaction. He would have boasted about it to Rokhlenu, but of course that would give everything away. Anyway, Rokhlenu wasn't very communicative lately. He was very kind and very patient, reminding Morlock to eat and drink when he forgot (as he invariably did), but Morlock did not want kindness or patience in response to this heroic deed. He wanted awe or nothing. If he could explain to Rokhlenu how important the problem was, maybe he could spring the twine on him as a solution and get an appropriate response. But it would require distraction on the guards' part if he were to escape their attention, and he thought this unlikely. He looked up and glanced at them.

  He saw, with some surprise, that there were only two: one in the day shape, one in the night shape. The day-shape guard was not an archer-anyway, he didn't have a bow. They were both werewolves of very little bite; the wolf had only one tooth on a cord around his neck; and the man had only a cord with no teeth. The man was looking idly down the corridor; the wolf was asleep.

  Morlock was astonished, and more than a little offended. Didn't they know how dangerous he was? Didn't they have any sense of responsibility? He looked at Khretnurrliu, who was wearing the rotting body of a decapitated wolf today, and somehow he knew his enemy was as offended as he. Morlock was minded to complain about it, although he didn't know who would listen.

  Then his attention was speared by something else. The grayish iron of the bar securing the cell gate was almost exactly the same color as the silvery twine he had labored so long to make. He wondered if the twine was strong enough to sustain the weight of the metal bar. He thought it was. If he could manage to loop the twine around the bar unobserved, there was a good chance he could ease it out of its slot and throw the cell door open.

  He wished there were some way he could warn Rokhlenu of his plan, but there wasn't. Rokhlenu was very difficult to talk to lately; Morlock wondered if his cellmate might be going mad. The thought of insanity bothered Morlock very much; he hated the thought of losing his selfhood that way. He was glad he wasn't going insane. But if Rokhlenu was, there was little he could do but kill him before Morlock caught his illness: it was the reasonable thing to do.

  Or was it? There was some reason why Morlock should not kill Rokhlenu; he was sure of it. Only he couldn't remember what it was. It would certainly be good to have someone fighting alongside him in the corridor.

  Neither of the guards was looking. The one was still asleep. Morlock unobtrusively tossed a loop of twine for the end of the lock-bar ... and missed.

  Morlock was shocked.
He could not remember the last time he had thrown anything at anything and missed. On the other hand, he couldn't remember much at all. His time in prison might have lasted only a few days or weeks, but everything before it seemed faint and unreal. Perhaps he really wasn't much good at throwing things.

  He tried it again, and this time the twine loop fell across the top of the lock-bar on its far end. Morlock jostled the loop gently, and it fell across the end of the lock-bar. He was ready.

  He looked up and saw that Khretnurrliu was staring at him. The dead wolf's severed head had opened its mouth in anticipation; the headless body was leaning forward, like a dog straining at an invisible leash. The dead werewolf was waiting for him.

  He let one end of the twine go and drew it unobtrusively back into the cell. Khretnurrliu's dead body sat back and the severed head tilted; it seemed disappointed in Morlock. So was Morlock. But he just couldn't face the dead wolf. He had already killed it once. How long was he supposed to go on killing it? Maybe it was Rokhlenu's turn.

  He sidled over to Rokhlenu and said, "Hey."

  "Hey," Rokhlenu replied wearily. "Long time no smell."

  "Rokhlenu."

  "Morlock."

  "Rokhlenu."

  "Morlock."

  "Rokhlenu."

  "Stop saying that. There's no one else here. You can just say what you have to say."

  "What would you do if you got out of here?"

  Rokhlenu seemed surprised and pleased. "You sound a little more like yourself today. And, it's funny: I was just thinking about that-the minor moons know why; I don't. But I'd probably go to the outlier pack, south of Wuruyaaria. I can send word to my father and brothers-" He continued for a while in this vein.

  Morlock twitched impatiently. This was too long term, too strategic. Morlock was asking about the immediate, the tactical situation. But he didn't know the words for this.

  "I mean here and now," he said finally, interrupting Rokhlenu's daydream. "What would you do here and now if you got out of here?"