The Wolf Age

by James Enge

  "How do they work?" Rokhlenu asked.

  "Not sure," Hlupnafenglu said with his customary, somewhat eerie cheer.

  "Morlock was going to show us," Hrutnefdhu added. "But he-well, he never got around to it."

  Because he was drunk? Rokhlenu wondered. Looking back, he seemed to remember Morlock had said that wine was not good for him-he forgot exactly what his old friend had said. But why would someone go on drinking if it harmed him? It was beyond Rokhlenu's understanding, and not immediately relevant, so he put it aside.

  Rokhlenu said, "Let's pull one down, and you two put it on me. I'll see if I can fly in it. If I don't kill myself, one of you follow me. We have got to do something about those airships or they'll burn our town down to water level."

  They dragged one of the wingsets down from the roof and strapped it on the gnyrrand's back. Wearing it, he felt as light as air: his feet barely touched the ground. There were grips inside the wings, and when he used them to flex the wings, he felt his feet leave the ground for a moment.

  "Chief, wait," said Hrutnefdhu.

  "No waiting. One of you follow me. I'll be headed straight for the airships." He ran out of the cave and took straight to the air.

  The southern wind threw him backward, pinning him against the hill above the cave, knocking the wind from his lungs.

  "You don't have a weapon!" shouted Hrutnefdhu at the top of his penetrating voice.

  "Oh," said Rokhlenu, dashed in multiple senses. "Help me down, citizens."

  They hauled him down. There were still many glass weapons about the cave, and a sheath for a short sword was built into the frame of the wings, running across the shoulders. Rokhlenu took a sword, practiced sheathing and unsheathing a couple times, and then said, less dramatically, "Like I said before. I'm going to walk up to the top of the hill and take off from there. One of you do the same. The other try to wake Morlock up. Maybe he can think of something. If you can get him to think."

  "Will do, Chief," said Hlupnafenglu.

  As he stepped out of the cave into the warm rainy night, he heard the werewolves behind him arguing about who would follow. He struggled up to the top of the hill, the wind threatening to blow him off his feet at any moment. When he reached the crest, he spread his wings and leapt into the air. The wind carried him away, up into the dark fire-torn sky.

  The worst thing, as soon as he left the ground, was the sense of placelessness. He was tumbling in the dark; there was no clear sign for him to follow, nothing to give him a sense of where to fly to.

  There was, at least, up and down. He drove the wings to carry him higher and higher. Suddenly it occurred to him that the wind was blowing from the south, almost due north, and he must already be past the borders of the outlier settlement.

  Steering took a few tries before he began to understand it, but he found he could angle the wings and his body to bank against the wind.

  Then he saw them! The airships! They were no blacker than the clouds, but the eyes of the gondolas were still red with fire. Every now and then the sky would flash with lightning, and in the bitter blue light he could see the long clawlike shapes of the airships clearly. Down below was the outlier settlement, also outlined with fire. It was already burning. It might already be too late. Wuinlendhono might already be dead.

  He drove his wings toward them. What he could do against them he did not know. But they weren't expecting him, and that was to his advantage.

  He closed on the airships faster than he expected. The storm winds added speed to his wings.

  And they did, in fact, see him. They were looking out from the windows of the gondola, scanning the dark night. He saw them long before they saw him ... but he was armed with a short sword and they had bows. A bolt of lightning thundered shockingly nearby; though he was dazed by it he was close enough to hear a shout from the gondola of the nearer airship: someone had seen him.

  With terrible clarity, he saw several archers take their bead on him and ready burning arrows to shoot.

  Then a shadow passed between him and their fiery light.

  Morlock was having the worst dream ever. Not a nightmare, in the usual sense. A frustration dream, a shame dream. Someone had come to him for help, someone he wanted to help, but he could not help them because he was drunk. Even in his dream Morlock knew it must be a dream, because he had given up drinking ages ago, precisely so that this exact thing would never happen again.

  It was very real, though. It was as if he could see Rokhlenu strapping on the wingset he had built. He could hear the words the werewolves spoke. But he knew it was a dream, because he had long ago given up drinking.

  He started a little when Hrutnefdhu screamed, You don't have a weapon! That was almost like it was really happening.

  He felt something on his hand. He stared at it for a while. It was red, but not like blood. Plus, it did not burn, as his blood did. It was cold, unlike blood. And it didn't smell like blood. It smelled like wine.

  He had a bowl of wine in his hand. He had spilled some of it when the pale werewolf shouted.

  If he actually had a bowl of wine in his hand, that strongly suggested he had been drinking it.

  If he had been drinking it, he was not having a nightmare about being drunk, as he often did. He was simply drunk.

  That meant that Rokhlenu did actually need his help.

  He'd said something about the Neyuwuleiuun ... and their airships.

  Morlock set the wine bowl down with elaborate care on the cave floor. He rose to his feet.

  Rokhlenu was gone. The pale werewolf and the red one were standing between the other completed wingset and arguing about something.

  "Where's Rokhlenu?" Morlock said. "He was just here."

  The two werewolves turned to him with blank looks. A pale werewolf with a blank look. Morlock felt there might be a joke in there somewhere if he could think a little more clearly, and if he were the joking type, and if this were a joking situation-none of which was the case, so the hell with it, Morlock decided.

  "He's gone, Khretvarrgliu," Hlupnafenglu said eventually. His right hand was gripping the wingset by the torso straps, so that Hrutnefdhu wouldn't escape with it, but his left hand mimicked a bird in flight.

  "Buckle that thing on me," Morlock directed.

  "Morlock. Old friend," said Hrutnefdhu gently. "You're too drunk to walk."

  "I won't be walking. Hlupnafenglu: oblige me."

  Hlupnafenglu walked over to Morlock with the wingset and Hrutnefdhu in tow. In the end, the pale werewolf assisted the red one in buckling the second wingset onto its maker.

  "Draw down the stirrups and buckle them on my feet," he directed.

  "What's a stirrup?" asked Hlupnafenglu.

  "Something to put your feet in." Like on a saddle, he almost addedexcept he didn't know the word for saddle in Moonspeech or Sunspeech, and, in fact, he realized belatedly that he had used the Wardspeech word for stirrup. "They're under the base of the wings, attached to cables."

  The werewolves found the stirrups and slowly drew them down to Morlock's feet. He stepped into them, and the two werewolves fastened the buckles over his feet.

  "Chieftain," Hlupnafenglu admitted, "we didn't do this for Rokhlenu. Is it important?"

  "It might be," Morlock said. The cables gave the wing beats extra force. That was the idea, anyway: Morlock had never actually flown one of these things. He'd kept on meaning to make the experiment ... but when he came back to the cave in the evening he usually started drinking.

  "Morlock, wait a moment," Hrutnefdhu said.

  "A sword," Morlock said to Hlupnafenglu, who grinned and handed him a glass sword from the weapon rack. Morlock sheathed it over his shoulder.

  "Morlock, wait."

  "Spear," he said to Hlupnafenglu. The red werewolf gave him a stabbing spear from the weapon rack, and he placed it in the other shoulder sheath.

  "Morlock. Wait!"

  "Citizens, good fortune," said Morlock as he strode from the cave.

>   The cables pulling against his leg muscles had a paradoxically steadying effect. But Morlock was unsure whether he could actually walk uphill under the triple burden of the wingset, the heavy wind, and his drunkenness. He breathed deeply of the air, trying to clear the wine-colored fog from his eyes and mind.

  He fixed the fingers of his wooden glove to the grip inside the left wing and clamped them shut. His right hand took the grip of the right wing. It was time to fly or fail-perhaps both.

  He judged the direction of the wind, the width of the slope he stood on, and what force his wings could apply at what angles to the wind. The calculation soothed him: drunk or sober he could do a little three-dimensional math. He took a few steps into the darkness and leapt off into the wind, driving the wings hard with his arms and legs.

  The shoulder of the hill flashed by at an acceptable distance. Morlock felt his mind, if not his body, come a little more alive.

  He pumped his arms and legs to gain height in the darkness. He dreaded the thought of smashing into some tree or unseen ridge.

  Like Rokhlenu before him, he felt the empty isolation, the disorientation of night flight. But it did not bother him as much. For one thing, he expected it: he had had flightlike experiences before. Plus, he was an experienced drunk who knew he was drunk: disorientation was an old, familiar enemy.

  He banked left, losing the lift under his wings and tumbling end over end a couple of times before he caught the knack of it. But finally he was on a roughly westward course, though still driven northward by the relentless south wind, and climbing as high and fast as he could.

  He saw the airships then, hanging like claws over the burning settlement of the outliers. The ships stood there, defying the wind, moored by some power he didn't understand. He wondered at it as he flew toward them, and he found in the wonder an intoxication deeper and more intense than the musty, muddy pleasures of wine. Why had he denied himself this danger and exultation? Why had he denied himself the air and the light and the darkness? This was why he was alive: to make, to do, to drive, not to drown his wits in fermented juice.

  As he watched the airships, he saw a shape that occasionally impinged on the fiery light glaring from the gondola ports. Rokhlenu: headed toward a gondola to board it and kill the crew. A plan unlikely of success, but not hopeless with the advantage of surprise.

  But there was no surprise. Morlock saw the archers taking aim at Rokhlenu with burning arrows. He expected Rokhlenu to dive, to swerve, to do something to avoid the arrows. But he didn't. Morlock guessed he was willing to risk a wound or two if he could get close enough to board the gondola. Perhaps he was counting on the metal rings to protect him; he might not realize that they would burn like paper, having been deeply imbued with metallic phlogiston.

  Morlock drove himself forward and upward; when he was above and somewhat in front of his friend he stalled in midair and kicked him savagely in the right arm. Rokhlenu lost lift and tumbled down, a dark shadow toward the dark earth, the red reflections of fire fading from the scales on his wings. Morlock heard the bows sing discordantly at the same moment, and he drove himself upward in a steep arc.

  The fiery arrows passed in midair between Morlock and Rokhlenu. Morlock turned his wings and let himself drop, spinning in the air so that his head was aimed almost directly at the ground. His stomach, full of wine and very little else, disliked this maneuver intensely and told him so noisily, but he did manage to escape the archers' second hasty salvo: he saw the arrows lay red tracks across the sky between his feet.

  Looking groundward, Morlock saw that Rokhlenu had succeeded in recovering from the tumble he had kicked him into and was coming back up toward the gondola.

  "Meet you on the keel!" he shouted to the startled werewolf as he fell past. He hoped keel was the right word; he had learned it from Hrutnefdhu when they were talking about boats in general (and the wickerwork boat Morlock had made in particular).

  He came out of his dive in a sharp curve upward; it strained the wings until they creaked loud enough to be heard over the storm winds, but it saved some of his momentum, helping him to fly upward. He was now headed almost directly toward the underside of the gondola; the archers inside had no clear shot at him. Those in the gondola of the other airship did-but the closer he got to the gondola of their sister ship, the less likely they were to risk it. He got close fast. Soon he was directly under the gondola; he stalled in the air, seized a handhold on the rough planking with his right hand, and dangled there, gasping.

  Apparently keel was the right word, or Rokhlenu had known what he meant by it, because a winged shadow hanging from the gondola some distance away started to shout at him in Rokhlenu's voice.

  "... you ... crazy?" he heard his old friend say.

  People were always saying this to Morlock, and he couldn't see the point. If he was, what was the point in asking him?

  "-in ... now ... dead ... half of them-" Rokhlenu shouted on, half of his words carried away by the wind. But Morlock guessed he was complaining about the ruin of his attack on the crew of the airship.

  "The wings will burn!" Morlock shouted several times. It was possible that he was shouting loud enough for the werewolves to hear him through the planking of the airship's floor. It didn't matter: Rokhlenu had to know this.

  "... metal ... protect ..." Rokhlenu shouted back-anyway, that was all Morlock heard of it.

  "The metal will burn!" Morlock roared.

  "Metal burns?" Rokhlenu asked. He asked it several times.

  "Everything burns!" Morlock replied. It was not strictly accurate. Dephlogistonated objects did not burn. Immaterial objects did not burn. There were other classes of exception, but none of them mattered at the moment.

  Rokhlenu said something that might have been a curse.

  Morlock released the clamp on his wooden glove by striking the winged arm against his knee. He swung over, handhold by handhold, until he was hanging next to Rokhlenu.

  "You need to get your feet in the stirrups," he said.

  "What are stirrups?"

  Morlock repressed a curse of his own. "Things to put your feet in. They're under the base of the wings."

  "Those ghost-bitten things! They kept smacking around, throwing me offl"

  "Put. On. Feet."

  Rokhlenu bent one foot up. Morlock, hanging from his right hand, used his wooden glove to catch a stirrup from under Rokhlenu's wings and pushed it toward the werewolf's free hand. Using the one hand, Rokhlenu managed to put it on his foot and buckle it. They repeated the process with the other stirrup.

  As Morlock struggled to refasten the clamp of his wooden glove to the grip of his left wing, Rokhlenu stretched out his legs and said, "It makes the wings feel different."

  That was the point: the pulleys attached to the stirrups helped provide power to the pseudo-musculature of cables and wings that drove the wings. Morlock didn't have the vocabulary to say this, and besides his stomach had finally reached the point of open rebellion. So he just said, "Yes," and turned his head to vomit.

  When he had finished and wiped his face on his sleeve, he turned back to Rokhlenu.

  "What now?" the werewolf asked.

  Morlock had been thinking about that, between convulsions of his belly, and he pointed at the buoyant part of the nearby airship.

  "Attack the other airship?" Rokhlenu asked.

  "Bag of air," Morlock said.

  "What?"

  "Not the gondola. The bag of air."

  Rokhlenu turned to looked at the nearby airship. It was too dark to see his face, but his shout was pensive as he asked, "You think it's held up by air?"

  "Hot air!" Morlock shouted.

  A moment passed, and Rokhlenu laughed. "Like ash carried up by a fire! Hot air! Are you sure?"

  "No!

  "How do they keep it hot?"

  "Don't know!"

  "This is a great plan!" Rokhlenu howled at him.

  "What's yours?"

  "Wake up! It's all a dream! Live happy!
"

  "Never works."

  "We'll try yours, then. Back up on the east side of this ship."

  Morlock closed his eyes to try to gather the points of the compass, then opened them rapidly to escape the whirling drunken vortex behind his eyelids. "Yes!" he said. He was almost sure the east was the side they had first approached from; the airship itself would screen them from its sister ship.

  A hatch opened in the underside of the gondola; werewolves, somehow distorted in form, stood there, holding bows with burning arrows nocked to shoot.

  Morlock and Rokhlenu both fell away in power dives. An arrow passed by Morlock's elbow like a red meteor. Morlock bent his flight sharply upward, trying to catch the steady south wind to give him lift. It worked and he flew swiftly past the windows in the gondola, close enough to see a werewolf archer's startled face.

  The werewolf wasn't the only one startled. He had at least three eyes, two human and one lupine, in a twisted mouthless face, and the brief glance Morlock had of him was startling indeed.

  Morlock flashed past and upward, finally coming to land on the side of the airship. It was covered with a wooden framework, and he grabbed onto the frame with his right hand.

  "What took you?" Rokhlenu shouted cheerfully in his ear.

  Morlock snarled, "Your mother couldn't make change." His stomach was unhappy, but there was nothing left in it to vomit. Morlock hated the dry heaves, even when he wasn't hanging by one hand a dozen bowshots above the ground.

  "... not to bandy words with you when you're drunk," Rokhlenu was saying. He didn't seem to be angry.

  Morlock nodded. He unclamped his wooden glove from the wing-grip and hooked it on the airship frame to support himself, at last drawing his sword with his right hand. Rokhlenu did likewise. At more or less the same moment they plunged the blades into the fabric surface of the airship.

  Morlock had expected a rush of hot air, perhaps fire. He was disappointed. The rift he was tearing in the surface spilled forth a cool bluish light, but nothing else.

  "Guess we were wrong!" Rokhlenu shouted.