The Wolf Hunt

by Gillian Bradshaw

  She looked miserably up into his face. “Oh, Tiarnán!” she gulped. “Promise me you don’t … that it’s nothing to do with … with the Fair Ones.”

  The question jolted him; it touched painfully near things he had locked away, treasures that played no part in the life of manor or court, and could be taken out and handled in the forest alone. “Why do you ask that?” he demanded, with an edge in his voice.

  “They say in the village that you go to the hollow hills, or to see the lady of a well,” Eline whispered, shaken out of tears at last.

  He hadn’t known that they said that, and the fact that they did filled him with indignant astonishment. They had been speculating about him. It seemed a gross intrusion on his privacy. “It is utterly, damnably false!” he declared. “No one has ever said such a thing to my face; if he had, I would teach him better than to tell lies. Who told you this?”

  “Nobody,” whispered Eline, taken aback, and beginning to be relieved. He was so indignant that it could not be true. “Kenmarcoc said it’s what they say in the village, and he told me not to pay any attention. But people will say all sorts of stupid things when there’s a mystery! And I don’t know what to think. I can’t bear it. Please, tell me the truth!”

  Tiarnán was silent. Somehow, without his admitting that he did more than hunt, the thing he kept for the forest had pressed itself between them. He knew, guiltily, that he was wrong to pretend that it did not exist. Foolish, too, when its existence was so clearly understood that even the villagers had been speculating about it. But how could he tell Eline? He felt instinctively that it would be wrong to try to pin it down with words, particularly here, in a place to which it was alien.

  Eline’s glimmer of hope faded. She buried her face in her arms and began to cry again. He wouldn’t tell her; he didn’t really love her.

  “Dearest heart, don’t cry!” Tiarnán urged gently. “What you’re asking …I can’t tell you that.”

  “But why?” Eline demanded, lifting her head again and staring at him, trying hard to stop crying. “Why?”

  He answered without thinking and with fatal honesty. “I’m afraid that if I tell you, I’ll lose your love, and perhaps my own self as well.”

  He knew as soon as he’d spoken that he should have stayed silent. The words were too stark: if I tell you, I’ll love your love. Did he believe the thing he could not tell her was so terrible that it would make her hate him? If that were so, he must have been wrong to marry her. Any peasant who sold an ox that gored, and concealed the fact from the buyer, would be forced to pay back the money. A knight who had a vicious habit and who nonetheless took an innocent girl as a wife must be far more guilty. She had had another suitor, one untouched by dark secrets: a man who truly loved her would either have told her the truth or have given her up.

  He did not feel that his secret was terrible, only that it was something she would not understand. It was a thing so strange and so private that he did not really understand it himself. But there was no comfort there. Father Judicaël had told him that she would not understand it, and that she and he would do each other harm. In answer he had told himself that anything could be understood through love. But now he found that he was afraid to risk being wrong.

  She had been perfectly happy with him before she suspected the secret’s existence; surely when she forgot about it, she would be happy again? It was not something that would ever intrude on the manor house or her life in it.

  But she was so wretched now, and he longed so to comfort her. And would she forget it? Wouldn’t his silence now cast a long shadow over their life together, poisoning her thoughts with suspicion of him?

  Eline had gasped with shock at his terrible words, and rolled over again with her back to him. Now she was smothering her sobs in her tear-soaked pillowcase. He felt an immense pity for her, so young and beautiful and vulnerable. She was his wife, after all, with more claim upon him than any other creature. She had sworn at their wedding to love and honor him. Why should he believe that she would perjure herself? Wasn’t it cowardly on his part to keep silent, and insulting to her not to trust? The secret was such a harmless thing. He had never hurt anyone by it. Surely, she would understand it after all, since she loved him? Surely it was better that she knew it than suspect him of demon worship or adultery?

  “My thousand times dear,” whispered Tiarnán, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t cry. I’ll tell you, if you want to know so badly.”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, rolling back and hugging him at last. She was damp with tears, soft-limbed and passionate, and the touch of her body went through him like a note of music. “Oh, I knew you loved me!” she said, kissing him. “And I promise you, I’ll love you whatever it is. But I can’t bear not knowing.”

  She leaned her head against his shoulder, quiet now. All the stormy tears she had shed over the day and night left her now with a feeling of immense calm, safely harbored in her husband’s arms. Whatever it is, she thought, God will give me strength for it. And another of the stories about the Fair Ones hovered at the back of her mind: the tale of a girl whose brave tenacity saved her lover from the snares of the Queen of Fairyland and brought him safely home. Perhaps she would be the one to save Tiarnán from whatever trap the forest had laid for his soul.

  Tiarnán was silent for a long time. He meant to tell her, but all the words he could find for his secret seemed false, ugly, and frightening. The reality was different, innocent and exhilarating: How could he cage it in language Eline would not be afraid of?

  At last Eline stirred in his arms, and stroked his beard, whispering for him to go on.

  “Years ago,” Tiarnán began very slowly — and the sudden awareness that he really was about to expose himself clogged the words with dread. He had to stop and breathe before he could go on. “When I was sixteen. Duke Hoel had just taken up the dukedom, and there were celebrations at court. We all went hunting.”

  He was trapped in another entangling silence. He remembered the time well. Duke Conan had died in an armed expedition against the duchy of Anjou, and his men had been left stranded and disorganized. When Hoel had received the news, he had gathered together all the fighting men at the court, taking even the young squires and the old men, and had ridden frantically to extricate the survivors. It had been Tiarnán’s first battle, and he had bloodily distinguished himself in it. Hoel had knighted him on the field of battle with a sword still red from the struggle, and allowed him to do homage for his father’s lands. For Tiarnán the act of homage had meant he was no longer a ward of the duke, with an estate administered by ducal officials, but a lord in his own right. It had meant respect, reputation — but most of all it had meant that he could leave the court and go back to Talensac. He had been eager to go home, longing for the court celebrations to end, but, at the same time, he had been unsure of himself. Eight years at court; eight years struggling to learn sophistication; eight years of grief and the violence that left a bitter taste in his mouth even when it brought him honor — how could he go home after that? And then had come the hunt, and what happened in it.

  Eline kissed him. “We gave chase to a stag,” Tiarnán continued finally. “I and a few others were waiting with a relay of dogs to set on the deer when it ran past. When we heard the horns nearby, we uncoupled the hounds, and they ran baying into the woods. We galloped after them. I heard the horns off to my right, but my dog Ravault was baying to the left, so I turned to follow his cry and lost the others. I rode after Ravault until the sound of the horns faded, and then I realized that he’d started some other quarry and was pursuing it alone. But I saw no reason to stop for that. I would never have caught up with the main hunt in time for the kill, so I thought I might as well follow my dog, and see what he’d found for me. I preferred being on my own, even then.”

  Tiarnán stopped again. This time Eline lay motionless in his arms, sensing that he stepped in darkness toward the secret itself. “The dog led me to a mound guarded by standing stone
s,” Tiarnán said at last, “and there I found him, struggling with a wolf. Even as I rode up, the wolf caught Ravault by the throat. I jumped down from my horse and hurried to kill the wolf with my sword, but by the time I’d done so, it was already too late, and the dog, too, was dead.” He remembered the dog, a brown alaunt with the heavy jaws and rangy body of the breed, but with an unpedigreed mongrel grin and a constantly flapping tail. He had scratched the dead hound’s ears and pressed his face against its still-warm side, before scraping out a hollow for it in the earth of the forest, and covering it with turf he had cut from the mound with his hunting knife. It had been dusk by the time he’d finished, and was beginning to rain. The dead wolf had lain gray and sodden between the two standing stones, and he had noticed for the first time how the turf he’d cut away from the mound looked like a door into the hill. A hollow hill, marked by the stones as a gateway to the domain of the Fair Ones. Perhaps he had realized then. He had never been sure whether he had known what he was doing, going to that place of ancient and capricious power and doing there what he had done. Perhaps he had realized; perhaps it really had been done as ignorantly as it had seemed at the time.

  “My horse was foundered from the chase,” he told Eline, “and I was very weary and grieved for the dog. It was too late to go anywhere that night. I unsaddled the horse and tethered it and tended it, and I made a camp for myself between the standing stones, because they gave me shelter from the rain. I skinned the wolf and pegged its hide above me for a tent, and I rolled myself in my cloak and went to sleep.”

  Again he stopped. He remembered waking, and finding that the moon was up and everything had changed. It had been like coming out of a thick fog into clear air. Every sense was so alive that it seemed that before they must have been swathed in wool. He had heard the voles squeaking in the grass and the bats in the air; he had smelled the rain, skidding away into the east with the clouds, and smelled the forest, too, all the richness of it, alive — he had never understood before how much it was alive, how each breath of its air tingled with a thousand messages. He’d got to his feet and found himself tangled in his own clothes. His thoughts had grown strange and wordless and unclear: he struggled with his own tunic and hose, tore at them with his teeth, and got free. And then he had rolled on the wet grass in the moonlight, and it was so sweet that nothing in all the world could match it. It was as though every hunt he had undertaken, he had been hunting for this; each beast he had chased, it had been to capture this. The bitterness of violence, the shame and anger of the past, the worries for the future — they were all gone, swallowed in that great moonlit now of night and rain. Experience became pure, innocent, and overpowering.

  Eline picked up her head and looked into his face. The moonlight crossed it with shadows, but his eyes, in a patch of light, were the bright alien eyes of a wild animal. “What happened?” she whispered, feeling the sick constriction of her stomach.

  “When I woke …” he said, fumbling with words that failed, that never could communicate that enormous wordless experience, “the wolf skin … I … was inside it.”

  “What do you mean?” she demanded, this time in horror.

  “I had taken the shape of a wolf.”

  They were both silent for a long time. Tiarnán was warm now in Eline’s arms, but she felt as though she were made of ice. She imagined the arms that encircled her sprouting hair and becoming the legs of a wolf, and the face changing to fangs under the strange eyes. She began to shiver.

  “Eline,” he said, holding her closer. “I don’t do any harm by it.”

  She couldn’t speak. She choked, shivering and shaking her head.

  “I’ve never killed a man in that shape or done injury to any human creature. All my sins have been committed as a man.”

  “This happens to you every time you go?” choked Eline. “Every time you leave me, you … you change?”

  “Not every time. Only when I go hunting without Mirre.” Three times since she’d married him. Three times, the body she held, which had entered her own, had shifted and become the body of a beast. Eline sat up abruptly and swung her feet out of the bed. She bent over double, shaking with horror. Tiarnán knelt in the bed behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders; she flinched, and he took them away. She was afraid to look at him; she knew that if she did she’d see him turning into a beast, and then she’d scream. “How can we stop it?” she asked wildly. “How do we break the curse?”

  “You don’t understand!” he cried impatiently. “I don’t want to stop it! I told you, I do no harm by it. It isn’t wicked and there isn’t any curse. It’s the most marvelous gift!”

  She gave an awful dragging moan and covered her ears. He reached out again to comfort her, and she flung herself out of the bed and away from him. He freely accepted the monstrous thing he had become; he delighted in it. She thought of her body being penetrated by a wolf, and knew suddenly that she was going to be sick. She scrabbled under the bed and got the chamber pot just in time.

  “Eline!” whispered Tiarnán, appalled, as she stared bleakly down into her own vomit. “There’s no harm in it.”

  “Just give me time,” she whispered back.

  “She’ll get used to it; she’ll get over it,” she heard at the back of her mind. But she was already certain that she wouldn’t. The thought of sleeping with Tiarnán ever again made her skin crawl; the fact that she’d slept with him already made her feel unclean. I can’t, she thought privately. I can’t, and I never will again. God help me.

  For about a week after the revelation, Eline wandered about the manor house in a daze of horror. Every morning when she woke she would look at her husband’s face, and for a moment think the whole midnight conversation had been a dream. It was the same face she had been so glad to gaze at on her wedding day, different only in the look of pain in the eyes. Then she would notice a previously unobserved wolfish quality to it and know that it was true. The hair on his body now reminded her inescapably of an animal’s. At night she would lie rigid on the very edge of the bed, arms clutched against herself to keep from touching him, and if their hands happened to brush each other during the day she would rub hers anxiously against her gown. The manor servants began discussing her in concerned whispers, and when she went into the village there were curious or hostile looks.

  She did not want to touch her husband, but she did want to talk to him. She was full of questions: How did he do it? Could he change himself any time, or did it just happen? Where did he go when he’d done it? What did he do? What did he eat? The details she raked from his unhappy replies she piled together and turned over obsessively in her mind. Like the sight of blood and mutilation, they both repelled and fascinated her. She told Tiarnán that she was trying to understand, and that without knowing such things she could never grasp what it meant to him.

  At first she believed that. But gradually, almost without her notice, “trying to understand” became inwardly “trying to understand how to stop it” and then, fatally, “trying to understand how to be free of him.” The word “werewolf,” which he had never uttered, hung perpetually in the back of her mind, and seemed more fearsome with each day that passed. She did not dare repeat what he had told her to anyone, first because everyone around her was her husband’s servant, and second, and even more tellingly, because she herself was enmeshed in his secret. If what he was became known, he would be burned at the stake, but she would become a spectacle, “the werewolf’s wife” — a scarecrow thing for all the world to gape at. Besides, who would believe her? The people of Talensac would be prepared to swear that black was white if Tiarnán was threatened, and everyone knew he was a favorite of the duke’s. Who’d take Eline’s bare word against that? To betray him would only invite a terrible retribution.

  Tiarnán answered her questions painfully but freely. The vehemence of her revulsion stunned and wounded him. He could not feel himself any different from what he had been before, and yet Eline shrank from him. He was deeply asham
ed of his weakness in confiding in her: the village held that a man of character should never give in to a woman’s pleading. Yet he had done it because he loved her, because he had wanted to trust her and to comfort her. He told himself that the extremity of her revulsion was only because she must have heard horrible stories about what he was. (Even in thought he avoided the ugly word that haunted her.) She must believe that he ate children or killed virgins. When she understood that he really did nothing but wander the forest, then she would be reconciled to him. But with every word of explanation he uttered, the thing itself seemed to grow more bizarre and harder to grasp, as though it altered and became monstrous as it moved from his experience to Eline’s horrified regard.

  “Does anyone else know?” asked Eline.

  Tiarnán remembered bitterly the only other time he had told his secret: when he had confessed it to Judicaël. Judicaël had not wept or recoiled in horror. The confession had distressed him, sent him stalking out of his hermit’s cell into his garden, where he had attacked a row of onions savagely with a hoe — but Judicaël had instantly understood why Tiarnán would love it. He did not know, he said, if it was sin: it had come unsought for, and no crime had been committed through it. He had repeatedly urged Tiarnan to give it up, but he had set no penance for it, saying that if Tiarnán had committed no sin, he could not absolve him, but if there were sin, they must wait for God to reveal to them how to atone. Perhaps Judicaël could make Eline understand as well.

  Eline’s understanding had by then progressed so far that when Tiarnán urged her to visit the. hermit, she dismissed the confessor from her list of possible allies in shocked disgust. No real priest would tolerate such an abomination. The hermit’s reputation for holiness was so much wind. Probably he really did bless bonfires and other forms of demon worship.

  After a week of tormented questions and painful proximity, Eline begged Tiarnán to allow her to leave Talensac for a little while and visit her married sister at Iffendic. “I need time,” she said. “I’m trying to understand; I am. But … I … I need to get away.”