The Wolf Hunt

by Gillian Bradshaw

  About noon, Isengrim suddenly sat up straight. Everything inside himself had turned like a weather vane in a gust of wind, pointing in a different direction, realigning itself. He knew the feeling: he had felt it before when he came back to the part of himself he left behind when he changed. He had never expected to feel it again. The door of the room was flung open, and Hoel and Havoise came in, followed by Marie, looking as composed as ever, and Tiher, dusty from the road and carrying a linen bundle under one arm.

  Tiher hefted the bundle and set it down on the dressing table.

  “It was where Alain said it was,” he told the others. He unwrapped the patterned linen altar cloth, slid a leather thong off a leather wrapping, and there was a set of woolen hunting clothes, folded, with a few dry leaves from the space under the stone still clinging to them.

  Isengrim turned his head away. The others gathered over the clothes, and he could sense their shock as the sight of the things brought home to them again just what he was. He did not listen to what they said; he felt as though his skin would split from the swelling of shame and fear, and he longed to be far away, out in the forest, with only the smell of the trees for company.

  Hoel came over and unclipped the leash from his collar, and Havoise set the things down on the floor, where he could look at them. He turned his head away again, though he could feel a trembling in every muscle from the longing to touch them. He had never changed in front of anyone — not knowingly. It had been a pleasure as intimate as making love, and how could he do it in front of these four watchers, and make himself still more monstrous in their eyes?

  “Something’s wrong,” said Hoel anxiously. He smelled sharp with apprehension. “Something’s been lost.”

  Isengrim looked pleadingly up at Marie, begging her to understand. And, miraculously, she did.

  “He’s ashamed,” she said. “He doesn’t want to transform himself in front of us.”

  There was a silence — and then, incredibly, Havoise laughed.

  “Of course!” she exclaimed. “He’ll be stark naked. Man or beast, he’s always taken great care of his dignity. Very well, very well, we can spare his blushes.” She picked the clothes up again, went to the small bedroom she shared with Hoel, and laid them out on the bed. “There you are!” she said, turning back and speaking to Isengrim directly. “Privacy.”

  Silent, shaking inwardly, he went through the door, and she closed it behind him.

  He could smell the thing he had left with the clothes now, the insubstantial yet pervasive, alien and familiar scent of his own humanity. Hope and terror held him motionless before it for a long moment. Then, eyes shut, working by scent alone, he made his way to the bed and took up what he had set down so long before.

  Instantly, as though his nose had been struck blind, that scent and all the scents vanished; the sounds of the lodge went dead, as though the whole world were a harp string muffled suddenly with a block of wood. But inside, the world of words, so long drowned, rose all at once shining from the ocean of sense. What had been heavy and laborious, done with an immense effort of will and concentration, became effortless, easy as opening an eye or lifting a hand, so simple that that the doer was unaware of doing it at all. He could think again; he could reason. It was like recovering suddenly from paralysis. He opened his eyes, and there were colors. He was crouching naked on all fours in the duke’s bedroom, his chin resting on his old green hunting clothes.

  He began to cry, shaking with tears and making no sound. He sat back on his heels and rubbed his face with his hands, then held the hands out before himself and watched them open and close. He jumped to his feet and looked down at his own body, hard and bare and thin and as he remembered it. Humanity, more precious than ermine and cloth of gold. Humanity.

  The duke was waiting for him. Fumbling and clumsy, he picked up his clothes and began to put them on.

  He was still crying when he’d finished dressing, and he sat down on the bed, trying to stop himself. He couldn’t. All the tears he’d been unable to shed as an animal poured from his eyes, and he bent double, holding himself, remembering returning to St. Mailon’s and finding the space beneath the stone empty; remembering Kenmarcoc screaming at him from the stocks; remembering the night of the wolf traps, the cold, the baying of the hunting dogs, the muzzle, the chains. He lay down, rolled over onto his back, and struggled to ram the tears back inside himself. At last successful, he lay still looking up at the light on the ceiling and breathing in quiet gasps. And all at once he was both profoundly grateful, and immensely, irresistibly tired. He closed his eyes and slept.

  The others sat in the next room and talked quietly, about how Tiarnán could best be returned to the human world, then about what Alain and Eline might do, about the state of affairs at Talensac, and finally, about whether Bishop Quiriac was likely to have caught the sixteen-point stag. At last they ran out of things to say and sat silently looking at one another. Then Hoel got to his feet. “He’s been there long enough to grow parsley, let alone get dressed,” he declared. “Let’s learn the worst.” He went to his bedroom door and opened it.

  For one horrible moment, Marie, following on his heels, thought that the room was empty. Then she saw the body lying on its back on the bed, a long, limp dark-haired shape in green. Hoel was staring at it rigidly, not sure whether it was alive or dead. She slipped past him to its side. There was the face which for a long time she’d seen only in dreams — the same arched eyebrows and narrow jaw under the close-clipped beard, changed only by a jagged line of whitened skin and white hair which ran from the lower lip down across the chin to the middle of the throat, in the place where a wolf had been injured in a fight with dogs. She touched his chest, and felt his heart beating under her fingers: he was asleep. And at the touch, his eyes opened, and met hers, and he sat up, staring at her.

  “Your eyes are gray,” he said in a hoarse, uncertain whisper.

  “Yes,” said Marie, “but you knew that.”

  He shook his head. “No. I couldn’t remember, and couldn’t tell.” He touched the side of her face, very lightly, then took his hand away again. His eyes had moved beyond her to Hoel, still standing motionless in the doorway. He jumped up, then knelt down before the duke and bowed his head. “My lord,” he whispered, “thank you.”

  Hoel drew in a breath that was almost a sob. “Tiarnán,” he said. “Oh, damnation!” He leaned over, pulled the knight to his feet, and embraced him, thumping him on the back. “Damnation!” he repeated. “Oh, thank God!” He held Tiarnán at arm’s length for a moment, looking at him, then shook him and embraced him again.

  “Tiarnán, my dear!” exclaimed Havoise, drawing him away from her husband and into the dressing room, then embracing him herself and kissing him on both cheeks, “Oh my dear, it is so good to have you back!”

  Tiarnán stood motionless, bewildered. When the ducal couple had let him go, he looked around the room, first toward Marie, who was in the doorway to the bedroom, and then at Tiher, who stood opposite, in front of the closed door that led to the rest of the lodge. Tiher looked back levelly for a moment, then said, “You’d better take off what’s round your neck.”

  Tiarnán put his hand to his neck and touched Isengrim’s silver-studded collar. His face went blank. He unbuckled the collar in silence and set it down on the dressing table, and he looked so like Isengrim, turning his head away from the clothes, that Marie wondered why she hadn’t seen at once that the two were the same, just from their mannerisms. “Thank you,” he said quietly.

  Tiher raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Glad to be of service. In case you’re wondering: no, I am not going to tell anyone where you’ve been the past year or repeat anything of what was said and done in this room today. As far as I’m concerned, I wasn’t here, and know nothing about it. And it’s best if you say the same.”

  Tiarnán nodded, then glanced around the room again. “Within this room, though, it must be different,” he said in the same hoarse voice. “You all k
now what I am. I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” asked Hoel.

  Tiarnán looked at him steadily. “It might be reckoned a disgraceful thing to be the liege lord of a werewolf.”

  “You brought me honor as a man and as a wolf. I’m the one who should be sorry.”

  Tiarnán shook his head. “My lord, you have done nothing for which you should be sorry from the time I first became your man.”

  Hoel reached out and touched the white mark on his chin. “I wouldn’t have risked a man in that wolf fight,” he said quietly. “It was a vainglorious exercise, undertaken from nothing more than pride. I was lucky you weren’t killed. And there was worse — the muzzle, and the chains, and the ‘good boy’ ‘bad wolf’ business. It wasn’t surprising you tried so hard to keep your dignity; I allowed you little enough space for it.”

  “You are a good master to man or beast,” replied Tiarnán. “There’s no blame due to you for treating a wolf as an animal. My lord, you gave me mercy when most men would have killed me — gave it twice: once on the road north of here, and again today. My life is doubly forfeit, and I owe you more than I can ever repay.”

  “You owe something to Marie, too,” said Havoise drily. Tiarnán looked at Marie, and she felt short of breath. “I owe everything to Marie,” he agreed, and smiled hesitantly. It was the lopsided smile she had never expected to see again, one side of the mouth curving up, the other staying serious, and the brown eyes that were and were not Isengrim’s brightening. She felt weak and silly, and bit her finger like a girl.

  Tiarnán turned back to Hoel. “My lord, you told Lord Alain and Lady Eline this morning that you would speak to them again when you had spoken to me. I am here, and, by the grace of God, you, and Lady Marie, able to speak. What should I say?”

  XVII

  The duke and duchess didn’t ask many questions. They wanted to know how Tiarnán had become what he was, for reassurance against suspicions of demon worship, and they wanted to be sure he could get an annulment of his marriage. When these points had been cleared up, he was told, gently but firmly, that it would be best if he left the lodge at once by the back door, before the hunting party returned. Hoel would tell the court that he had killed Isengrim and buried him in the forest. It was what everyone expected, and would cause no surprise. Tiarnán’s return from the dead, however, would cause a great deal of surprise, and if he were to live unsuspected it was essential that no one connect him with Isengrim. He must turn up at his own manor first, and with luck no one would even realize that he had come back on the same day that the duke’s pet wolf died.

  “Come see me at court when you’ve got your lands in order,” commanded Hoel, and hurried his liege man out the door.

  So in the middle of a hot July afternoon Tiarnán found himself standing in the forest behind the lodge of Treffendel, still giddy and disoriented from his sudden transfiguration. No one had seen him leave the hunting lodge, and no one had suggested that he see his wife, for which he was grateful. The leaves hung limp on the trees, and the air was full of midges and mosquitoes. He was hot in the heavy tunic and hose he’d chosen the previous October, and he took the tunic off and slung it over his shoulder. The simple human action disoriented him again, and he had to stand still, breathing hard, while a prickle of nausea ran over his skin. His humanity was still so new and his experiences as a wolf so near that he felt fragile, as though his mind were a broken glass that someone had glued together and which needed time to set again. When his heart had stopped thundering he glanced around, getting his bearings. He had not forgotten the forest of Broceliande, not in any form. He turned to the northeast and began walking quickly homeward.

  He arrived in Talensac at the time when the peasants had stopped their work in the fields and were tending the animals on their farms. He had been eager to reach the manor, but as he left Treffendel’s forest and came into his own, his quick steps slowed. The walk had given him some time to collect himself, but he still felt shaken and exposed, vulnerable to the opinions of others as he hadn’t been since he was a child. He had heard none of the discussions of what had been happening in Talensac, and felt none of the duke’s certainty that he would be welcomed there. What could he say to people? What would they think of his sudden reappearance? He’d been aware that his manor worked smoothly and that his people approved of him, but he’d taken this very much for granted: that was what Talensac was like. It needed little governing from him because the way they did things at Talensac was right. He’d been dutiful in administering justice and managing disputes with neighbors because Judicaël had taught him that this was his responsibility, but it hadn’t taken much of his time. Talensac, he thought now, as he walked through the fringes of his trees toward the empty fields, Talensac was a paradise, and he’d never understood his own unmerited good fortune in having it, until he was cast out.

  He stopped on the edge of the fields and saw it there in the dell before him: the whole sweep of field, wood, and thatch, church and village and manor house, wrapped in the silvery haze of a summer afternoon. There lay a part of himself which he had left behind with the same careless confidence with which he had set that other piece of his soul beneath the stone, and as disastrously lost. Could he take it back? He remembered now what Tiher had reported Alain as saying — that the people here wouldn’t want him back if they knew what he really was. Monster, devil creature, werewolf.

  He drew up his shoulders with a small jerk, as though he were pulling on a cloak, and began walking again. This was home. He could go nowhere else.

  When he came up to the blacksmith’s house at the edge of the village, old habit reminded him that he was hot and thirsty from the walk, and he stopped to get a drink. He was just setting the bucket down when the mistress of the house came out with a yoke of buckets to fetch some water for herself. She stopped dead when she saw him and her face went white. Then she dropped the buckets and screamed. She backed rapidly away from him, crossing herself and still screaming.

  Tiarnán got up. The screams shivered inside him, making the new joins of his self ache. He was not sure what to do: it seemed that she must have heard some rumor of what he was, after all. He was determined that as a man he would not to be driven off as easily as he had been as a wolf. “Judith, Conwal’s daughter,” he said sharply, “what are you screaming for?”

  She stopped screaming just as her husband and brother came rushing round the corner of the house to see what had happened, and also stopped dead. Donoal ran up behind Justin and crashed into him, and Tiarnán wondered what he was doing at the blacksmith’s house.

  “Oh, Machtiern!” cried Judith. “Is it you?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Machtiern!” said Justin Braz, running forward and then stopping with a timid expression on his big-boned face that Tiarnán had never seen there before. “Is it really you?”

  “Why are you all asking that? Who else would I be?”

  Judith’s husband Glevian gaped. “You’re not … dead?”

  “Would I be drinking water from your well if I were dead?” demanded Tiarnán impatiently.

  Four faces broke into grins of utter delight. More people were hurrying from the neighboring houses, stopping, then running toward them. “It’s the machtiern!” they shouted to one another in incredulous joy.

  “Oh, my lord!” exclaimed Judith, laughing and crying and wringing her hands with happiness. “I thought you were a ghost!”

  “Are you coming back?” asked Justin with the same unfamiliar timidity.

  “Isn’t this Talensac, and my home?”

  Justin gave a howl of joy. “Thank God!” he said, and ran over, dropped on his knees in front of Tiarnán, and kissed his hands.

  Justin had always regarded hand kissing as fit only for serfs, women, and foreigners, and Tiarnán jerked his hands back in astonishment. Justin beamed at him and slammed a massive fist repeatedly against the ground in inarticulate delight. He had been flogged for taking grain to Montfort
, the first man in the village to suffer so. He had been shackled to the new post on the green, and one of Alain’s Fougères hirelings had given him twenty lashes with the whip, counting them out in French. Trapped and helpless, unable, with his face against the wood, even to see the blows coming, he had screamed at neuf, wept at seize, and begged for mercy at dix-huit. He would not forget it till the end of his life. And now the machtiern was back, and the nightmare was over, and he could wake up into a world which was as it should be.

  Donoal was hovering behind Justin, beaming so that his face hurt. “Machtiern,” he said, “thank God! Lord Tiarnán, we all thought you were dead. It’s been almost a year … .” And he wondered even as he said it whether Tiarnán realized it had been almost a year. The machtiern stood there in the same green hunting clothes he had worn when he left Talensac the previous autumn, and the expression on his normally reserved face was of utter bewilderment. It was always said that time was different in the hollow hills, that a man could go there for a single day and find that seven years or a century had passed when he came home. Donoal had long felt that if any mortal went riding with the fairy hunt, it would be Tiarnán, whose knowledge of the forest had always seemed more than human. His eyes fell on the white mark across his lord’s chin, and at once his suspicions were confirmed. That was not a scar, but the kind of discoloration called an elf mark and attributed to some supernatural weapon of the Fair Ones. Tiarnán had been to the hollow hills, and the people there had tried to stop him coming out again.

  To say as much out loud, however, might remind the people of the hills to come back and snatch their runaway. Donoal reached out and clasped Tiarnán’s hand, as though he had to touch him to hold him to the human world. “My dear lord, welcome!” he said. “Welcome home!”

  More people were arriving every second, and all of them were beaming, shouting excitedly, clapping their hands. The noise and the emotion were hard for Tiarnán in his battered state to comprehend. He shook his head in confusion, and, for want of anything better to do, began walking on into the village. Everyone followed him, shouting out to newcomers that it was the machtiern, alive! and at the same time explaining to him that his wife had remarried, she’d done homage to the duke for the manor and then married a foreigner from Fougères who had cruel, foreign ways and a foul, greedy, foreign bailiff.