The Wolf Hunt

by Gillian Bradshaw

  “For God’s sake, don’t ask him where he’s been!” Donoal whispered to Justin as they hurried after the others.

  “Do you think I’m a fool?” Justin snarled back. “Did you see the mark on his chin? They didn’t want him to go, did they?”

  Even before Tiarnán reached the brook, someone had run into the church tower and begun ringing the bell, and the whole population of the village boiled onto the green. Tiarnán was horrified to see two of his serfs shuffling after the others in leg irons; horrified again to see one of them branded, and another with his ears cut off. Then he saw the stocks, overflowing with new victims, and the stained flogging pillar, and he stopped short. The sight of the new instrument of punishment shocked him as deeply as it would any other villager.

  “What is that?” he demanded, pointing to the pillar.

  “The foreign lord had it made,” said Glevian. “I didn’t want to forge the shackles for it, Machtiern, and Mailon didn’t want to cut the wood, but we had to. He ordered us to, so we had to. We didn’t think you were ever coming back, you see.”

  “And it’s been used?”

  “Oh yes, Machtiern. Ever since the foreign lord doubled the charges at the mill, it’s been used. Justin was the first man flogged at it, and then Rinan, and Guerech, and Géré, and Gourmaelon …”

  Tiarnán glanced at Justin, finally understanding the look of timidity and the rapture of the villagers’ welcome. The jolt of white-hot rage that went through him burned his soul into one piece again. He remembered the taste of Alain’s blood in his mouth that morning, and he wished passionately that his fangs had succeeded in reaching that tantalizing throat. How dare he — God in Heaven! — brutalize Talensac?

  “Take it down,” said Tiarnán between his teeth, “and burn it. Take the iron off first if you like, Glevian, and turn it into something useful. Who has the key to the stocks?”

  Alain’s clerk Gilbert came down to the village a few minutes later to see what they were ringing the bells for. He brought the four men-at-arms Alain had fetched from Fougères, armed with knives and cudgels. He found a bonfire being lit on the green, the flogging pillar heaved on top of it, and the whole assembled village fanning the flames. For a moment he considered retreating to the manor house at once, but then he remembered that the duke was only a couple of hours away at Treffendel, and could be called on for help if needed, and he pressed on. The villagers fell silent as he approached, grinning and nudging one another. In the middle of the crowd, talking to the parish priest and the blacksmith, was a man he didn’t know, a lean, dark-haired man in a sweat-stained white shirt and green hose. The stranger turned to look at him as he approached, and the priest and the blacksmith whispered something to him. Before Gilbert had a chance to say anything, the stranger rapped out a question in Breton.

  “You will speak to me in French!” said Gilbert angrily. “Are you responsible for this disorder?”

  The crowd laughed and stamped its feet as though he’d said something funny, which disconcerted him.

  The stranger gave him a look which made him take a step backward, a look blank except for a concentrated fury in the eyes. “I asked for the key to the stocks,” said the stranger, in French this time. “They tell me you have it.”

  “I do,” said Gilbert, plucking up his courage again, “and it seems I’ll need it, to put you in. How dare you come into my lord’s village and make trouble?” The villagers roared delightedly. “What’s your name, where are you from, and what are you doing here?” shouted Gilbert, going red.

  The stranger looked at him with contempt. “My name is Tiarnán, son of Maencomin,” he said evenly. “I am lord of Talensac, and I am coming home. Now you know. You will release my people from the stocks this instant, or I will send you to your lord with your tongue slit to teach it courtesy and your hand cut off to keep it from other men’s money.”

  When Tiher arrived the next morning he found the peasants singing as they worked the fields, the village green littered with the remains of a bonfire and a feast, and the clerk Gilbert sitting in the stocks, disconsolately guarded by the four men-at-arms. The guards must have been posted to keep the bailiff from being stoned or mutilated. Gilbert did not seem to have been damaged by the people he’d abused, and from the village’s mood the first time Tiher visited, he would have expected them to go a fair ways toward killing the man. On the other hand, the villagers had been permitted to express their opinion of Gilbert: Tiher had never seen a man so covered with filth. He whistled and rode on across the brook to the manor lodge. This time the gate stood wide open. The gatekeeper from Fougères had disappeared, and piles of luggage sat before the lodge door: a Talensac man and his family were moving back in.

  When Tiher had galloped up to Talensac the day before, he’d told the servants that Alain and Eline had been attacked by the duke’s pet wolf, and that he’d come to fetch some things for them, as their injuries meant they’d be staying the night at Treffendel. He’d returned now to collect the horse he’d exhausted on the furious ride over. He made a methodical display of ignorance to the new gatekeeper, asking what had happened since the previous noon, and expressing astonishment at the answer. The gatekeeper was openly gleeful, and advised Tiher to go tell his cousin and his cousin’s whore not to come back to Talensac. Tiher could make no reply to that. He was bitterly certain that the gatekeeper’s hatred was justified.

  The gatekeeper did not want him to see the lord of the manor, but Tiher eventually prevailed in Duke Hoel’s name, and rode on to the manor house. One of the tables had been pulled out into the sun before the door, and Tiarnán and the parish priest were sitting at it, going over the manor’s account books. A number of servants hung about watching them, and more men and women were carrying things into and out of the house. The Fougères servants were packing to go, while Talensac happily reclaimed its own.

  “God prosper you, Lord Tiarnán of Talensac!” Tiher exclaimed, getting down from his horse. “Duke Hoel will be overjoyed to hear that you’re alive. I wish you all happiness of your return.”

  Tiarnán had not expected to see Tiher again so soon. The appearance of someone who knew what he was sent another wave of disorientation through him. He half-expected to catch Tiher’s scent and to find the other towering over him. He hauled his senses back to the human present with a shudder and got to his feet politely: Tiher had freely promised his silence about Tiarnán’s secret, and was owed courtesy. “God prosper you, Lord Tiher de Fougères,” he replied. “Be welcome to the manor. What brings you here?”

  “I’ve come to fetch my horse,” replied Tiher blandly. “I left it here yesterday when I came to fetch some things for my cousin Alain. I expect they’ve told you he’s at Treffendel with the duke, recovering from an injury.”

  Tiarnán looked down. This smooth hypocrisy was something he did not feel equal to. He would have to speak to Tiher honestly and in private; he was anxious to know what Alain and Eline had decided. “You will excuse us for a time,” he said to the priest. “I need to speak to Lord Tiher about how things stand with my lord the duke.” A perfectly respectable reason to ask for privacy, and true, too. The priest bowed and beamed, and Tiarnán showed his visitor into the house.

  Tiher found that the upheaval that gripped the rest of the manor was trebled in the Great Hall. Alain’s tapestry of Saint Martin had been stretched facedown over the new tables, and Alain’s new bed linen was stacked in mounds on top of it. Everywhere people were packing and unpacking. The group from Fougères formed silent knots in a noisy, glad, laughing crowd from Talensac.

  The servants who’d been hovering about outside followed them in, and Tiarnán sent one of them to fetch wine for his guest, then impatiently told the rest that, unless they were particularly concerned with the duke’s business, they could get on with their own. They reluctantly watched their lord and his guest climb the stairs to the privacy of the bedroom.

  Alain’s new great bed had been heaved up on its side and leaned against the
wall, and the clothes chest that Tiher had ransacked the day before was gone. The light slanted through the open window onto the bare floorboards and scattered rushes of an empty room. Tiarnán hesitated, then went back onto the landing and shouted for the servants to bring a couple of stools with the wine.

  Tiher laughed, and Tiarnán shot him an unfathomable look. When the servants came up with the wine and the stools, they showed a tendency to hover once more, and had to be shooed off.

  “They’re afraid to let you out of their sight, aren’t they?” said Tiher, sitting down. “Perhaps you could give me some lessons in managing a manor some time. I’d love to be adored like that.”

  “They were grossly abused by your cousin,” said Tiarnán. “They’re still afraid he’ll come back. I’ll be pleased when they realize he can’t, and stop hanging over me.” He poured the wine, a cup for Tiher and one for himself, and set the jug down carefully on the uneven floor.

  Tiher took the cup and sipped. The wine was not the fine Bordeaux that Alain had given him, but the local Talensac vintage, thin and sour. Tiarnán was obviously determined to touch nothing of Alain’s, not the tapestry nor the linen nor the bed nor the wine. Which was just as well, as Alain had asked Tiher that morning to make sure that all his own property was removed from the manor. “I bought those things with my own money,” he’d said, “and the monster has no right to them.” No shame, no remorse, though his “own money” had been borrowed in Nantes on the strength of the manor of Talensac, to which he had never had the least right. It was left to Tiher to feel remorse — and he did. He was bitterly ashamed of his cousin. He supposed that he could try to see the situation through Alain’s eyes, tell himself repeatedly that the man whose wine he was drinking was an unnatural monster, and that Alain had been justified in … but he did not believe that Alain had been justified in what he had done to Tiarnán, still less in what he’d done to Talensac. It was as Marie had said. The man sitting opposite was not evil, and the wolf had not been evil, either. That was not a matter of faith, but of simple experience.

  Tiher looked thoughtfully at his rival for a moment. Tiarnán sat straight and self-possessed, his cup of wine on his knee, his face set in its old expression of guarded courtesy. The thought that that human body could change and become the body of an animal was disturbing and unpleasant, but full of strange questions which Tiher found himself itching to ask: What is it like, being a wolf? Can you sense things that humans cannot? Have you ever met the people of the hills? Are you forced to transform yourself, every so often, or do you only do it because you enjoy it? Are you going to do it again?

  The questions were better left unasked. Tiarnán was human, had been so at heart even as a wolf, and probing too deeply into his private mysteries would only create monsters where there were none.

  “My cousin won’t be coming back here,” Tiher promised out loud. “He’s decided to accept the duke’s offer of free passage for himself and his wife to the Holy Land.”

  Tiarnán let out his breath slowly in what was not quite a sigh of relief. “Tell him,” he said, in an even voice, “to stay out of my way until he goes. I wish to respect your cousin’s life, so as not to waste our lord the duke’s care over me, but if he crosses my path I will kill him. There has never been a man I have had so much cause to hate.” His face was studiously blank, but the pupils of his eyes had contracted to a deadly point like the tip of a spear. Tiher, looking at him, remembered the wolf lunging toward Alain’s throat and shivered.

  “He has no plans to meet you,” said Tiher.

  “Good,” said Tiarnán, and sipped his wine.

  Tiher cleared his throat. “Duke Hoel will start your appeal to have your marriage annulled as soon as he’s officially informed that you’re back and want it — which I imagine will be as soon as I get back to Treffendel today. I talked to Alain privately this morning. He was very eager to give me instructions for his servants here, telling them to make sure that everything he bought while he was lord here was returned to him. I told him I can’t give them any such orders until he’s officially heard that you’ve returned, but I thought I would warn you that he’s likely to send you a long list. The duke is going to let him and Eline use a house in Rennes until the formalities are completed, and he wants everything sent there — armor, clothes, furniture, linen, horses, hawks, the wine, everything. Oh, and a cash sum in replacement of Eline’s dowry.”

  Tiarnán’s face stayed blankly furious. “He shall have his own things back, but he’s spent every penny in the manor, and there’s no money to give him — as indeed he must know. I hope to recover something from that thieving bailiff of his, but there are others who have a prior claim on his plunder. And, since your cousin sold my armor, weapons, and warhorse, as well as all my clothes and hawks and the furniture from my house and hall, there’s nothing for me to sell to raise it. Indeed, I’m going to have to borrow money to get back my horse and arms, which I must have to serve the duke.”

  “Your clothes, too?” asked Tiher, looking at his clothes, a plain blue tunic and brown hose, and noticing for the first time that the sleeves were too short.

  “My clothes, too. I’ve borrowed what I’m wearing from one of my own servants.” The blue tunic was Donoal’s Sunday best.

  Tiher suffered another stab of the shame that Alain had not felt. “Alain was thorough, wasn’t he?” he said, trying to ward off the pain with cynical lightness. “I’m very sorry. You should be able to recover your horse and weapons and the rest from the man in Nantes when the duke pays off Alain’s debt, and if you ask Duke Hoel I’m sure he’d be glad to help pay back the dowry as well.”

  Tiarnán shook his head impatiently. He felt that he had cost Hoel too much as it was. He was reluctant to ask even for the return of the relief, though he was entitled to take it back, since there had not, after all, been a new succession to the manor. And now a demand for Eline’s dowry! That money had never existed in silver at all: it had all been settled between himself and Lord Hervé in forestry rights. It was true, though: when a marriage was annulled, the woman was legally entitled to take back her dowry. Tiarnán was determined not to leave either Eline or Alain with any legal claim upon him. “What Eline has a right to,” he told Tiher, “she shall have somehow. Tell your cousin that I will deal with him honorably, and take nothing that isn’t mine.”

  Tiher remembered how Tiarnán had returned Alain’s sword and armor, lost at Comper. Then as now, the magnanimity would be squandered in vain. He shook his head. “That won’t make him feel the least shame over what he did to you, you know,” he confessed bitterly. “He thinks he was entitled to everything he stole, and is full of outrage at the way he’s being treated now.”

  Tiarnán’s blank fury was replaced by unambiguous contempt. “I’ll deal with him honorably nonetheless.”

  Tiher sighed. “Well, at least you’ll have the satisfaction of feeling thoroughly superior!”

  Tiarnán’s eyes glinted. “Why not? It’s the only satisfaction I’ll get from him.”

  Tiher had forgotten the man’s straight-faced subtlety, and stared for a moment in surprise. Their eyes met, and all at once the grimness that had hung over the meeting was gone. What was between Alain and Tiarnán was excluded: Tiher had been no part of it. The shame was not his after all.

  Tiher leaned back in his chair, feeling much happier, and swallowed some of the wine. “Your servants would love to treat Alain the way they’ve treated Gilbert,” he said brightly.

  Again the glint. “You may take Gilbert back to his master when you go.”

  “In the highly scented condition he’s in? No, thank you! He can walk by himself.”

  Tiarnán smiled. He had expected this meeting to be very much more difficult. The awareness that Tiher knew his secret had at first made him feel as though he were facing the other without a layer of his skin. Tiher, however, was behaving as though that secret were irrelevant, and Tiarnán was grateful. Tiher, he thought now, had always been an honora
ble man — unlike his cousin. He would probably make Marie very happy.

  Tiarnán’s wolf memories always seemed vivid but strangely oblique to him when he was a man, half-wordless, like the memories of early childhood. His human mind had only just begun to digest Isengrim’s experiences, interpreting them in its own terms. He already knew, however, that what he had begun to feel for Marie as a wolf translated into passionate human love. When he had lain down to rest the previous night, he’d thought of her and been swept by another wave of disorienting sickness, one that brought tears of anguish to his eyes. She had been in love with him once, but now she knew what he was, and the sight of him caused her pain. He longed to see her again, but he was afraid to. He had scented what he was to Eline: he did not want to recognize that same revulsion on Marie’s face. She had said that she understood Eline very well. Marie, it was true, had saved him from certain death and restored to him a life worth living, but her motives for doing so he could only guess at. Truthfulness, principally, he thought, and concern for an abstract justice. He dared not tempt himself into another disaster by hoping she still loved him a little. All his confidence had been crushed by the enormous weight of his humiliations, and he dreaded meeting her again. The particular bitterness of being regarded as a monster by a woman he loved was one he had already tasted; he did not think he could bear to sample it again. Let Tiher marry Marie and make her happy. When she was happily married, the tempest of feelings that tormented him now would calm.