Frontier Wolf

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  The press was opening and falling back; men sullen and panting but no longer bloodthirsty. The horn ceased its ringing demand, and the uproar sank away to an uneasy silence. One man sat on the ground, with blood trickling darkly from a small deep stab-wound in the shoulder. Another cherished a long shallow gash in his forearm. Alexios found that he was shaking a little, and hoped desperately that it did not show, as he looked from one to another of the men about him. And the men in their turn looked back, taking in the fact that their new Commander stood in their midst with one cheek cut and an eye rapidly filling up and turning black. Maybe some of them were pondering the punishment for striking an officer. Well, it would do them no harm to sweat a little.

  Alexios said levelly, ‘It is in my mind that there has been enough of dancing for this night.’ He glanced at the wounded men. ‘Get those two up to the Medic. I will speak with the ringleaders in the Principia at noon tomorrow. See to it, Optio.’

  He swung on his heel, and so came face to face with his junior trumpeter who still stood close behind him. ‘My thanks,’ he said, and the boy grinned. A whisp of striped fur moved in the hollow of his shoulder between his neck and the folds of his wolfskin, and a pair of golden eyes glared out at the world. The kitten clung on with all its barbs, as its master, wincing slightly, detached it claw by claw. Alexios’s brows flicked upwards, and Rufus said apologetically, ‘I was thinking you were in a hurry, Sir. Hadn’t time to put him down where he’d be safe.’

  ‘I was in a hurry,’ Alexios agreed, ‘I am glad I didn’t have to wait while you got free of that thing, it seems to have as many hooks as a cockle burr. Best get back now, it must be close on time to sound for the Third Watch.’

  By the corner of the granary his centenarii stood waiting for him, Lucius still braced and ready for action, Hilarion draped against the granary wall.

  ‘Sir,’ said Lucius, gravely, ‘with respect, the Commander should not get personally involved –’

  ‘But seeing that the dance was in his honour,’ murmured Hilarion, ‘surely it would have been discourteous not to join in.’

  Next day at noon, sitting behind the big writing-table in the office in the Principia where such things were dealt with, Alexios looked from one to another of the four wooden figures drawn up in a row before him, while the four wooden figures stared back at the wall above his head. He did not suppose for a moment that they were the ringleaders; how could you possibly pick ringleaders out of what had happened last night? The optios would simply have picked two men at random from each side, and the centenarii, poor old Lucius with his thoughts already turned towards the room behind the sandal-maker’s shop – would have confirmed the choice. And anyway it didn’t much matter.

  ‘Well, and what have you to say for yourselves?’ he demanded; and the words sounded stiff and pompous in his own ears.

  One of the men stepped forward half a pace; Bericus of the round and guileless face, who stood out as an Emperor’s hard bargain even among the Wolves of Castellum. With an air of honest bewilderment, he began, ‘Sir, if it is about last night, you mean –’

  ‘It is about last night I mean,’ said Alexios.

  ‘Well Sir, we were dancing the Bull Calves, and that does look very like the real thing to any man who has not seen it before.’

  ‘It certainly looked very like the real thing last night,’ Alexios agreed. He touched his swollen and purpled cheekbone absentmindedly. ‘Two men are in the sick block this morning, with knife wounds that look quite remarkably like the real thing, too.’

  There was a small sharp silence, and the four went on staring at the wall above the Commander’s head. ‘An easy thing it is, for such dancing to get just a feather-weight out of hand,’ said the Emperor’s hard bargain.

  ‘Especially when the dance is the Bull Calves and the dancers are of the Dalriads and the Votadini.’ Alexios was aware of a slight stiffening in the already stiff figures before him.

  ‘Sir,’ said another man. ‘that is an old story and long forgotten.’

  ‘So. A cattle raiding story, maybe? Nay then, I do not ask; it is a thing between the Votadini and the Dalriads, and I who am of neither people have no right to know.’ He let his voice turn musing, as though he were speaking half to himself. This was a new game of skill and suddenly he was beginning to enjoy it. ‘Yet before he left for Habitancum, the Ducenarius Julius Gavros told me that when a man of the Tribes joined the Frontier Wolves, he brought his loyalties with him so that from that day forward they were to the Wolves and no longer to his old tribe. Therefore,’ he looked at the last speaker, ‘it must assuredly be that this – old story is long forgotten.’ He shifted his gaze deliberately along the row of faces still staring at the wall above his head, and his tone quickened and hardened. ‘Unless of course the Ducenarius Gavros was mistaken in his trust and pride in the men he commanded.’

  Again there was a small sharp silence, filled with the crying of the gulls that formed a background to life at Castellum. Someone swallowed harshly, and the four pairs of eyes came down to look him squarely in the face.

  ‘The Ducenarius Gavros was said to be a good judge of men, Sir,’ said the Emperor’s hard bargain.

  ‘I am very sure of it.’ Alexios began to play with a stylus on the table before him. ‘If I were not, if I thought for a moment that what happened last night was – what it seemed to be, there would be seven days confined to barracks, with latrine fatigues, for the four of you. If it ever seems to happen again, there will be seven days confined to barracks for the four of you, and we shall have the sweetest and most shining latrines in all the province of North Britain!’ He dropped the stylus with a little clatter, ‘Which would of course be black injustice. And all because of a misunderstanding on my part; such a misunderstanding as comes from lack of experience. My arms drill was only of the regular parade-ground kind. Therefore, to prevent this foolish kind of thing happening another time, you shall provide me with the experience that I lack. You shall teach me, as you have long since taught Centenarius Hilarion and Centenarius Lucius, to take a part in these weapon-dances of yours – though not, I think in the dance of the Bull Calves.’

  The gulls swept across the roofs of the fort; and their crying, Alexios thought, had suddenly a hint of ribald laughter in it. The shadow of wings flickered across the patch of thin winter sunshine on the writing-table, seeming to bring the laughter into the bare office room. But the Commander and the evil doers looked at each other without the twitch of a lip or the flicker of an eyelid.

  ‘Sir,’ said the Emperor’s hard bargain, ‘we shall be honoured.’

  ‘Right,’ said the Commander, and picked up the stylus again. ‘Charge dismissed.’

  ‘Left turn!’ barked the optio in charge. ‘March!’

  5 Wolfskin

  THE DARK THRESHOLD month of Janus passed on its slow way, with nothing save the lengthening daylight to promise that it would ever be spring again, as the still frosty weather of midwinter gave place to snow and sleet and freezing rain that drove before bitter winds from the north-east, and lips were raw and hands chapped to the bone on icy harness. And it seemed that nothing moved in all that snowbound and drenched and frozen countryside but the short winter patrols from Castellum, and their four-footed brothers who howled closer about fort and town and cattlefold through the bitter nights.

  But a day came when the wind went round to the south, and there was a new smell in it that could not be quite lost even in the taint that always came up from the tannery sheds in the town when the wind was in that quarter. And there was a faint warmth to the sun that slipped in and out between soft blurred drifts of cloud. It was one of those days that holds a promise of spring as yet far off. And at noon, when Cloe had stalked out to lie blinking in a sheltered corner of number three barrack-row, the optio of the just-returned patrol came to find Alexios who was down in the horse-lines seeing to his mount, Phoenix, who had cut his frog on an iron-hard fang of furze root when out at exercise the day before.


  ‘Sir, word from Cunorix, son of Ferradach Dhu.’

  Alexios eased the hoof he had been holding gently back onto the hard ground. ‘It seems well enough,’ he said to the groom standing by. ‘Could do with another salving this evening.’ Then straightening up, he turned to the optio, ‘So? And what word is that?’

  ‘Cunorix says that the wolves are leaving the winter packs for mating. He says that if the weather holds it will be a fine hunting day tomorrow, and if the Commander would ride hunting let him send word by Govan Heron’s-Feather who is in the town now, and he will be at the Western gate with the ponies and hounds by sun-up.’

  So next morning at sun-up, having handed over to his Senior Centenarius for the day, Alexios went out past the sentries on the Dextra gate, with a pair of borrowed hunting spears over his shoulder, and found Cunorix sitting comfortably with his back to one of the buttresses that on that side of the fort kept the walls from sliding into the river, his arm through the bridles of a couple of rough-coated hunting ponies, two shaggy yellow-eyed wolfhounds lying beside him.

  He turned and got to his feet as Alexios drew near, flinging up a hand in greeting. ‘It will be a good day,’ he said; and then, glancing at the heavy spears, ‘and the Commander has chosen his spears well.’

  ‘The word was that the wolves were leaving the pack.’

  ‘The Commander will have had his hands full with other matters these past months. But now it is in my mind that the time comes for him to be gaining his wolfskin.’

  ‘In the Commander’s also,’ said Alexios with a sudden lift of the spirit. In the dark days of winter and all the business of trying to find both himself and his men, he had almost forgotten the hunting trip that the Chieftain’s son had spoken of in the Hall of Ferradach Dhu, and the quick handstrike afterwards. Almost, but not quite. It was good to find that the Chieftain’s son had not forgotten either.

  They mounted the waiting ponies, and with hounds loping on in front, headed down the steep slope to the river crossing, where the black stone that the troops called the Lady stood in the sere winter grass beside the ford. They splashed across it and headed on up the estuary, past the faint track that Alexios had ridden with the old Commander on their courtesy visit to the Lord of Six Hundred Spears, and still on towards the ruins of Credigone and the eastern end of the old Northern Wall. Presently they turned inland, with no track to follow this time, leaving the narrowing estuary with its gulls and its crying and calling shore-birds behind them, and heading up a side glen where alder and hazel crowded the banks of a small fast burn. The burn was coming down in spate, running green with melting snow-water from the high moors, so that they must follow the bank a good way before they could come to a good crossing place; but between the darkly sodden wreck of last year’s bracken and the soft grey drift of the sky, the catkins were lengthening on the hazel bushes, making a kind of faint sunlight of their own, and in one especially sheltered place, as the two young men brushed past, the first pollen scattered from the whippy sprays so that they rode through a sudden golden mist. Even here at the world’s end, spring was remembering the way back, and for a moment a sense of quickening caught almost painfully at Alexios somewhere below the breastbone.

  Last spring he had hunted in the German woods, before his own particular world fell to pieces . . .

  ‘We can get across here,’ said Cunorix, just ahead of him.

  The burn had widened into a chain of shallows, and they splashed through easily enough, the hounds shaking themselves as they scrambled out on the further bank, and headed up through the steep woods towards the lip of the glen.

  The hazel woods fell back, and now they were out into open country; high country that climbed higher yet. Half-melted snow lay puddled in every hollow, and the wind had an edge to it like a scold’s tongue, for all that it blew from the south-west. But even up here there was the sense of quickening. The first blossom clung like stray sparks to the dark masses of the furze, and there was the green rooty smell of things growing, and the air full of the lonely bubbling matingcall of curlew that had come up from the estuary as nesting time drew near. It was a day when scent would lie close to the ground but long lasting; a good hunting day.

  ‘Luath has a scent,’ Cunorix said quietly.

  And looking down, Alexios saw the big hound standing suddenly tense, muzzle raised a little and faint tremors running his whole length to the ragged plume-tip of his tail. A moment later, Luffra had it also. The two riders waited, their ponies reined close, careful to make no sound or movement that would draw their attention away. Then with no sound the two great hounds were off, and Alexios and Cunorix, driving their heels into their ponies’ flanks, were after them.

  It was a long hunting and a hard one, for the quarry whose scent they followed was a big dog-wolf in his prime, old enough to have learned cunning but not yet past the strength and swiftness of his youth. More than once as he twisted and doubled through the wild country, Alexios thought that they had lost him, but always Luath and Luffra picked up his scent again and raced on.

  Gradually they were working over to the north-west, and from the ridge crests of the high moorland country they began to glimpse far off a kind of broken shadow-line across the hills, and here and there, grey squared-off shapes that might almost have been outcrops of natural rock.

  ‘He’s making for Credigone and the Old Wall,’ Cunorix shouted. ‘It’s all wolf country up there.’ And a moment later flung out an arm, pointing, ‘There he goes!’

  And sighting along the line of the pointing finger, Alexios made out a flicker of movement on the opposite hillside, something that might have been a huge dog, as it broke from cover of a thorn thicket and raced for the next patch of scrub.

  Controlling his pony with his knees, Cunorix cupped both hands about his mouth and sent out a long wordless cry; and Luffra, running far ahead, swung right-handwise into a wide curve that made Alexios think of a sheepdog working the flock . . .

  The hounds were giving tongue now, the deep belling notes caught and flung back by the hills on either side. Alexios drove his heels into his pony’s flanks and hurled the willing little beast forward, neck and neck with Cunorix, splashing through pockets of half-melted snow among the black tide of sodden heather, startling the green plover as they went.

  Again, desperately, the wolf tried to double on his tracks, but the hounds were too close now on either flank and his speed was too far spent. A shallow glen opened before them, thicketed with hazel and birch and rowan; at its head, half-lost in thorn and brambles, the ruins of what might once have been a signal station behind the Wall.

  And there among the rotting timbers and fallen stones, Alexios’s wolf turned at bay.

  On the outskirts of the tangle the two hounds stood yelling, holding him there but making no attack; for the hounds of men who hunt for food and skins as well as sport are trained to run down and hold the quarry, but not to kill unless they are given the word.

  Alexios reined in and dropped from the saddle, flinging the reins to Cunorix’s outstretched hand. Both of them knew the custom of the Frontier Wolves; you could ride down the quarry with as many comrades as chose to come with you, but you went in to get your wolfskin cloak alone.

  ‘Good hunting!’ Cunorix shouted after him.

  Readying his chosen spear in his hand, he ran in, past the yelling hounds, scrambling low through the briar tangle and the fallen stones, his heart racing high in his throat with the swift excitement of the moment. Behind him he heard Cunorix calling off the hounds.

  Ahead, in a small clear space backed by a stretch of still-standing wall, his wolf waited for him.

  He had tried to leap for a narrow grass-grown ledge high against the face of the wall, maybe the old rampart walk. If he had been fresh he might have managed it, and gone on over the wall top and away, but he had been run long and hard, and he fell back with heaving flanks. As he burst out into the open space, Alexios saw the great brute gather himself and try once m
ore, and again fall back. But he was not done yet; the last desperate courage of the cornered animal was still with him. The crumbling wall at his back, he gathered himself one last time and sprang for the throat of his ancient enemy, the Hunter with the Spear.

  Alexios had time to see the hatred in the yellow eyes, the laid back ears and wicked grinning jaws, but above all, the thing behind the eyes that made this his wolf; his, and no other wolf in the world. He seemed to see the eyes for a long while, coming towards him slowly as through water, swelling on his sight; and yet he knew that it was only a splinter of time before he felt the shock as his spear took the leaping wolf in the breast. For an instant he smelled the hot breath in his face. The spear was wrenched from his grasp, and he let it go. There was a horrible yowling in his ears; a kicking and struggling on the ground beside him. He ripped his hunting-dagger from his belt and dived in to finish it. Snapping jaws just missed his arm as he drove the point in deep to the heart. The struggling and yowling stopped and the great wolf lay still.

  Alexios got up and pulled out the spear, and stood looking at the dead beast, who lay with bared teeth, lips still drawn back in a snarl as though to defy death itself. He had been a beauty, thick-coated, brindled cream and grey, lighter than most of his kind, save for a dark fore-stripe that ran from the snarling muzzle up between the ears. His eyes were still bright and full, golden as yellow Baltic amber, fixed but not yet beginning to glaze. And standing there, Alexios knew the regret that comes in the moment after the kill is made, and the life gone, and all the speed and beauty and danger and courage. He had known all that before, he had killed wolves before; but it had never been quite like this; this was his wolf, and no other wolf would ever be his wolf again.

  Suddenly he knew, a far-down instinctive knowledge that had no words to give it shape, why it was the custom of the Frontier Scouts that each man killed once, for his wolfskin cloak, and except in dire need of a new cloak, never killed wolf again.