The Wolf

by Leo Carew

  The hybrid, still swearing and at one point managing to flatten one of the soldiers with an open-palmed slap, was forced onto his back and pinned there, just as the innkeeper ducked beneath the thatch, a heavy cudgel in his hands. “Your men have killed my chickens!” he shouted at once, pointing accusingly at the hollow-cheeked man who stood clutching the birds. There was uproar as the men replied to the accusation, most appealing to Bellamus.

  Bellamus held up a hand, and his men fell quiet at once. Only the hybrid continued moving, struggling to free himself of the soldiers who held him down, until the innkeeper cracked him on the head with the cudgel. It seemed to stun the wretch, whose movements became gentle and uncoordinated.

  “What happened?” asked Bellamus, looking at the red-headed knight who had been pinned by the hybrid, and was now getting to his feet.

  “The monster threw itself on me!” he said. “We left them alone, like you said, Master.”

  “He attacked you because you were killing my chickens!” accused the innkeeper.

  Bellamus looked at the man clutching the two ruined birds. “Is this true?”

  The man said nothing. He blinked twice, and then laid the chickens down in the snow.

  “I’m sorry, Master,” said the other, again.

  “Those weren’t your chickens!” said the innkeeper, hefting his cudgel. He began to advance on the red-headed man, but Bellamus held up a hand to still him.

  “You will not lay a hand on one of my men,” he said. “Every last one is under my protection.” Before the innkeeper could reply, Bellamus went on. “But nor do I expect any man of mine to steal.”

  “I’m sorry, Master,” said the man who had been holding the chickens.

  “Too late,” said Bellamus. “Arrest them.” He gestured to the watching throng, and half a dozen men stepped forward to take hold of the thieves, who offered no resistance. Bellamus stooped down and unlaced his tattered boots, throwing the laces to his men and instructing them to bind the prisoners’ hands. He turned to the innkeeper. “You have a barn behind the inn. Will it hang a couple of ropes?”

  The watching crowd stirred suddenly, and from the corner of his eye, Bellamus detected a spastic jerk from the prisoners. The innkeeper looked hesitant. “It will,” he said warily.

  “To the barn,” said Bellamus, waving the prisoners onward.

  “Sir?” shouted one of them, his voice quaking. A murmur went up from the crowd and Bellamus repeated his gesture.

  “Move.”

  The stupefied prisoners were pushed forward by their captors, the crowd following behind in a daze.

  The barn behind the inn was low, but still the brace between two crucks would serve as a gallows, being some twelve feet off the ground. There was a coil of manky rope beside the door which Bellamus took and cut in half. The prisoners, hands now tied behind their backs, had been pushed immediately inside the building and the crowd was gathering in the doorway, more men hurrying to join the back as word spread of what was happening. Stepan pushed his way to the front to stand with Bellamus.

  An echoing, cavernous silence filled the barn as the upstart knotted the end of each piece of rope and flung it over one of the wooden braces, securing the free end on a lower brace. With his own hands, Bellamus then tied two nooses. The sight of them at last spurred the prisoners into speech.

  “What?”

  “Master!”

  “They were just chickens, Master, we can pay!”

  Bellamus paid no attention, fetching a pair of milking stools and positioning one beneath each noose. “On the stools,” he said. Haltingly, the prisoners were moved forward, each one of them jerking like a cogwheel as they were lifted into place. Bellamus had an idea that his men were only obeying so willingly because they thought that he would not go through with the threatened punishment.

  As the red-headed man felt the noose tighten around his neck, tears spilt suddenly into his beard. “I’m sorry, Master,” he moaned. “We were hungry. I’m sorry!” he called at the innkeeper, who stirred, taking a pace forward.

  “I will take compensation for the chickens,” said the innkeeper, as Stepan, by Bellamus’s side, tightened the second noose around the man with the hollowed cheeks. “There is no need to hang your men.”

  “You will have compensation,” said Bellamus. “But my men have not just stolen from you. They have disobeyed me.”

  Someone from the crowd objected that one of the prisoners was a knight, and Bellamus had no authority to hang him. Abruptly, Bellamus turned on the muttering crowd. “Listen to me now!” be bellowed. “Not a single one of you would have made it back south of the Abus if you weren’t with me. Do you deny it?”

  Silence.

  “You are now my men, until I’ve discharged you. If we steal from these communities, word will travel ahead of us that a band of marauding villains approaches, and we will be hounded until those scraps of us who made it back from the Black Kingdom are finished too. I do not give instructions lightly. I do not give them without reason. These fools,” and he pointed a resolute finger at the crying men, standing yet upon their stools and held in place by the ropes around their necks, “have disobeyed me. Trust in me: I will secure you food and warmth on our road back to Lundenceaster. But if any of you steals, there will be no exceptions.” He turned back to the prisoners, who began to beg once more.

  “It was a mistake, Master!”

  “Please! We marched with you like all the rest. We fought for you! I’ll serve you, my lord!”

  Bellamus shrugged. “You have proven to me that you can’t maintain your discipline. If you can’t maintain your discipline, you cannot be trusted to fight in the north. You are no good to me.”

  And he kicked away the first stool.

  The red-headed prisoner toppled, and then was caught by the rope. He bounced a little, swinging as his feet kicked wildly.

  Bellamus advanced to the second stool. The hollow-cheeked prisoner gave a scream and shook his head frantically, eyes bulging white and mad as Bellamus hacked at the stool with his foot. The second man dropped.

  Bellamus turned away, back towards the aghast crowd.

  “Out. All of you.” He stood before them, his eyes cold and feet rooted to the floor. There was a tense silence, broken only by the squeaking of the rope against the wooden brace above as the two men flailed and kicked behind him. After a long while, some at the back of the crowd turned away. Others followed in drips until, finally, it was just three men left, particular friends of the prisoners, staring confrontationally at Bellamus.

  “Off you go, brother,” said Stepan, shoving one of them away. The man sprang back towards Stepan, assessed his towering form, and then retreated, his eyes swivelling between the knight and the upstart. The innkeeper followed in silence, leaving Bellamus, Stepan and the suspended prisoners behind them.

  “This is my fault,” said Bellamus. “I knew we should have waited for ale after the food.”

  “It was they who made the mistake,” said Stepan, simply. “And I doubt there’ll be any more mistakes this evening. Even so,” he turned around to face the prisoners, “you could cut these two down now and they’d probably recover.” He glanced sidelong at Bellamus, who still had his back to the scene. “I’m not sure the men will like this.”

  “My men have seen worse. They would never have disobeyed an order of mine. The new ones needed to learn.” Bellamus scuffed a line through the hay that covered the floor. “And they’re angry now; that will fade with time, but the lesson won’t.” He stared bitterly through the open door of the barn, still facing away from the men swinging at his back. Their coarse flailing had ceased, and been replaced by a rattling tremor. “What a bloody shame,” he murmured. “Let’s get out of here as soon as we can. I need to see the king.”

  15

  The Giant Elk

  Roper awoke cold in the narrow bed in his quarters. The rough woollen blankets had mostly slipped off him and he pulled them back about his shoulders, elicitin
g a groan from Keturah next to him. She shuffled irritably to release some blanket for him and draped an arm over his chest, burying her face in the horsehair pillow.

  My head, thought Roper, screwing up his eyes and grimacing. He could not remember leaving the Honour Hall yesterday, nor much beyond Uvoren’s speech. There had been wrestling; that he remembered. He had an idea that Uvoren had won it, and that Pryce had been surly because he had lost his second bout.

  He glanced at the window above his table a little too quickly and the room span. He shut his eyes and after a time, when the world seemed to have stabilised, opened them again. Snow was resting lightly against the panes of glass and more appeared to be drifting down past the window. No wonder he was cold. I must find a bigger bed, he thought absently to himself.

  It was too cold for inactivity. He dragged himself out from beneath Keturah and stood to another wave of nausea. Gingerly, he pulled on a cotton tunic which he belted before extracting a heavy wolfskin cloak from an iron-clad chest and draping it about his shoulders. Opening the door to his quarters, he found one of the young women serving her time as a maid and requested wood, water and dried dandelion roots. These were brought, with the woman insisting on building the fire for him in the hearth at the back of the room, pulling across a small lever with a clunk to allow air to flow up through the grate and feed the flames. She set a blackened copper pot above it to heat the water before bowing herself out of the room. Roper waited for the water to come to the boil before tipping the dried, ground roots into the tumbling liquid and leaving it to brew.

  While he waited, he stared out of the window. He could not see far as the air was thick with snowflakes but the roofs all around him were six inches deep in the crystals. The snow covered the leaded gutters, collected on the sills and leading of windows and rested gently on the slate tiles. The fire was roaring now and its warmth was beginning to permeate the room, along with the burnt-earth smell of the simmering roots.

  Roper stood and poured some of the steaming brew into a birch cup, straining out the roots with a cotton gauze. He sipped it and sat back at his table, staring glassy-eyed out of the window. “Yes please,” mumbled Keturah into the pillow and Roper stood again to supply her with her own cup. She sat up, black hair hanging loose over her shoulders as she sipped the brew and wrinkled her nose. Roper stared at her, half in fascination, half through sheer vacancy.

  “Who won the wrestling last night?” he asked at last.

  “That berserker, Tarben,” she said. “It was him and Uvoren for the final bout. Uvoren nearly had him, but he was too strong.” Vague images flickered through Roper’s head of an individual so vast and hairy that it had assumed the form of a bear in his memory. Keturah’s eyes raked his face and she offered him a smile of such sweetness that he returned it entirely involuntarily. “So what will you do about him?” She meant Uvoren.

  “I don’t know,” said Roper. “I can’t kill him. Not yet. It would split the country and his allies would declare war. And he has strong sons who would take up his mantle. Last night I thought to bring him close and offer peace, but I see now that he came too near to ruling this land to be happy with his old role. I think I shall have to finish him, one way or another.”

  “Yes, you will. He’s certainly not going to have a quiet winter.”

  “He’ll spend it plotting against me,” Roper agreed.

  It was a holiday. There was always a holiday after a feast. They could do what they wished for the rest of the day.

  Keturah glanced out of the window. “Poor devils,” she said, taking another sip of the brew.

  “Who?”

  “Half our country,” she said. “So many of the eastern subjects lost their homes and granaries to the Suthern invasion. You know better than I, you’ve seen it. But they must be facing a bleak winter.”

  Roper paused. “You’re right. Those without homes and stores can’t possibly survive. We can’t just leave them.”

  “We can,” said Keturah. “Your father would have. As would mine, if he ruled. The Black Lord is not supposed to bother himself with concerns like that. He is a warrior ruler.”

  “And because I withdrew on the battlefield, they suffered. We should take them into the fortress.” Since the return of Roper’s army, the refugees had begun to herd in front of the Hindrunn walls once more.

  “Do you think that wise?” asked Keturah. “Thousands of refugees cramming the streets?”

  Roper was silent again. Keturah’s warrior-ruler comment fitted with everything he knew about his role, but he had also been taught that the Black Lord was the ultimate servant of the realm. And if the realm suffered, surely he should allay that suffering.

  But at that moment, there came a knock at the door. “Come!”

  A Vidarr legionary entered and Roper recognised him as the one who had waited on Tekoa when they had first met. Harald, he thought he was called. “My lord? Tekoa is leading a party hunting in the Trawden forests and said it would be his great honour if you would join him.”

  “That wasn’t how he phrased the invitation.”

  “No, lord,” admitted Harald with a bemused smile. “It wasn’t.”

  The Trawden forests were where the delicious boar from the night before had been hunted. They were part of the Vidarr estate and jealously guarded. The trees teemed with deer, aurochs and, it was claimed, giant elk with each antler as long as a man is tall. Tekoa was a keen huntsman and an invitation to the Trawden forests was worth having, even to the Black Lord.

  Roper licked his lips and looked solemnly at Keturah. “Go,” she said shortly.

  “Are you coming?”

  “Almighty, no.”

  It was a holiday, after all.

  For Roper, the day was breathless. He had hunted before, of course. In the berjasti, the young apprentices were encouraged to hunt and fish to supplement their meagre rations. But it was for food alone. They would tickle trout from the brooks that ran nearby, floating their fingers beneath the bellies of the fish that sheltered beneath the overhanging bank and drawing them into their chests before throwing them, flapping, onto the bank. They would snare hares and grouse, dispatching them gleefully and roasting them right away. They would create little gallows for squirrels, wait for badgers to emerge at dusk and pin the snarling beasts to the earth with a spear. Little fishing lines with hawthorn or antler hooks would be set out, or else used by hand to tempt crayfish out from the shelter of the stream bed. Roper had set deadfalls that had caught foxes (tough, dry, not pleasant), hedgehogs (fatty and delicious) and marten (like fox, but a slightly sweeter taste). Sometimes, if they had time, they might find the tracks of a deer and pursue it with bow and arrow, but that was rare and successes were rarer still.

  Hunting with Tekoa was nothing like this. They were after the giant elk, with the legate declaring that nothing else would do. “The stags aren’t in the best state this time of year. We should have more of a challenge if we went after them in the summer, but they still have their antlers. Look for the antlers, lord.” They rode out on coursers; a trio of enormous shaggy hounds loping behind them. It was Tekoa and Roper, a couple of Vidarr legionaries including Harald for assistance, and two other senior officers of the country whose names Roper did not know. They carried lances, and each had a bow and a quiver of arrows strapped on to their horse.

  The snow was still falling, thick and soft, and the forests were a delight to Roper. They were somewhere between broadleaf and evergreen, with the skeletons of immense beech and oak standing out stark against the snow, their leaves long gone. Alongside them grew pine, spruce, larch and cedar, needles gleaming dark green beneath a white dusting. Thrushes squeaked and chirruped from the branches as they passed, cantering up a winding path, the noise of their horses’ hooves softened by the snow. They had barely entered the forest when they stopped at Roper’s insistence to listen. In the distance, a pack of wolves was howling, voices weaving in and out of one another as they claimed ownership over this stretch of the
wild. It made Roper think of his time in the haskoli. Often in the evenings, they had been able to hear the wolves in the surrounding mountains. They rode on, Roper already beaming to himself.

  “Quiet now,” said Tekoa after a time. “And look there!” Roper followed his finger and saw something immense and dark stealing away into the undergrowth. He waited some more but all was still. It was gone, leaving just the memory of its grace and power. “Bear,” said Tekoa. They were still for a time longer, though it was not coming back.

  They would usually have taken a huntsman with them, but Tekoa insisted on directing everything himself. They rode on, passing trees with the familiar Anakim handprint carved into their trunk; people who had been to this place before them and declared their love for it. Each would be invested with memories, but only to the right people. Even beneath the snow, this forest smelt damp and intoxicating. Roper could feel eyes watching their progress as they moved through and he observed Tekoa, for whom this place must crawl with memories, stare distractedly at a particular spot every now and then, a slight smile coming to his face. No Sutherner would understand what this wilderness meant to the Anakim or their attachment to the land through which they moved. They were maskunn: exposed.

  After an hour’s riding, they reached an immense central clearing. “Watch here; the elk come for the fresh shoots and shrubs that grow out of the shade of the trees. When we see one, we will drive it against the trees. We’ll trap it somewhere where its antlers are too big for it to fit through. Then we have a fight.”