"I had in mind that James was a bastard for leaving his story hanging there. Whether it's gospel truth or whether it's all a cock-and-bull story, I don't even care. With due respect to your convictions, Abraham and Gardner. But James . . ." She shook her head despairingly. The back-log hissed and flared briefly, throwing golden lights dancing across Yuriko's hair.
I crossed the soft Kermanshahan carpeting and stood before the hearth. Yuriko held the Thai toward me, as if to say, Never mind my words, everything remains between us as before. I nodded my understanding, inhaled the fragrant gold, held the Thai for Steinman and passed it along to Senator McPherson.
The strains of a Mozart concerto emerged from speakers whose baffle-cloths were indistinguishable from priceless centuries-old tapestry for very good reasons.
"What further did you wish to hear?" I asked.
Yuriko laughed. "James, you're fortunate to have inherited your fortune. You'd never be much good at earning money—at least not if you tried to do it by writing novels."
"I never claimed to be a businessman or a novelist," I responded. "But just what is your complaint? I've simply told you the story of Ghor, fifth-born son of Genseric. As I lived it. Yes, my dear, as I lived it, unmeasured millennia ago. You might quarrel with the structure of a novel, but how can you complain about the truth?"
"Well, James, let's see where you left yourself. That is, Ghor."
Her startlingly slim and graceful hands flowed through an arresting gesture. "You started life as an abandoned cripple, suckled by a conveniently lactating wolf-bitch. Certainly a familiar touch, that!"
I agreed.
"You survived your infancy, overcame your twisted leg, were raised as a wolf, returned to human society and took rather sanguine vengeance upon the family that had abandoned you."
"Yes."
"And then you launched yourself on the most extraordinary series of adventures. Including, as the expression has it, arson, rape and bloody murder."
"But what is it that you find so objectionable in my tale?" I asked her.
She smiled at me.
"I'll accept all of the improbabilities, James, and I'll even write off the seemingly supernatural interventions that seem to occur so often. Let's just say that they were the barbaric mind's interpretation of events that we would find other explanations for, today."
"Such as?"
"Well," she reached and touched my hand lightly. I felt the electric thrill that never failed to come with her touch. "Well," she said, "just for one example. That strange incident on the island. What happened? A volcano opened, bronze robots emerged from its molten bowels, wiped out Ghor's followers, then flew away into the sky. Now really!"
"It happened," I said angrily.
"Of course it did. But was it magical? Might there not have been a more advanced civilization in the world at the time? Maybe they were geologists, sent there to study that volcano. Once it blew, they took their findings and left. They weren't robots. They were wearing protective suits."
"Still, Yuriko, why the 'You bastard' treatment?"
"Because, James, at the end of your whole incredible saga, you just left it hanging. All of the blood, all of the suffering, your wife and child dead, your arch-foe Mentumenen dead. You'd been, literally, to hell and back. And there you were, living with the wolves once again. What happened?"
Before I could answer her, Abraham Steinman raised another objection. "I find it hard to reconcile your pantheon, Allison."
I stood with my back to the guttering fire, waiting for Steinman to elaborate.
"At the start of your tale you made reference to some Scandinavian deities. Ymir, of course, is a familiar figure. Ythillin is less so, but your description of her fits into the Norse concept. But then you bring in Mitra, who was worshipped for some centuries as a sort of alternate Jesus. Ishtar, who was the great Babylonian goddess. Set, the Egyptian devil-god who murdered his brother Osiris. Gaea, the Greek earth-mother. And the Hounds of Tindalos, creations, I believe, of the modern genius Belknapius. Not to mention Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Cthugha of Fomalhaut."
He clucked his tongue like a nursery school teacher who had caught a five-year-old in a fib. Compared to that great intellect, I suppose we were all on the level of five-year-olds.
"If all of this took place those untold thousands of generations ago," Abraham resumed, "how to account for the admixture of deities and beings from so many cultures and such widely separated periods?"
"I do not account for them," said. "What I have told you is the baldest outline of a life I lived long before this one. What happened, happened, and I make no effort to defend or justify it. This is not a courtroom. If you choose not to believe me, then consider it all just a tale. I hope that I have amused you, these past hours. You are surely not obliged to believe me."
"Well," Steinman considered, "I suppose that's fair enough."
Now Senator McPherson spoke. "Suppose, though, to satisfy Miz Yamash'ta, you do tell us what happened after you rejoined the wolves. Surely your memory doesn't just fade out at that point?"
"Surely it does not," I said.
***
And so I found myself a wolf once again, a beast in my heart and largely, even, in my body. It was as if I had reverted to the days of my childhood—or cubhood!—in that terrible time after Gudrun of the Shining Locks had rejected me and Genseric the Sworder exposed me on the ice to die.
Werewolf, wolf-man, man-wolf, what difference did it make? I struggled not to think, not to deal with the terrible events that had overtaken me and the terrible deeds that I myself had performed since my first encounters with the Aesir and the Vanir.
Did I change? Did the weird Lycanthropic alteration come over me, there in the snow-riven waste? Did I mutter those few simple syllables that I had learned from Telordric the White Magician, going now on two legs, now on four, fighting now with fist or the metal arm made for me by Dar'ah Humarl, now with the fangs and claws of my animal form?
I knew not, neither did I care.
At times I think I switched back and forth between my Lycanthropic form as a werewolf and my human form as a wolf-man. What difference did it make?
The anguish of my life was forgotten, and that was all that mattered to me. None of the fighting, none of the killing—nor any of the wounds, the pain, the injury that had been inflicted upon me—mattered. It was all like a grand game in which the winning of a battle, the conquest of a nation, the overthrow of a dynasty meant neither more nor less than the gain or loss of a marker.
I had seen enough of death to know both that it came inevitably to all men and indeed to all living things, and that it was to be fought off and avoided only for the purpose of prolonging this game of warfare that we chose to call life. There with the wolves of the ice-pack I could forget the one memory that it had been impossible for me to accept—the memory of my wife Shanara and my nameless infant child, dead in the northern wastes.
Surely this was a rich irony. I who had slain parent and brother with never a moment's hesitancy, who had gloated in their dying agony, had been brought low by the loss of two loved ones of my own.
The Ice Bitch Ythillin laughed her cold and bitter laugh, I am sure, at the irony of my grief! And it was my life with the wolves of the ice-pack, my deliberate and willful abandonment of human identity, human consciousness, human recollection, that alone made it possible for me to live on.
With the wolves I hunted elk, exulting in the acrid stench of fear that emanated from our prey when some great ruminant realized that it was trapped, doomed. I lusted for the feel of living flesh between my fangs, the taste of hotly spurting blood on my tongue.
As a wolf I became respected as a sharp-nosed scout, a peerless and tireless tracker of our prey. In the moment of attack none was more fearless and none more ferocious than I. At the moment of the kill, no wolf was more savage or more terrible than I.
And I rose, not by design but by the inevitable competition of courage and strength and skill tha
t settles the social order of the wolves, to the moment when I was the second leader of our pack. And then one day I felt myself overcome by strange urgings, irresistible urgings. I felt my hairs stiffening, my tongue lolling, my nostrils twitching to the stimulus of a scent like none other: that of the wolf-bitch in heat.
I rose from my place and trotted across the glittering ice. Soon I found the source of that all-powerful stimulus. It was the mate of the leader of our wolf-pack. He was an old and wise wolf who had seen many winters. He had mated as a young hunter, and as do wolves, he had mated for life. But after years of companionship and litters of whelps, his bitch had died, and after a period of mourning—yes, wolves mourn!—he had mated again, this time with a young female of glittering eyes and long, luxuriant fur.
But now her scent called to me and I could no more resist that call than a fir can resist the call of the springtime sun. I trotted to her side. She lay on a bank of soft snow, looked up at me, licked the fur of my muzzle.
I issued a challenge, a mighty howl that said as clearly to the wolves of our pack as ever human speech said to human ear, that I was claiming the mate of the leader. With her, I claimed the leader¬ship of the pack itself.
By the law of the wolves—and, yes, the wolves have law!—the old leader could choose one of three courses. He could accept my challenge and fight me, fight me to the death. He could yield to my claim, yield to me both his mate and his leadership of the wolf-pack, and become a submissive follower. Or he could leave the pack to wander the ice-floes, a loner, a rogue wolf, hunting such small prey as he could bring down alone, picking at the offal left by others, perhaps attacking the despised Man.
He chose to fight.
There are few preliminaries in the life of the wolf-pack. The challenge had been issued. The old leader had accepted. The rest of the pack assembled, ringing us, the leader's bitch settled to one side of the circle of wolves while the old leader and I stood glaring and snarling at each other in the center.
He was older than I. Larger. Immensely strong. But he was an old wolf, his reflexes not as rapid as once they had been, his stamina less than it had been years gone by.
While I was—ageless.
He must, somehow, have sensed that difference between us. He knew that his sole chance for triumph was to carry a rapid and decisive attack.
He charged across the hard-packed snow until he was a half-dozen strides from me, then launched himself into a flying lunge, his bared yellow fangs directed at my throat.
I timed my response, ducking my belly onto the snow and lung¬ing forward just as he descended to complete his attack.
He missed my throat, skidded across my body, his belly sliding over my hind-quarters as he tumbled onto the snow.
In a flash I reversed myself and caught him from the rear, nipping him on a hind haunch as he scrambled to recover from his failed attack.
With a coughing growl he came back to his feet and stood glar¬ing at me. He was hardly injured by the nip I had taken from his haunch. A tiny dribble of blood trickled down his fur. He edged sideways, trying to circle into a more advantageous position to use against me. He had been humiliated, and he did not wish to be humiliated again.
He growled a challenge to me, urging me to attack, but I refrained, taunting him. I edged myself into position before his bitch and urinated into the snow beside her, marking her as my possession with my spoor. With one paw I cuffed her gently, not to hurt but to show that she was my mate now.
The old leader almost choked on his snarl. He charged across the circle at me, this time making a low approach so as to lunge upward at my throat. This was a far more dangerous attack than his earlier, almost contemptible, flying leap.
I skipped sideways with my hindquarters, backing a half-step so that the trajectory of his new attack lay at right angles—what men would call right angles!—to my own position.
He tried to correct his attack, and partially he succeeded.
We lunged and snapped simultaneously, our very fangs clashing as we collided. We both went sprawling; I rolled onto one side as he skidded to a halt. He was on me before I could regain my feet, and his teeth would have closed in the soft flesh of my neck ending the challenge—and my life—save for the thickness of my heavy coat and the force of our previous clash, which had badly hurt his lower jaw.
So instead of my gushing jugular, his only trophy of the attack was a mouthful of thick fur and a single gobbet of my flesh.
This time I growled my fury and resentment, and backed away, belly down, trying to regain my lost advantage.
My opponent spat and sputtered, clearing his mouth of the fur he had ripped from my throat. I uttered a snarl of fury and circled. My opponent had placed himself before the bitch who was both the symbol and prize of our combat. He stood over her, growling his warning to me.
At that moment I almost uttered the brief syllables that would turn me into a man, armed with the bronze mechanical arm of Dar'ah Humarl, prepared to aim some spring-driven blade or spiked ball at my foe, to destroy him as a man destroys a wild, dangerous animal. But no, I was myself an animal, as wild as my opponent and, if anything, even more dangerous.
I resisted the urge to snarl those syllables, and instead threw my bulk into a murderous charge against my opponent. Not ten paces from the bitch I feinted as if I would leap past my opponent to the left. Instead I shifted my course to the right as if I intended to pass him on that side and seize the prize, the bitch, for myself.
The old wolf spun first one way, then the other, trying to compensate for my feint and my change of direction.
Another calculated movement and I had my opponent trying to maneuver in three directions at once. He reared above me, fore-paws flailing for balance, hind feet scrambling on the snow for purchase.
I launched myself with all the power of my iron-hard sinews. I aimed my attack not at my opponent's throat nor at his unprotected belly, but at his mighty chest.
My jaws were opened wide, my head twisted to one side to bring my upper and lower jaw together on the two sides of his ribcage. My razor-like fangs cut through the thick fur and the muscular flesh of the old leader as if they had been the soft wool and tender flesh of a newborn lamb.
As the mighty muscles of my jaw snapped shut I felt and heard brittle bones of his ribcage snap. My teeth met in the middle of his chest. I wrenched my head, tearing away the prize of my successful attack. I had ripped the very heart from my opponent, and tugged it away; his body fell, lifeless, to the snow. He did not even twitch.
I dropped my prize on the snow and pawed at it. I stood over the body of my defeated opponent while the rest of the tribe stood in their positions around us. I made a little summoning whimper to the leader's bitch and she minced temptingly toward me. She licked the little wound on my neck. I made the low, whimpering sound that gave her permission to sample the fresh carrion before her.
She sniffed at the flesh of what had been her mate, pulled away a gobbet of steaming bloody flesh and carried it to her place to be consumed.
One by one the remainder of the wolf-pack advanced to make obeisance to me, their new leader, and to receive their share of the flesh of my defeated predecessor.
Once my dominance of the pack was formalized and accepted by all I strode from the circle, growling to the others a warning that none might follow me.
I walked alone across the snow and ice until darkness fell. The sky was black but clear, the stars and moon bright in the crisp, almost polar air. They cast a bright glow that was reflected from the white surface, giving the world a ghostly semblance of daylight.
Now I muttered the syllables I had learned from Telordric before I killed that white magician. They were brief and simple; they must be, to be made by the vocal apparatus of a wolf, apparatus designed for the making of growls and snarls and whines and eerie howls but not for the making of human syllables.
I felt my body shifting, my hind legs growing longer, my forelegs turning into arms and my forepaws into
hands. My muzzle shrank to the nose and jaws of a human. My pelt was absorbed, leaving only the poll and beard and coarse body-hairs of a normal if hirsute man. I threw back my face and glared into the sky, shouting my challenge to my enemy, mentor, patroness and tormentor, Ythillin the first daughter of the Ice Gods.
"Bitch," I shouted. "Bitch! I have won the leadership of the wolves! I have won the beautiful wolf-bitch for my prize! Is she not a token of yourself ? What more must I do? Whom else must I conquer? Why can I not die, Ice-Bitch!"
A terrible wind rose and spun glittering crystals of snow and ice around me. Prism-like, they broke the spectrum of the moon- and starlight into a shimmering rainbow that bathed and burned me until I felt like a living, chromatic flame. I was swept from the ground, raised by that icy whirlwind like a sailor caught up in a waterspout or a dirt-grubbing farmer snatched from the earth by a cyclone's whirling black funnel.
I was carried high into the air, spun topsy-turvy until I could not tell whether the glaring white disk and the twinkling specks that whirled past my eyes were the true moon and stars or their icy reflections glittering at me from the frozen slopes beneath. The wind howled in my ears and in it I heard the voices—I thought I heard the voices—of those gods and mortals with whom I struggled these terrible, toilsome years.
Gudrun and Genseric were there, old Bragi and the four broth¬ers I had slain, Raki and Sigismund, Alwin and Obri. Harolf was there, the Aesir chieftain and Hetlund his son, Tjarvakka the Aesir priest and Hialmar my companion in arms. Oderic and Guthric, Nald and Cudric, warriors all, of the Vanir, and Hengist Ironarm my uncle and Tostig Bearslayer my cousin.
Gl'erf was there, leader of the half-human Mi-Go, and Klu'do the she with whom I had tried—and failed—to mate.
Agha Junghaz, king in Turan, and the beauteous Jahree the chiefest of his wives. Ushilon and the Stygian sorcerer Mentumenen, Kaius Valkonnus of Aquilonia and Lamaril the Invincible—who had proved, before my attack, to be anything but what his title claimed.
And Lord Garak, king in Belverus, capital of Nemedia, and his sons Tashako and Yashati and his daughter, my wife the Lady Shanara of Jelah and our child.
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