Summer in Orcus
Page 10
The only reason that Summer did not turn around and run immediately was because the wolf was in a cage.
The cage had shining metal bars and an enormous ring at the top with a rope through it. It looked as if the wolf had been walking between two trees and the cage had dropped down over it. There was a bit of a gap at the bottom where a tree root lifted it, and the ground had been clawed and scrabbled into dirt around it.
“Have mercy,” said the wolf, staring into Summer’s eyes. “Let me out.”
“Oh!” said Summer.
It was not that the wolf talked. The weasel had made it very clear that she could expect all sorts of creatures to talk. But she had never heard a voice like that, so deep and growling and wild, threaded through with a howling music.
She wanted to help him. Creatures with voices like that did not belong in cages. Still—
“Have mercy,” said the wolf again. “If it was not you who put me here, then help me.”
Reginald hopped closer. “Steady, now,” he said. “I don’t like to see a dirty trick like this played on anyone—for that’s a trap you’re in, sure enough—but how do we know you won’t come after us when you’re free?”
“I give you the word of a wolf,” said the wolf.
“Is that good?” asked Summer timidly.
“Not really,” said the weasel. “Wolves make no promises, except to each other.”
The wolf grinned. His teeth were as long as Summer’s fingers. “That is true,” he admitted.
“Well, we can’t leave him here,” said Summer. “He’ll starve!”
“He doesn’t look like he’s missed any meals lately,” said Reginald, eyeing the width of the wolf’s shoulders.
“I am not so worried about starving,” said the wolf. “But if I am still in this cage by nightfall, it will shatter my windows and burn my doors.”
None of this made any sense to Summer, but Reginald hopped a bit closer and examined the bars speculatively. “Hmm. Silver wash over iron, are they?” He tapped a bar with one claw.
He was standing in reach of the wolf’s jaws, if the beast sprang. Summer wanted to dart forward and grab him and pull him back, saying, “It’s not safe!”
She had opened her mouth and taken a half-step forward—
—and then she stopped as if she had run into an iron bar herself, because it was exactly what her mother would have done.
For one horrible moment, Summer felt as if she had gone down to the secret chamber of her heart and found her mother writing on its walls.
The wolf met her eyes with his own fierce, impossibly green ones, and Summer thought, I have to get him out. It doesn’t matter if he eats me. If I leave him here, I won’t feel like me any more.
The weasel stirred.
“You could flip that cage over if you wanted,” he said to the wolf. “One paw in that gap, and I don’t think it would stand for a moment. But you haven’t and you aren’t touching it, and the bars are made of silver…”
The wolf looked at the sky.
“You’re a were-wolf, aren’t you?” said Summer.
“No,” said the wolf. “I am a wolf and was born a wolf and will be a wolf until I die. I am a were-house.”
“A warehouse?”
The wolf sighed. “No. A were-house. I am a wolf by day, and by night I turn into a rather pleasant cottage with white curtains.”
A great deal of Summer’s fear evaporated and she folded her arms and said, very grimly, “This is a pun, isn’t it?”
“Only by accident, I assure you,” said the wolf. “We wolves are prone to such maladies. A cousin of mine is a were-library, and another turns into a very large skylark on solstices.” He scuffed at the ground with his paw. “I believe the hunter meant to trap me and put a silver chain through my tongue and when I change tonight, I will be trapped in that form forever and can be sold on the real estate market.”
“Well, we can’t have that,” said Reginald. “Wouldn’t turn a rat over to the house-hunters.” He looked at Summer. “What do you think?”
Summer took a deep breath, and let it out. “If you promise you won’t eat us,” she said. “Promise as if we were wolves.”
The wolf stepped up to the bars and looked at her thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said. “I promise by tooth and marrow and bone. Show mercy to me and I will show it to you in return. There’s too little courage in the world to go eating it up.”
It seemed to be the best that they were going to get. Summer turned her thoughts to getting the wolf out of the cage.
“Do you think the valet-birds could lift it?” she asked.
Reginald shook his head. “Only one who could possibly lift that thing is him, and he can’t touch the silver, worse luck.”
“What if we had something to put between him and the silver?” asked Summer.
In the end they sacrificed the linen tablecloth, which made the valet birds very unhappy. They wrapped it around the lowest bar, by the gap, with many grumpy twitters, while Reginald shouted encouraging things like, “There’s a lad!” and, “Rightly done!” and the weasel kept an eye out in case the hunter should return.
When the bar was wrapped, Summer took a branch and wedged one end under the cage to use as a lever. She and Reginald threw their full weight against it, and the wolf got the linen-wrapped bar in his teeth.
“One,” said Reginald. “Two. Heave!”
They heaved.
The wolf’s neck muscles pulsed and the cage flipped over with a great crash. Bracken and rotten wood flew in all directions.
“Free!” cried the wolf. He shook himself and gasped air untainted by silver. “Free!”
Summer had bright spots in front of her eyes from pulling so hard on the lever. Bark had scraped across her palms. She sat down on a tree root.
When she looked up, the wolf was six inches away.
She swallowed hard.
“Mercy for mercy,” said the wolf, leaning forward. He touched his nose to her forehead. “My name is Glorious.”
“Summer,” said Summer, through a mouth gone dry.
“Summer. We would call a cub that, before it grew into its paws and its name.” He lolled his tongue out between teeth as long and white as stalagmites. “Now let us go from here, and tell me, human child, what brings you wandering in the woods with a bird and a weasel and the scent of crones about you?”
They left the cage. The wolf walked beside them. His shoulder came halfway up Summer’s ribcage, and his tail was longer than her arm.
It was unsettling to walk beside a wolf. She tried to watch the road, but she kept getting little glimpses of him out of the corner of her eye, and then her heart would hammer and her spine would tingle.
Summer tried to think of him as a were-house. She didn’t think anybody could be unsettled by a were-house.
It was very hard to look at Glorious and think of a cottage with white curtains.
“Is Glorious—um—a usual sort of name for wolves?” asked Summer timidly.
“Yes,” said the wolf. “My sister is Strong and my brother is Splendid. We call ourselves what we are, or wish to be, or could be again.” He shook his head, and his fur stood out in a ragged corona. “Now. Speak to me of crones, Summer-cub.”
So she told him the whole story, about the saints and the sad Frog Tree and the Wheymaster and Grub. At the end he asked her only one question: “How did Baba Yaga smell?”
“A little like you,” she whispered. “And a little like an herb garden, and a little like bleach.”
The weasel came out on her shoulder and said, “Like—” and chittered a long, chattering passage in the language of weasels.
The wolf listened gravely. Then he nodded.
“That is a true story,” he said. “My people know her well.”
They had gone on for quite some time, and neither Summer nor Reginald quite wanted to ask if Glorious planned to accompany them until night-fall.
Finally the weasel did it for them. “Well?” h
e asked, standing on Summer’s shoulder and looking down at the wolf (but only a little way down). “You are walking along with us instead of tearing off into the woods, and you’ve heard our story. What do you mean to do about it?”
Glorious grinned. “I mean to walk with you until I am out of these woods with the house-hunters about. I am quite helpless at night, but a hunter will not take a house with people already in it. And in return—well. If we should encounter this ‘Grub’ person, or this ‘Houndbreaker’—” he pronounced the name with exaggerated care “—he will find, I think, that wolves are not broken so easily as hounds.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
When they stopped that night, Summer was more than ready. There was a blister on the back of her heel, and when she took her shoe off, it was one of the big squashy ones. She poked it with her finger and it turned bright white, then red.
“Ow,” she mumbled.
The valet-birds flittered around her, trying to bandage it up with napkins, but there was only so much they could do.
It was getting late. The sky was turning purple. The valet-birds hopped about gathering sticks, but Glorious yawned. “Don’t bother,” he told them.
He sat back on his haunches, threw his head back, and howled.
Summer let out a squeak and jumped a little. She can be forgiven for this, because the howl of a real wolf sitting right next to you is shockingly loud and shockingly strange. It starts deep and works its way up to a high pure note, and it shivers along your spine and down your arms and makes your fingers tremble.
The sound seemed to say to Summer that the world was divided into predators and prey, and Summer herself was most definitely prey.
But it was also very beautiful. It made her heart ache with its wildness and its sorrow and she loved Glorious for being exactly what he was.
The howl lasted for a long time. Even after it died away, Summer thought that she could still hear it, hanging in the air around them like smoke.
The first star came out and balanced on the point of a pine tree.
“That’s that, then,” said Glorious. He yawned again and laid down on his side. “Don’t be alarmed,” he added, as an afterthought. “It doesn’t hurt—” and then he turned into a house.
From Summer’s perspective, it looked as if Glorious just…unrolled. There weren’t any unpleasant inside-out bits. (She had been rather nervous that it would involve guts and bones and things.) He simply unrolled as if he had been a carpet, into a wooden floor. Planks slid under Summer’s feet as politely as bedroom slippers. Walls shot up around them, formed a ceiling, and then, in less time than it takes to tell it, she and Reginald and the valet-birds and the weasel were standing inside a neat little cottage with a roaring fire in the fireplace and white curtains blowing in the evening breeze.
“Well!” said Reginald, turning around several times. “Well! You don’t see that every day, indeed you don’t! If you’d told me about it, I’d say you were trying to sell me a bag of moonshine.”
Summer turned around in place, her mouth open. The door and the cupboards were painted blue, and the stones of the fireplace were the color of wolf-fur. The trim around the windows was painted the pale green of Glorious’s eyes.
It was not a very big cottage. There was one large room with the fireplace and a low table, and the roof peaked overhead. There was one small room with a bed in it and a pink comforter the color of a wolf’s tongue. The rafters were carved with running wolves and the chairs had cut-out pawprints on their backs.
“Oh, Glorious!” said Summer. “This is lovely!” She wanted to hug the wolf, but it is rather hard to hug a house, so she ran a hand over the back of the chairs. “Oh, how wonderful!”
They went outside to admire the cottage, and Summer’s heart turned over and gave a funny little squeeze.
The outside of the front door was painted turquoise.
She stared at it for a little while and didn’t think at all, and then finally she thought: So that’s all right, then. I am on the right path. And I was meant to meet Glorious and help free him from the cage. It’s all right.
It is a great relief, when one has thrown away normal life in search of their heart’s desire, to know that one is doing it right and isn’t going to get yelled at for going the wrong way.
It was a very pleasant evening. They toasted cheese and bread in the fireplace and Summer slept in the bed while Reginald perched on a chair back.
She thought that if she did have to go home—and probably she would eventually—she would do everything possible not to forget this.
“Do you think it’s safe?” she asked. “When he wakes up, we won’t all be—be squished up inside him somehow, will we?”
“Shouldn’t think so,” said Reginald. “He’d have said something, surely.”
And indeed, when Summer woke up in the morning, after a long and luxurious sleep—for there is nothing better than a real bed when you have been sleeping on sand and tree roots—she was very warm and not at all squished, and curled up with her head pillowed on Glorious’s side.
The wolf grinned lazily at her as she sat up.
“You are a very nice house,” said Summer shyly.
“Indeed,” said Glorious. “But I am a much better wolf.”
He rose and stretched from nose to tailtip. “Start on without me. I shall catch up to you when I have eaten—small brother, would you care to join me?”
The weasel hopped out of Summer’s pocket and swarmed up one of the wolf’s legs. “Very much so,” he said.
They loped off into the woods. Summer watched them go, feeling a little left out.
“Thank goodness,” said Reginald. “He’s a marvelous chap and very sound in the architecture, but I was dreading having to feed him. He could eat us both up in two bites and probably have room for a bit of trifle afterwards.”
“Will they come back?” asked Summer.
“Once they’ve eaten,” said Reginald firmly. “And we should do the same.”
They did indeed come back, licking their lips. Summer would have been more bothered by that, but her blister was much worse this morning and she was limping badly and biting her lip.
She wanted to cry, but it is very hard to cry when you are travelling with a wolf. There is something about them that is so much larger and braver that you feel determined to try and look large and brave as well, even if you are rather small.
Glorious trotted along beside her for perhaps ten minutes, then sank down into a crouch.
“Up on my back, “he said. “There is no running on torn paws, and we will make better time without it.”
“Are you sure?” asked Summer. “I mean—um—you’re a wolf—”
“And you a human,” said Glorious, “and that is a weasel and that fluttering fellow dancing up ahead is a hoopoe. But here we all are nonetheless. A slow rabbit is a dead rabbit, Summer-cub.”
Summer rubbed her suddenly sweaty hands on her jeans and put a leg over the wolf’s back.
It was not like riding a horse. Summer had never actually ridden a horse, it must be said, but she had read every book in the library about girls and horses and all the Black Stallion books, even the ones toward the end that got very strange and had aliens in them. Riding a wolf was not anything like those books.
For one thing, wolves are not nearly so broad as horses, even very large ones, and for another their bones are arranged differently, and there is nothing that resembles reins. (There is no real reason you couldn’t put a halter on a wolf, provided you don’t mind ending with fewer fingers than when you started.) Summer sank her hands into Glorious’s mane. She could feel his ribcage expand as he breathed.
He stood up, shook himself a little, and moved into a quick trot and from there into a ground-eating lope. It rattled Summer’s bones until she got into the rhythm of it and flattened herself down across his back.
I’m riding a wolf. I’ve never ridden anything scarier than the carousel and now I’m riding a real wolf.
Such a pace cannot be kept forever, of course. Soon enough, Glorious slowed to a trot, with his tongue hanging out, and Reginald landed and strolled alongside them, hopping to low branches and practicing the occasional dance-step.
Meanwhile, Summer was doing her best to engage Glorious in conversation. She loved the way she could feel his voice rumbling down in his chest when he spoke.
“But how did you come to be a were-house, anyway?” she asked.
“Indeed!” said Reginald. “Were you bitten by a hinge or cursed by a hearth-witch?”
“Oh, that.” Glorious stretched hugely and yawned, showing a vast pink gullet. “I went down to the stream where the houses drink, and drank there under the full moon. You could probably do so without taking harm, but wolves are prone to metamorphic instability, and so what with one thing and another…” He shrugged. “It’s not so bad. Houses aren’t hungry, and most of the necessary business of life can be accomplished during the day.”
“I didn’t know houses had to drink,” said Summer.
“They get thirsty on the long migrations,” said Glorious.
“It’s a magnificent sight from overhead,” added Reginald. “A hundred houses in a herd, stampeding across the savannah, the big bulls slashing at each other with their rain-gutters…”
Summer was very suspicious that they were making fun of her, but then she thought of Baba Yaga’s house, walking about on enormous bird feet. Perhaps the house had come from this world initially.
“Are all houses wild here?” she asked. “Do people ever build them?”
“Oh, well,” said Reginald. “You can build them. It’s a bit shabby, but of course there isn’t always a well-grown warehouse—begging your pardon, Glorious—about when you need a place to store the potatoes.” He flitted his wings. “And the big manor houses are almost all gone, from overhunting. You can only get them from house-herders now, and they’re never as good as the wild ones.”