The sky was quickly growing darker. He knew that his family would worry, if they weren’t already worrying that he had been gone so long. “I have to find a way out of the wolf shape!”
He pushed himself up onto his haunches again and tried to look down at the vast expanse of fur that was his broad wolf chest. He lifted one paw and gently prodded the bloodstained fur. It was too painful to do much more than that. He delicately traced the line of blood down his breast. Nothing happened. Alexei was out of ideas.
He threw himself back on both hind legs, lifted his face to the sky, and howled. Never had a wolf cry echoed across the fields with such loneliness. Attempting to rip the wolf shape from his true self, he lifted his front paws and scrabbled wildly across his snout, down his throat, across his chest and shoulders.
Suddenly the fur gave way. It peeled away as if a knife had drawn two lines, one down his chest and the other across his collarbone. The pelt fell away from his shoulders, intact and seemingly harmless. Alexei shuddered and hugged himself to keep warm, barely looking at the pelt on the ground behind him. His human chest was sticky with drying blood. Tears could now slip down his cheeks, and he kicked at the pelt in fury. A wild wave of rage, terror, and relief boiled up inside him. Did he ever really want to ever see the wolf skin again, let alone use it? Why had it suddenly given way? Without understanding how to remove it, did he dare ever put it on again?
He huddled there, sniffling and ashamed. “Was grandfather wrong to have entrusted the pelt to me?” he wondered. Finally, he turned and looked at the discarded pelt in the dusk. Calmer now, at least since the immediate danger of permanent captivity in the wolf shape was past, Alexei reconsidered how he had been able to remove the pelt. Slowly and thoughtfully, he reenacted his last frantic movements as the werewolf. As he drew his hands back and forth, up and down, across his face, throat, and then chest, he realized that he had inadvertently made the sign of the cross with one paw and that the skin had peeled away along the four arms of the religious sign.
Alexei gasped and sucked the quickly chilling night air into his lungs. It had been the sign of the cross that had opened the skin. But had it also destroyed the magic altogether? Would the transformation still be possible now that the magic of the skin had been mingled with the image of Christianity?
“Was the cross a magical symbol at some point?” Alexei hoped so. In his experience, he had only ever seen the cross used by the German Lutherans and the Russian Orthodox landlords that had imposed their religions on the people of Estonia.
“Might there have been some other, more Estonian magical gesture that had been meant to transform a werewolf back into a man?” Alexei asked himself.
He picked up the great pelt, still sniffling. Had he accidently destroyed the power of his grandfather’s great gift? There was only one way to know for sure.
He picked up the now inanimate wolf skin and looked at it. It seemed harmless enough. But the chance that he was mistaken terrified him that he might be trapped again in the wolf shape and not able to extricate himself. He hurriedly dressed and gathered up the pelt. He did not dare to attempt the transformation in the gathering dusk. Darkness might only reinforce the power of the skin and make it more difficult to escape. Alexei was desperately curious but also desperately afraid.
It was two days later and late afternoon before Alexei was able to gather the courage to test the magic again. He took the wolf skin out to the eastern crossroad, a few miles away—a short walk for a man his age—where he thought few would stumble upon his experiment. He set aside his clothes and unfurled the massive fur. He draped it across his shoulders again and grasped it, drawing the lower portion around his legs.
The skin must have grown used to him. The transformation this time was sudden and immediate. Tendons stretched and fur tightened. Alexei couldn’t stop himself from throwing his head back and baying at the rising moon. He lost his balance and fell down onto all fours. His tail swung heavily and warily as new, dusky scents assaulted his senses. The magic was clearly still intact.
“But to remove the skin?” Alexei cautiously sat back on his hind legs and quickly crossed himself, holding his breath as he lost his balance and fell onto all fours again. The skin peeled away in a single graceful movement, leaving an ungainly, naked young man on his hands and knees on an empty road.
The silliness of how he imagined he must look overcame him and Alexei couldn’t stop laughing as he dressed. He laughed until he cried and he kept crying as he made his way home, relieved that his grandfather’s trust had not been misplaced and that his fears of captivity in the wolf shape had been allayed.
Midsummer came. The village gathered around the bonfire that everyone helped to build in the middle of the village to celebrate the turning of the seasons. Children shouted and ran around. Young men jumped across the flames, hoping to impress the young women. Young women hung together, hoping to be noticed by the young men. Married couples and grandparents sat and watched the younger people playing around the fire. Everyone drank and sang.
Alexei joined his friends, singing and drinking before he finally jumped across the flames himself. Everyone cheered as his feet skimmed the tops of the flames, as they did for all the young men. But then, like so many others, as his feet touched the ground on the other side, Alexei stumbled and fell forward onto the grass. Little boys, chasing each other around the edges of the fire, leaped over him as he had leaped over the bonfire. Everyone clapped and laughed as he sheepishly pushed himself up from the ground. Another mug of beer was pressed into his hand. He joined the other men who had jumped across the fire and they clapped him on the back, singing to celebrate the solstice. He turned to look back across the fire and then he saw her.
Alexei blushed and looked away. The beautiful young woman with the long golden braids smiled at him from across the midsummer bonfire. He knew her name was Grete, that she was the daughter of a farmer in a nearby village. He knew that when she laughed it was like sunlight spilling over branches in the forest. She was here to visit cousins for Midsummer. He had often admired her when she and her family would come to his village for seasonal markets or to visit relatives. But Alexei had never imagined that she might be interested in being friends—or more—with him.
He glanced back at her. She winked. He felt his cheeks grow warm again. She tilted her head and studied his face. He could not pull his eyes away from her. She leaned over and whispered to one of her cousins. The two women blushed and giggled, turning away from him.
When Grete looked back across the bonfire to him, he caught himself winking at her as well. She smiled. His heart sang.
There were no storms that posed a danger to Alexei’s village or the surrounding area until the next winter. By that time, he had married the lovely Grete and a baby was on the way. When he donned the wolf skin to fight the storm, he was nervous but did it to protect Grete and their new baby as much as to protect the town.
Alexei trotted up from the barnyard behind his house. Thunder boomed and ricocheted in the air around him. Lightning burst above, dazzling his eyes and blinding him momentarily each time, until he learned to turn his face away from the jagged spears of light that came sizzling through the air.
Beneath the thunder, he heard old women laughing. Coming up through the lowest hanging clouds, he saw a trio of storm hags holding hands and skipping in a circle as they laughed and sang. Their tattered cloaks, draped over their heads and wrapped loosely about their torsos, reminded Alexei of the moldy and decaying shrouds he had seen wrapped around the bodies of the dead occasionally dug up from their graves by earthly wolves looking for food in the winter.
The hags danced and seemed to be singing, though Alexei could not hear their words over the roar of the wind in his ears. They laughed as rain cascaded from the clouds struck by their scrawny feet. Their long, tangled hair darted about their faces in the wind, like snakes. Toothless gums smacked with glee, their rheumy eyes peering about them, but each hag apparently unable to see
beyond the withered hands that grasped her own. One stepped on a hanging corner of another’s cloak and tripped, the threesome stumbling and nearly falling. Righting themselves, they howled and cackled. More rain tore down from their footprints and flattened the wheat fields below.
Alexei leapt at the trio of hags, snarling with his fangs bared. Two scattered, tripping and falling over themselves as he caught one in his great jaws. She screamed and scrabbled at his face, trying to scratch his eyes out with her clawlike fingers, but Alexei held her shoulder firmly in his jaws, her gray storm blood spilling out from between his teeth into the wind like ribbons. He shook her and shook her and shook her repeatedly until she finally stopped struggling and he could toss her now lifeless body aside.
Alexei stood peering through the clouds around him. The other two storm hags were nowhere to be seen.
But, no! He saw one of them, above him and to one side, shaking her fist at him and screaming with rage, her cloak and tangled hair snapping around her in the wind. She was daring him to attack her as he had attacked her sister. Roaring with fury, he charged her.
His jaws snapped shut on air as she darted to one side. Something cold and heavy smacked the side of his face and he stumbled into the clouds beside him. He heard a whistling that was not the wind and saw a manlike figure coming after him. But the man had a dog’s snout and lower jaw and was swinging an axe over his head.
Alexei guessed that the flat head of the axe was what had struck the side of his face. The dog-snouted man barked and howled, swinging his axe. Alexei tripped over something in the cloud drifts around his feet and the axe came down, nearly cutting open his foreleg. The dog-snouted man howled and swung again. Alexei grabbed the man’s wrist in his teeth and the man dropped his axe as they went tumbling through the clouds together. The man’s dog snout closed around Alexei’s shoulder. More of the gray storm blood seeped from the man’s wrist between Alexei’s wolf fangs as Alexei’s own red blood seeped into the fur around his shoulder. In a single movement, Alexei roared and flung the dog-snouted man down and away as he ran further up into the heights of the storm.
The dog-snouted man did not seem to follow him. Thunder crashed around Alexei, deafening him for a moment. He saw another man stumbling about the clouds, holding a jug that he lifted to his lips to take a long swig from before stumbling off again. Thunder boomed each time he drunkenly knocked into a cloud drift. Thinking the drunk no threat, Alexei kept climbing into the storm.
Off to one side, Alexei could see another manlike figure, but this one was large—nearly three times the size of the largest farmer Alexei knew in their village. This giant was nearly indistinguishable from the sky, seemingly formed of the same dark-gray clouds that he stood among. The cloud giant flapped his arms and shouted as he stamped one giant foot into the clouds he stood on, grimacing as if he had just drunk a chalice full of serpents. Thunder shook the sky, nearly knocking Alexei over. A terrified herd of cloud cattle came stampeding past Alexei, driven on by the giant’s antics. Thunder boomed and shook the clouds, more rain pouring from the gashes the cows’ hooves cut into the clouds as they stampeded past.
Alexei threw himself at the giant and locked his jaws around the giant’s leg. He pulled and tugged, trying to pull the giant over, but the giant just picked up his leg and shook it, attempting to dislodge Alexei. They hung there, wolf and giant, Alexei grinding his teeth into the giant’s leg and feeling the giant’s leg bone resisting him deep within the giant’s leg. Finally the giant reached down, shouting something at Alexei in words that he could not understand, and wrenched Alexei’s jaws from his shin. He picked Alexei up and tossed him like a ball in a game of ninepins. Alexei tumbled head-over-heels through the clouds, striking the haunches of one of the still stampeding cows. He fell to the clouds at the cow’s feet, nearly trampled by the last of the herd running alongside. Then the cattle were gone and Alexei lay there, bruised and bloody and panting.
He felt the clouds beneath him rumble with the ongoing thunder of both the stampeding cattle and the drunkard stumbling about below. He could see flashes of lightning through the folds of the clouds beside and above him.
“How can I go on? Is there no end to this storm? How can I ever defeat it?” Alexei asked himself, struggling to his four wolf feet. He gasped and choked, trying to keep breathing even as his aching ribs demanded that he stop trying. “How did Grandfather survive this?”
Another thunderclap exploded above him. Lightning shot past him towards the earth, and in the brief tear it made in the clouds he could see the fields of his village far, far below. The wheat was being pummeled into the mud. He could easily imagine the starvation that would come in the wake of the ruined harvest. He gasped again, his ribs heaving.
“I cannot let my neighbors starve!” he told himself. “I cannot let my family starve!” He pulled himself back onto his haunches and jumped into the storm above him again.
Climbing further into the storm, his claws scrabbling against the clouds as the way became steeper and steeper, he could hear the cattle bellowing below as the giant kept tormenting and terrifying them and driving them on to cause more havoc on the earth below. Off to one side, he saw the drunkard again, now even more drunk on whatever he was sipping from his jug, colliding with the clouds and unleashing more thunder and rain and wind every time he knocked into the wall of clouds around him.
Alexei could see one of the storm hags through the mist above him. She was crouching down, her arms outstretched, as if waiting to catch something—or someone?—she couldn’t quite see.
“Libahunt!” she screamed. “Think you can get past me again, do you?” She moved slightly from side to side. “Get past me and my sister, now?” He heard another cry and saw the other storm hag to her left, also crouched down with her arms outstretched. Their fingers nearly touched.
The two hags were clearly trying to stop him from getting past them.
“But why? What is beyond them that is so important?” Alexei asked himself.
“But why should you want to discover what is beyond the two old wretches?” a voice asked. Out of the wind-riven clouds stepped a woman’s figure, but this woman was not old and withered like the hags but young and lithe, and wrapped not in a shroudlike cloak but a translucent robe seemingly made of moonlight.
This woman’s hair was long and flowing, and although the wind was swirling around them, neither her robe nor her hair seemed disturbed in the least.
She reached one hand out toward Alexei. “Come with me, libahunt,” she quietly urged him. “Leave those old women to their games. There are other games to play together, you and I, games that do not leave the players hurt and injured but happy and begging for more.” She reached up with her other hand and undid the clasp that held her robe closed. It fluttered to her feet before the wind ripped it away.
She stood, still reaching out to him. Lovely. Delightful. Everything in him that was still a man wanted to go with her and leave the hags and the stampeding cattle and the giant there in the storm clouds while he and the young woman went off together to enjoy themselves on a sunny afternoon somewhere else. Anyplace but here.
“Why hesitate?” the beauty asked him. “Wouldn’t anyplace be a better place than this one? Wouldn’t any company be better than the company of the hags? And I do not simply offer you any company, but the most delightful company…” She stepped toward him, her hips swaying. She smiled and Alexei felt a gentle warmth wash across and through him.
He stepped towards her. She reached down and ran her fingers through the fur along his shoulder. He shivered with delight.
“Come.” She turned. “Let us go discover the heart of joy and gladness elsewhere, my gentle libahunt, and leave this storm to itself.”
He nodded. “Discover the heart of joy and gladness elsewhere,” he murmured. “Leave this… this storm…”
Then it struck him. He knew what was above and beyond the crouching hags with their outstretched fingers.
“The heart
of the storm!” he shouted, leaping up into the air and turning back towards the hags. “Kill whatever is at the heart of the storm and the storm will die!”
He heard the young woman scream in fury and defeat behind him, her cry trailing off like a scarf torn away by the wind and snaking through the air, never to return to its owner. Glancing behind him, Alexei saw the young beauty shrivel and vanish.
“Think you to escape us?” hissed the hags as he neared them.
In response, he charged straight for the hag on the left and closed his great jaws around her face. She cried out and dug her clawlike fingers into his shoulders. Alexei flipped himself over her head, tearing away most of her face with his teeth. Great ribbons of gray blood poured into the wind. The other hag jumped at him, but Alexei somersaulted further into the heart of the storm and the two hags fell upon each other, tumbling down through the clouds below them.
Alexei rolled to a stop, dropping the bits and strips of the hag’s flesh from his mouth. He gasped, looking around him, trying to see through the clouds and the wind what lay here at the heart of the storm. Thunder exploded and the wind howled in a burst around him. He crept along slowly to one side, looking both before him and behind him, above and below.
Wind struck him again. Lightning streaked past. He began to realize that the wind and thunder and lightning all seemed to be pulsating together in a common rhythm, and within the howling of the wind he heard another howling, a pair of voices heaving and grunting, crying out and roaring.
He hunched down and crept forward through a curtain of cloud. There, at the heart of the storm, in a bed of black-green storm clouds, two cloud giants were making love.
But these cloud giants were an elderly, angry couple. The old woman, her breasts sagging and her face wizened so that she seemed older than the world itself, sat astride her lover, shouting without words as he roared and grunted, his long beard caught in the wind that circled around them. Thunder and lightning and rain and wind all streamed from this bed, crushed from the cloud mattress by the thrusting and heaving of the giants attempting to pleasure themselves even as they unleashed the storm that was destroying the farms and fields on the earth below.
Storm Wolf Page 3
