Storm Wolf

by Stephen Morris

  “Nonsense!” she exclaimed. “It would be a shameful disgrace if we turned away a guest or made him sleep in the barn—especially at this time of year!”

  Edita, the youngest, came over to Alexei and took his hand as he stood beside the chair in front of the hearth. “Come, sir. Sit.” She smiled up at him and Alexei could not refuse the little girl. He sat.

  The grandmother gave his coat and satchel to Dovydas, the boy, who took them away. He smiled at Alexei, wishing him “Happy Christmas, sir. We are glad to have you!”

  Amalija darted out of the room and hurried back with a steaming cup of tea that she pressed into his cold hands. “Drink, sir. Happy Christmas! Warm yourself!” Then she was gone again and Edita, without waiting for an invitation, climbed onto his lap. He caught his breath sharply. It had been a long time since he had known the weight of a child on his lap. He sipped the tea, trying not to show the grief mixing with the warm recollections.

  “I can tell from your accent that you are not from any region of our Lithuania,” the old woman said, pulling another chair alongside Alexei. “Where is it that you come from, sir?”

  “I was a farmer in Estonia,” he answered her. “My wife and children—they took ill and died. I could not bear to remain alone there with my memories,” he explained, hoping that she would believe the half-truth.

  She nodded gravely, never taking her eyes from his. “I understand, sir. Grief is a sharp goad to drive a man forward.”

  Alexei nodded, pulling his eyes from hers and looking into the depths of the hot tea he wrapped his hands around. He remembered drinking tea with Grete, his own children sitting on his lap, the contentment that always brought. Edita swung her legs and held up her doll for his inspection, saying something in Lithuanian, and he could not stop his wan smile that bloomed in response.

  “Much of your Estonia and most of our Lithuania have been under the thumb of the tsar in Moscow,” the old woman went on. “Our Lithuanian tongue was even forbidden by the tsar during the 1860s,” she told him, “but Polish and some German were tolerated, especially in Vilnius and the cities, because of our markets and business with Prussia. I hear that they have recently been allowed in Vilnius to print some few books in Lithuanian again, although the tsar is not happy with that. But out here among the farmers, we speak only Lithuanian and Russian—and my little Edita here is only just beginning to learn the Russian. You must forgive her, friend.”

  Edita insisted Alexei kiss her doll and then, apparently bored by the conversation between the adults, she slid down from his lap and wished him a “Happy Christmas!” as she tumbled from the room.

  “I am afraid it is she that must forgive me, Grandmother,” Alexei answered. “I am sorry that Estonian and Lithuanian are so unlike each other that we must use the tsar’s Russian to speak to each other.”

  She reached over and patted his arm. “But you have a place with us, good sir. You have come as our Christmas guest and we are happy to have you with us for as long as you choose to stay.” Leaning in as if to share a secret, she added, her eyes twinkling, “Even if we must use the tsar’s Russian to converse!”

  After finishing his cup of tea, Alexei had been taken into the back parts of the house, and he realized that the family must be well-to-do farmers, indeed. There was a maid and a cook in the kitchen, and the children’s mother, daughter-in-law of the grandmother who had opened the door, was arranging straw on the dining table in another room.

  “Christmas straw!” Alexei exclaimed when he saw it. “Back home, in Estonia, we also use the Christmas straw on the table to celebrate the holiday!”

  The mother, who was introduced to him as Aušrinė, smiled and spread the linen tablecloth over the straw. “We shall be glad to have you join us at our Kūčios supper!” she told him. “In your Estonia, it must take days to prepare the table for Kūčios supper, just as we do here in Lithuania. But do we also share the tradition of the Christmas bath?”

  “We have a Christmas sauna,” Alexei told her. “Very important. Everyone must wash in the sauna before sunset and the beginning of the Christmas dinner.”

  “Yes! But we have no sauna here,” Aušrinė told him. “But please, we have hot water and towels! No one can come to Christmas unwashed! You can wash now and wash again on Christmas Eve!” Alexei laughed with them all, despite his ache to be home with Grete and their children for even one more Christmas. He allowed them to usher him into the washing room, where he was happy to indulge himself in the steaming water and wash away the pain and dirt of his flight from home before donning the new clothes Aušrinė had sent Dovydas to bring him.

  Over the next few days Alexei helped the farmer Adomas, the son of the old woman, whose name Alexei learned was Vakarė, with the daily chores of the farm that continued even throughout the winter. Together they fed and milked the cows, shoveled out the manure, fed the pigs and horses as Adomas’s three children fed the chickens and gathered eggs. The family ate their meals at a small table in the kitchen, as the large table in the dining room was being prepared for the grand supper of Christmas Eve. They welcomed Alexei at the kitchen table to eat meals with them and treated him as if he were a cousin or uncle newly returned from a long journey. They spoke in Russian as much as they could so as to include him in their conversations.

  It was early in the morning almost a week later that Alexei was awake much earlier than the family and, feeling restless, made his way out of the house and across the farmyard into the barn. He had thought he might start the morning chores and took the pail to fill with chicken feed for the hens. He scooped feed from the sack slumped against a post supporting the hayloft and leisurely strolled about the barn, casting the feed about. The hens were beginning to cluck and stir, but in the predawn darkness, many were silent, their beaks still tucked under a wing. Alexei made his way between the rows of stalls, hearing the cattle rousing themselves as well. The chicken feed splattered against the worn posts dividing the stalls and bounced along the floor. He knew the chickens would find it.

  He turned a corner to make his way along the second row of stalls.

  A voice cried out and pushed him in the chest. Alexei lifted up the pail to strike whatever thief he had surprised in the dark.

  The voice said something again, words this time, though Alexei could not understand any of them. The figure struck a flint and sparks flashed. A candle was lit and gleamed in shadows dancing around the barn. A candle held by a short man who stood before Alexei.

  The man was hunched over, apparently old enough to be a grandfather. Wild tufts of gray hair poked out from beneath the red cap he wore, and white stubble covered his wrinkled cheeks. The candlelight revealed that he was wearing an old, patched jacket and breeches, similar to what a poor farmhand might wear. Old-fashioned shoes of birch bark covered his feet.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here?” demanded Alexei, knowing that the old man could not understand him even as the words spilled from his lips. He repeated himself in Russian, thinking the old man might understand that.

  The man held the candle up higher and studied Alexei’s face. He said something that Alexei couldn’t understand. The two men stood staring at each other. Alexei wasn’t sure what to do. He slowly lowered the pail, thinking the old man did not look especially dangerous.

  “You are a vilkolakis, are you not?” the old man asked him.

  Alexei was startled. He had clearly heard the old man’s voice, thin and scratchy, but the old man’s lips had not moved!

  “You are a vilkolakis,” the old man repeated, this time as a statement and not a question, but again his lips did not move. “We can speak directly to each other,” the man said, again his lips not moving, evidently seeing Alexei’s perplexity. “One mind with the other. You are a vilkolakis and I am Javinė, what you might call a… a barn sprite, I think.”

  “A… barn sprite?” Alexei asked. The old man stared at him and then tapped his forehead with a stubby finger.

  “Speak with your t
houghts.” Alexei heard the old man’s voice again. “Your thoughts I can understand. But your speech? Impossible!” The old man coughed and sputtered.

  “A sprite?” Alexei repeated in his thoughts.

  “Yes. A sprite,” the old man’s words formed in Alexei’s mind, exasperation coloring their tone. “Named Javinė.”

  “And I… I am Alexei,” answered Alexei in his thoughts. The old man nodded.

  “You are a newcomer to the household, Alexei,” answered Javinė. “A newcomer who is a vilkolakis but not the usual kind of vilkolakis that we used to encounter here in these parts. You are a different sort of vilkolakis, Alexei.” Javinė stepped closer and sniffed at Alexei. He snorted. “A vilkolakis who can fly? One of the werewolves from Estonia, heh? Well, well. That certainly is a change! Who would ever have thought that I should meet a vilkolakis from Estonia feeding the chickens here in my barn!”

  “Your barn?” exclaimed Alexei. Then he caught himself and repeated the question in his thoughts. “Your barn? This barn belongs to Adomas and his family! It is not yours, little sprite—or whatever you call yourself, Javinė.”

  “It is mine,” Javinė insisted shrilly. “I have looked over and protected this farm and this barn for Adomas’ father and grandfather and I will watch it for his son and grandson as well! It is mine and theirs—ours, together! I protect the farm and they leave me rye bread and salt and beer.” Javinė held his candle up to Alexei’s face.

  “They cannot see me. But you can see me, vilkolakis. You can see me and we can speak, mind to mind. Because we each have one foot in this world and one foot in the Otherworld, the world where the gods and demons live,” Javinė explained. “But you are far from home, vilkolakis Alexei. Why are you here in my barn?”

  “I… I had to flee from my village,” stammered Alexei in his thoughts. “I made my way south through Latvia and am now here. In Adomas’ barn.” He hurried to correct himself, seeing Javinė scowl and dodging the sprite’s foot as he tried to kick Alexei’s shin. “In your barn.”

  “And what are you searching for?” squeaked Javinė, satisfied that Alexei had acknowledged that the barn was the sprite’s.

  “My grandfather—my dead grandfather—told me to go south and west,” Alexei explained, watching the sprite stalk around him. “He told me that I could find a master of the old magic if I traveled south and west, and that this master of the old magic would… would give me what I need.” He was reluctant to tell the sprite too much of what had happened back home, his slaughter of his family, and how he needed to be freed from the wolf magic.

  Javinė the sprite stood still and studied Alexei. “Very well,” he muttered at last, lowering his candle. “Keep your secrets. Keep searching. It’s not as if there are any masters of the old magic left in this vicinity, in any case.”

  “Thank you. I think.” Alexei was wary and yet bemused by the temperamental old man.

  Javinė turned away and stalked off. “Find me here in the barn if you need me, vilkolakis,” he grumbled. “You can find me here before dawn.” He blew out the candle in his hand and the barn was plunged back into darkness. “And I… if I need you for some reason, vilkolakis… I will find you.”

  Elžbieta sat in the early morning dark of her room, brushing her hair and staring into the looking glass on the wall beside her bed. She could hear her father in the farmyard outside, opening the barn doors and fetching the pails that hung near the doors so he could milk the cows. A plough horse whinnied his morning greeting to her father, and her father called back a greeting to the horse.

  Elžbieta smiled. Her younger sisters were still asleep in their beds in the other three corners of the room as she brushed her hair and imagined how her life would be changing shortly. She was engaged to be married in three short weeks to the son of a neighboring farmer and she would soon be brushing her hair in her new bedroom as a newly married woman with a farmer husband of her own. She loved her parents and her family, but she was excited to grow up, to wed, and move out of her parents’ home and into the home of her husband and his family. Soon after the wedding, she anticipated, she would probably also be expecting the first grandchild of both families. This coming Christmas was a happy time for Elžbieta, with momentous changes afoot.

  She brushed her hair for another moment before going out to join her father in the morning chores in the barn and farmyard. Her mother was in the kitchen, she knew, kneading the family’s bread for the day. That would be her task in her new house with her new husband. She shivered in giddy anticipation.

  A small noise startled Elžbieta. As if a pebble had been gently tossed against the window pane next to the looking glass. She paused as she set the brush down on the shelf below the looking glass, wondering if she had perhaps misheard. Then it came again. A small clink and rattle.

  She stood still and held her breath.

  “Elžbieta?”

  She heard the quiet whisper of her name outside the window.

  “Andrius?” she whispered back. Who else but her betrothed would be tossing pebbles at her window before dawn and whispering her name? She stepped to the window and, pulling the curtain aside with her fingertips, peered out.

  She could see the farmyard below, and the moon still hung in the sky above. The dark silhouette of the barn filled most of her view, and the shadow of the barn only made the dark farmyard below more difficult to see if Andrius was hiding below.

  “Come down!” The husky whisper hung in the air. “Meet me beside the barn!”

  Elžbieta was thrilled at the prospect of an early morning clandestine meeting with her husband-to-be in the shadows. “But how did my father not hear him?” she wondered. Her father must be too busy, too far into the barn to notice the rattle of the pebbles against the windows or the furtive whispers.

  “Yes! I will!” she whispered back and dropped the curtain back into place. She threw a shawl around her shoulders and hurried out of the room and down the stairs as quietly as she could, hoping to escape the notice of her mother.

  As she stepped out of the house, the cold pierced her. A shawl was not enough to enable her to stand outside with Andrius for even a moment or two. “But I can’t go back inside to get my coat,” she worried. “Mother will certainly hear the door a second time and want to know why I was so foolish as to not put on my coat in the first place.” She scurried across the farmyard and darted alongside the barn. She could hear the milk squirting into the pail that must be between her father’s feet as he sat on the milking stool in the first stall.

  Alongside the barn she paused, huddling in the shadows and pulling the shawl more tightly around her shoulders. “Where are you, Andrius?” she whispered. She did not see him—or anyone—as she had expected to, leaning against this side of the barn away from the house. The other side of the barn was too exposed, too easily seen from the kitchen windows where her mother would inevitably look up from kneading the bread and see whoever might be standing there.

  “Andrius!” Elžbieta hissed again, as loudly as she dared. “Where are you?” She glanced back along the barn.

  “Andrius is not coming this morning, child,” a deep voice whispered into her ear. She felt hot, steaming breath caress her neck. “But I am here for you.” The smell of blood and raw meat assailed her nostrils as she whipped her head back to see a large man who had not been there before. He had yellow eyes under bushy eyebrows and several days of stubble on his chin. His greasy hair was disheveled and his jacket smelled unwashed. He grinned in a sickening leer, and she could see his teeth—most lumpy and misshapen, but a few long and pointed. The man wrapped an arm around her waist.

  Elžbieta screamed.

  That evening—after Alexei’s early morning encounter with the barn sprite and almost a week after his arrival—was the night before Christmas Eve. Dovydas announced at supper that he had heard from the other boys in the town that a young woman had been attacked that morning and badly mauled by a large wolf while in her family’s barnyard feeding th
e hens. Her father had heard her screams and come running and was able to beat the great wolf off with a shovel. But the young woman, recently engaged, was so badly injured that it was unknown if the wedding would be able to take place as planned.

  Amalija shivered as Dovydas gleefully recounted the most gruesome details of the attack. Alexei smiled to himself, recognizing the pleasure that all boys have in relating such news to their sisters.

  “Dovydas!” she chided him. “You talk like you were happy to hear about all this!”

  “Well, Amalija.” He shrugged. “I am happy that it was on the other side of town and not here that the wolf decided to show his face this morning. Who knows? Otherwise, it might be you that people would be talking about.”

  “Dovydas!” his mother Aušrinė scolded him. “You should never threaten your sisters with tales such as that! You never know what words coming out of your mouth might find their way into the truth!”

  “It does seem to be the start of a harsh winter, though,” his father Adomas added. “It is not good that a wolf should be seen so soon, so close to the town. It is an especially bad sign that the wolf should feel driven to attack a person so early in the season.”

  Alexei wondered if there was a Master of Wolves in Lithuania that had assigned the girl to the wolf as a winter meal and what might happen to her father in retaliation for saving his daughter. “I will have to ask Javinė about that the next time I see him,” Alexei thought.

  The next night was Christmas Eve. Kūčios supper was a festive but solemn event. Every household in the town was preparing for the most important dinner of the year. Women had spent days cleaning the houses and preparing the meal. Men had been cleaning the barns and doing as much work in advance as they could so the only chores between Christmas and Epiphany would be feeding and tending the animals. Last-minute errands remained and gifts were brought stealthily from their hiding places so they could be shared later.