The Wolf King

by Alice Borchardt

  “Wedo, go get it,” Hugo ordered the crop-eared one.

  Wedo hurried past them to climb the stairs at the back of the shop. The third man watched the street anxiously.

  Silvie used the momentary distraction to get to her feet and try to put as much distance between herself and Hugo as she could.

  “Go ahead. Go ahead,” the one-handed man urged Hugo. “She told you where it is. Finish it, you fool. Finish it.”

  Hugo bared his teeth and lunged at Silvie. He stepped on the cat.

  The cat wasn’t hurt—this was ascertained upon later investigation—but the resulting ghastly screech probably awakened everyone on the entire block from their siestas, and Silvie went over the bar. She wasn’t sure afterward if she high jumped, broad jumped, or just took wing and flew, but in one second she was over the bar and running down the street, letting fly with long, loud, wailing screams sufficient to end the siesta of anyone who managed to sleep through the cat’s cry of anguish.

  A half hour later, she was sitting in Lucilla’s peristyle garden with Lucilla’s maids applying restoratives while the redoubtable Lucilla tried to get a coherent story out of her.

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  Silvie stopped her coughing and sobbing long enough to say, in high indignation, “Of course I’m sure it was him. He was going to killlll meeeee.”

  “You’re beginning to make me wish he’d succeeded,” Lucilla snapped. “Get some control of yourself, woman, and answer my questions properly.”

  Dulcinia, the singer, was with Lucilla, as she often was these days. Silvie had first run to Dulcinia, in terror that Lucilla might kill her. Hugo was, at best, a hunted man. Lucilla, the pope, and even just possibly the Lombard duke Desiderius would like to have a chat with him. The sort of chat one has in a room where racks, branding irons, and thumbscrews are the most prominent furnishings. Lucilla might believe—perish the thought—that Silvie gave him money of her own accord, or cherished some secret tenderness for him in her heart.

  Dulcinia, seeing Silvie’s emotional condition, understood this was manifestly not the case and conducted her at once to Lucilla. She promised to intercede with Lucilla if the lady became testy.

  “Please, Silvie,” Dulcinia pleaded. “Gain some control over yourself and try to tell our illustrious patroness what happened.”

  Dulcinia wrung out a cloth in a basin of water and pressed it with her long-fingered hands to Silvie’s forehead and eyes, then handed her a clean handkerchief. “Now blow your nose, girl, and try to make some sense.”

  Silvie blew, then took a deep breath. In the darkness, where she didn’t have to look at Lucilla’s disapproving face, she felt better.

  “There now,” Dulcinia cooed. “That’s a good girl.”

  “I really don’t know anything except that it was Hugo,” Silvie said. “He tapped on my shutters. He was cloaked and hooded, so I couldn’t tell who it was, so I thought . . . I thought—”

  “We’re not interested in what you thought,” Lucilla said in a terrible voice.

  Silvie burst into tears again.

  Dulcinia ran out of patience. “Now, stop. Both of you. Silvie, stop yowling like an alley cat in heat, and you, Lucilla, stop frightening her.

  “She thought it was one of her regular patrons. We all know what kind of people frequent Silvie’s establishment.”

  Silvie gulped. “Yes, that’s what I thought. But it wasn’t. It was Hugo. I was on the floor and Hugo had a knife to my throat, and he said he wanted money. I told him where to find it.”

  “There were others with him?” Lucilla asked.

  “Yes, two. Outlaws.”

  “Outlaws?” Lucilla asked.

  “One had cropped ears; the other had only one hand. Hugo called the crop-eared one Wedo. He didn’t say a name for the other, the one-hand man. Anyway—” Silvie’s eyes were wide with terror. “That one told Hugo to finish it! He came after me and he stepped on the cat—”

  “Who came after you? And what has the cat to do with anything?” Lucilla asked.

  “Hugo came after me, and he stepped on the cat. The cat is a yellow, black, and white one. She belongs to my neighbor across the street and sometimes comes into my shop. To get scraps. I feed her because she catches mice for everyone, not only her owner, and besides—”

  “I’m getting to know this cat entirely too well,” Lucilla interrupted. “Now, Silvie, take a deep breath and tell me what Hugo did after he stepped on the cat.”

  “I don’t know, because when the cat screamed, everyone jumped, and I ran and I ran and I ran . . . until I got to Dulcinia’s villa. And . . .” Silvie began sobbing again.

  “I don’t think there’s a bit of doubt. It’s Hugo,” Dulcinia said.

  Lucilla rose and went to call her guards.

  “Don’t worry,” Dulcinia told Silvie. “You have friends now, powerful friends. We will protect you. I’ll send one of my men to the shop with you tonight, and then we can meet again in the morning and decide what to do. Now, calm yourself and go lie down. Lucilla’s physician will see you.”

  “I don’t need any physician. There’s nothing wrong with me,” Silvie added.

  “Yes, you do, my dear. You may not have noticed it yet, but you have a very ugly black eye. Now, go with the servants and do as they tell you,” Dulcinia said as Lucilla’s maids shepherded Silvie away.

  Dulcinia spent a quiet time alone until Lucilla returned. She wasn’t lonely, however. Music played at all times inside Dulcinia’s mind. She was famous for her singing and sometimes composed her own melodies for poems she set to music. Now she tried to find a theme to express the beauty of Lucilla’s gardens at dusk. The beauty of the fountains’ endless chime, the subtle aromas of the herbs and flowers growing along the paths and borders. A rose was blooming nearby, mixing its fragrance with white thyme and sage bearing soft blue flowers. Something—jasmine, perhaps—brushed her from time to time with its ravishing scent.

  A wormwood with silvery foliage and downy yellow flowers glowed pale in the first moonlight. Lucilla returned and sat down beside Dulcinia.

  “Thank you for bringing her here. This really is an important piece of information. I’m sorry I was so impatient with Silvie, but I find her histrionics maddening.”

  “Yes, but you are irritable today. I think if I had the same experience Silvie had, I’d be hysterical, too.”

  “Nonsense,” Lucilla said. “Never in all your life, not even as a child, did you behave as badly as Silvie at her best. When Regeane asked me to supervise that one’s ‘business venture,’ I was wild. But of course I didn’t show that to Regeane. I agreed. Regeane had done too much for me, for Hadrian, for everyone, for me to deny her that rather modest request. When I think of what that girl went through at the hands of her repulsive relatives, of the Lombard party, of all the squabbling factions here in Rome, it chills my blood. Tied to a stake, watching her champion fight for her life. Do you know they actually—”

  “Lit the fire,” Dulcinia finished. “Yes, I was there. So was everyone else in Rome above the age of two and below ninety. And now one of those selfsame relatives is back. Ready to cause the child more trouble.”

  “Not if I get my hands on him,” Lucilla said. “I alerted Hadrian, the papal guard, and sent my own people out to scour the city, but I don’t think we’ll find Hugo. Even that nasty little son of a bitch isn’t that stupid.

  “Moreover, someone is with Silvie, and they will watch her shop day and night. I detest Silvie sometimes, certainly. I haven’t forgiven her for speaking out against Regeane, when the girl was only trying to save Silvie’s louse-ridden hide. Regeane forgave her and then even managed to put Silvie under my protection. And anyone under my protection is to be kept safe at all costs. My reputation demands it. What I’m doing now is trying to think of some way to discredit Hugo to Desiderius.

  “Because depend on it, my love, it is to the Lombard duke that Hugo is going. No one wants to harbor the little rat any more tha
n they want a large collection of leeches, bedbugs, or any other sort of vermin.”

  “You’re sure?” Dulcinia asked.

  “Certain. Hugo is probably destitute. They fooled us royally when they forsook Regeane and transferred their loyalties to the Lombard party here in Rome.

  “Maeniel is a good-natured man and would probably have paid them to stay away, but when they tried to get Regeane judicially murdered, it was too much for even his stomach. Regeane had tried to get me to refrain from having their throats cut, and if they had remained in the background, I might have acceded to her wishes.

  “But those bastards thought they could make a big score and get even with Regeane for crossing them. They failed. Gundabald is dead.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” Lucilla said. “I’m sure. But none of us—not me, Hadrian, or Maeniel—could ever find hide nor hair of Hugo, and believe me, love, we all have different but highly efficient methods of searching. My guess is Gundabald told Hugo he was going to tell Maeniel what sort of wife he’d married. Maeniel knew already and the information was, shall we say, redundant.”

  “This troubles me,” said Dulcinia. “I met Regeane. I liked her. But you and Silvie sometimes speak of her as if she weren’t quite human.”

  “Yes, yes . . . ,” Lucilla answered. “But sometimes ignorance is a great deal safer than certain types of knowledge. So please don’t trouble yourself about it, my love.

  “In any case, when Gundabald didn’t return, Hugo’s guts promptly turned to water. After he got off the pot, he probably ran as fast as he could. Between one thing and another, Gundabald had amassed quite a lot of money, so it took Hugo some time to run through it.

  “Pity, I’d hoped someone would cut the little weasel’s throat for his ill-gotten gains, but it appears they didn’t. Now he’s come back to sell the only thing he has that’s worth anything—information.”

  Dulcinia was pleased. She hadn’t seen Lucilla this animated in months. She was beginning to think her beloved was ready to succumb to old age, but now she seemed revitalized. Yes, Dulcinia realized Lucilla was simply bored. In her youth, Lucilla had been absorbed in a brutal struggle to survive. Then she’d been drawn into politics through her association with Hadrian and spent her middle years battling the Lombard party, who were determined to gain control of the papacy.

  Now the Lombards were defeated, at least in their designs on the papacy. Hadrian was pope. Lucilla’s children were grown: her son Antonius was with Regeane, her daughter Augusta had married into one of the wealthiest and most socially prominent families in Rome. Lucilla was rich, secure, and in most quarters highly respected, but bored and lonely.

  Regeane and Antonius were gone. Hadrian and Lucilla were still lovers, but he was more and more involved in administrative matters both secular and sacred. Fifteen minutes of Augusta’s conversation was sufficient to induce either a coma or rage, depending on whether she saw fit to instruct her mother on politics or society. Augusta knew nothing about the former and too much about the latter. In any event, Lucilla found herself alone with very little to do.

  But now! Hugo’s return brought some new and interesting troubles into Lucilla’s life.

  Dulcinia smiled.

  “This is no laughing matter,” Lucilla said.

  “To be sure, but it’s late and I believe, if I remember correctly, you invited me to supper this evening. I haven’t had a bite since this morning. I skipped lunch, and then Silvie broke in and—”

  “Oh, good Lord.” Lucilla slapped her forehead. “I had forgotten. I received a shipment of artichokes and a barrel of oysters, and the cook promised to do artichokes in Sicilian style with a wild boar stuffing made with olive oil, cheese, and bread crumbs. And the oysters raw with a tart citron butter sauce. Not only that, but I have a wonderful amphora of six-year-old Falernum from my own estate.”

  “What a feast,” Dulcinia cried. “Just us two?”

  “Yes, but I greatly fear I’ll make you sing for your supper.”

  “It’s always a pleasure to sing for you, my love.”

  And the two women went off together, arm in arm.

  Hugo and his friends had taken shelter in a tomb far outside the city gates along the road to Lombardy. The tomb wasn’t Roman or even an Etruscan tomb of the earlier period when the wealth yielded by iron and Greek trade made a civilization bloom in Etruria, but a still older one of the bronze age, when the dead were not separated from the family but returned to their kin as bones to be buried under the house floors, and were the recipients of sacrifices as revered ancestors. So it was a strangely vacant place, peaceful yet empty, made of dressed but unmortared stone in the shape of a beehive with a basin near the door to hold the lustral water and, at times, the sacred fire—both fire and water used to sanctify the burial rites.

  It would soon be evening. Hugo and his cohorts were gobbling down some bread and a little cheese they’d managed to steal from Silvie’s wineshop. Hugo had given his friends only a few silver coins and kept the rest for himself. “After all, she’s my wife. I own the shop, and I can make her sell it, and—”

  “If you do, you’ll be a fool,” the crop-eared man named Wedo said.

  “Why? I’ve been thinking it over, and she is my wife. We were married before I left home, and—”

  “If Rome is like every other city I’ve been in,” Wedo whispered, “a woman or, for that matter, a man alone couldn’t own any business—not without the protection of higher-ups.”

  “Silvie’s a slut. She doesn’t have any highborn friends.”

  “She does now,” Wedo said. “Depend on it. From what you told me, Silvie earned at the most a few coppers a night selling herself to drunks in the back room of taverns. I saw that shop. A counter with wine wells, tables, chairs . . . And upstairs was nicer. A bed with curtains around it, linen sheets, wool blankets, and three dresses and even more than three aprons, all hanging from nails on the wall. That woman of yours, she’s got friends, all right.

  “If Gimp and you hadn’t been such fools and scared her, we might have gotten even more.”

  Gimp ducked his head and tried to look invisible.

  “No, you go back there, boy,” said Wedo, “and the next thing this Silvie cooks is your goose.

  “Now, how about a decent split on what we got from your woman? Then we can all go our separate ways in peace.”

  Hugo finished eating, stood up, brushed the grease and crumbs off his hands, then went and urinated in the basin that once held the water for the sacrificial rites.

  No, he thought as his stream hit the meander that once marked the path the dead must take to paradise. No, he didn’t want to give any more of Silvie’s money to either the man called Gimp or to Wedo. He needed every copper of it if he was to gain an audience with any of Desiderius’s servants.

  Regretfully he admitted to himself that Wedo was right. There was no way a girl like Silvie could have earned enough, even from a generous protector, to have paid for such an establishment. The only person he could think of with enough compassion to help Silvie was Regeane.

  Hugo was afraid of Regeane, but the thought of Lucilla or Maeniel made the blood congeal in his veins. Compared to either of them, Regeane was a gentle person. Maeniel would certainly kill him on sight, and Lucilla would do worse: have him tortured until she was sure he had no more to tell her, then put him to death in the most painful way possible. She’d promised him just that. He’d been present when Lucilla was tortured by the Lombard duke’s men.

  He finished urinating, then turned back to where his companions were eating. Hesitation. Hesitation had cost him his opportunity to kill Silvie. So he didn’t hesitate. He grabbed Wedo by the hair, jerked his head back, and slit his throat.

  Gimp raised his head, looking shocked, but a second later Hugo’s boot toe caught him on the point of the chin. He never felt the blow when Hugo’s knife pierced his throat from the front and severed his spine at the back.

  The tomb wa
s suddenly quiet. Hugo had killed men before, his first in a tavern brawl not long after Gundabald died. But usually it was more difficult than this had been, and far more complications followed. He sensed, however, that it wouldn’t be prudent to linger, so he cleaned his knife on Wedo’s shirt, then searched both corpses, noting as he did that blood was still flowing from Gimp’s throat in a dark stream.

  Predictably, Gimp had nothing. But Wedo yielded two gold coins he must have held back from the money in Silvie’s strongbox.

  Hugo congratulated himself on taking the sensible approach to the problem of dealing with his two companions. He had needed to rid himself of them both. They would certainly have proven an embarrassment at the Lombard court. And the two gold coins would go far to helping him put on the show necessary to gain Desiderius’s ear.

  Then he rose and left the tomb.

  The brightness of late afternoon stung Hugo’s eyes for a second. He glanced around furtively, but he was absolutely alone. The only sound came from insects singing in the tall new grass, and the only moving thing in sight was a dust devil whirling along the stones of the ancient Roman road to Lombardy.

  He set out walking, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the corpses he’d left behind.

  Inside the tomb, Gimp began moving; the dark blood from his jugular vein flowed faster as he began returning to consciousness.

  On the road outside the tomb, the evening breeze dropped and the dust devil vanished, melting into the still air like a wisp of smoke. The consciousness riding it hung motionless, indifferent to movement or stillness. It remembered a sort of grim malice but not much else. It was fading; without human energies to feed on, it would soon dissipate the way even thick fog does in sunlight, fading into tenuous filaments until at last it is gone.

  The tomb guardians were only shadows now. The last processions they could remember were over two thousand years ago. They lay and dreamed of a vanished people who came with offerings of wheat, fruit, and flowers to feast the dead before they were burned on a pyre. Thus the spirits might begin the journey to the distant land of the dead. The people they had known were gone, the world so changed that their intercession was no longer deemed to be necessary. The only reason they lingered was because some few farmers hereabouts came and made offerings of oil and wine, believing such offerings brought good luck.