No true beasts like those maddened, ruined—yes, they were ruined by systematic human cruelty—dogs could ever offer him the energies that sustained his conscious living, human presence. Without humans he must fade, sink into mumbling stupidity like Gimp and then— He pushed the thought out of his mind. How to stop them? A much easier target was the horses. The men couldn’t see him but the horses were a far simpler matter.
He materialized in front of them. He took the bear form and roared.
The results were more than satisfactory.
A few seconds later, he was back in Hugo’s body, chuckling. The sound made Armine’s blood run cold.
“Try to make the best speed possible,” he told Armine. “I gave them a little something to think about. By the time they catch their horses and get the creatures calmed down, we should be well on our way.”
Armine studied the man riding by his side. He was clean. He was wearing Hugo’s oldest clothes, shirt, dalmatic, and riding pants reinforced by leather at the rear, knees, and ankles. But the face was so completely changed he could see nothing of Hugo in it. It was the face of a warrior: dangerous, strong, bold, fearless, and oddly handsome. He was leaning back in the saddle, knees clamped to the horse’s sides. He controlled the reins easily with one hand, while the other rested on the knife in his belt.
They were moving fast in a straight line down the center of the Roman road. When they reached patches of mud or washouts where the road was gone, he prodded his horse easily into a gallop and passed through without difficulty.
“What did you do with Hugo?” Armine asked.
The thing in Hugo’s body grinned in a completely wicked manner. “I ate him.”
Armine gave him a weary look. “My lord, don’t toy with me. Did you destroy Hugo’s soul when you took his body?”
“No, but you are very . . . There are many things about the world you don’t understand. I tried to tell your daughter. The lightning killed Hugo. When I returned after seeing the wolf off, I found what remained on the porch. He was still breathing, just barely, but his brain, the part of you that is in the skull, was . . . mush.”
Armine nodded. He had more life experience than Chiara. He knew severe head injuries were often fatal.
“I took the body. I can use it.” The creature shrugged. “But Hugo is gone. The man you knew resided in his brain; when that brain was destroyed he went wherever it is . . . your God sends them. Heaven, hell, I can’t say. He is not my God and doesn’t explain these things to me. But trust me, Hugo won’t be back.”
“I can’t say I entirely regret that,” Armine commented.
The bear laughed. The hollow echoes of the sound set Armine’s teeth on edge.
“Don’t do that,” Armine said.
“Chiara doesn’t like it either,” the bear replied. “But—” He broke off, looking preoccupied. “Damn. They are coming again and gaining ground.”
Imagine, imagine a world without boundaries, a world without nations, cities, farms, or even laws or rules. The ice shield covered the poles. In the summer it retracted. In the winter it extended itself to the edge of the many seas. In the summer the giant beasts that dominated the limited wilderness between sea and ice spread over the vast plains, the green valleys caught in the folds of the wrinkled, nameless mountain ranges, and the shorelines of the vast wild seas.
This world boasted of incredible riches and brutal hardship. Deer and elk gifted with twelve-foot sets of antlers, wolves that ran in packs and were the size of small horses, mammoth elephants with giant, curved tusks and hairy skin dominated this world.
Matrona and her people hunted, loved, lived, and conquered among animal beings the like of which the world had not seen since the dinosaurs were destroyed and have never been seen since. They wept at the end of each summer, cut off their fingers in token of grief, and slashed their faces. They did this in terror, hoping that whatever gods ruled their universe would see their sorrow and in time give them again the gift of springtime. Then they followed the massive herds of prey animals down in a wild and dangerous journey from the high plains, the mountains, the hills, and the forests to winter along coasts, on islands bared by the shrunken ice-locked sea amid the wind-swept promontories battered by terrifying storms.
In this world a woman must bear four children to raise one; a man must father seven to replace himself. But love they did and snatched joy from the jaws of death and knew transcendent happiness in the shadow of the sword.
Matrona rose from the waters of the swamp like a cicada bursting its shell and confronted the two wolves. Regeane and Maeniel gave each other guilty looks.
“You gave Charles your word,” she said to Maeniel.
He cocked his head to one side. In wolf this was So?
“It was all your idea,” she reminded him.
He hung his head, looking like a scolded dog.
“I don’t want your apologies,” Matrona said. “Speak to your consort.”
Maeniel looked mutinous, but only for a moment, then he turned to Regeane. They touched noses. Can you handle this?
She gave a low grunting sound in her throat.
Matrona understood it as well as Maeniel. It was I will try.
The head of a cattail landed near Regeane’s feet. Someone had swiped a sword through the stem. She looked up. The wolf’s eyes saw the outline of Remingus between herself and the sun. He was as solid as he had been on the day when he went to the square with her in Pavia.
“The bear is near,” he told Regeane.
The wolf flicked an ear forward, then back. She felt annoyance.
Remingus continued. “Chiara and her father—he is trying to defend them. He will fail. The girl, Chiara, saved your husband. You owe them a blood debt.”
Regeane set out at a dead run.
Maeniel tried to follow. He leaped into the air, halted, and was pulled back the way a dog is when he reaches the end of a chain, forepaws in the air, standing on his hind legs. Matrona had hold of his ruff. She held him back. Maeniel’s mind dissolved into berserk fury. With the movement of a giant dragon, his body writhed and then broke free. He turned and faced Matrona.
She stood, woman, about eight feet away. Magnificent in her absolute nakedness. Her hair a wild tangle of ebony silk that hung to her waist. Big breasted with dark, strongly marked nipples, a wide rib cage that sloped down to a narrow waist, then spread again into wide, graceful hips. The hair at her groin grew thick, black and curly, a dark silky sable pelt covering her sexual structures. Not protecting them, enhancing them, the hair rising like a wedge whose point terminated just below her navel. For the first time in their long friendship, her femaleness struck him like a club. She smiled, dark eyes glittering with knowledge that made Eve seem a simple, innocent girl. White teeth, canines slightly longer and more pointed than other women’s, flashed in a savage, triumphant grin.
“Let her go,” she commanded. “It is time. Come. By your own will, you serve a human being. A human king. The more fool you, but it is what you have chosen. So be it. She must now go on alone.”
Human, Maeniel thought. No, Matrona was not completely human. She was the . . . other. He studied her, the red rage roaring in his brain. The others. They had not always had fire. They got it from the men. But her people hadn’t needed it either. The hair pattern on Matrona’s body was that of a creature that had ancestors, close ancestors, comfortable in their own pelts—as were the wolves.
Matrona’s ancestors had emerged from the beast state just in time to battle the hideous and beautiful, but mortal and terrifying, agonizing cold. A cold and dark that threatened to sweep all before it and end the life of all land creatures and most of the vegetation they fed upon.
And in this final and seemingly everlasting darkness and bitter cold, only the hunters could live, and the other quasi-humans fell away, dying of hunger when the cold stripped the trees bare of fruit, flowers, then leaves. When drought scoured jungles into deserts and the wide plains were scorched tinder, dr
ied by the unending heat in the tropical latitudes and then burned when heat lightning lanced down from skies darkened by thick dust. And rain never fell.
The rain, the fecund water of the skies, never fell, and the things, being not yet savage enough to kill, died. They had taken another path than the hunters, a more gentle, seemingly wiser road than Matrona’s people, but it led only into an eternal night.
Only the hunters, masters of fire and wooden spears, survived. They could triumph, feed on the corpses left by the carnage and chaos, and so survive. The weak, the loving, the kind, the compassionate, the beautiful, and the intelligent served the hunters who mimicked the ways of wolves and dire wolves, or they died.
And the world held its breath and waited for the sun to return.
And Matrona’s people strode through the vast desolation and brought humanity to birth and, for a time, humanity cowered in the shadow of their strength. Matrona’s people took fire from their hands and it shone as cold, put an end almost even to them.
This Maeniel the wolf understood in a twinkling. As he lunged toward Matrona for the kill.
Matrona threw back her head, white teeth gleaming, and laughed. Laughed as, too late, Maeniel realized he’d flown free of the world of humanity and was flung, following Matrona, into another.
The sounds of combat were growing louder and louder. Lucilla, still facing Adalgisus, bared her teeth at him. “Sounds as if Ansgar or his son might have arrived.”
“His son?” Adalgisus asked.
“Yes,” Lucilla whispered. “He was present when you took Stella away. She was afraid for him.”
“My son?” Stella whispered. “Oh, Lucilla, do you think it could be my son?”
Adalgisus made a lunge toward Stella.
Lucilla lifted the club in her hand above her head. “Touch her, go ahead, touch her,” she screamed. “I’ll kill you.”
Adalgisus backed away toward the door.
Just then Dagobert appeared at the door. He took one look at what was left of Eberhardt and spoke to Adalgisus. “Come. It wasn’t a fight, it was a slaughter. How could they get in so easily?” He seemed both distraught and bewildered. And, indeed, he was outlined against the scarlet glow of a fire.
Lucilla heard a long, agonized, animal scream.
Dagobert glanced back in terror. “They are killing them, killing them and burning the church.”
Lucilla heard the explosive sound of glass breaking.
“If we don’t leave now, we will be next. I can’t understand it. The Lombard king is Ludolf’s overlord. How could he dare slaughter the king’s soldiers?”
“Possibly kidnapping his mother had something to do with it,” Lucilla suggested with an ugly laugh.
Adalgisus made another move toward Stella. Lucilla let out a yell of fury.
“Are you insane?” Dagobert shouted. “Look at what’s left of Eberhardt and what she’s already done to you. We must go and go now. Ansgar’s son is in a killing mood. How do you think he’ll behave when he finds his mother in the condition she’s in?”
“Whose fault is that?” Adalgisus screeched. “You hit her. I didn’t tell you to hit her.”
The firelight was very bright now, the garden was filling with smoke. Lucilla lowered her weapon.
“That’s it, go on arguing. Keep it up until Ludolf finds you. Both of you listen. I’ll come with you without a fight if you leave Stella here and do her no further harm, but we must leave at once, hear me? At once. Adalgisus, your father will be furious if you don’t salvage something from this disaster, and I will be the something, but you go and leave poor Stella alone.”
Lucilla dropped the oak butt she’d used as a weapon and moved toward the door. Adalgisus seized her by the arm and they fled. More glass broke as they ran through the garden. Lucilla looked at the church. Fire had seized the beams supporting the apse above the altar and the whole belltower was involved. Sounds from the rest of the cathedral indicated that some of Dagobert’s men had been sober enough to make a stand, but they were losing. More and more Lucilla heard cries for mercy and the screaming of those being slaughtered.
Flames were spreading quickly across the stable’s thatched roof when Lucilla and the two men reached it. Lucilla knew they had no time to spare. Still, she had to do their thinking for them. They remained addled by drink, but she managed to get three horses saddled, then snatched up their bridles and led them to a door at the back. The stable was filling with smoke.
Lucilla grabbed Adalgisus’s arm. “Up. Up. Mount up!” she commanded.
He was shaking all over. “How . . . How do you know they’re not waiting for us out there?”
“They probably are,” Lucilla snapped. “But you go first anyway. You, Dagobert, bring up the rear.”
Obediently he mounted behind her.
God, she thought as she slipped into her own saddle. The smoke was so thick she could barely breathe. She dropped her head down near the horse’s neck, trying for clearer air. It was very dark inside the shed but behind her she saw Dagobert reeling in his saddle. He was still half drunk, too drunk to protect himself from the thick, choking smoke.
“Good,” she whispered to herself. “Good.”
She sidled her horse toward the door. Then one solid, hard kick from her riding boot opened it. And what Lucilla thought might happen, did. The stable became a tunnel of flame as icy air from the outside roared through the open door. The horse Adalgisus was riding shot through like a loosed crossbow bolt. Her own mount bucked, but Lucilla knew that to be thrown was death. She let go of the reins and clung to the pommel like a burr, and when the beast’s hind legs hit the ground he took off at the same pace Adalgisus’s had.
Then the air flow reversed itself and the backdraft caught Dagobert. Both horse and man screamed in terror as the fire played on their backs. Her own horse was dug in, his back hooves lunging forward on a wild runaway. Her head was near and to one side of the horse’s neck.
Dagobert’s head slammed into the lintel of the stable door. His skull didn’t so much fracture as disintegrate. Lucilla saw him die. She saw his head split; even the jawbone was torn away by the impact. Then what was left fell, landing in a blazing heap near the doorway. His horse, saddle empty, dashed past her, and Lucilla, a fine horsewoman, caught the bridle and gathered the reins into her hands and led him behind her. Then they were beyond the trees surrounding the monastery and riding through pastureland. Adalgisus looked back, saw Lucilla at a gallop behind him leading the other horse. Lucilla shook her head and then Adalgisus spurred his mount to the best speed possible out across the open countryside and away.
Once alone, Stella lay quietly on Lucilla’s discarded mantle, listening to the dying sounds of carnage in the church. She was numb, the pain oozing away slowly in the silence. She was so frightened that she didn’t feel fear any longer. Suddenly Ludolf was bending over her.
“Mother,” Ludolf said, touching her face.
“Oh, my dear.” She caught his hand. Dulcinia glanced around the room. “It’s a pigsty,” Stella whispered. “Cold, empty, without even a lock on the door. We were offered no comfort at all.”
Ludolf nodded and tried to gather Stella into his arms. She made the most dreadful sound that either of them had ever heard.
“Oh, God,” he whispered.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” Stella whispered. “Don’t, don’t touch me. Please, please, just give me a few moments. I’m sure I’ll be better, but please don’t touch me now.”
Dulcinia went down on one knee beside Stella. She pulled off her own veil and made a pillow and slid it under Stella’s head. Stella was still curled on the stone floor. Then Ludolf covered her with his mantle.
Dulcinia explored Stella’s abdomen very gently with her fingers. It was swollen tight and hard.
“Lucilla?” she asked softly.
“Lucilla made them go with her, thank God,” Stella whispered. “I was afraid—afraid they would touch me again. They wanted to take me with them. I’m so
rry, my son. When I move, I’m in so much pain. Please, give me some time to get myself together.”
Stella smiled the shadow of a smile. “I’m sure in a little while I’ll be able to ride.”
Ludolf stroked her hair. “Yes, Mother. Take all the time you need. I’m in command here. You’re perfectly safe. Now, what happened?”
Stella looked distressed. “Adalgisus came. My fault, I wrote him. He wanted Lucilla but took me hostage, too. What he planned I don’t know. Don’t know even if he had a plan—so many of these warriors are so drunken and foolish . . .”
Stella closed her eyes. She seemed weary.
Dulcinia had never seen a more terrible look than the one Ludolf had on his face. He was cradling his mother’s head and shoulders in his arms, trying to keep her from the cold floor. A moment later Stella opened her eyes again.
“In the night, they came in the night—”
“Who, Mother?” Ludolf whispered.
“Adalgisus, Eberhardt, and Dagobert . . .” Stella seemed in very deep distress.
“Don’t bother to say it, Mother,” Ludolf whispered. “I know what they wanted. Don’t distress yourself by saying it.”
“They called us whores—”
To Dulcinia the pain in Stella’s voice was simply inconceivable. She whispered, “No,” and turned away. Her hand was on Ludolf’s arm. She felt him flinch slightly as her fingers bit into his flesh. They were both kneeling by Stella.
“Lucilla said not to fight. I was too small, they’d hurt me. But I fought. You will tell your father I fought, won’t you? Please? Tell him I fought. Love you . . . my son.”
The last words were spoken so softly they were almost not even a whisper, only a breath. And they were the last words Stella ever said.
Dulcinia still had the opium and valerian Lucilla had given her. She mixed them in some good wine, then warmed it. Stella was able to take a small amount of the medicine, and after that she seemed to find some physical comfort. Ludolf and Dulcinia were able to move her gently to one of the bed platforms, suitably padded with feather ticks and blankets looted from Dagobert’s stores. In fact, Ludolf received so many bed coverings he had, in the end, to turn them away.
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