The Wolf King

by Alice Borchardt

  Regeane was quiet. She was shaken to her very core by what she’d seen. She had gone farther than either Chiara or the bear.

  “I can see,” the bear told Regeane, “that any further attempt to capture you or the gray wolf would be futile. I’m not sure such an attempt would be practical with Chiara. She—” He looked at her standing over him. “—she is somehow talented. You said,” he spoke to Chiara, “you said you loved me.”

  “That’s because I do.” She looked both mutinous and mulish at the same time. “But don’t let it give you any ideas. I’m my father’s daughter, and I won’t just throw myself away on just any wandering evil spirit. I’ll expect some assurances, something more in the line of a settlement than just a lot of airy promises.”

  “Now you be quiet,” Armine said. “The bear and I will settle your future between us.”

  Chiara glared at them both, then began struggling toward the road.

  Gimp was found resting against a milepost, sleeping.

  “Damnation, they took the horses,” Armine said. “He can’t even be depended on to look after horses.”

  “He can’t be depended on for anything,” the bear snarled.

  Then he sat Hugo down. Hugo’s eyes went blank, his body slumped.

  Regeane peered at Hugo’s face. “He looks like Hugo now,” she said. “When the bear is in residence, he seems someone else.”

  “He is,” Armine said truculently. “The creature—daemon—whatever he is, told me Hugo’s brain is mush. He was struck by lightning during the storm. Whatever happened, Hugo is gone. I’m not entirely sure if I believe everything that creature wants me to, but when he isn’t present, this—” He pointed at Hugo’s body. “—shows no signs of consciousness.”

  Chiara came back and handed Regeane a dress and shift. Regeane went back into the ruins to change. She hoped to ride along with them for a time, but before she did, she smiled a long, slow smile of satisfaction at Hugo. It looks as if Hugo is going to live a long, healthy, prosperous life—a thing I wouldn’t have bet on a few years ago.

  When she returned, Armine and Chiara and the bear were talking together.

  “Can you do what I just saw you do in Florence?”

  “What?” the bear asked.

  “Leave Hugo’s body and be in . . . say . . . a competitor’s counting house while he’s doing business?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Ah, Hugo, is it? Hugo?”

  “It might as well be,” the bear answered.

  “I hope you didn’t kill them, too. I mean the men escorting us.”

  “No,” the bear said shortly. He was holding the reins of four horses. “They are on foot and—” The bear’s smile was saturnine, to say the least. “—I think probably running yet.”

  Chiara sniffed but looked satisfied.

  “My dear Hugo,” Armine said. “I believe this might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  Matrona approached Charles’s tent a few hours later. She was wearing a long, flowing robe of white linen. It was deeply embroidered with gold at the neck, hem, and sleeves.

  The scarae at the entrance heard her. It was Arbeo, who had been Maeniel’s jailer when they first met the king. “He won’t see anyone, my lady, but he told me if you came, to let you in. It’s been a terrible evening. The king’s counselors were here, all screaming and yelling for us to retreat, saying the king’s plan failed. We’re going to lose. We must beat a retreat or attack with our full force tomorrow. The king won’t let them do either one. He says he won’t waste his best troops yet—” Arbeo broke off because Charles was standing behind him.

  “Be quiet!” said Charles. He motioned Matrona into his tent.

  She entered and sat down in a camp chair. The model Antonius had built filled fully half of the tent. Next to the model was a table with wine and some cold joints of meat.

  Charles gestured toward the table. “Wine? Food?”

  “No,” Matrona said.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “The garrison at Ivrea is no more. I stampeded the horses. Bernard finished them. They were slaughtered to a man. None escaped to warn Desiderius.”

  Charles nodded.

  “The lord Maeniel is with Bernard. He will attack at dawn. His army is on the march even now. They will emerge from the morning fog and catch Desiderius in the flank.

  “Your plan has worked, my king. In no little time at all, you will be master of the Lombard kingdom.”

  “I wish I were as sure as you are,” Charles answered. He walked over to the wine pitcher on the table and lifted it. The thing was Roman; a procession in high relief was cast around the belly of the pitcher, nymphs and satyrs frolicked together in the rites of Bacchus.

  “I am sure,” Matrona said. “I looked into my mirror and saw what will be.”

  The handle of the pitcher was an acanthus flower spike. Charles’s hand rested on the handle. “A beautiful thing but pagan, deeply pagan. As you and your lord are, my lady Matrona. If I win, I’ll have this beautiful Roman pitcher melted down, that it be made into a reliquary for the bones of some saint or other. Do you know where I got it?”

  “You probably took it from the Saxons who, no doubt in the world, stole it from someone else,” Matrona said.

  “Yes, it was buried among the loot I acquired when I destroyed their sacred tree Irmunsul. So I gave it a reprieve as long as it served me, but I plan to win the world for Christ, and pagan things no longer have any place here.”

  “Yes.”

  “So accept Christ and lead your lord and his beautiful wife to the baptismal pool, and I will find a high position for you in my kingdom.”

  Matrona smiled. “Do you think that a swim in a chilly pool and a bit of bad Latin muttered over us by a bishop will make much difference to our essential natures?”

  Charles looked uncomfortable.

  “My king, I will be blunt. At this stage in your career, you cannot afford to fail. A king who fails has but one place to fall and that is into a grave. My lord has given you victory and at no little cost to himself. Allow him some peace in return. This is all he asks.

  “You attacked the Saxons and destroyed the sacred tree because you needed money to content your nobles, who might have defected to your brother’s wife had you been too stingy with your largess when he died. You attacked the Lombards because you needed a victory, and a big one, to impress the most powerful magnates of the Frankish realm. Men who, I might add, hold even your life in their hands, should they choose to act in concert. After tomorrow your position will be secure. Use your strength to be merciful and to grant my lord the peace he asks.”

  A wave of fury swept over Charles, a rage so intense Matrona, who could feel, smell, and sense his wrath, felt sure he would have killed her if he had a weapon at hand. Then it faded and something like grudging admiration took its place.

  “Are you always so brusque with kings?”

  Matrona’s lips twitched. She knew better than to smile. He was still on the edge of murder. “I never lie,” she said. “I may not always tell the whole truth, but I never lie.”

  He stretched out his hand to her. “Come. There is some little time before dawn, when I must ride out with my troops. What are you wearing under that magnificent gown?”

  “Nothing.”

  When she met Maeniel in the shadow of the fortress at Susa the next day, she said, “He knows.”

  Antonius, riding along with Maeniel, answered, “It doesn’t matter what he knows. The problem is what he cares to do about what he knows.”

  “Succinct and, as usual, to the point,” Maeniel said.

  “Religion and expediency are at war in his mind,” Matrona said. “We are very useful to him.”

  Charles had thrown his bowman and foot at the old Roman fortress. They were taking casualties without visible effect as they tried with little success to force a passage at the river. Desiderius’s men on the high ground wielding compound bows were using Charles’s troops for
target practice.

  “This is what I do not like about war,” Matrona said. “They are only a diversion, but they will die just the same.”

  “I’ll give credit to Charles: he was in the vanguard leading the attack.”

  As Matrona and the rest watched, Charles blew retreat, thus tempting Desiderius’s mercenaries to abandon the cover of the fortress to press the rout.

  It was after daybreak and before sunrise; the fog that had filled the river valleys still meandered in clouds on the wooded slopes and near the water. In some places visibility was very good. In others, both armies clashed in the murk. Bernard and his army attacked at the dramatic moment when the sun’s first rays blazed down from the notch in the pass, striking long corridors of light down through the mist and illuminating the whole valley. The river was a pale, lacy maelstrom, the grass an emerald carpet. The forest outliers still hugged moisture and the night’s darkness that lay like a stain on the earth. The stones comprising the ancient fortress were burned to almost alabaster brilliance in the golden light.

  Charlemagne closed his trap.

  Bernard’s men crashed, howling, into the flanks of Desiderius’s army. The king was among them, upholding the Langobard standard. He fled first. Maeniel was mounted on Audovald; the horse half reared and pranced with excitement. Maeniel gave the loud snort that is Go in horse. And they went.

  The massed ranks of the scarae struck the line first, punching through those few of Desiderius’s troops that tried to make a stand.

  Maeniel felt the splendid rush that is long-held tension dissolved. He, like the rest of the great magnates of France, led his men into battle.

  Battle, such as it was. The erstwhile captain of the king’s guard, blindly loyal to his sovereign, tried to put his troops together and make a stand. Indeed, they might have prevailed, had Desiderius shown courage or resolution. Charles had brought the best part of his army over the mountains, but they were less than the experienced troops the lord of the Lombards commanded.

  It was a fine mercenary army, and Desiderius had schemed, murdered, betrayed, and extorted wealth from every nook and cranny of his kingdom in order to put together this massive mailed fist, to impose his will on all of Italy. But when the moment, or rather moments, came to strike and destroy his enemies, Desiderius always backed away.

  The year before Pope Hadrian had out-bluffed him near Rome, and had Desiderius supported his minions in the Holy City with troops, Regeane and Maeniel might well have died. And Hadrian, under his thumb, might have been forced to abdicate or been murdered. But again Desiderius had backed out of the quarrel and fled.

  Both forces came to a stop well out of the pass at Susa on the open plain. The glittering massed ranks of Desiderius’s army were drawn up six deep in battle array. The sun was to Charles’s back. The Frankish commanders sat on their horses, waiting for the king’s signal.

  Maeniel watched the Lombard host. By then all of his household were present, mounted, and ready to fight and win. Silvia was there. She was dressed as a man, or possibly the wearing of armor simply made her appearance androgynous.

  “Do we fight?” she asked Maeniel. She sounded eager.

  “Hold back,” he told the rest of his pack. “I don’t know.”

  “On balance,” Antonius said, “I think he will run. And then the king will have to decide if he wants to organize a siege at Pavia.”

  “He has a magnificent army,” Maeniel said. “He might very well win, even though in a difficult position. His commander is, moreover, an able man.”

  “His position isn’t that bad,” Antonius said. “A tributary of the Ticino is in front of him. His archers can catch the Frankish foot on the boggy low ground and destroy them. His commander has placed his heaviest cavalry on both wings. He’s no fool. That’s what Hannibal did at Cannae. His center will break, but not far—see those little hills behind them? They will not halt a retreat. But he could envelop the scarae and maybe—just maybe—destroy them. The foot will perish easily enough, but Charles’s elite troops are better armed than anything he has. And better motivated. No general likes fifty-fifty odds in a pitched battle. That’s why both he and Charles are holding back.

  “I’m betting he will take the safe way out and run. He can base part of his force at Turin and keep the rest at Pavia. Then he can let Charles beat his brains out against its walls. But his commander is aching to fight. He knows they will never have a better opportunity, and his advice might carry the day, but his king is a shifty, devious little rat. My advice, my lord, is hold your position and don’t budge.”

  Antonius smiled. He shifted his position on his horse’s back. “I don’t spend enough time in the saddle.”

  Matrona’s mare, Cloris, pranced and tossed her mane.

  Audovald spoke sharply to her. She became quiet.

  The sun began to burn Maeniel’s back through his mail shirt.

  Antonius was vindicated.

  Desiderius ran.

  A beautiful, orderly retreat orchestrated by the captain of his guard. The archers held their position as the cavalry withdrew in double file. The captain of the guard, as he had on the day when he pulled the king away from the mob, left last, in command of the rear guard.

  “Nivardd is an able man,” Antonius said.

  “Nivardd,” Maeniel repeated. “I never knew his name.”

  Regeane and the rest spent the night in a tumbledown ruin of a village in the wetlands of the river valley. They sat up late, strangely convivial around the open fire.

  “It is peculiar no one lives here,” Chiara said. “There is not even any trace of brigands.”

  “No one has been here for a long time,” the bear said. He grinned at Regeane. “I take it you concur, my lady.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I can always tell.” The houses, though roofless, were still standing, and they camped in one with its back to the wind.

  “Taxation ruined this place,” the bear said. “I know. I traveled this way a long time ago with a sorcerer of my acquaintance. The people here fled to escape the taxes, not long before the old empire died. They were vanishing even then and those who remained were at their wits’ end what to do to evade the assessment since, flight or not, the amount they must ante up to the collectors remained the same.”

  “There were fewer and fewer of them to pay it,” Armine said.

  The bear nodded. He really didn’t look like Hugo any longer. He kept his hair close-cropped; Hugo had worn his long. He never drank; Hugo had been a sot.

  The bear had been frank about the matter when Regeane had asked him about it. “It has no effect on me, not the essential me, that is. I don’t have brain to fuddle. At least not the way Hugo did.” He had been cleaning a duck bone with his teeth. “I do enjoy food, though. The taste, I mean. This body would starve without me to care for it. So if I have to eat, I might as well enjoy it.

  “What are you going to do now, wolf?” he asked Regeane.

  “I don’t know.” She was cracking open a fish cooked in clay. There were a number in the fire. She hadn’t been able to snag any big ones, but she’d taken eight medium-size ones during a quick wade-fishing expedition.

  “Give me some of that,” Chiara said, extending a piece of flat bread.

  Regeane expertly deboned the fish and dropped half into Chiara’s flat bread, along with some of the greens she’d used to stuff them.

  Chiara ate voraciously. “I’m starving,” she said between mouthfuls. “Fighting gives you an appetite.”

  “That was hardly a fight,” the bear said in lofty condescension. “A bit of a skirmish, that’s all.”

  “Somehow I had the feeling, a strong feeling, it was more than that,” Armine said. “But my dear friend Hugo, if you want to call it that, I’ll humor you. Though at one point I believe both of my arms were broken.”

  “They probably were,” Regeane said.

  “I know,” Armine said, meeting her eyes across the fire. “What happened?”

  �
��I don’t know,” Regeane answered.

  Armine was doing his best with a bowl of stewed rabbit.

  “I think,” she continued, “it had something to do with what Chiara and I tried to do for the bear.”

  Chiara began to tremble and cry. Gimp got what remained of her fish. He was sitting with them, finishing everyone’s leftovers, and since none of them were happy with the rather vinegary wine, he was washing them down with copious drafts of the same.

  The bear Hugo put his arm around Chiara and began to comfort her. “I’m here,” he said, “and I always will be.”

  “You don’t even smell like Hugo,” she said.

  The bear Hugo laughed. “Ask the wolf, she’s the expert.”

  “He doesn’t,” Regeane said. “He smells clean. No aroma of dirt, perspiration, or constant drink. He has a dry, sharp smell, rather like some kind of soap.”

  “Do you smell everything?” Chiara asked, distracted from her grief.

  “Everything,” Regeane said. “Scents are a constant background to all everyday things. For instance, these ruins, they haven’t been lived in for a long time, not by humans at any rate. A fox denned here in the next house, the vixen raised a litter, but they’re gone. The latest odor is some months old: a traveler came by last winter. He remained a few days. He dug. He probably had treasure on his mind. I smell an old—again, some months old—scent of turned earth, and . . . and there is an owl in a ruined temple nearby. You can’t see the building because it’s mostly a mound of brush, but I smell brick and limestone and marble. That says temple to me.”

  Chiara and Armine both goggled at her.

  “No wonder you weren’t worried about brigands,” Armine said. “You should probably know if there were any within miles of us.”

  Regeane nodded and cracked open another fish bundle and began to prepare a second meal for Chiara.

  The bear Hugo yawned. “This damned body is tired. I would know if anyone came this way, too. That owl has fledglings in her nest. That’s where she is, out hunting for them. I don’t know where the male is. I was wondering if something happened to him. I don’t smell anything, but I perceive temperature gradients, movement, body processes, heartbeat. It does beat. Your intellectual classes are woefully ignorant of how living things work. When I extend my perceptions, your bodies are transparent to me, and, among other things, I sense what you would call topography. The shape of the land and the things living on it.”