The Mythic Dream
Page 18
As a wolf, my progeny were even more numerous.
Zeus neglected to geld me, see.
His punishment against me was that I would have to run my dinner down every night, that I would have to be as savage in my daily life as I was when I cubed the smallest bit of my least son into his stew.
But in punishing me thusly, he also gifted me with everything a wolf might have.
Chief among those has been wives.
As king, I had privilege and access to any woman who caught my eye. As king of the wolves, my dalliances ranged even further. Not only could I mate with wolves of the forest, I found that, much like my maker Zeus, I could share such congress with other animals as well. Specifically, the curs and mongrels that lived off the waste of towns.
My children were numbered in litters in those days, and of course, as when I was a man, I selected favorites to let walk alongside me, capable wolves I trained to hamstring your kind and leave them flopping and moaning in the dust of the road. You die soon enough on your own and, dying alone, can’t lash out with knives or pikes. However, there were also lessons my children could learn about the back of the neck, and the throat. Open the throat, and everything good spills out, doesn’t it?
The soft belly is good too, if there’s time.
You’ll learn this all as well, don’t worry.
Really, there’s no part of a man that a wolf can’t take advantage of.
And of course I instructed my children of those early years to hunt mainly at night, and to keep their distance from the soldiers, and to always stay upwind, unless the panic of the livestock is beneficial in some way.
Myself, while I still took one of you from time to time as reminder, it was less about sustenance, more about a display of who was still king, and who was not.
What I found I derived more nutrition from was the puny whelps the town curs threw, with their floppy ears and mottled coats—my pups, I mean. Did living my first week as a wolf on the meat of my own sons dictate my taste, I wonder? Was I still living Zeus’s judgment, then?
If so, it was a sweet judgment.
What I would do is pass through the edge of a town, mount whatever straggly dogs were bold enough to pad out for the fresh deer I’d dragged up, and then I would come back a couple of moons later. With pups, I liked to wait until they were suckling on their mother. When they were lined up on the teat like that, I could lower my great mouth down to their wiggling bodies and pull them up one at a time, their mouths holding onto their mother, stretching her out until there’s that pleasant pop of suction collapsing.
While chewing the meat and soft bones together in a single mouthful, the rest of the pups wouldn’t even scramble away, would just keep feeding, loading their bellies with that pale blue milk that is the perfect garnish for their soft muscle, like a center that comes in a warm rush, surprising every time.
The mothers just glared up at me, unable to move.
Sometimes I would leave them one or two pups yet wriggling, for the next generation. I found that throwing pups off of pups I’d fathered was even sweeter, is what I imagine I might taste were I to bite into my own naked belly.
Such is the way mighty Zeus designed me.
Even better, eating the milk-saturated, wriggling-blind pups born from pups I’d myself fathered had an unexpected effect, one not dissimilar to the one you see before you now.
If I gorged myself on the whole litter back then, I could, for perhaps an hour, stand up on my hind feet as I used to when I was man.
With practice I found I could even walk a bit, unsteadily.
It’s a release like none other, to work around the curse laid down by a god and prove it not a curse. To walk slowly through the market of a sleeping town, my every sense alive, my children arrayed out behind and beside and ahead of me, lest some soldier wake to relieve himself, try to raise the alarm.
The night was populated with monsters in those days, yes.
In these days as well.
* * *
It was during one such midnight stroll that my revenge against mighty Zeus took shape.
Having eaten, this time, the mother of the litter as well as the litter—she was weak, it was a mercy—I found that my balance was even better, and I walked confidently all the way through town this time, to the meadow on the other side where it smelled like horses usually grazed. There were no horses then, though.
One of my sons growled deep in his chest, alerting the rest of us to what was happening out in the grass. In a burrow out in the field was the pounding heart of one of my many curs, giving birth. She’d come out here for safety. She’d come out here to try to escape me.
Having never eaten a litter this fresh, still sheathed in afterbirth, and curious what the result might be, I had my children uncover her, never mind that the pups wouldn’t be filled with that milky-rich center this time.
The mother was a pitiful thing, starved down and weak, whimpering, crying from the effort, shivering with fear, only half done with her delivery. The first four pups were rolling in the dirt, eyes closed.
My mouth watered, as would any wolf’s, as would any king’s.
Moving slow on my two legs, I started to bend over, come down to all fours for this rare feast, but startled back from a sudden, powerful fluttering to my right. My first thought was that this was a trap, that the soldiers were ranged all around, covering their scent and sound somehow—that a crossbow bolt or net was nearly on me, to shorten my reign at last. But then I realized: we weren’t the only hunters, this night.
It was an owl, one of the tall ones that stands up to a man’s waist or a wolf’s shoulders.
It too had been tracking this birth, and likely mourning that it had no access to the burrow.
To it, these wriggling pups were just helpless, especially plump mice that didn’t yet know to run away.
Its talons pierced the back of the pup farthest from the teat, and then the great gray wings pushed down together, lifting the bird back into the darkness on an expanding pad of air. We all listened to it lift away, coast down deep in the trees, and strain this giant mouse down its gullet.
When one of my sons nosed forward, for one of the remaining pups, I lifted my lips, warned him back. He mewled, dropped his tail, slunk off, and I never even had to look over.
I was still listening to this owl, deep in the woods.
* * *
Yes, as a king I had perhaps underestimated Zeus. I admit that freely. Being a wolf, however, had taught me certain things I could never have learned otherwise.
As a man, I could of course walk by any number of rabbits or moles and never feel compelled to snap them up, swallow them down. As a wolf, I snatched those rabbits and moles up even when I wasn’t hungry for their meat. I still thought like a man, but my body reacted to its natural prey like the wolf it was.
I had to imagine it would be the same with Zeus. For all his might and cleverness, he would still be prey himself to whatever form he was using to move among the mortals. And, with these new ears, I knew what form he had been recently taking, and would, I had to presume, continue to take until his current dalliance had run its course.
For years he had sat atop his Mount, playing treacherous petty games with others of his kind, but then a vision of milky skin must have passed before his eyes, as it always did. He had leaned over from his high seat, studied us down here in our filth, finally settled his divine gaze on the one of us who had caught his fancy, one whose beauty was already dooming him or her to unasked-for nightly visits.
His whole existence, see, it’s about satisfying his own fickle desires, be they carnal, as was the case here, or, as when he knocked on my door, playful. Either way, he’s so satisfied with himself that he can’t quite contain his mirth. He’s getting away with it again, and that persistent divine chuckle deep in his chest, at the core of his being, that’s what my wolf ears can’t help but register.
I say this with confidence because I felt that same mirth myself moment
s ago, padding up behind you: I’m getting away with it again, yes. And who is there now to punish me? But I get ahead of myself.
Though I hadn’t bothered to interest myself with where Zeus was going—which bedroom, what tower—my ears had picked up how he was getting there. I knew what animal raiment he was clothing himself with, and so wagered that I could use that against him.
I padded away from my children that night, and stationed myself along the shore, in what I knew to be his path.
Then it was just the waiting.
Time passes differently on the Mount than it does in the mortal realm. I say this because, if Zeus’s carnal impulses want to be satisfied on any kind of cycle, then that cycle is markedly different than in men, or wolves.
I sat on that rocky shore for five weeks, listening for his return. My sides drew in, my mouth watered for the animals I could hear crawling around me, but I remained motionless, could not give up this effort just because death might be looming. I wasn’t even sure I could starve down to nothing, but by the end of the first week, I knew that this hunger, already all-consuming, was not likely to abate.
Yet I persisted in my vigil.
I once had offered a god a simple meal, and he had turned the table over on me. In my new form, though, I could set that table back up, couldn’t I?
My dry lips cracked with movement when I heard the heavens open to admit a traveler down into our realm.
Zeus was in the world again.
* * *
Though it was daylight, I raced alongshore to the nearest town, took a scent-reading, found the cur I’d mounted two months ago feeding her newborn pups. She bared her teeth at me in the fiercest way she had, and had I still the mouth for it, I would have smiled at her pitiful effort.
She had hidden herself under the porch of a stone house.
I pushed under to dig her out, sucking down the first two of the pups as a reward to myself, but then the stone house’s owner stepped out with a farming tool.
For a moment we locked eyes, his face slack, my muzzle bloody, and then I was on him, had his throat in my teeth. To insure no more interruptions, I went into his stone house then, walking on two feet thanks to the meal he’d interrupted, and easily dispatched the rest of the family—daughter, daughter, wife, moving on to the next while the previous was still falling. On the way out, I took note that the pot bubbling over the fire was stew.
Again, my kind can’t smile, but perhaps my eyes did.
Quickly, with no thought to who might be watching—there was no time—I dropped to all fours, dug the cur and her pups out, and left them curled up there, save the piebald one I had nipped by the back of the neck.
He struggled and kicked in my teeth, but he weighed nothing and was still new enough as to be blind, couldn’t see the legendary run I was making, from far inland all the way to the coast in a matter of hours.
When his skin pricked and his blood washed into my mouth, I didn’t even bite down more, just ran faster, and faster again.
The chuckling satisfaction in the sky was moving along the water’s edge now, was coming back from whatever conquest Zeus felt he’d just made, whatever he’d just gotten away with again.
Instead of meeting him, I surged ahead even faster, into his path, into where he was going.
This time he wasn’t a swan, wasn’t a bull, but a great eagle.
And just as I was carrying a young son in my mouth, he had in his talons the unconscious form of a young boy who had evidently been fetching enough for Zeus to transform, glide all the way down here, and now deliver him back up for a week of pleasure on the Mount, whether the boy agreed or not.
Such is the way of things with a god.
Pushing harder and harder, I ran ahead, dropped the pup from my mouth into the grass, in order to finish what I’d started years before.
Had I left the struggling pup on shore, that would be too obvious, even for one so brazen as Zeus. In the grass, though, his sharp predator eyes would automatically register the blades trembling with life, and his wings would dip him down ever so slightly, to consider this new possibility, his clawed feet already flexing in anticipation.
I was just ahead, hunkered down in a copse of trees, my hackles vibrating with anticipation.
No bird of prey could resist. Not even mighty Zeus.
Without considering the danger, he flipped the unconscious boy up into the sky to retrieve later and angled his head down, tucked his wings back, and fell into a sharp dive, following his eagle instincts.
Slashing down like that, he was a bolt of lightning, yes.
His great talons pierced the pup in four places when he hit, each puncture instantly mortal, and then he was gone again, banking hard to the other side of the meadow, which is perhaps an instinct in birds of prey.
Where he drifted down was a mere span before my copse of trees.
Holding the shattered, leaking pup down with one claw, he drove his beak down for a morsel, came up with it fast, leaning his head back so as to straighten his neck, work this meat down.
And again, and again, three bites in all. It was all the pup had to it. The bony tail yet flopped on the ground, and Zeus’s eagle eyes, attuned to just that type of movement, watched it, perhaps curious, perhaps amused.
At which point I stepped out.
He turned to face me, taking on his divine aspect in a matter of two steps.
“Lycaon,” he said, his voice thunderous, the whole realm trembling from it.
“Mighty Zeus,” I said back to him, and dipped my head in a show of respect, if not respect itself.
“What brings you to my field this day?” he asked, moving to the side to see me better, I think, his head actions still that of a bird even though he stood on man legs.
“Did you like your meal?” I said to him, and in a divine instant he saw the smile in my eyes, and he registered that he had just eaten one of my sons after all these years. He turned away, looked up into the sky, where presumably his boy-child was still falling, and would continue falling until fetched.
“You know not what you’ve done with this, Lycaon,” he said at last, licking a speck of the pup’s blood from the corner of his mouth and spitting it harshly down into the grass.
“It was to honor your greatness,” I told him. “You never allowed that possibility, did you?”
“To honor me?” he said.
“He was my own son,” I said, a growl rumbling in my chest. “The most precious thing I had to offer.”
He shook his head, looked to the sea in sorrow.
“Your least son,” he said. “Your weakest son. Did you even dispatch him yourself, or have it done, Lycaon?”
I only stared at him about this.
“And so you insist on honoring me in this fashion,” he said, turning back to me, his eyes sparking, flashing, the air around us crackling. “Despite the fact that I resist it, you continue the motion you started those many years ago. Did you ever stop to think there might be a reason for my reaction that day, Lycaon?”
“You would not be hoodwinked,” I said, my words barely crossing my lips.
“Such is the shortened sight and apprehension of mortals,” Zeus said. “When—when a god such as myself tastes of human flesh like this, Lycaon, even disguised human flesh, so begins the corruption.”
“You were already corrupt,” I said.
“Not like this,” Zeus said. “Never like this. This is the end of us, Lycaon—of the gods. This is the end of this age altogether.”
“And the beginning of mine,” I said, just loud enough.
“If you had kept from eating human flesh yourself,” Zeus said, “you would have become again who you used to be, did you know that, Lycaon?”
“I am who I am.”
“You are at that,” he said, still circling, still considering this new situation, these new terms. “This, I think, will be your age, your kind’s age. Hark, can you hear, can you smell it already, can you see it in your mind’s eye?”
I hadn’t bitten her deeply enough.
She was . . .
“No,” I said, taking a step back.
“Yes,” Zeus said, with force, and as we watched together, her frail form began to tremble and seize.
My bite, my teeth, my saliva—they were changing her.
Just as had happened with me, claws punched through the ends of her fingers, her legs broke backwards, and her mouth elongated into a muzzle.
She stood then, not on four feet like me, but on two, as I had been when I’d attacked her.
“I should have gelded you that day,” Zeus said, “and I cannot undo what you’ve started, but I can correct my mistake, anyway.”
He turned his hand over, palm up, and bade me rise, rise, and I had no choice: just like the newly born wolf-girl miles away, I stood up on two feet like this, and felt the world solid beneath me. Whereas before my balancing up on two legs had been a rare treat, due to my preferred sustenance—a rare treat I had to concentrate to maintain—now, due to my reshaped limbs, standing up on my hind legs was natural.
“No longer can you run down the fast little rabbits of the field,” Zeus proclaimed. “They twitch this way and that way with no notice. You’re too slow for that kind of hunting, now. Now the only prey you can easily catch, it will have spears to lob against you, walls to build to keep your hunger out.”
I forced myself back forward, onto what I now have no recourse but to call my arms again, though they were furred, though there were yet claws at the end.
Zeus chuckled at my awkwardness. I was born again, a third time, but now I was no longer wolf, no longer man, but a form locked between the two.
“And from this day on,” Zeus said, squatting to see me eye to eye, “you will no longer couple as you’ve been doing, Lycaon. Now the only way you can procreate will be the way you just did, with your mouth, with your bite. Thus says Zeus, even if it will be my last proclamation.”