Departures (16 page)

By God! Hope ran through him. It was dizzying, so much so that he almost stumbled into a pile of garbage at the edge of the street. Surely a priest could lift this curse from him!

He seldom went to church. He had to worry about keeping his belly, if not full, then at least with something in it—on Sunday no less than any oilier day. But he knew where every church in the town was. They were likely places for work—and handouts.

Even had he been next door to Saint Martin’s, he would not have gone there, not after the shouts of burning him in front of it. But Saint Martin’s lay close by the Rhine, far away from the ancient maze of streets through which he was running. This central part of Cologne, he had heard, went back to the legendary days of Rome.

Of Rome he knew nothing save the name. He did know he
was near the church of Saint Cäcilien. If none of the men who hunted him was waiting down this street—

None was. He turned right, then left. There stood Saint Cäcilien’s church, its doors open to the needy. No one, Dieter thought, had ever been more needy than he. He climbed awkwardly up the stairs—stairs were made for creatures with two legs, not four—and into the church.

It looked different from the way he remembered, and not just because he was seeing it only in shades of gray. Now his eyes were also lower to the ground. The pews seemed a forest around him.

In boy’s shape, too, he hardly noticed the incense in the air. It was just part of how churches smelled. As a wolf, though, the bitterness of myrrh and frankincense’s sharp spicy scent made his nose twitch and tingle. He gasped, then sneezed once, twice, three times.

A priest was walking up the aisle to the altar. He carried a long staff with a crucifix on the end. At the sneezes, he whirled around in surprise. “Good health to—” he began, then stopped in horror when he saw who—or, rather, what—had sneezed.

Dieter trotted toward him. He opened his mouth to ask the priest’s blessing. That showed him the one flaw in his plan. As a wolf, he could not tell the man what he needed.

The priest saw only a great hairy beast rushing at him with gaping jaws. “
Lieber Gott
!” he gasped. With no other weapon he could reach, he swung his staff at the wolf.

The crucifix was silver. The blow hurt Dieter as much as if he had been human. Howling in pain and dismay, he whirled about and fled from the church, tail between his legs. “A wolf! A wolf!” the priest shouted behind him.

Some of the hunters were just drawing near Saint Cäcilien’s. They yelled and pointed when they saw Dieter streak out. They ran after him. His savage growl, though, made them think twice about coming close. Having been hurt already, he now acted and sounded fiercer than before.

But the men did cut him off from the new market square. He growled, deep in his throat. So many streets led off the square, he would have had his choice of escape routes. Instead, his pursuers were forcing him away—and the priest’s hue and cry would only bring more people out after him. Already he could hear new voices, smell new scents among those who chased him.

He was halfway down a street before it jogged to show him it had only the exit down which he had come. A tall, barred gate
of stout timbers blocked the other end. He yelped and whimpered. He was trapped here. Too late to double back now; his pursuers had plugged the way out.

They knew it, too. “We have him now!” one shouted. “He can’t get into the Jews’ quarter at night. Come on!”

Dieter snarled, this time at himself. He should have remembered that the Jews were closed off from the rest of the city between sunrise and sunset. The men were coming closer fast. He could not go back through them. He stood there, panting. Part of him, the exhausted part, wanted to lie down and give up.

Then he thought of the flames again. No, he could not let the hunters take him. He ran for the gate and flung himself upward.

He had imagined himself easily clearing the timbers, landing lightly on the far side. His head and forelegs cleared, sure enough, but his belly slammed against the gate hard enough to drive half the wind from him. He hung there a moment, stunned. His hind feet scrabbled for purchase. The wood was rough; his claws bit. Leaving skin and hair behind, he dragged himself over, fell like a stone to the ground.

His undignified scramble had let him be seen. “There he went!” a man yelled from the other side of the gate. The fellow pounded on it with his fist. “Here, you damned Jews, open up!”

Dieter raced away. Now he had time to find a hiding place without any of his pursuers liable to spot him diving for cover. He would not keep that chance for long. Several men were battering at the gate, one, by the sound of it, with an axe. “Open up!” they shouted at the top of their lungs. “You damned stupid Jews, there’s a werewolf loose among you!”

That would make the gates open if anything did, Dieter thought. He knew he never hurried to do anything for people who cursed him and called him names. He suspected the Jews were no different from him in that, no matter that they had their own strange faith. But he would run if someone screamed, “Fire, you fool!” The Jews might swallow insults for the sake of hunting him down.

He rounded a corner, and almost ran into an old man crossing the street. They both stopped, staring at each other. The old Jew did not run shrieking, as so many had.

Behind Dieter, clamor grew. Either someone would come open the gate or soon the men who hunted him soon would break it down.

The frozen tableau that gripped Dieter and the man could not last, not with shouts of “Werewolf!” flying thick and fast. Dieter
was about to run when the old Jew spoke: “Come with me, and quickly!” He opened a door, gestured urgently.

Dieter hesitated. All the wild, wolfly instincts in him rebelled at trusting any man. The boy he still was had trouble believing anyone would want to help him in his present state. But the old man had not known he was coming. No trap could be waiting for him inside that house. And even if one somehow was, what could a frail graybeard do against any wolf, let alone a werebeast?

The sound of the gate creaking open decided him. His hunters were in the Jewish quarter, and the Jews likely would be after him, too. Everyone was against him save, this one old man. He grabbed at that like a drowning man grabbing for a log. He darted inside.

The old man shut the door behind them. “Get under the table there,” he said. When Dieter had, he draped a cloth over it that hung down to the floor on all sides. Then he lit a couple of candles at a little brazier and set them on the table. Dieter’s world, the little square of it he could see, went from black to gray. The old man rustled about for another couple of minutes, then sat down. His knees pushed at the tablecloth.

“Now we wait,” he said. Dieter whined softly to show he had heard.

They did not wait long. A knock came at the door. “Avram, are you there?” a man asked.

“Where else would I be, with the candles lit?” the old Jew said. “It’s late, David. Why do you come around asking foolish questions?”

“Avram, will you please open up?” the other man, David, asked. “Some of the good folk from outside the gate are with me. They are searching, they say, for a—a wolf.”

The stool creaked as Avram rose. Dieter heard him open the door. “A wolf? In Cologne?”

“So they say,” David told him. “They seemed most urgent. We thought it wiser to let them come in, no matter the hour.”

“Is that the commotion I heard?” Avram sounded grumpy and disapproving. “It was loud enough to disturb my studies.”

“Too bad, old Jew.” Dieter shivered at the sound of the new voice—it belonged to the man who had dared swing a club at him. “When a werewolf is loose in the city, we don’t care what we disturb to find it.” Others shouted agreement.

“Well, I have seen no wolves, were or otherwise, gentlemen. I’ve been at my books since sundown. May I go back to them?”

“Since sundown, you say? Why are your candles so long?”
Dieter had to clamp his jaws shut to keep from whimpering in terror. Not only was this hunter a brave man, he also was no one’s fool.

Avram just shrugged; Dieter heard his robe rustle. “Because the last pair guttered out not long ago, and I lit these from them. Why else?”

“Hrmmp. You’ve seen or heard nothing out of the ordinary, you say?”

“Not till you came,” Avram replied sharply.

“You watch your mouth, Jew, or you’ll watch the few teeth you have left go flying into the mud.” But after that the man turned back to his comrades. “If this old bugger’s been here all night, the cursed beast can’t have sneaked in. On to the next house.” Dieter heard them tramping away.

Avram shut the door and walked back over to the table. He did not lift the cloth. Very softly, he said, “I’ll stay down here reading until these candles fail. Don’t come out till then. I’ll leave a dish of water for you. You’d be wiser to stay the night here, I think. In the morning, in your proper shape, you’ll have an easier time getting back to your own affairs.”

Dieter wished he could answer in words. He thumped his tail against the floor. Avram grunted. The old Jew sat down, began turning pages and, every so often, muttering to himself.

When one candle went out, he got up. As he had promised, he poured water from a jug and set it by the table. He blew out the other candle. “Sleep well, wolf,” he said. He went up the stairs in the dark.

Even though no one could see him now, Dieter did not come out for a long time. When at last he did, he bent his head over the bowl and lapped it dry, then slurped drops of water from his chin and whiskers with his tongue. Fleeing was thirsty work.

He went back under the table to sleep. If it grew light before he changed back to himself, he wanted the concealment the cloth would bring.

He woke to find one of his feet poking a table leg. One of his feet … It was hairless, clawless, with five toes all in a row. It was dirty but pink under the dirt. He could see it was pink. “I’m Dieter,” he whispered. His mouth formed words. He was a boy again.

He crawled out from under the table, stood up. He realized he was naked, and saw he had a small scar on his belly that had not been there before: a souvenir, he supposed, of his scramble over the gate. He made a cloak of the tablecloth.

He had just wrapped it around himself when old Avram came downstairs. “So that’s what you look like, eh?” the old Jew said. He handed Dieter a bundle of clothes. “Here. Put these on. You’re apt to look out of place, wearing table linen in the street.”

The clothes were not new, but were better than what Dieter was used to wearing. They fit well enough. As he dressed, Avram cut him cheese and bread for breakfast. He had not known how hungry he was until he saw he had finished before Avram was even half done with his smaller portion.

“Want more?” Avram asked.

“No, thank you.” Dieter paused. “Thank you,” he said again, in a different tone of voice.

The old Jew gave a gruff nod. “It should be safe now to go back to your part of the city, boy.”

“Yes.” Dieter started for the door, then stopped. He turned back to Avram. “May I ask you something?”

“Ask,” Avram said around a mouthful of bread and cheese.

“Why did you save me?” Dieter blurted. “I mean—everyone else who saw me wanted to kill me on sight. What made you so different from the rest of them?”

Avram sat silent so long on his stool that Dieter wondered if he had somehow offended him. At last the old Jew said slowly, “One thing you should remember always—you are not the only one ever hunted down Cologne’s streets.”

Dieter thought about that. He never really had before. Jews falling victim to mobs were just part of life in the city to him, like chamber pots being hurled into the street from second-floor windows or famine one year in four. The Jews, though, he realized, might not see it like that.

Indeed, Avram was going on, as much to himself as to Dieter, “No, lad, and not all wolves run on four legs, either. You ask me, the ones with two are worse. Keep clear of them, and you’ll do all right.” He opened the door.

Yesterday, Dieter thought as he stepped into the cool damp air of early morning, he would have had no idea what the old Jew was talking about. Now he knew. With a last nod to Avram, he started down the street. He would have to find some work to do if he expected to eat lunch.

Medieval heralds were endlessly ingenious. This story springs from their habit of granting arms to
all
sorts of individuals. Every example of heraldry cited herein is genuine. Hmm. If heraldry really is a science, does that make “Clash of Arms” science fiction?

THE TOURNAMENT HELD EVERY OTHER YEAR
at the castle of Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia always produced splendid jousting, luring as it did great knights from all over Europe. Indeed, one tourney year the lure proved too much even for Magister Stephen de Windesore, who left his comfortable home outside London to travel to the wilds of Germany.

You must understand at once that Magister Stephen did not arrive at the castle of Thunder-ten-tronckh to break a lance himself. Far from it. He was fat and well past fifty. While that was also true of several of the knights there, no more need be said than that Magister Stephen habitually rode a mule.

His sharpest weapon was his tongue, and at the castle of Thunder-ten-tronckh or, to be more accurate, in a tavern just outside the castle he was having trouble with that. The Westphalians used a dialect even more barbarous than his own English, and his French, I fear, was more of the variety learned at Stratford-atte-Bowe than around Paris. On the other hand, he spoke very loudly.

“Me? I don’t care a fig for cart horses and arrogant swaggerers in plate,” he declared to anyone who would listen. To emphasize the point, he gestured with a mug of beer. Some slopped over the edge and splashed the table. He did not miss it; it was thin, bitter stuff next to the smooth English ale he liked.

“You don’t like jousts, why did you come?” asked an Italian merchant whose French that was hardly better than Magister Stephen’s. The Italian was chiefly interested in getting the best price for a load of pepper, cinnamon, and spikenard, but he had an amateur’s passion for deeds of dought.