Authors: R. A. MacAvoy
“So. You’re not the complete optician after all,” he said when he could. “There’s a bit of the soldier about you still.”
“I’m not the complete anything,” I answered, and I sat up in my blanket. “But how would you know what the complete optician would be like? Do you even know what optics is?”
“Lens grinding,” he replied. “I’m not an ignoramus.” And he pulled himself off the stones before adding, “You didn’t say anything? To anyone? About the cards?”
“You didn’t say anything? About the wolf?”
He smiled: a fierce grin on that narrow face. Much like that of a wolf. “So now you admit it is a wolf.”
I paraphrased myself. “I never have seen a wolf. I have seen a dog. It looks like any dog to me.”
Arlin gave me the glance of one who withholds judgment. “And you say its tail curls over its back?”
“When it is happy.”
Still he wouldn’t let me be. “How often… is the creature happy?”
I found myself inclined to giggle. “Any day now, I expect to see it so.” At that moment, I did not know myself whether my pitiful white dog was a grandmother-devouring monster or not, and worse, what means I had to control it if it were a wolf. I leaned over and poked Arlin in the floating ribs, as he had done to me, and he let loose a wild swing at my face that was only half in fun, and then the kitchen girl, a plump thing of fifteen or so, was pushing us apart with her ample charms. “No wrestling here, lads,” she said and deposited herself on the hearthstones much closer to Arlin than to myself, with the exposed top third of her bosom placed only inches beneath his nose.
This was no surprise to me. My size, my face, and my evident poverty made a barrier between myself and all but the most discerning women. Arlin’s reaction, however, surprised the girl thoroughly. He smiled at her so maliciously, with such evident understanding of her motives and such complete contempt, that even a servant at a middling-price territorial inn had to take offense. She flounced back behind the bar through the taproom, closing and bolting us officiously away from the ale kegs, and I could hear her clogs rattling down the stone hall and up the wooden stairs at the rear of the building.
“Well, that puts us in our places,” I said to cover the embarrassment I felt. Arlin’s grin had faded, but he kept his dark eyes locked on me. “I don’t… appreciate women,” he stated. “Or perhaps you had already guessed that.”
I hadn’t given the matter any thought, and I told him so.
“But you needn’t worry, little goblin. I’m very picky about the men I appreciate also,” he said, and he rose, his silver scabbard and his dagger glistening in the firelight, and he went to his room.
The inn hearth had a good fire, but I slept poorly and left at first light, followed by my white dog, who was turning into a gray wolf before my very eyes.
I had hoped to be settled somewhere before the snows fell, if not grinding lenses then chopping wood or tending cattle, for the winters of the northern territories are no easier than those of Velonya. Grobebh Township, however, already had a lens grinder, who had to turn his attention to other work at least half the day to feed his family, and as I considered making the circuit of the public stables, I passed the brick front of a printer’s house, where a small newspaper, still ink-damp, was being tacked into a glass-fronted case on the wall. There I read of the disappearance of a laundrywoman’s child from her bed in the middle of the previous night. I marched smartly out of Grobebh in the falling snow, looking neither left nor right and especially not behind me.
I could never be reasonable about the first snow of the year. As it heartened me this year, so it was then, except that then I was wilder. The sight of so much simple whiteness awakes in me a similarly simple spirit. It is not that I have never had to shovel walks or coach drives, sir. It is not that I have never greeted the winter with a cough and a runny nose. I have suffered these things like other men, and still the snow exalts me.
When I am cold to the bone, underfed, and oppressed by circumstance, as I was for my twenty-third celebration of the first falling, I remain cold, hungry, and miserable, but still I must run, plunge, dig, and fling the stuff about like a happy cross between a squirrel and a lunatic. When the first fall is a wet one, my personal eccentricity can be dangerous to my health, but on that white day when I was twenty-two, it was cold enough and dry enough that I was in no danger except of being put in a hospice for my own good.
Luckily I was alone, save for the dog, or wolf, or what-have-you, whom I led farther from human habitation as the white, padded day wore on. He was too rational a creature, or too old, or too suspicious to encourage me when I clambered up a tree and shook down the snow on him. He did not seem to know how the blanket of snow both hid him and revealed his footprints. Once the snow ended and men came out to look at the world, he would be easy to track.
Powl’s attitude would have gone beyond laughter at this behavior of mine—not the exuberance, but the fact that I was letting the beast’s need dictate my own, when he was no good to me and I had never sought out his company nor derived any great good from it. He had taken rabbits from me and given me none in return. He had never allowed me to touch him except back to back, for the warmth of it. I could not even say I was fond of him.
Perhaps he was a wolf after all. Perhaps he was a werewolf—after all, I had first thought he wore the face of the avenger I had killed.
It was bright noon when this memory knitted itself in my mind, and for the rest of the day I kept a wary eye on the dog, who kept a wary eye on me.
I was no longer talking to the beast, and that was really his only use to me: to have a better excuse to be talking than to hear myself rattle on.
Hunger is more fierce when it is cold out, and especially when it is snowing. I crossed the fences of farms and barged among the coppiced trees that shed a white dander, but nowhere could I find a rabbit’s run or a badger’s den in a spot concealed from man to set me a snare.
In the blue light of afternoon I began to realize that this business of living from day to day off the woods had its limits and that I had hit them. As much as the rabbit or the badger I needed protection from the winter, and being a man, I would find it among men.
There was a farmhouse only ten acres or so away; I could see it by the light of its windows. After the day’s exertion and the lack of sustenance, the yellow glow seemed holy, seductive, irresistible. It brought tears to my eyes; the tears then froze in the lashes.
I heard a scream and a snap, in that order, and turned to find that my dog had taken a white hare from the middle of the white, stubbly field. White dog, white snow, white hare with a red stain spreading. It was a large animal and as plump as a hare ever gets outside a pen.
Perhaps I was not reduced to beggary yet. I went down on my knees and called the dog, dropping my pack to the snow and feeling with numb hands for flint, knife, and tinder. The dog put back both his ears, tucked his tail between his legs, and took his dinner as far away from me as his four long legs could take it.
It was not one single light but many, within the large house and without, hung from poles and winking through the falling snow. I stumbled starved and blue-fingered into a wedding, and my coming was so welcome to the assembled party that I might have been the bridegroom.
Their beggar had fallen through, you see: The hired beggar, who by requesting admission first after the vows were completed, ensured that the marriage would be prosperous. The man had been arranged for, but snowfall did not stop to argue, and by the time the bride’s uncle harnessed up to bring the old man in from the next village, the wet roads had set their ruts as firmly as steel bands and there was no coming or going out by cart or carriage.
Lucky the festivities had begun that morning with the bride’s procession and the groom’s, and the priest had come early to bless the butchering (earning two gratuities and saving one trip in rough weather), so the blizzard was too late to stop the festivities. It served instead to enforce them, since no one could go home.
From the blue silence and cold I was flung into a smell of spices strong enough to make a nose bleed, and red fire and red velvets and pies of fresh apple, dried peach, poppyseed, and onions, all brown and shining with egg. For entertainment we had a man with a three-string fiddle and three children on a table of tuned bells, which grew so sticky and covered with grease that their resonance was sensibly diminished.
I remember that the bride was black-haired and the groom half bald, but they disappeared very soon after filling my cap (borrowed, for the purpose) with bread and sausage, and the wedding was not for their amusement anyway.
As none of the fifty guests dared leave and no great number of us could be supplied with bedding, it was decided to dance the night through with lines, squares, and heys, to keep ourselves warm—but no one was very cold, with fifty bodies and a great fire blazing.
Though I had perfected seven courtly dances at school and a great number more with Powl outside the observatory, I think this night was the first night of my life that I learned what it really is to dance, and it was the bride’s mother’s younger sister who taught me this lesson, along with others, later in the course of the night, after our dancing had brought us down into the cellar, where the cider and cider vinegar were aging.
Her husband was away in the militia.
When it appeared that the back of the storm was broken and the stars as visible as the floating snow in the sky, I went out into the empty yard to breathe, still wearing the red velvet and rabbit ermine of the beggar guest, and there I did the sword dance by myself on the frozen ground, using my Felinkan hedger in place of a saber.
I ought to have asked Solinka—her name I remember, alone of all I met that evening—to witness my performance, if only in gratitude for the double education she had given me, but I had been alone with myself for so long that feeling of all sorts called out for solitude, and I was overfull of feeling.
And then this young matron of two babies gave me no reason to suppose she had an interest in my overfull feelings, or that she was anything other than lively at parties. And kind.
By dawn the guests had puddled down in corners, five or six under a blanket, and the only sound was resin popping in the fire. Solinka was with her sister and her sister’s husband and both the little children. I folded my red velvet and walked around for some minutes, seeking a place to put it that was not soiled with grease. At last I inserted it between a sleeping child’s head and the heart-stenciled wall. I left nothing in payment, for any gift or any work done will break the good spell of the beggar guest. I took the bread and the sausage, left the borrowed cap behind, and went out along the load again, chasing werewolves.
The next town but one had lost a child three nights before. It took me until evening to plow through the drifts to find the settlement, and I broke wood for tinder at the butcher’s house in exchange for warm sleeping, dinner, and breakfast. Afterward, in cold sunshine, I went forth to see what I could see.
She had been four, the butcher’s wife had told me, and had shared the room with two older sisters. Neither girl had wakened in the night. Her mother had found the window open on its chain; there was no better clue than that. It was no
effort for me to discover the house and even the window that had known this horrid event; I would have had to be determined to avoid being shown what the whole population wanted to show me.
It was a simple set of casement windows with bull’s-eye glass, only the middle pane of which opened, and though it was closed I could make out the fastenings of a latch and a chain. Beneath, I found what had been a herbal border, now churned to mush by the feet of the curious.
The bottom of the window was at the level of my shoulder. A tall man might have lifted out a small girl without waking others—if she cooperated. I might have lifted myself in and thrown a child out, but again, not if she resisted. Children, however, could sleep like the dead, once they finally got to sleep.
“They like ’em young like that, four or five. That’s when they’re really tender.”
I turned back to the man who had led me to the place, wondering what sort of creature he was to speak of the vanished child that way below her own family’s window. “Who does?” I asked him.
“The wolf people. It’s like we prefer young pigs and not slab-sided old sows and boars. And, of course, girls is better.”
He was not particularly ill dressed. He looked more presentable than I did. A barman, perhaps, or a baker’s assistant. His face was loose and his eyes shiny. “Four-year-old girls are more tender than four-year-old boys? How is it you know that?” I tried to keep my voice neutral, but I had let my accent slip, and the Old Velonya had a flavor of disparagement all its own.
He backed a pace. “Why… stands to reason.”
The window opened and I was looking in the face of a youngster of about eight or ten. Her expression as she looked at me standing below must have been much like mine as I addressed the ghoul beside me. I, like him, stepped back a pace. She slammed the window again and paid great attention to the latch.
“They think they’re special goods now,” said the loose-faced man, clenching his heavy jaw left and right, his features lit with resentment and satisfaction together. “But she wasn’t better or anyone else. And now she’s—”