Authors: Alice Borchardt
But Black Leg was a wolf, and when the bird knives arrived, his face wasn’t there. The creatures were wiped away by two coordinated blows from his paws, battered into fragments so tiny, they drifted down like glowing dust toward the floor.
Abruptly, the sun went out and the chamber became utterly dark. He heard her give a yell of triumph and knew she must have pitched another piece of the same substance over the opening through which the sun’s light streamed. Now man again, he hunkered down, hoping she was right: the birds couldn’t function in complete darkness.
He could feel her close to him, and when her arms embraced him, he only found it a little strange that she should pick so dangerous a moment for love play. Then he felt the fear and knew whatever was embracing him, it wasn’t her. Its pelt was short, silky, and fragrant. The lips were hot, the hint of teeth under them, fangs.
Then lichens began to glow and it vanished as though it had never been. He found her hand in the faint light, and they both crawled out under the wall.
The daylight was a shock to Black Leg’s eyes. Outside the narrow windows, the garden was blooming and singing as though the long, bad night hadn’t happened. There was still food piled against the wall. His legs were bothering him, and totally forgetting the armor, he went wolf to heal the lacerations. But when he landed all four feet on the stone floor, he found he was still wearing the armor, only now it was suited to a wolf, not a man.
She divested him of it very carefully, while he went to work on the food with a will. When they had both finished stuffing themselves, they sat and examined the armor. He was human again; the vegetable food suited a human better.
“It’s the first thing we’ve found that works against them,” he said.
“I know, but do you recognize those symbols?” she asked.
“Like on the inside of the tunnel?”
“Yes. They are a sure sign that the makers of the tunnel made this, also.”
“What’s bad about that? From what you tell me, they were pretty smart.”
“They were, and their weapons can be dangerous.”
“Didn’t you ever try to figure out the symbols?”
He had softened the armor in water and made a glove out of it. It was joined, so his fingers and wrist could move freely. He took a rock and struck hard at the back of his hand. The symbols on the glove flared, but he felt nothing. It turned the edge of the rock with astonishing ease. He concentrated, studying the glove where it covered his fingers. When he thought of them, talons three inches long sprang out of the glove over his fingertips.
“You’re damn right they’re dangerous. But not to me,” he said.
He drew the talons through a melon rind lying on the floor of the cave, and the talons sectioned the melon rind like so many razors. Then he reached out toward the lichens on the wall.
“Leave them alone,” she said. “They’re doing their job, just like that vine out there that you were so foolish as to try to pull up.”
He opened and closed the glove. “I’d like to see those vines try to attack me now.”
“One weapon,” she said, “and already he’s swaggering.”
“That’s snide,” he said as he dove under the wall to collect a few more armor pieces.
There in the gloom Black Leg didn’t feel so confident. The only light was the lichen glow, and the dead were ghostly amorphous shapes in the gloom. He shivered as he remembered the kiss.
But he collected the remnants of what the first corpse he’d seen had been wearing and slid back out quickly. He went to the pool where the lichens had cleaned him and placed them in the water, then methodically began to dress himself.
“Why dangerous? How dangerous?” he asked her.
She was dressing, too, wearing some of that really unpleasant vine.
She considered for a moment. The vine didn’t make a bad garment. Yes, it left her breasts bare, as the other one had, but it supported them and twined attractively at her arms and legs. It had small, heart-shaped leaves and blue, flat flowers with long orange stamens and a black pistil.
“A sexy flower,” he said.
“That’s what flowers are: sex. And yes, your attraction to me last night when you gave me your wolf self wasn’t entirely an accident. It’s an aphrodisiac.”
“I overdosed,” he said.
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“I did that on purpose. I couldn’t think of any way to persuade you to take it otherwise. And I was afraid you’d die. Besides, I want to hear about dangerous. And what about my tail?”
She rolled her eyes. “A true nonlinear thinker. What the hell are you talking about?”
“The armor. Why dangerous? And how can I get it to cover my tail when I’m wolf?”
“Come on. Let’s go down to the lake. The sun is out and it’s a beautiful day.”
She talked as they walked. “The armor is dangerous because the universe has logic.”
He sighed.
“It does it like a seed. You plant a seed, and after a while, you get a tree. An acorn, an oak; a hazelnut, a hazelnut bush.”
“This I know.”
“Yeah? Why?”
He was silent. “This I don’t know.”
“My. At last some modesty. The universe is the same. From small beginning it grew into what it is now. Sun, moon, stars, the celestial sphere. And it’s big, very big, bigger than your people can ever possibly imagine. To put it simply, the people who built the tunnel and created the armor understood how the universe started and why it became the way it is. Their language reflects the logic of the universe, and you can’t—and I can’t—understand their language unless we comprehend that logic. That’s why no one has ever been able to understand the tunnel, or read the symbols written in it. The universe is filled with all sorts of beings, and you wouldn’t believe how many of them have tried.”
He stopped and looked out at the little lake. The sun was high in the sky, and he could look down into the center and see that it was deep and clear. A shape moved in the shadowed gloom of long, spiral waterweed at the bottom.
“Fish?” he asked.
“Something,” she replied. “I’m not sure I want to find out. Every time I find out something new about this place, I get more upset. Thanks to you, I don’t need the water any longer. I can feed like a human.”
They sat down on a flat rock and shared large, red, juicy fruit from a vine coiling over a bush covered with blue berries.
“So what harm do you think the armor could do to me?” he asked.
“I think if you put it all the way on, you might find out.”
“This is too big for me,” he said.
“I know,” she answered. “And I’m sorry.”
“I’m still going to put it all the way on. I think it’s our ticket out of here.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s the trouble. All I wanted was a tumble in the hay. Oh, boy, I said. I’ll bet that cute thing is fun and games. What he doesn’t know about the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees, I can sure teach him. I brought back a hero. You are that thing, you know. When you gave me part of your own being to save my life, I knew it.”
The garden sang to them. The reeds piped; something sang a distant trill when the wind blew. A waterfall of notes wandered downstream toward them from trees that bent low over the water and trailed long, weeping branches into the stream, rather like willows do. But no willow ever had golden flowers that rained perfume into the slow eddies of the central pool.
“Are you missing anything? I mean, did human wolfness take anything away?” he asked.
“No. In fact, the tree is telling me about the fish. They’re old and slow, even older than the plants. They have been here a long time. The tree says, ‘Don’t catch them. There aren’t any more where they came from. These fish are the last.’ ”
“Look,” he whispered, and pointed to the canyon wall across from them. It had begun to weep, the water seemingly welling out of the porous rock, running down the walls into the plant beds below. They were built in an intricate maze, and as the water filled each one, the soil swelled and the plants turned greener. The guardian vines, like the one she was wearing, became a mound of green fuzz, dotted with white. Next to them, lilies bloomed, or at least that’s what they looked like, blush pink and white, spotted with brown.
Then something low, gray-green, and furred burst into scarlet blossom. The music swelled as each group sang in thanksgiving for what they felt was rain. The beds were planted in the same shapes as the letters he had seen on the armor and on the walls of the tunnel. An eternal garden surrounded him, created to be a microcosm of the universe, its fragrances, its colors, its life sacred to the beings who shaped it to reflect the beauty of all life everywhere.
“The fish,” he said. “The tree tells you they are very old. Maybe they can give you more information than the plants can. The trick you did before. The way you turned into rain. Can you still do it?”
“Trick,” she replied, “is an unhappy description of that particular power of mine.”
Black Leg answered in the same vein. “There is a certain poverty of description in the language for several of your activities. I do the best I can. No offense intended.”
She laughed, waded into the lake, and fell into droplets that ringed the calm surface of the water for a few seconds, then were gone.
He studied the layout of the garden. He felt he might stay here for a thousand years simply contemplating the exquisite care with which the garden had been fitted together. And, of course, that’s what it was: a page like the carpet pages in an illuminated missal from one of the Christian monasteries. And in a flash of insight, he saw what many wiser minds had not seen, how this script must be read. He went back to where his armor lay, thinking about his father.
They had sat together beside a fire in the hills and discussed human wretchedness while they listened to a pack in the distance plan a hunt. It was cold and already there was a frost on the grass. A high, chill moon illuminated the ice-limned gorse and heather around them. His father quizzed him as to what the pack planned.
“The elk are moving down from the high pastures. The father and mother of the pack spotted three yearling fawns that look weak. They plan to ambush the bachelor herd about a mile away and take one.”
His father nodded approvingly. “Very good. Want to join them? Supposed to be three, so we could join the hunt and take one for ourselves.”
“Why? We killed today, a mare in foal. We have as much meat as we can carry home. If we killed again, we’d have to waste most of it.”
“Spoken like a true wolf,” Maeniel said.
“How can you tell? It’s been years since you were a full-time wolf. Do we change so little?”
“Not at all. Never. I remember things that happened thousands of years ago as though they occurred yesterday. Before—as Dugald tells it—the water rose and drowned the vast plains that were once dry and now are the North Sea. We hunted elk here, and in much the same way as this pack hunts them now. A stealthy tracking of the herd, then the tests to see which ones are strongest. We know each member by their own particular scent and can describe his appearance and behavior to one another.
“The wolves spoke of one called Blaze. He is strong, but slow, and if they can drive him into broken or boggy ground, they might get him. But then there is One Eye. Been diseased from his birth, but he is wary and very fast. If they can blindside him upwind, he won’t stand a fight. Another has fallen into the habit of kneeling to eat, fishing under cedar breaks and hazel bushes for herbs still green in spite of frost. He’s fat, but has callus pads on his knees. If they ambush him from above, the callus pads limit his agility.
“We have hunted them time out of mind. When they had a six-foot spread of antlers and hooves like war hammers, it was the same then as it is now, and we went about it in the same way and talked with each other about the same things.”
Black Leg shivered. He didn’t believe the part about a six-foot spread of antlers. No, that simply wasn’t possible. But he had his own memories. As yet he hadn’t turned those pages in his mind and tested some of the things his father was telling him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. His father had been wild at birth, before his transformation. Black Leg had grown up among humans.
Maeniel grinned at his son across the fire. Black Leg felt guilty. It was as though his father knew what he was thinking. So he changed the subject.
“They change, don’t they? The humans, I mean.”
“They don’t do anything else,” Maeniel said. “And have been ringing in changes since they came into existence. Who can say what they will one day be.”
“Dugald says—”
“Don’t quote Dugald to me. Not if you value your hide.”
Black Leg gave his father a very nasty but very wolf look. It said as clearly as if he had spoken, “You are my father and pack leader. Therefore, I respect you. But that’s not a good reason to take advantage of another who has not yet reached the fullness of his strength.”
Maeniel looked away, somewhat abashed. Good manners were important in a wolf pack, and between senior and cub. He had been guilty of a breach of etiquette.
“Very well. Dugald says . . .” Maeniel stated.
Black Leg continued, “That you hang around with humans because their strange ways fascinate you.”
“That’s one reason. Yes.” Maeniel poked at the fire. “This is another. No other creature can do this.”
“Make a fire?” Black Leg asked.
“Yes. And this.” Maeniel took a stick and began to write in the dirt: Alpha, Beta . . .”
“The alphabet.” Black Leg was astounded. “But what’s so special about that?”
Maeniel broke the stick and met Black Leg’s eyes. “You could teach a wolf the alphabet, my son, but you could never teach him to use it. Yet all of what they are flows from such things, especially that one. They are going somewhere, moving through time. Wolves are as the Stella Polaris pole star. We do not change.”
Black Leg felt cold, and not entirely from the mountain night. He didn’t like it when his father talked this way. “I would rather be a wolf and think about deer with stomach trouble or weak legs.”
Now he stood here in the midst of this beautiful garden, almost, but not quite, ready to call the change.