Twilight of the Wolves (30 page)

And when he had used me he barked orders and Kryzstof’s hands tried to reach me cowering and quivering in the corner where I felt shame for the first time. All the abuse on the long deadly road to Luca was another me, a me of transition, between my true self, the wolfgirl, and this spectre who ghosts even still through the house and life that is my prison. But that night I felt shame and a pain without name, not only in my body, where I
was ripped and beaten, but deeper, where my wolfheart grew and all my memories lived. I was defiled and would never be clean again. I would never be me, would never be whole. And Kryzstof took me in his arms, his skin soft, his touch tender, and I was a brittle leaf, a remnant of fall caught in the blizzards of winter, dried out, dying.

He carried me back to my bed shaking and weeping, begging forgiveness. And even as I wanted to hate him, even as all the world was drained of light, all the colors rotting off, all my life wasting away, my memories ravaged, I opened my heart to him and put my arms around him and gave myself to the tears refused to me for so long. And he, Polina, and the others held me that night and whispered a thousand promises and consolations that I never heard. Not then, and not any of the times after.

The tears for all that I had lost. The tears for the next twenty years that I saw so clearly that night. The tears for a thousand more nights to come.

And you, my lost Moon. My eternal wolf. Heart of my heart. You saw me and you see me but you did not see this that night. You promised me but then you went away.

You left me.

You promised me.

The dress is too tight around my tumescence, my lumbering fat body. Used and old, wrinkled, and ready for the end. For the end of this humiliation, this debasement called life.

He smiles, though, and waves me to sit. His coat is thick and dark blue and tight, his shirt puffy and white as a cloud, and his trousers short and hugging his skin.

My dear, it’s so nice to finally sit with you. Oh, don’t mind them. Alexandra and Alexandra, get out. Take it with you—he waves his hand at Alyc, already crying, staring at me and I feel more than see his arms reaching out for mine as Lord Alexander leans into me—Let them talk. It’s taken me twenty years, but I’m finally man enough to take you as you are and place you where
you belong. At my side. Hm? Isn’t this better than chopping onions or whatever it is the savages do back behind that wall. Go ahead, eat. It’s elk, the meat of a god, I imagine—he laughed but I only poked the catmeat on the plate and smiled—the gods. Why do your people consider these beasts gods? I’ve never understood. What makes this elk a god and keeps me from being one, hm? Go on, speak. You’re free now.

Free, the word pierces through the barrier twenty years thick and touches me at the root of my spine. Free, and I turn to his smile, to those barbaric bluesuns, my throat caught. Water, cooling the heat but doing nothing to the desert of my mouth, absorbed before relief strikes and I’m silent too long when he slams the table and asks me again why we think the beasts are gods. My voice, thick and clicking, the foreign words wrestling my tongue, Guard world. Keep it good. When gods leave world, go forest with. And with forest go planet. Life.

He blinks then throws his head back laughing, When that forest is gone, man will truly live! he slaps the table laughing, his voice racked by age, That forest is the last obstacle. When we burn it down and your gods all die, you’ll understand all the things we do for you and you’ll no longer fight civilisation and progress. Imagine, trains crossing from city to city. New frontiers and new cities sprouting all over, wherever ore and things of value can be grown. We brought you peace and now we’ll bring you industry. The future. We can plant proper trees, ones for rubber, and proper crops, for tobacco, for coffee, for cocoa. Have you ever tasted chocolate, my dear? Oh, it’s delightful. You’d love it, but it’s hard to find in this brutal Lucan land. And wine! Not the gutrot your people drink, but true and proper wine! Bitter and strong. Your wine is too sweet and delicate. Fine for women, but not for a man.

He fills his mouth and drinks his wine and paws at my knee beneath the table, taking my hand in his machinefist and feels the coldness of my skin, asks me if I need a shawl which I shake
away. The blood boils but he will have none of my heat, only my hate. The touch of his hand on mine fills me with pain and hope and regret. I should’ve died. Should’ve killed myself long ago rather than been his whore. It’s my weakness, my cowardice, my trivial love of life and the hopeless world that kept my heart still beating. But in his brutality there was at times a warmth that I feel now. A gratitude, even the loathing rises all the way to my teeth and it’s all I can do to keep from screaming and ramming the fork through his face and eating his human heart.

Tomorrow you will be mine, in body and heart. You will reign over this household as my one and true love. I will take you away from your bondage and save you as I saved you all those years ago from the barbarous hands of the slavers. Would that make you happy?

Yes, master, I bow keeping my eyes low. My face is a mask and I will play the sheep if I can die a wolf.

He tsked, No, no longer will you call me master. Simply Lord Alex. Or, better yet, Alex, hm? Isn’t that better, the familiar? In that way you will be above the masses with me. You will stand high above your race as an example. Through much suffering have you become worthy of a place beside me where the light of the distant stars will wash away this imperfect and bestial darkness from your body and soul. When we rise again, we will be together, alone, far across the ocean in Roca. Your land is a fertile paradise but ours is a created one. From the dust and the rocks we have forged a world of precise perfections.

Your world, this land here, it has its own magic. The brilliant hues, the color, the bounty! There is so much to have here and most of it has been untouched! The savages of this land never understood what it was that lies beneath their feet or in their trees. So it is not that we force you to be slaves, but it is the natural order. Just as a dragon stands, or rather, flies at one evolutionary pinnacle, so the Rocan stand above all of this. We are men who have created Man. The new gods. We have seen
what the world is and we have taken it, transformed it, and it is what I give to you. I found you, a beaten slave, and now raise you to nobility. Lady. I will even let you keep your old name. Lady Aya, the first of her kind. We are too old in this life, but in the next, we will be gods! We will take the next step! Many are afraid now of becoming more, of being more, but we shall be the new gods forged of fire and steel and silver and gold. All beauty will be in our veins! Here, I have something for you.

He clapped his hand and Alexi sauntered into the room and laid a tiny box in his father’s outstretched hand. Lord Alexander did not look at his son or acknowledge his presence and Alexi disappeared, laughter bubbling inside of him as he danced out of sight.

Here, my lady, a present fitting for your new place in the world.

The box, pushed before me, small and black and tied by a goldleaf ribbon. The heart betrays and I’m warm, butterflies beating against the walls of my chest and a swarm inside my skull. Within is a thin string of gold holding a large crystal with many faces carved into its exterior. My blood beats but it’s black and cold and everything flutters, my hands shaking but not from anger and he smiles and laughs and urges me to put it on and then helps me clasp it round my neck where the stone rests above my breasts and tears press against my eyes, a pressure in my head and my chest and I can’t speak.

And then he kisses my cheek and his warmth is inside me and he promises we will be together again tonight and then I’m alone, sitting, motionless, and I hate him. Weeping, I hate him. I say it over and over to make it true, to keep it there inside, tying all my memories together. This final humiliation, this filling me with pleasure and gratitude where my body makes its final betrayal.

He has killed me a thousand times and turned even my body against me. All that I have.

So many nights I’ve cried to the moon and waited for the howl
to answer me. So many nights I longed for you to appear in the nightsky along with the other seven, luminous and dark, a shadow on the expanse of spacetime. Only for me. For my eyes. For my heart. For all these years I held to the promises you told a girl who had the heart of a wolf and I hear your voice inside, not only the doublevoice of your godhood, but your human voice, when you were only cursed. Doubly cursed. Once by a wolf and once by a human child.

It breaks my heart every day and in a new way to know that you no longer exist beside me, my star, my Moon, my life and my light. My center, my darkness, my breath and my fight.

I long for your howl again, that distant song that was never wrong and then the lunar petals sing too, a polyphonic symphony to bring it all back to me, and I dance in your moonlight, basking in the reminiscences of your breathing twilight.

The night collapses upon me and I am numb, moving through the house unsure of my place, no longer a servant but not yet served. Alexi tells me that this is better than he could’ve imagined and I know that I am only a pawn and the enemy has played into Alexi’s hand unwittingly through decrepit fantasy and hubris. He talks about Valencia and the promises of Arcanes, of dragons, and the spirit deepest to the Vulpen: revolution. He speaks as if tonight is already the past, a certainty, already his name being written in the stars along with the old gods.

I find myself beside Lord Alexander who speaks on and on as he always does, but it’s different now, full of promises that make no sense. Promises after Death and in new life and our hearts beating as one. My thoughts drown him out and I am alone in the bed I’ve bled in for years and years, where my body’s been taken from me, and I feel nothing. I smell the sweat of all the others but no longer feel jealous as I sometimes did, betrayal after betrayal, for years and years, the body turning to its enslavement and finding comfort there, in the black abyss of his
heartless chest. The foul decayed stench that he farts and burps away, that seeps through his pores and covers his skin in grime and oil, his coarse body hair that rubs me raw. But then his words twist and spin and he’s no longer trying to teach me but justify himself and his voice gets soft and quavers, I do it for him. I don’t want to hurt him. I never wanted to hurt any of them. They may be bastards but they’re mine. I know they won’t have me here for them. I began too late. I was too old when I started fathering children and Alexi hates me though he’s afraid to admit it. My dear—he takes my hand in his cold but human hand—you must think I’m a monster at times. They must be strong. I do this for them. To make them strong. All I can give them is all that I leave behind but I cannot protect them from the world. You’ve seen them. You know them. They will never be Rocan and they will never be natives. They’re caught between worlds and I shelter them from that. It’s my power that keeps them safe but I will not last, his kiss is dry and short on the back of my hand.

But there he was, sitting with the Alexandras laughing and clapping with their first steps into the world. Rocking them to sleep. Tying Alexi’s shoes, cleaning the wounds he got from the other boys. The bleeding noses, the scraped knees, the raw fists. Dacia lying there with her feet up and Lord Alexander rubbing her legs, laughing with her. Not instructing but laughing, treating her as a woman and not a thing. And then all the touches he gave to me. His softness and his delicate hands, like a child’s, unused to work. Even with Alyc, the look on his face when he was born and the fear he felt when Krysta died because she couldn’t stop bleeding from birthing poor baby Alyc. He read to him and held him every day for half a year staring out into the night and the suns, his face crumbling not only from age but at the loss of that beautiful girl, too young for child bearing. The canyons of his face grew deeper and his voice thicker and his habits meaner. It was then that age came to him, mortality’s limits appeared clear before him and he spoke to us like children in
need of instruction.

The Twilight Days he sat with the children, his bastards and even our children, born into slavery. He sat with them cutting out masks for the festival and painting their faces. Gods and demons and he put flowers in their hair and sang the songs he brought with him across the ocean. Patting heads and clapping, dancing, chasing happiness, pulling it from the air around and handing it to the children. They weren’t his but he was kind to them. He was kind to us when he wanted to be. In the daylight he was our friend and master. In the night he was our monster.

My dear Aya, light of my life, I have wasted so much time. I do not lie when I say that I loved you upon first sight. You changed everything inside of me and I needed to have you, to possess you as you possess me. And so I took you. I needed you and still do. To leave you there with those soldiers was to leave myself, my heart and body. Before that moment there was nothing and no one. I came to this world and left mine behind. I had a family before. Rocan. I married too young and left her too soon. I can’t see her face or smell her breath. I never missed her the way I always miss you. Even when I watch you, the way you cooked or cleaned, the way you averted your eyes from me, I missed you. It broke my heart to not speak to you, to not ravage you again and again. You are all that I have ever wanted. All that I need. And now you are mine. Now more than ever. I can’t live without you and I won’t. You will always be by my side. Always. I found you and I saved you so you could save me.

His face is creased and carved with deep lines of hope. The gleam of candlelight on the metal surrounding his iceblue eye makes him grotesque, even as he pours himself into the night. Away from the didactic tones and ponderous philosophies, he speaks as if he is a man and I am a woman, though he demands I be his.

I’m too old for him to touch anymore. Too fat and too coarse. He has used me fully and I am left only with his delusions, the
significance he’s pushed onto me.