Anna von Wessen (32 page)

“I have been watching Drelho,” he said, “ever since I received word that Vaya Eleria had been awakened. Probably you are not aware of her history with Krestyin, who was King of the Weld of Wales in 1750?”

“How do you know that? None knew the name of the White Wolf of the North.”

“Many didn’t. But the secret was known to my forefather who then was King of the German Narken – and it was passed down to me like an heirloom.” He scrutinised Anna’s face, and crossed his burly arms over his chest. “Yet you seemed not very surprised when I told you. How is it that
you
know?”

“Vaya Eleria is my friend,” Anna replied staunchly.

“Your friend! You will pardon me for saying that that seems highly improbable.”

“Why is that?”

“You are, by all means, her very successor! I would have thought that she cherished a fond hatred for you.”

“You thought wrong.”

Wolach held up his hands, and smiled. “I see that I did!” he exclaimed. “But I am Narkul enough to apologise.”

Anna watched him silently, till he resumed his speech.

“My motivations, then,” he said, “should be simple enough to comprehend. Of course I have had dealings with her kind before – Lumaria who are sympathetic to the wolves. It seems always to manifest itself as a sort of obsession, an addiction much like that the humans develop to narcotic substances. Usually it is nothing more than a child’s contumacious wish to rebel against society. In Vaya Eleria’s case, however . . . Well, I knew very well that she was a desirable asset. General of the English Lumarian army for more than a hundred years, and daughter of the renowned King Ephram! I simply could not pass up the chance that she had not, shall we say, ‘broken her addiction.’ ”

“You forget already, perhaps,” said Anna, “that Vaya Eleria is my friend. I do not like the way you are speaking about her.”

“Surely I have not forgotten! And, you know, when I think of it again – really it makes all the sense in the world. Wolf-lover that the Princess is, no doubt she took an immediate liking to you! But then I wonder . . . How many know your secret?”

“Only she.”

“Only she! Only she and King Xeros, you mean; for it was her conversation with him on the subject which enlightened the clever Esa, and through him, myself. But I suppose that she must be your very
great
friend! And if you are so dear to one another . . .”

He stopped, and adopted all of a sudden a very pensive expression. He leant his chin down upon his fist, and stared at Anna. “If you were to come to me,” he said, “do you think that Vaya Eleria would come, too?”

“I could not tell you,” Anna answered simply, not wanting yet to strike up a fight with Wolach.

“Well, I suppose you couldn’t. Really that is the sort of thing which one must speak about in person . . .”

He was ignoring Anna now, and thinking very hard. His wide brow was furrowed in concentration.

“Now we have gotten that,” said Anna, “and all of the formalities out of the way – I wonder if you might tell me, exactly what it is you want of me?”

He returned slowly from his deep reverie, but finally looked to Anna again with his full attention. “That is a very reasonable question,” he said. “I would like very much to answer it. You see, Anna von Wessen – Narkul armies are organised very differently from human ones, and a little differently, too, from Endalin ones. They are nothing at all like those of the Lumaria! My own army is divided into companies, twelve in all. Those companies are each segmented into twelve battalions; and the battalions into twelve sections, each home to approximately six hundred soldiers. Each section has a Leader; each battalion has what we call a Low Captain; and each company is headed by a High Captain. Of the High Captains, there are three of greatest rank, who are called the First, Second and Third Captains. The First Captain reports to the Lieutenant, who takes his orders directly from me, the General. I wish for you, Anna von Wessen, to be Captain – after you are trained in the ways of our military, of course, and certified capable – of my most skilled company. This would make you my First Captain.”

“You wish to offer that post,” Anna asked, “to someone you do not even know?”

“I do.”

“Surely you have competent soldiers enough of your own.”

“I have some. But I would not say enough. The truth is – even among such a mighty race as the Narken, there are many more foul seeds than productive ones. And the foul ones, as you may guess, multiply much faster than the productive ones, for they are far more numerous. They sow themselves over and over, insidious little beans that they are, till there is hardly any arable ground left, and the whole population loses hope at advancement. But then there are those like me – and then there are those like you. We are, you understand, the epitome of the strength and capability of our race.”

“I dislike your talk of sowing seeds. It betrays your salacious intent.”

“Salacious intent! Well, I never!” But then he paused, and laughed. “On second thought,” he said, “I suppose there is no point in concealing the truth from you. I thought that I might; but clearly you are a little too wise to be fooled. And there is no need to discuss that matter now! At present it is nothing more than an afterthought.”

“Trust that it shall remain that way. But I suppose I must ask you – what would be my objective, as your
Captain?
”

“You would lead the war I wage against my enemies. My greatest ones, at present, are Koro and Trydon.”

“You would have me war against Koro!”

“Yes. But that is for the future; your first undertaking would be simple enough. Yet it is essential, you see, in order that we may reach the point where overtaking Trydon, the Voranan-hater, and Koro, High King of the marble-skins, will be possible. I am in the midst of countless negotiations to increase the size of my allied state. On all sides, with every day that passes, I attract new citizens.”

“And what would this undertaking be?”

“Hmmm. It seems I have digressed a little! But no matter. Your first assignment, Anna von Wessen – is the collapse of the Weld.”

“The Weld!”

“Why, yes! But you appear shocked. Surely you understand that I am not allied with that collective?”

Anna said nothing.

“The Weld,” continued Wolach, “is a bad jest gone on too long. It is much smaller, you know, than it used to be – but still they seem to love humans, just as much as ever they did! Befriending them, mating with them – bah! It sickens me.”

Anna smiled sardonically. “Surely you know that as a Narkul,” she said, “you are part human? It’s strange you despise them so.”

“Then I suppose it strange that
you,
Anna von Wessen, should consume them to survive.”

“Not anymore,” Anna said with a shiver.

“Oh, no? Well, bravo! It’s a pity, though; for obviously I thought otherwise, and went through all the trouble to procure you your supper! Ah, well. I will eat it myself, so that it does not spoil.” He flashed a smile. “But really – I do not wish to argue with you. If you knew him, surely you could not fail to see that Xeros is a ridiculous old Narkul, with a backward conception of wolfen liberalism and democracy. There can be no democracy, you see, when there is a war to be won. Such a silly notion can only be afforded in times of peace. And so long as the Lumaria thrive, well – there will never be peace.”

“But you intend to change all that.”

“I do! And I wish for you to be my right hand.”

“And if I refuse?”

“First of all, I would ask that you take a few hours to consider it. Have something to eat; get a little rest. In the morning we will talk again.”

“What if I told you that my decision could not be swayed by that brief period’s thought?”

He looked at her sternly. “I really think,” he said slowly, “that you should not make that statement so rashly.”

“It’s the full truth of it. I see no good in drinking your whiskey, eating your food, and sleeping aboard your dirty ship – when I know very well that I shall have nothing different to tell you at morning’s light.”

Probably it would have been better to postpone this announcement; to play along, if you will, for as long as she was able. But we have told you before that Anna was prideful, too quick to anger, and impatient with all insult to her honour. So perhaps she spoke too soon.

“This is your final word?” asked Wolach.

“Yes.”

“Well! Really I don’t suppose that someone like you is apt to change her mind, when once it is set so firmly. I see I shall make no proselyte out of you! So I will pester you no more.”

He rose from his seat, and began to sidle from the tiny room.

“What will you do with me?” Anna inquired fearlessly.

He looked once more at her, and said simply: “You shall be taken to the deck, where your head will be removed, and your body cast into the sea. You should know, that the ship has been fitted with an Aera, made complete with one of your hairs taken while you slumbered. That Esa managed to bring you to me was a fine piece of luck; and I will not let you escape me now.” He shook his head, and tutted softly. “Really it’s too bad. Such admirable little pups we could have made together! I see no reason, after all, why your measure of Lumarian blood should have gotten in the way of it – capable as Vaya Eleria proved herself to bear the child of Krestyin.”

Anna was taken aback. “How is it, Wolach, that you know the things you know?” she demanded.

“I know all, Anna von Wessen!” he called as he departed, slamming the door in his wake. But Anna did not rise to pursue him.

XXXIII:

Dio Constantín

T
hings seemed to pass very slowly, after that. Anna sat alone for a while in the cabin, and went back a little on her oath of its uselessness, by emptying the bottle of whiskey which Wolach had left behind. No sooner was it gone, than Gorn returned to the cabin, and bade her follow him to the deck. She saw no good in resisting.

She walked down the narrow corridor with a blank countenance, noting absently the wet footprints which Gorn had tracked down from the deck. Beside them, almost in a perfectly parallel line, were the dried bloodstains. She followed Gorn to the little rotted staircase at the head of the corridor, watched as he pushed up a cracked wooden hatch, and stepped out behind him onto the windy deck.

She was shoved flat against the wall of the pilot’s room, where she stood still and silent, gazing up at the inky black sky, and counting the sparkling stars which danced over her head. But she gave it up after a hundred, fancying by then that they only mocked her with their blatant freedom. So she hung her head, and waited for the executioner. The deck all around her was empty. The wind blew fiercely, and brought with it a heavy spray from the waves. Anna could hear voices, loudest of all Wolach’s, from the bow; but she paid them no heed. For a moment she thought of Greyson, and wished heartily that she had told him where she meant to go this night. At least he might have understood what had happened, then. Certainly there was no chance of Vaya’s repairing his ignorance, till she had done all she could do herself to find Anna. Anna wished that she could tell her not to bother; for in no more than a quarter of an hour, it would be too late.

But perhaps they had had time enough. Anna knew that she had said all she wished to say; and she felt that Vaya had done the same. Perhaps it was better that she could return to the life she had lost, and work earnestly at becoming again what she had been. Still Anna wanted more than anything to see her face once more. She
could
see it so clearly, hovering in the air before her; but to be able to touch it, just for a moment . . .

She was startled, then, nearly out of her skin, by a voice that whispered in her ear. She whipped her head around, and found herself looking into a broad, grey-bearded face. Its owner’s words had been:

“Are you ready to fight?”

“Who are you?”

“That matters very little. I asked you – are you ready to fight?”

“I don’t know what sort of a game you think this is –”

“Are you ready to fight?”

She looked with stark terror into his wide blue eyes. “Yes,” she said simply.

“Here,” he said, as he used his big hands to wheel her round. “Let me take this off.”

She felt his fingers on her neck; and a moment later, the chain fell away.

“How did you –”

He only held up a hand to silence her, and smiled. “I will be waiting for you in the bow,” he said.

“What is your name?”

“There will be time enough for that later – if we succeed. Prepare yourself, my child.”

And then he disappeared. Anna stood staring after him, looking this way and that – but she could not decide where he had gone.

Finally Gorn returned for her. “You see?” he said. “I told you I would pitch you overboard.”

He made to take her arm; but she struck out with a fist, and broke his nose. Then she kicked him in the leg, and smiled when she heard it snap. He howled pathetically.

“What in the world . . .?”

Someone came round from the pilot’s room, and peered at the scene which was taking place on the starboard deck. “Curse you, Gorn!” he shouted. “Can you do nothing right?”

“I’m very sorry, Esa,” Gorn whined, as he dragged himself, bleeding profusely and with his leg sticking out at an unnatural angle, out of range of Anna’s vengeful limbs.

“You should be, you pitiful rube.”

He kicked Gorn out of the way, and came across the deck to meet Anna. He stood before her with his wiry arms crossed, and his hairy chest bared between the panels of a worn leather vest. Dirty, stringy black hair hung down both sides of his face, and was pulled at the back into a ponytail. When he flashed a cruel smile, his stained teeth showed jagged between pale, chapped lips; and even in human form his eyes retained that sickly bloodshot tinge.

“Well,” said Anna. “You are quite as ugly as I thought you would be.”

“Very good!” he exclaimed. “I hate to disappoint.”

Anna glared at him.

“Now,” he said, “really I can’t say I blame you at all for bloodying Gorn – but I warn you that if you try and do the same to me, it’s you who will end up bloody.” He laughed. “But then, I suppose the sea shall wash you clean! Nice white skin, with pretty shining locks – sinking all the way to the bottom!”

He yanked her forward, and they walked towards the bow, where there was a small group awaiting them. Wolach stepped away from his conversation with the Captain, and came near to Anna.

“Angry as you have made me with your rudeness and petulance,” he said, “I have decided to throw you from the front of the ship. That way I will run my keel over your body, before I say my final farewell.”

Anna’s eyes sought the one who had freed her from the Turin. He stood just by the rail, with his hands clasped in front of him, and his head bowed.

“Hey now,” said Wolach, as he reached to scrape his sharp nails across the skin of Anna’s throat. “Where goes the Turin? Whoever has removed it – we suffer not such a dearth of them that we may risk removing
this
one! Someone get me another!”

But what happened next, happened very quickly indeed. Anna’s professed comrade sprang all at once from his submissive position, and shouted to her, “Change your shape!” He jumped away from the rail, and transformed all in an instant into a gigantic Narkul. Wolach was first to respond. When he changed his own shape, however, he was significantly larger than his opponent, dark and furious. The other’s fur had changed to grey – but his anger seemed no less terrible.

Esa and the Captain turned speedily into two hideous monsters. But before this, and for the briefest moment, Esa stared wonderingly at the grey wolf, obviously shocked. Yet there was more in his look, than there was in the others’. His surprise changed rapidly to anger; and he whirled with the Captain upon the grey wolf. They reared on their hind legs, and swiped mercilessly at him with their claws.

“Stay!” cried Wolach. “Stay a moment!”

Esa and the Captain stepped back, and surveyed the grey wolf with eyes that wished him dead. But Wolach stepped towards him, and looked into his face.

“What is the meaning of this, Dio
Constantín?”

“It is true you used Esa to take advantage of the Weld,” said the grey wolf. “But you see very well that I have done the same to you.”

Wolach roared much like a lion, and sprang towards the one he called Dio Constantín. But all of a sudden there came four great Narken from round the pilot’s room, two from the grey mist of the starboard deck,  and two from the darkness of the port. They leapt intrepidly into the fray, and fell straightaway to mauling Wolach’s wolves. Only Wolach and Dio Constantín stood still, as if in a temporary ring of protection, staring at each other hatefully, while Anna huddled down by the rail, watching in horror.

“You see that the majority of your crew is with me,” said Dio Constantín. “You have been beautifully duped, Wolach.”

“Perhaps I have been,” replied Wolach, each of his words dripping with loathing bitter as snake’s venom. “But I am not one to lie down without a fight.”

“Come, then!”

And so they fell to attempting to destroy one another. Gorn appeared after a little, still broken and bleeding. He joined the fight just the same, though he was soon beaten down, and cast from the frenzy like a dying spark from a blaze.

“Do as I do,” shouted Dio
Constantín to Anna, “or we will both die!”

“It’s not so easy as that,” she mumbled beneath her breath, as Esa broke away from the battle, and came to fetch her. But she struck out with two hands, and sent him soaring. He crashed through the wide pane of glass in the pilot’s wall; and so far as Anna could see, did not get up again. 

After this Anna fell down to the soaking deck, and pressed her back against the rail, panting out a puffing string of harsh, rapid breaths. The Turin had sapped her of energy. Her strength was diminished considerably, and she was covered with wounds. It was all she could do to fend off Esa’s attack.

But the arrival of Dio Constantín’s wolves remedied the situation wonderfully. Two allotted themselves the task of overtaking the burly Captain, while the second pair went directly to Dio to assist him with Wolach. Very soon the former had succeeded in pinning and binding the Captain, and Wolach found himself under the heavy fire of five rampaging Narken. But he was not Wolach, grandson of Worgan, great-grandson of Worgach for naught; and probably he would even have found a way out of that tight situation, if what happened presently had not happened at all.

Thunder cracked and boomed in the sky overhead, and lightning split the night. Torrential rain began suddenly to fall, and mighty wind to blow from what seemed every direction. The waves grew high and full of foam, splashing and sliding every which way over the slippery deck. With wide eyes, Anna watched the pinioned Captain gliding over the briny boards, farther and farther till finally he crashed through the rail, and fell from the ship. In a last but ineffectual effort, he snapped at the rail with his strong jaws; hung suspended for a moment over the creamy, crashing waves; and affording Anna a brief glimpse of his horrified countenance, dropped forever out of sight.

Without a pilot, the ship swung this way and that, to and fro, over and under the cold, heavy waves. Weak and stunned, and with the raging salt water licking cruelly at her bleeding wounds, Anna tried to hold to the rail. She watched the six Narken battling some twenty or so yards off to her right, all flailing so helplessly in the midst of their fierce exhibitions of might, that surely none of them could afford to come to her aid.

Most ironically, it was Esa himself who kept her aboard. He came limping, and dripping prodigious amounts of blood, across the swerving, tipping deck, seized Anna’s wrist up in his jaws, and jerked it forward till it snapped asunder. This was a most painful way in which to be saved; but saved she was nonetheless, for it seemed that merely to watch her flounder over the edge of the ship was not enough of vengeance to sate Esa’s hungry appetite. When the wrist bone gave way, and the flesh turned to shifting rubber beneath the points of his teeth, he pawed Anna towards him, and hooked his mandibles round her throat.

She shoved upwards at his reeking face, but the farther she pushed it away, the farther along it brought her throat for the journey. She was forced to pause when she felt the flesh beneath her chin begin to tear, and to weep profuse tears of thick, coppery blood which flowed sickeningly down into her mouth. But the taste seemed only to excite Esa, and to increase the speed of his shaking jaws; and more likely than not he would have managed to take Anna’s entire head, if Dio Constantín had not found himself able at that moment to break away from the fight, and come to her assistance. He reached down with his hairy wolfen paws, exercised the stubby digits much like the fingers of a hand, and wrenched Esa’s jaws apart. So forceful was this movement that the upper and lower ones snapped completely apart, backwards and upwards like a reverse bear-trap, till Esa’s head was no more than a small mound of bloody pulp, which was quick in the torrent to wash itself over the deck, and mix itself permanently into the
millennia-old bowl of murder and massacre which is the sea.

Anna was rendered utterly disabled by this attack. Dio Constantín left his comrades to the work of subduing Wolach (little headway though they were making), and remained huddled over an insensible Anna, holding her head, and stifling as best he could with his great paw the blood that guzzled from her throat. His massive body shielded her from the wet, and from much of the wind, so that she felt almost as if she were floating, flying through the terrible night . . .

But then there came the thing to which we alluded above, and have not yet told of. The four Narken were losing their battle with Wolach, and were being pushed farther every moment towards the edge of the deck. Dio Constantín was looking quite miserably (the cause of his remarkable sadness, of course, Anna could not fathom) down into Anna’s face. But through the damp and murky darkness there came suddenly the blowing of a high, sharp whistle; and all movement upon the deck ceased for wonder at it.

Dio seemed the only one who wholly understood its significance. He rose up with Anna cradled in his arms, and turned towards the sound. Anna lay with the side of her head resting against the thick fur of his muscled forearm, and squinted through the fog and spray. She thought very much that she could make out a light, there on the black horizon, moving steadily nearer with each moment that passed. Perhaps it was only her imagination (probably it was), but the crescendo of the storm seemed then to reach its
utmost peak; and afterwards to fall sharply, dwindling deeply and quickly, a rapid and converse diminuendo of sound. By the time the purpose of the light and the whistle became apparent, all the sea seemed silent. A small schooner came sailing like an arrow through the mist.