Anna von Wessen (38 page)

XXXIX:

Strength of the Wolf

T
he people of the fortress dined together every night at seven o’clock. Some hours, then, after her speech in the Hall of Magen, Anna joined them there for supper. She was seated at the King’s table between Dio and Griel. Nessa was situated across from her; and for the first time since she had heard of her, Anna saw the dark-haired, blue-eyed Cassandra MacAdam. She sat beside Nessa, looking nervous but not exceedingly so, and glancing all round the great chamber with eyes more curious than fearful. Anna could see that her hand was joined to Nessa’s beneath the table, and that they spoke together almost every moment. Indeed, Anna had not yet seen Nessa so serene – and had never suspected that she would. With Cassie beside her, all of the war and anger seemed to dissipate from her dark eye. It was a most strange phenomenon.

Vaya had chosen to absent herself from the gathering. She knew very well she could not eat what was served her, and was determined not even to attempt it, until the time came that she had no other choice. Without her, Anna was mildly uncomfortable, and felt somewhat out of place. Yet she had never sat before in a room where there flowed so much good fellowship. Dinners amongst the Lumaria were civil (sometimes hardly that), perfunctory things – and like quite everything else which concerned that people, were cold, both in company and in eating. The supper on Anna’s plate was warm, as were the arms and elbows to either side of her. Griel seemed to be growing quickly fond of her, and Dio only smiled all the evening. Even Nessa, much to Anna’s surprise, looked to her politely.

Of a community where there once had dwelt some twelve thousand or more, the Weld was now home to less than fifteen hundred. Fifteen hundred wolves, that was; for there were a goodly number of humans among them, who were either mated to members of the fortress, or who had nowhere else to go, and preferred the ever-present danger of their friends to loneliness. But their ideology as a whole (both wolves and humans alike) was not one which was widely upheld anymore. They believed in two things: and those things were freedom and loyalty. They strove for justice; but that was a thing not always easy to come by, when one was dealing constantly with the repercussions of selfishness and avarice. The world was not content, just as it had never been, with enjoying what it already owned. There was Wolach, and many who were like Wolach, trying always to gather to themselves far more than they needed. There were Trydon and Abrast, and all the American wolves doing the same. 

Call to mind
the view of Raphael Hythloday, on how much land a sovereign should collect to himself in Utopia. There were many things about which he perhaps thought wrongly, and considered too simply for the complex quality of human nature; but in this one respect, we think, he spoke wisdom. Consider it in juxtaposition with the great quantities of land being amassed by Narkul and Lumarian leaders, under the very noses of the humans. Did both races think they would, in this way, somehow conquer the world? Did they think they would call themselves masters of the earth? They forget, though, that none who live upon it can truly call themselves master; for the true master lives far above it, in the very place from which He long ago created it. Hardly anyone in all the world understood this. But the Weldon wolves did.

Many of them had died during the extermination conducted by the Lumaria in the mid-twentieth century, and even more had fled, wanting nothing but to hide themselves, and give up fighting altogether. What people sat here now, talking and laughing and sharing of a simple hot supper, were the children of those who had survived and remained. They had no allies but those who sat beside them. They knew no others to whom they could turn, when the world became a little too violent to bear. They had only themselves and their brothers; but they were strangely happy in this.

Yet Anna looked round at them with marked melancholy. At Drelho there lived a whole thousand – and once Koro had come with nearly the whole of Night House, what chance did the Weldon wolves have? What chance did Anna have to aid them? She knew, knew beyond anything that she would try; but she did not expect to win. 

When the fortress broke up around eight o’clock, and went respectively either to their rest or their nightly entertainments, Nessa sent Cassie ahead of her, and called Anna aside.

“Tomorrow morning,” she said, “meet me in the first training chamber in the East wing.”

Anna nodded, but did not have time to speak; for Nessa had already gone.

~

Anna rose with Vaya in the early morn, and they left their chamber in pursuit of the East wing. They arrived presently in the room which Nessa had appointed, and found her there quite alone.

“As a Lumarian,” Nessa said to Anna, “you are accustomed to weapons. I know you have all sorts. But it’s as a wolf that you must get used to fighting. As a wolf you cannot hold a gun! You must rely on your great strength – the power of your jaws, and the sharpness of your claws.”

She gave, for the first time Anna had seen, a thin smile; and added, “Do not think for a moment that I intend to fight you. I am not proud; and I know very well you could kill me, even if you did not mean to. No – we will do something far more important today.”

“And what is that?”

“You must learn to change your shape at will. I know very well that you can’t.”

“I have tried.”

“I’ve no doubt that you have. But I have been a wolf much longer than you – quite all my life! I can help you to do what you must.”

To recount each moment of their ensuing trials would be too tedious. Nessa tried her very best to explain, and to demonstrate; but Anna could not seem to do what she meant, except upon those occasions that Nessa lost her patience, and incited Anna to wrath.

“But this won’t do!” Nessa cried, running her hands through her pale hair, and making it stand up in all directions. “You cannot rely on your anger! You must control it; you must channel it. You must tell yourself to do it – and then do it! Do it, damn you!”

“Perhaps,” said Vaya dryly from her place in the corner, “you are not the best teacher Anna could have.”

“And what would you know about it? Begone with you, Lumarian!”

“That’s enough!” said Anna. “That’s enough for today.”

In an instant Nessa was standing before her, and holding a rigid finger an inch from her throat. “Enough?” she asked. “You say it’s enough? You come here with your speeches, and your promises – and you give up before the work is done? What will you do, when you are trapped in a corner with Lumaria on all sides of you? What if you find yourself suddenly in your human form, with no weapons to ward them off, and the wolf nowhere in sight? Will you die, and leave us all to finish the fight that you started? Is that what you’ll do? Will you?”

Anna’s angry breath abated, and her flexing limbs stilled. The growl stopped in her throat, and she looked in bewilderment at Nessa.

“That’s not what you want to do, I know,” said Nessa. “But it’s what will happen! Do you see that you must be ready? You must try!”

Anna pressed her back to the cold stone, and closed her eyes. With no origin and no cause, a scene of battle flooded suddenly behind her lids. She saw death, death everywhere around – and she could not change her shape. She stood naked in the freezing wind, with foes drawing near in every direction, and her hands empty of any implement with which to deal them a mortal blow. But then there came a scream – a scream that sounded first inside her head, and then against her ears. It was not the roaring wind. She looked wildly about, and caught sight of Vaya there, pinned to the ground by a multitude of Ephram’s soldiers. They held a sword above her, and pierced it through the skin of her chest, so that the blade just touched her heart. She could not shift away; and she looked to Anna with pleading eyes.

A great surge of warmth filled Anna’s body, and dimmed the shock of the biting wind. Thick fur came to cover her; her back began to bend, with no pain this time; she shot up, up over the heads of her enemies; and next moment they were staring at her in fear. Some turned and ran. The others stood motionless, frozen by terror, simply waiting for her to take their heads.

A howl like a trumpet-blast ripped through her lips, and filled the darkening sky, rebounding from tree to tree and shaking the leaves of the canopy overhead. She sank down on her haunches, and sprang forward to the musical sound of death-screams.

Next thing she knew, the dark forest had vanished from before her eyes, and she was looking again upon the blank walls of the chamber. The echoing screams were no more; but still there was a single voice, raised very high, and positioned just beneath her. It was not a cry of fear, but rather of extreme annoyance. She looked down to see Nessa caught beneath her paw.

Yes, she was irritated; but also she was smiling. “Good, good,” she said roughly. “You’ve done it. Now get off of me!”

They spent the remainder of that day, and all of the next, working to command Anna’s will of her shape. By the following night she was exhausted and worn, but extremely content with her success (the whole of which included two felled walls in the training chamber, and a dark hole in the ceiling made by the top of her own head). She sat on the wooden bench which stretched along the side of the room, mopping her face with a towel. Vaya had just come in to meet her, and was sitting beside her.

“All right, then,” said Nessa. “I suppose you deserve some rest.”

It seemed she was about to say something else, but instead she paused, and adopted a look of deep thought. Perhaps a very deep thought, yes; but also a very quiet one, for Anna could not hear it.

“What is it?” Anna asked her.

“Oh – it’s nothing, really. I only thought of something I should tell you.”

“So tell me!”

“It was my intention to. Even now I am trying – but it’s rather difficult, you see. It seems I do not loathe you as much as I thought.”

Her smile, however, was false, and Anna was uneasy. She looked to Vaya.

“What I think she is trying to say,” Vaya began, “is that you have changed a great deal. Now you are stronger than all of them. It will take many hands to defeat you. But . . .”

“But?”

It seemed she was unable to continue; so Nessa was forced to take up the subject.

“Well,” she said, “now that she’s started it, I suppose I must finish. By gaining the strength of the wolf, you see – you’ve also taken on its vulnerability. Still you are immortal; but you can be killed much more easily, by any wound which pierces a vital organ, or by any which results in significant blood loss. Just as I can. Just as the humans can! You are a fragile little wight, now, just like all the rest of us.”

Anna turned her eyes again to Vaya, but she would not look at her. Anna took her hand, and it remained slack in her own. Nessa looked away uncomfortably, and left the room without another word.

They sat silent for a while on the bench. Their hands clenched the wood between them, and though their fingers were parted by hardly an inch, they did not touch them together. They only sat, each staring at the hand of the other, and thinking thoughts which, for the first time since they had begun to listen, were strangely incoherent to one another, and almost impossible to fasten upon. It was plain to them both, however, that all of this originated with Vaya. Anna frowned as she looked at Vaya’s thin fingers, and wondered why she did not want her to take them in her own. There was a coldness emanating from her very skin, which had nothing at all to do with its usual, bloodless ice. It seemed almost to push against Anna like a physical barrier, driving her farther and farther away against her own will.

She stood without looking at Vaya, and strode to the door. “I’m going to dinner,” she said quietly.

Vaya made her no answer. With a catch in her throat, and a stream of much-resented tears flowing fast down her cheeks, Anna hurried away down the corridor.

~

She sat ruminating moodily all through supper. The buzz of chatter flowed through her right ear and out the left, though with its passage she gleaned absolutely nothing of its subject or composition. The sound only aggravated her.

She had been fingering for nearly an hour a hard circular outline, which pressed against the outer fabric of her trousers’ pocket. Concerning that hard little circle she had had particular intentions which she meant to carry out that very evening; but now she doubted whether really she ought to.

These doubts, however, were extremely difficult to describe. If she had doubted the strength of Vaya’s love for her, well – then she would have been even more oblivious than you yourself can probably confess to be, what with all you have heard and seen thus far. No, it was something rather different.

After the short amount of time which they had spent apart (even before it, probably, if Anna had thought hard enough about it), Anna realised that the quiet coldness was merely an effect, and not the cause of Vaya’s reaction in the training chamber. It had more to do with the pain of ensuring that her own fibres remained inextricably twined with Anna’s – not with any desire to untangle them somehow. So no, Anna did not doubt her love. Occasionally maybe she had trouble believing that its strength could be entirely equal to the fire which was her own (certainly she is not the first person to have thought such a thing, and doubtless Vaya herself had entertained the same selfless notions), but that it lived and raged was something she did not question at all. The thing which she
did
doubt, in fact, had nothing at all to do with Vaya. Or, rather, it did – but this is not making much sense now.