Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves (14 page)

Guy felt very brave now, seated there beside his father’s bay gelding, the only boy in Lamorisse who’d been allowed to see this. But he was frightened, too. He knew what the people said about the awful monsters in the forests. About how bad people lived in those forbidden woods, and in the mountains, too. And it must all be true. As they waited in the woods, Guy had seen something big, with wings, looking down at him from a high perch in the trees, the way a cat watched a bug before it pounced. He had told the Richards, and they had laughed, telling him it was a trick of the wind and the lightning.

But he noted how warily they had looked up into the trees, and suddenly he didn’t feel safe with them anymore. He didn’t feel safe because he knew they were out in the territory where the old broken Frankish castle stood like a bared skeleton on the rocky crags. It was haunted, so they said.

Worse than that, they’d have to cross
the bridge
again on their way home. The bridge over the gully where he had once seen the man with the devil face, down below. The one who had strangely waved for him to come down. And when Guy didn’t because something told him not to, the man had done something terrible to a small animal, laughing all the while, and then pointed up at Guy and promised, without words, that he would get the boy someday and do the same thing to
him.

That bridge was always a scary place now. So scary it made Guy’s belly hurt until he shut his eyes and prayed to Jesus to bring him safely to the other side. And even then he would not look back until the bridge was gone in case the devil-man was there. Pointing at him and laughing.

But now he wasn’t afraid. He was with his father. A great captain, once, in the king’s lancers, who was the most important soldier in the militia of Lamorisse now. Guy drew a deep breath and sat up tall in the saddle.

“Are you going out hunting more monsters now?” he asked his father.

Jacques Moreau cleared his throat and chuckled dryly.
“Non, mon fils,
we have our quota for tonight.”

* * * *

“Jacques—a moment here,
s’il vous plait.”

Moreau instructed his son to remain mounted and rejoined his companions.
“Oui?”

Darcy Lavelle stood in the doorway of the Cochieu farmhouse, alternately sipping ale and tending to the reloading of his pistols. He looked to the boy and then modulated his voice, affecting a casual air, to Jacques Moreau.

“Evidence, we have here,
mon ami
—hard evidence that evil things are about to unleash some new outrage in the province. This be no natural beast, I think we all agree—”

Moreau was nodding his head glumly, his benumbed mind trying to formulate their next action even as he hoped some other would suggest it. Why hadn’t Darcy Lavelle assumed leadership after the magistrate had died and the council leader had been arrested? Decorated cavalry trooper…veteran of numerous bloody campaigns. Lavelle had spurned the position, flatly declaring himself a better follower than a leader. Now he held Moreau’s old job as craft guild spokesman. What was the difference?

A fool’s question…

“So what do you think?” Moreau asked, gratefully accepting a mug of ale from a red-eyed Hercule Cochieu.

“Take this thing back with us, of course,” Lavelle replied. “The more who see it the better.”

Moreau found himself nodding numbly again.

They loaded the dead vigilante onto his horse, wrapping him
cap-a-pie
against prying eyes until his family could be approached. Then they nervously lashed the mangled werewolf’s grisly hands and feet and carried it by pole to a wagon, similarly obscuring it from view with a coarse shroud.

They took a late, bracing meal of stew and hard bread, outfitted the Cochieu family for travel, and departed the way they had come, through the forest and back to Lamorisse.

“A victory,” Wyatt Ault, the one-time mercenary, told Moreau as he cantered up beside him. “Victory over evil—that’s how you view this, Jacques. To be followed by many more, one hopes, until this Farouche filth is scoured from French soil. Don’t worry about responsibility. We share that.”

Moreau cast him an uneasy smile.

Nadine Cochieu swung her horse over to join them, a somber set to her pretty face, making her look years older. “I suppose you know what you’re doing, gentils, but you can’t just ride back into Lamorisse with that…thing.”

“What are you saying, Nadine?”

“Monsieur Moreau,” she said in a conspiratorial voice, “you have a dead monster in that wagon now but—God forgive us all, the Devil will make us pay. Have you given no thought to what will happen when the sun rises? Tarry here until morn, and
then
make your plan.”

“You’re saying you know who that creature will become?” Moreau asked her gravely, slowing the entourage.

Nadine Cochieu blinked at him through the rain, which had by now diminished to a thick mist. “You mean not one of you will admit to knowing who that is, or what he came for?” Her eyes disengaged from their uneasy faces, and she pulled away.

Consulting a while, they decided to see what did indeed transpire when the sun’s rays broke the horizon, though there was both little doubt and a reluctance to believe.

A few anxious hours later, the gray haze lifted by stages over the white-capped peaks to the east. And the Wunderknechten band witnessed for the first time the transformation of a lycanthrope, as it resolved to its human form.

The children were kept at a distance as the phenomenon transpired with diabolical languor. A new appreciation for things beyond human ken dawned with the breaking day.

Nadine Cochieu had not watched, knowing what it was that caused them to gasp and turn away in revulsion and private prayer, buttressing themselves against the new higher order of fear to be faced in the near future. She pushed her snorting mare past them to peer down into the wagon, an ugly scowl twisting her lips.

“He came for me…”

Her father, Hercule, uttered a gasp of revulsion. But no one spoke for a time. They shuffled about the area aimlessly, two men at last replacing the rough-textured mantas over the mangled corpse of Rene Farouche, the late minister of commerce in the province.

Wyatt Ault sat astride his big destrier, snicking his rapier in and out of its sheath. “Well…what now?”

“Can’t take him back to town,” one man advanced.
“Mon Dieu
—a
Farouche!”

“Oui—
a
dead
Farouche!” Darcy Lavelle blurted. “And don’t forget it. They die like anything else,
whatever
shapes their black magic lets them assume.” He turned to Jacques Moreau. “We can’t just toss him out onto the road…”

Moreau stood with his arms crossed over his chest, his jaw working inside his cheek. He projected pensiveness, but inside his thoughts were a-boil, and he prayed it didn’t show. He felt like fleeing again. That familiar call to flight—to save himself first and foremost—framed itself in his mind. He felt trapped, strangled, pressed into a tight corner. Recalled the stricture of that tiny mountain adit again. Little Guy…calling to him for help. Crying.

Cold sweat formed on his brow, and his chest constricted.

But then Guy was at his side. He looked down at his son, saw that expression of absorption he knew would lock this moment into memory, to be recalled in some latter day when such moments would be measured for value and truth and fondness. He placed his arm around the boy’s shoulders and squared his own, drawing himself up tall, as befit a newly appointed leader.

“All right, Wunderknechten,” he said, sighing heavily, “get the shovels. We choose a discreet spot, bury him
sans ceremonie,
and mark the place well with holy warding symbols.”

“What?”

“Bury
him—
why?”

“For safekeeping,” Moreau answered, “until we can substantiate our claim about him. Until we have the proper support for what we must do next.”

“That’s crazy,
n’est-ce pas?”

“Crazy, perhaps. But am I or am I
not
the magistrate?”

The troop demurred a moment, then Wyatt Ault shrugged and nodded, beckoning for two men to help him with the task.

CHAPTER THREE

Claude Aucoin rose customarily early, brushed the cheek of his sleeping wife, Anne, and dressed, foregoing a morning meal for the peace and solitude of his shop, where he would spend an hour on the obsession that had of late given his life its sole meaning.

He passed the bedchamber of his daughter, unable to control the urge to scowl, though there was no one about to appreciate his boorishness in the pre-dawn gloom.

Aucoin, a gaffer—Lamorisse’s most celebrated craftsman at the art of glassblowing—entered his ground-floor shop and prepared a gather of molten glass in the furnace. Taking up his four-foot-long pipe, he began shaping the delicate spigot of the
cristallo
wine fountain he was determined to replicate.

The fountain had been his greatest achievement, the hallmark of his artistry. His wife had broken it in a careless accident years before. Now, amidst the debris of his shattered dreams and injured pride, he had taken to restoring some small, symbolic paean to the happiness of yesterday.

There came a gentle knock at the rear door. Francoise’s hand. There was no mistaking it. He ignored her. A second knock, more insistent. Still he paid it no heed.

His daughter poked her head through the crack, her dark hair tousled, her large, eloquent brown eyes still strained from disturbed sleep.

“What do you want? I’m busy here,” Aucoin said gruffly, intently eyeing the delicate shape he had formed at the far end of the pipe.

“A visitor,
mon pere,”
she whispered urgently. “A rider has come from Mme. Ault. She says there will be a meeting this morning at the
auberge.
Is it the Wunderknechten?”

“Never mind. What time?”

“Nine bells—papa, I wish to go along with you.”

“Forget it.”

“But I—this business is
mine,
as well—”

“I said to
forget
it,” he growled, slamming down the pipe and gripping the table edge tensely. He glanced at the bubbling mess he’d made of the nascent spigot-form. “Now see what I’ve done—you—” He stilled the grinding of his jaw. “Tell the messenger to tell Mme. Ault I’ll be there. Then rouse your mother and be about your chores.”

Francoise stood trembling at the doorjamb a moment, seeming on the edge of words or tears. Perhaps both.

Aucoin looked at her, his eyes flickering ever so slightly.

“Au revoir,”
he said with quiet finality.

* * * *

Gabrielle Chabot bounded down the stairs of the inn, passed her father as he made his way back toward the kitchen, and gave him a quick, playful brush on a stubbled cheek with her lips.

“Never mind that now,” Henri told her, affecting a bluff air and a mock threat with the back of his hand. “I’ve a score of things for you to do…” He related them, along with the reason.

Gabrielle was at once caught up by her father’s urgency. She animatedly went about the business of preparing the
auberge
for the meeting. Hazy dawn light slanted across the eddying dust motes as Gabrielle threw open the shutters.

She started when she caught sight of the figure slumped over the bar.

“Reynald Labossiere—have you no work today?” she asked sharply, miffed at being taken by surprise. “Does Henri know you’re here?”

“Oui,
your father let me in,” the stoop-shouldered man replied, a bit slurred. “Relax. God be with you this morning, my child.”

She hummed in petulant rejoinder, then began sweeping the floor vigorously, raising dust devils she hoped would dislodge him from his stool. “Let’s hope so,” she said after a time. “Let’s hope He’s with
all
of us.”

Gabrielle eyed the mug of ale Labossiere sipped distractedly. “A poor start for any day,” she said, scowling.

“Perhaps a poor day is starting,” he replied.

She stopped sweeping and regarded him from the corner of an eye as she arranged tables and chairs. He was not at all unpleasant to look at, though he was probably twice her age. But circumstance and self-loathing had bent and twisted him like some fine golden figurine melted in an uncaring crucible. She had often admired the scar that coursed his cheek, though he would never speak of its origin. It sometimes made him look noble, courageous. Now, tufted by a scruff of beard, it merely made him look vagrant.

He was a man who had prematurely retired from the strife of mainstream life. He took refuge in a renewed religious faith, though in a grim, pathetic way, wrapping Christianity about him like sackcloth.

“What are you doing here so early anyway?” Gabrielle pressed, her tone laced with scorn. “Your bed too lonely a place?”

“That’s hardly proper business for a child to discuss.”

“I’m
not
a child,
faineant
—idler! I’m woman enough to know a man who’s been cuckolded without being
man
enough to do anything about it—”

“Stop that now,” Labossiere commanded, his voice rising with emotion. “What sort of thing is that for a—? You know nothing of what you speak.” His words drifted off, dwindling to an echo in the depths of his mug as he returned to his sipping.

“Oh,
non?”
she went on. “Faye—
etourdi
—thoughtless, selfish wench! I don’t know which of you I despise more—”

Gabrielle caught her breath, her face flushing with embarrassment, and turned her back to him. Her nails dug into her flesh as she stood trembling slightly with arms crossed over her bosom. “Monsieur Labossiere, I am sorry…”

“Forget it, girl. It’s all right. It’s all right. I forgive you…”

Gabrielle made a tiny, mad whimpering sound in her throat. Her voice was once again laced with bitterness. “Of course you do. Just as you forgive Faye, and God knows what lovers she’s known, and the monsters who control our lives—”

“We are Christians, Gaby. That’s our lot. It’s difficult, but we must forgive our enemies, those who do us ill. We are being chastised. There is a terrible burden of penance upon us. Temporal punishment for our sins, which we must bear.”

“Hell,” Gabrielle swore, hopping lithely up onto the bar beside Labossiere, but at once arranging her skirts modestly. “These aren’t ancient days, Reynald. These invaders aren’t the Romans. We’re not so small that we need to—to embrace our fate by walking into the arena singing. By walking willingly into the beasts’ den.”

“I once spoke like you,” he said, smiling wanly. “Life changes that. Beware how you live, Gabrielle…”

“Ahh.” She waved at him scoffingly, rubbed her itching nose. “They might as well be the Romans,” she went on, a curious meditative note entering her voice. “They are not from this world…”

He glanced at her sharply. “More visions?”

She chortled. “You’re the only one who ever asks about my stupid dreams. You know what I dream of late? I dream of a hero who comes and sweeps me into his arms and rides off with me, away from this damned place…”

Reynald’s expression softened. “What does he look like?”

A puzzled gleam crept into her eyes. “That’s funny. He looks different at different times. Sometimes he’s even…scary. My hero…” Her countenance darkened. “And I dream of other things, not so pleasant. Castles, besieged. People screaming and dying in the midst of blood and thunder and awful sounds and—and I’ve dreamt of you, Reynald—”

“Moi?”

“Oui…
you’re not everything you claim to be. Or maybe…even
who
you claim to be…” She shook her head abruptly, dispersing her reverie. “Do you know of the meeting? The Wunderknechten meeting here today?”

“That’s why I’m here,” he intoned grimly. “Rumor has it they’ve done violence against the powers that reign. That’s wrong, you know. And they may contemplate more. So I must do what I can to make them see the terrible consequences their actions may bring upon us all…”

* * * *

“You
buried
him?”

“It
—we buried
it,”
corrected one of the party that had battled the werewolf at the Cochieu farm.

“Keep your voices down,
s’il vous plait,”
Jacques Moreau requested, offering his palms in a cautioning gesture.

“You killed and buried a
Farouche?”

“And marked the spot well so that we might recover him when we need to,” Moreau assured, peering up to the
lunette
above the stairs in the inn. Henri Chabot, the concierge, leaned against the windowsill, watching for unwelcome customers. He shook his head reassuringly and spat another cherry pit into his hand.

“We marked it with a crucifix,” Darcy Lavelle, the new guild leader, added. “There’ll be nothing rising from that grave until we’re ready to open it.”

The gathering shuffled uneasily amid outbreaks of nervous coughing.

“You’re
sure
of who it was?” someone breathed.

Moreau sighed. “There was no mistaking.”

The
cure,
Father Giroux, sat with slumping shoulders, shaking his head mournfully. “There was no other way?”

“Violence begets violence,” Reynald Labossiere pronounced loudly from where he sat at the bar beside Gabrielle.

“I tried to tell Jacques that this might not be the best way of handling—” Wyatt Ault began, but Darcy came to Moreau’s rescue.

“Of course it was the best way,” he declared. “What were we supposed to do with the body until the duke or some representative of the king could be brought here? The fewer who know, the better, for now. And
Pere
Giroux, what would you have had us do—
tame
him? Teach him to do tricks? That’s what the Farouche have been doing with
us.
How many dance to their tune because they fear to oppose their evil magic? Is your Church not fundamentally committed to dealing with black magic,
cure?
The Farouche use our own political gamesmanship to control us. What is the officially sanctioned faith in Burgundy these days anyway? Are we Huguenot or Catholic?” He scratched his head vigorously, reestablished his composure, and sat down with a wave of his hand.

“We are Christians,” Labossiere said. “And as Wunderknechten, that is all that matters. And Christians are bound to obey the existing political order—”

“So long as it does not confound their faith,” Moreau interjected. “And if we follow the Farouche
political order
much longer, there will be no living Christians within a hundred miles of Dijon! And they won’t stop there. Isn’t that so, Wyatt?” He saw the ex-mercenary, now a tanner, shrug dolefully. Wyatt Ault’s wife, Marie, hugged his arm encouragingly beside him.

Henri Chabot hissed them to silence from up in the
lunette.
The doors presently were opened to admit two women. One was Darcy’s wife, Blanche, a charming, compassionate woman who was one of the more cherished souls in Lamorisse. Her kindly nature and blithe spirit always seemed to triumph over adversity. And she’d known her share. A congenital defect had left her clubfooted. Yet no one in town associated Blanche with any state of debilitation, so thoroughly did the woman’s spirit rise above her difficulty.

Only her husband ever took note of her handicap, and then, only in antic affection.

“Come now, Blanche, over here,” Darcy Lavelle called out in mock impatience. “Chabot’s three-legged mule out there gets around faster than you.”

Lavelle was archly booed into submission, and Blanche moved beside him and gave him a short, sharp punch in the arm before kissing him lightly in greeting.

The second arriving woman evoked many sympathetic smiles and a degree of indulgence that might have marked
her
for one denied cosmic justice. This was Yvonne Dusseault, whose husband, Jean, was a Farouche sympathizer who had spurned his faith and was said to be seen in the forests deep in the night, engaged in foul rituals endorsed by the clan. Yvonne’s militant support of the Wunderknechten was a byword, and despite her seemingly precarious position, there was a special reason for trusting her: Jean had often been seen cavorting with an avowed witch. A seductress said to be possessed of the shape-shifting powers of the evil Farouche brothers.

The women were brought up to date. As they reacted to the news—Blanche with deep concern, Yvonne with seething anger—Father Giroux began to ramble.

“King Henry—this is all his fault, you know. Nothing like this ever happened in Burgundy before—before he took to wife Marie de Medicis,
n’est-ce pas?
That’s the story, if truth be known. Henry of Navarre dared to use the controversy over Divine revelation for political ends. He opened the way…”

“You may be right,” Moreau allowed absently, wrapped up in his own fear of failing them as their new magistrate. The Wunderknechten were tending toward defiance. And there would be no turning back after the slaying of the werewolf, Rene Farouche. Barring military intervention—and that was a remote hope in Burgundy under present conditions—they would soon be pitted against a powerful, frightening enemy. The true lords of the province—beings of unknown origin who stalked the night and plied their dark magic. “But as for what we should do next, I—?” Moreau went on uncertainly.

But then Henri Chabot was calling sharply from the landing.

“Aucoin! Claude Aucoin—it’s your daughter—”

The glassblower lurched to his feet, brows knit with confused rancor. A man at the door nervously admitted Francoise Aucoin.

Francoise swallowed when she saw the hostile looks aimed her way. She looked small and intimidated. Rather overdressed for the weather in the capuchin whose lapels she clutched at her breast. Her eyes moistened when she caught sight of her father’s reddening face in the crowd, but she squared her shoulders and strode into the
auberge.
The door closed softly behind her.

“I told you—” her father started.

“I know what you said, papa. I came anyway,” she told him, a stubborn tear forming in the corner of an eye.

Gabrielle breathed in noisy exasperation at the bar and shifted into a posture full of adolescent petulance.

Blanche Lavelle stood and motioned to Francoise. “Come, sit here, dear. You’re as welcome in this company as any who fear the Lord—”

“Some fear Him more than others,” someone blurted acidly.

“That’s enough of that,” Jacques Moreau said hotly. “She’s here now, and that means she shares our concerns. That’s all I care about.” There were a few dissenting murmurs, but in the downcast eyes of many in the audience Moreau found a tingle of satisfaction. He was glad he had come to the girl’s aid.

But Francoise had not come to be defended. “I need no help from you, Jacques Moreau. I’ve come under my own power, God’s own power, if He be with me. Where is the girl from the farm?”

Nadine Cochieu stood and eyed Francoise narrowly.

“Oui?”

“You are Nadine?”

“And you are Francoise. So?” Nadine radiated hostility, unsure of why she had been singled out.

“Was
it Rene Farouche?”

Nadine seemed shaken to hear the name pronounced again. She nodded gravely.