Storm Wolf (4 page)

He felt the clouds beneath him rumble with the ongoing thunder of both the stampeding cattle and the drunkard stumbling about below. He could see flashes of lightning through the folds of the clouds beside and above him.

“How can I go on? Is there no end to this storm? How can I ever defeat it?” Alexei asked himself, struggling to his four wolf feet. He gasped and choked, trying to keep breathing even as his aching ribs demanded that he stop trying. “How did Grandfather survive this?”

Another thunderclap exploded above him. Lightning shot past him towards the earth, and in the brief tear it made in the clouds he could see the fields of his village far, far below. The wheat was being pummeled into the mud. He could easily imagine the starvation that would come in the wake of the ruined harvest. He gasped again, his ribs heaving.

“I cannot let my neighbors starve!” he told himself. “I cannot let my family starve!” He pulled himself back onto his haunches and jumped into the storm above him again.

Climbing further into the storm, his claws scrabbling against the clouds as the way became steeper and steeper, he could hear the cattle bellowing below as the giant kept tormenting and terrifying them and driving them on to cause more havoc on the earth below. Off to one side, he saw the drunkard again, now even more drunk on whatever he was sipping from his jug, colliding with the clouds and unleashing more thunder and rain and wind every time he knocked into the wall of clouds around him.

Alexei could see one of the storm hags through the mist above him. She was crouching down, her arms outstretched, as if waiting to catch something—or someone?—she couldn’t quite see.

“
Libahunt!”
she screamed. “Think you can get past me again, do you?” She moved slightly from side to side. “Get past me and my sister, now?” He heard another cry and saw the other storm hag to her left, also crouched down with her arms outstretched. Their fingers nearly touched.

The two hags were clearly trying to stop him from getting past them.

“But why? What is beyond them that is so important?” Alexei asked himself.

“But why should you want to discover what is beyond the two old wretches?” a voice asked. Out of the wind-riven clouds stepped a woman’s figure, but this woman was not old and withered like the hags but young and lithe, and wrapped not in a shroudlike cloak but a translucent robe seemingly made of moonlight.

This woman’s hair was long and flowing, and although the wind was swirling around them, neither her robe nor her hair seemed disturbed in the least.

She reached one hand out toward Alexei. “Come with me,
libahunt
,” she quietly urged him. “Leave those old women to their games. There are other games to play together, you and I, games that do not leave the players hurt and injured but happy and begging for more.” She reached up with her other hand and undid the clasp that held her robe closed. It fluttered to her feet before the wind ripped it away.

She stood, still reaching out to him. Lovely. Delightful. Everything in him that was still a man wanted to go with her and leave the hags and the stampeding cattle and the giant there in the storm clouds while he and the young woman went off together to enjoy themselves on a sunny afternoon somewhere else. Anyplace but here.

“Why hesitate?” the beauty asked him. “Wouldn’t anyplace be a better place than this one? Wouldn’t any company be better than the company of the hags? And I do not simply offer you any company, but the most delightful company…” She stepped toward him, her hips swaying. She smiled and Alexei felt a gentle warmth wash across and through him.

He stepped towards her. She reached down and ran her fingers through the fur along his shoulder. He shivered with delight.

“Come.” She turned. “Let us go discover the heart of joy and gladness elsewhere, my gentle
libahunt
, and leave this storm to itself.”

He nodded. “Discover the heart of joy and gladness elsewhere,” he murmured. “Leave this… this storm…”

Then it struck him. He knew what was above and beyond the crouching hags with their outstretched fingers.

“The heart of the storm!” he shouted, leaping up into the air and turning back towards the hags. “Kill whatever is at the heart of the storm and the storm will die!”

He heard the young woman scream in fury and defeat behind him, her cry trailing off like a scarf torn away by the wind and snaking through the air, never to return to its owner. Glancing behind him, Alexei saw the young beauty shrivel and vanish.

“Think you to escape us?” hissed the hags as he neared them.

In response, he charged straight for the hag on the left and closed his great jaws around her face. She cried out and dug her clawlike fingers into his shoulders. Alexei flipped himself over her head, tearing away most of her face with his teeth. Great ribbons of gray blood poured into the wind. The other hag jumped at him, but Alexei somersaulted further into the heart of the storm and the two hags fell upon each other, tumbling down through the clouds below them.

Alexei rolled to a stop, dropping the bits and strips of the hag’s flesh from his mouth. He gasped, looking around him, trying to see through the clouds and the wind what lay here at the heart of the storm. Thunder exploded and the wind howled in a burst around him. He crept along slowly to one side, looking both before him and behind him, above and below.

Wind struck him again. Lightning streaked past. He began to realize that the wind and thunder and lightning all seemed to be pulsating together in a common rhythm, and within the howling of the wind he heard another howling, a pair of voices heaving and grunting, crying out and roaring.

He hunched down and crept forward through a curtain of cloud. There, at the heart of the storm, in a bed of black-green storm clouds, two cloud giants were making love.

But these cloud giants were an elderly, angry couple. The old woman, her breasts sagging and her face wizened so that she seemed older than the world itself, sat astride her lover, shouting without words as he roared and grunted, his long beard caught in the wind that circled around them. Thunder and lightning and rain and wind all streamed from this bed, crushed from the cloud mattress by the thrusting and heaving of the giants attempting to pleasure themselves even as they unleashed the storm that was destroying the farms and fields on the earth below.

The old man thrust his hips up toward the old woman, roaring something that Alexei could not understand. The old woman atop him slapped his face and screamed. Neither seemed to be enjoying their lovemaking, but both seemed trapped in the bed, unable to do anything else. She slapped the old man again and forced her hips down toward his. They cried out in ecstasy and fury, thunder echoing their cries all the way down through the clouds to the farmers below. Lightning writhed like snakes in the blankets, trying to escape the unhappy couple in the bed.

Alexei stood there, staring at the pair, trying to understand everything he was seeing.

“Is this the All-Father and the All-Mother?” he wondered. “The pair who made the world in the beginning? How can I kill them to stop the storm? Is it even possible to simply distract them? Will the storm stop then? What can I do?”

Then the old woman roared again and arched her back and flung her hands down behind her, rocking back and forth, causing the whole sky to tremble. Lightning tumbled from the cloud sheets and rain cascaded out between the sheets as well, nearly washing Alexei from the sky. The old man turned his head and seemingly noticed Alexei watching them. He said something, the sky rumbling, and reached toward Alexei. The old woman, still shuddering, turned to look in his direction as well and Alexei suddenly felt pinned by both their gazes.

“No,” Alexei muttered. “No, this cannot be…” The old woman leaned over and reached out, scooping him up in her palm and bringing him close to her face. A foul stench washed over him, making him cough and choke and gag. Her breath was the smell of rotting corpses in the summer, of rotting reeds in the mud of the marshes in the spring, the rotting meat of dead animals left in the woods by hunters or bears.

Alexei shuddered, struggling to slip out of her grasp. But then she opened her mouth and swallowed him whole.

He tumbled down through the darkness. More hideous winds met him, smells of things he could not identify but that he knew were dead and rotting within the old woman. He felt the slime and mud of her throat as she swallowed him and felt her windpipe closing around him as he was drawn down toward her stomach.

“No! This is not the All-Mother!” he shouted in his mind, wolf roars bursting from his mouth. “She is the Lady of the Dead… she is Death itself!”

He reached out with his paws to stop sliding down further. His claws scraped her windpipe. He could hear her rumblings of complaint and could feel her shift her weight, beginning again to rock back and forth atop the old man.

“I have to get out!” Alexei demanded. He could not let himself slip into her stomach and be trapped in the gullet of Death with all those things that he could smell. In the darkness he could no longer tell which way was up or which was down. He just knew he had to get out.

He dug with his claws and nipped with his teeth. The cloud body around him had substance similar to a human body yet different. He dug more strongly, stopping his inexorable sliding toward Death’s stomach, and pale threads of the now familiar gray blood of the storm creatures seeped in around him. He nipped harder, pulling bits of flesh from Death’s windpipe. He heard her cough, far away. He felt her shudder as she patted her chest.

Her hips rocked again and he felt himself fall again, ever closer to her stomach. He scraped at her windpipe, tugging with his teeth, even ripping bits of her flesh out. More gray blood seeped in around him, making his prison both slicker in his descent to her stomach and easier to wriggle about in. He wedged a forelimb out of her windpipe, feeling it lodge beside what might be her lung. He could feel the inhalation and deflation of something. Then he tore a larger hole in her windpipe and was able to get his other forelimb out. A bit more work, and his head was halfway through the bloody hole he had torn.

Her hip rocking intensified. She coughed and swallowed, and Alexei felt himself slip back toward her stomach.

“Does she know what’s going on?” he wondered, struggling to keep himself wedged out between her lungs. The blood was getting in his eyes, covering his paws and claws, making it harder to tear away at the cloud flesh in front of him.

She coughed again and he was engulfed by a wave of filth from below.

“I must get out,” he wheezed. “Now!”

Alexei braced his hind legs against the back of her windpipe, held his breath, and pushed himself forward.

Nothing. He was stuck in the bloody mucus of her windpipe.

He tried again.

Nothing. The blood and bits of flesh were getting into his snout, making it difficult to breathe. He nipped and tore at the hole he had made and braced his back legs for one last attempt.

He thought of Grete, back in their home. He thought of their new baby. If he were trapped and died here, his family would never know what had happened. Grete would think he had run off. Abandoned her. Most of the villagers would shun her after that. Her life depended on his escape as much as his own did.

Death rocked more forcefully. He could hear her cry in rage and passion and pain.

Maybe he could use her rocking on her hips?

“I must escape!” Flexing his haunches to match the rhythm of her hips, he roared and jumped.

Alexei burst out of Lady Death just below her sternum. Blood and cloud flesh exploded around him. He tumbled into the roaring wind and onto the chest and beard of the old man.

Lightning burst around them and old Lady Death, her windpipe punctured and her torso torn open, looked down at him and her cloud body faded away.

As she faded, the clouds around them dispersed. The old man unraveled and the bed on which he was lying dissolved. Lightning flickered and was gone. In a matter of moments, the terrible storm that had raged around the lovemaking of Lady Death and her consort was gone. The sky was gray and filled with clouds, but the clouds were impotent now.

Alexei wheezed and gasped, trying to catch enough air into his lungs, and then slowly trotted the long way back down through the clouds that remained to Grete and their village.

“Grandfather, you would be proud!” Alexei smiled. He had not betrayed his grandfather Edvin’s trust.

It was a bad winter that season, followed by a worse spring. Tremendous blizzards came, one after the other, almost one a week throughout the winter months, and then drenching rains in the spring that were intent on causing floods and attempting to wash away the villagers’ homes. Alexei had to don the skin many times. He did not always find Lady Death at the heart of the storms, but there was always a giant, a serpent, a hag, or some monstrous entity at the heart of each storm. Alexei learned to destroy each sort of storm monster and the storm would disperse each time.

Everyone had known his grandfather Edvin had been the village werewolf, but because he had hinted that Alexei should keep his ownership of the skin secret, he thought it best to say nothing about his role in driving away the storms, even to his beloved Grete. It pained him to go out in the storms, lying to her to explain his absences. But she grew used to it and stopped asking where Alexei was going when the sky grew dark.