The Wolf Age (39 page)

"What difference does it make what the month's called?" Rokhlenu asked Morlock.

"Nothing, except I find Brenting easier to pronounce."

"Are you joking? With that lippy growling bibbly sound at the beginning of the word?"

"You can say it."

"Of course I can say it, but why should I have to? I'm not an ape hanging by my feet from a tree branch. What's so hard to say about Uyaarwuionien? It practically sings its way out of your mouth."

"Not my mouth. I still haven't mastered the vowels of Sunspeech, let alone Moonspeech. Yesterday I asked a citizen selling grain in the marketplace whether she would sell me a pound of wheat flour and she started to take her clothes off."

"Oh. Oh, I see." In Sunspeech, the word luiunhiendhi meant "flour ground from wheat" whereas luunhendhe was an abrupt and rather intimate invitation involving another type of seed entirely. "Still, it's promising that she was so eager to go along. Did you get anywhere with her?"

"I got my flour eventually, if that's what you mean."

It was not what Rokhlenu meant at all. Like many males about to mate for life, he was eager to see his friends married off also, or at least happily settled. Morlock was an awkward prospect in this line.

"Well-pronounce it any way you want, as long as you're there. The act needs witnesses, and I want you to be mine."

"I'm honored, old friend," Morlock said formally, then added, "What should I bring?"

"Just yourself."

"Hm." Morlock looked unhappy. After a moment he said, "Rokhlenu."

"Morlock."

"I think our friendship has passed the point where we waste time being polite to each other?"

"Sometime on day two, I'd say. Why?"

"I remind you that I have never been to a mating of werewolves. If a gift is customary, I would prefer to bring a gift, polite protestations notwithstanding."

"Yes, I see. But I mean what I say, Morlock. When a First Wolf mates, or anyone with a lot of bite, really, it's the custom to not give gifts to the happy couple. They are supposed to be too ghost-bitingly wealthy to need the guests' assistance. We really only want you to be there."

"I will be." Morlock looked closely at him, a faint smile on his face. "You say `happy couple' as if you mean it."

Rokhlenu shrugged and threw a chair at his old friend. Morlock caught it neatly-with his right hand, Rokhlenu noticed with a pang; he hardly ever moved the left hand anymore unless he had to. "I do mean it, I guess," Rokhlenu admitted. "Sad, isn't it?"

"Sad? No. Tragic perhaps."

"Tragic?"

"Happiness is usually tragic."

"It is?"

Morlock twirled the chair nervously in his fingers. He was no longer smiling. "I may be using the wrong words. The word I am thinking of in my native language implies no criticism."

"Now who's being polite? Get out and don't come back until you want to."

Morlock smiled, nodded, threw the chair back at him, and left.

"Your friend has been life-mated," Wuinlendhono said sagely, when Rokhlenu told her about the conversation later.

"Morlock? Married? Impossible."

"I'm sure his wife came to the same conclusion, at some point."

"Don't put the snarl on my old friend."

"He knows stuff about marriage that you don't, is what I'm saying, really. He has a sense of what you're getting into."

"I'm not getting into a what. I'm getting into a who."

"There's a what and a who. The who is your mate; the what is the marriage itself. There's usually trouble with one or the other."

"You worry too much about trouble. What happens can be dealt with. What never happens, you never have to deal with."

"Very philosophical. But I've got enough trouble to worry me. If these parfumiers don't come up with a decent wedding scent I may have to be mated wearing garlic instead of honor-teeth."

"Suits me. That or your natural scents: what could be more intoxicating?"

"It's not for you, clod. If you think I'm going to appear before what passes for the gentry in this bug-bitten swampy suburb without a decent wedding scent you ... you can ..."

"Think again? Bite you? Whistle up my tail?"

"You may not finish my sentences for me until we're mated and old."

"I can't wait to get started."

The waiting was hard, and became harder as the day got closer.

The day before the mating, grim news came from the city. Rokhlenu's father and two of his brothers had been killed in a night-theft while they were working as rope winders. His other brothers were missing; no one knew where they were-or, at least, if they knew, they would not say.

The messenger came to him just before sunset, and he went immediately to Wuinlendhono. He found her lying in her sleep chamber, just waking up from her afternoon sleep. Sitting down beside her sleeping cloak, he told her all he had heard.

"They can say night-thieves," he said. "And maybe they were nightthieves. But Rywudhaariu, that god-licking old gray-muzzle, he sent them. This is his work."

"It's a good guess. When did this all take place?"

"Seven months ago."

"You were on the fifth floor of the Vargulleion. There was nothing you could do."

"I know," Rokhlenu said, but he still felt guilty. He felt the shame survivors sometimes feel. "I think we should cancel the mating."

"Rokhlenu. Beloved. We will not cancel the mating."

"My father is dead. My brothers are dead."

"No deader now than they were yesterday."

"But now I know. If they were your kith, you would understand."

"I do understand. No, let me show you something, stalwart."

She rolled out of her sleeping cloak and grabbed a great heavy codex that was lying on a nearby chair. It was the prisoner book they had taken from the Vargulleion.

"I am not in here, by the way," she said, looking over the volume at him with her night-black eyes. "Evidently they didn't consider me a prisoner. But look at this."

Her forefinger rested on an entry; he read it over her shoulder. A prisoner named Slenginhuiuo. The crime was adultery. The dates of admission and discharge were illegible, but the prisoner was discharged as dead. Annotations in ideogrammatic Moonspeech added that the body was unfit for use as animal fodder and should be chopped up for fertilizer on the plantations.

"My mother," Wuinlendhono said. "I found this a few days ago. I hadn't wanted to look for it. I wanted to believe that he forgave her at last, that he sold her into some wild pack, that she was growing old licking someone else's cubs in the empty lands. But now I know. I know that she is dead. He had them torture her until she died."

"And you say we should be mated anyway."

"This is why we must be mated. Our families are gone. Our pasts are gone. All we have is each other, the present, and the future. Grieve. Plan vengeance. Do what you must. But tomorrow you will mount me as your mate. I need you."

If she had said (as he half expected her to say), be sensible, the plans are made, I finally have chosen my mating scent, we have bought expensive food and smoke which will spoil if it is not used, be sensible, all the invitations have been spoken, we have responsibilities to others, what will people think, be sensible-if she had said any of that, or anything like it, he would have left her forever. But the words she actually spoke tolled in his heart like a bell; he knew he could never leave her. She and no other was his life-mate.

"Need you, too," he grumbled.

"Oh, you golden-tongued persuader."

So Rokhlenu's mood was unexpectedly chaotic as he donned his wedding shirt the next day in the late afternoon. He was vibrating with hope and longing for Wuinlendhono; nothing could change that. But he was shaken by waves of grief and anger and loneliness, too. Somehow, no matter what he had done and where he had been, he had always seen himself returning to his family's den and telling his tale to them and listening to others from them as he lay by his brothers and father on the hearth before the long fireplace. Now they were dead, and that part of him was dying, like a gangrenous limb.

He stood in the little sleeping closet they had built for him in a corner of the irredeemables' barracks. A male was supposed to be mated from his parents' lair, the home where he grew up. But if that place still existed, it was just a place, a hole in the cliffs above Nekkuklendon mesa. The people who gave it meaning, who made it home, were dead. This place was just a place. He could still smell the sawdust from its making. But if he'd lived here for a hundred years, it still wouldn't be home.

"Chief," a hesitant voice broke in on his thoughts, "your friends are here."

Rokhlenu raised his head and saw that the door to his sleeping closet was open. In the doorway stood claw-fingered Lekkativengu.

"Good news," he said heavily, and moved toward the door. Lekkativengu stepped hastily out of the way, but Rokhlenu grabbed him by the shoulder before he had retreated entirely.

"You're in charge here, after I'm gone," he said.

"I know, Chief. Thanks."

They both knew it was a consolation prize; Rokhlenu had picked Yaarirruuiu to be the reeve of his campaign band. Lekkativengu had never really bitten through the bone as Olleiulu's replacement. Now that Rokhlenu had tasted real grief he was less inclined to condemn Lekkativengu as a scatterwit club-juggler. But he needed someone he could trust to watch his back in the long days and nights ahead, and he had seen Yaarirruuiu in the hour of action.

But the job of herding the irredeemables wasn't nothing, and Rokhlenu needed Lekkativengu to do it well. He said, "Olleiulu trusted you. Show me you deserve it and I'll never forget it."

Lekkativengu nodded, put his claw-fingered hand on Rokhlenu's shoulder, and said something about Rokhlenu's intended that would have earned him a knife in the belly on any other day. But encouragements like that were traditional between friends on a mating day, so Rokhlenu grinned and said, "If you insist. Over and over."

They released each other, and Rokhlenu turned to his friends. They were a rather motley crew: the never-wolf Morlock, the biteless healer female Liudhleeo-no, she was wearing an honor-tooth. No, it was the crystal spike she had pulled from Morlock's skull. Excellent: Wuinlendhono had told her to wear it. And it was a reminder, a very civil reminder, of how much he owed her. Beyond them stood the twenty irredeemables who had fought with him at the recent election rally-the twenty who had survived, anyway. Pale Hrutnefdhu was the only one missing.

Liudhleeo stepped forward, took his shoulder, and made an obscene suggestion about Wuinlendhono.

"Certainly," he said, "since you ask. Anything to oblige."

"Hrutnefdhu thought it best not to come," she added, in a low voice. "He hopes you understand."

"I do-though I'd be glad to see him here."

Morlock was close enough to hear this exchange, and he looked with some surprise at Liudhleeo, at Rokhlenu, and back at Liudhleeo. Then he shrugged.

Rokhlenu felt a sudden pang of doubt-did Morlock fully understand the life-mating ritual? Surely it couldn't be that different among neverwolves. Anyway, there was no time for a lesson now.

Liudhleeo stood aside, and Morlock grabbed Rokhlenu's shoulder. "I don't know any of the traditional remarks on a day like this," he observed.

Rokhlenu silently thanked the ghosts for this.

"I'll say this instead," Morlock continued. "We are one blood. Your blood is my blood. It will be avenged."

Rokhlenu belatedly realized that Morlock was talking about his father and brothers. His grief, never distant, returned in a great crashing wave. But this was real. It mattered, unlike the traditional obscene compliments. He met Morlock's eye. "I told you not to bring a present, you rat-bastard."

Morlock half smiled and shrugged. "I won't do it again," he promised, and stood back.

There were more encounters, more jokes and songs about the act of mating. But soon enough, Yaarirruuiu said, "Friends, the sun is setting. We must get our chief to his new home."

They roared and cheered and barked. Rokhlenu picked up a bundle of his clothes, and the twenty irredeemables who were accompanying him into Wuinlendhono's household picked up boxes of wealth and weapons and their own belongings. He walked before them, and they followed singing false and not really flattering stories about his sexual adventures or misadventures.

The walk to Wuinlendhono's lair-tower (still supported by cables, but on a firmer foundation than before thanks to Morlock and Hlupnafenglu) was not long, thank ghost. He pounded on the door and demanded entry.

The door was immediately opened by a snow-pale, anxious-looking Wuinlendhono. She wore a loose white wedding shirt, not so different than his own, except that the hem was lower, sweeping the floor. "My intended, you and yours enter my house and remain here forever," she said rapidly, and kissed his ear. She added in a whisper, "Ghost, I thought you were never coming. It's almost sunset."

"Plenty of time," he breathed, half stunned by the mix of her natural scent and her wedding scent. He noted with interest that she seemed more nervous than he was.

She took him by the hand and led him into the great audience chamber of the lair-tower. The dais had been moved so that moonlight would fall on it as soon as dark touched the sky after sunset. Around the audience chamber were scattered tables with bowls of food and water and fuming smoke. There were many low couches, and on some of them the councilors, allies, and friends who were Wuinlendhono's wedding party. They were already eating, drinking, smoking.

"My intended, disport yourselves with your friends and mine," Wuinlendhono said, in a loud formal voice. "I await your intention at the mating couch." She added in a low voice, "I give you a hundred breaths. If you're not on the dais by then, I'm coming after you and nailing you wherever you happen to be. One hundred breaths. And I'm breathing pretty fast, stalwart."

He watched her stride sinuously away from him and he took a deep breath. Ninety-nine more, and then ...

His irredeemables were dumping the boxes with traditional informality about the room. This was just part of the tradition, meant to give the place a moved-in look. All the significant wealth and property (boxes of gold and such) had been brought over early in the day and secured.