Mikhail jumped, startled. Wiktor’s voice instantly awakened Nikita, Franco, and Alekza, who’d been curled up nearby. Pauli, her wits still sluggish from Belyi’s death, stirred on her hay pallet and opened her eyes. Behind Wiktor stood Renati, who had been watching faithfully for him for three days, ever since he’d gone on the track of whatever had killed Pauli’s brother. Wiktor stood up, regal in his snow-crusted robes, the weathered lines and cracks in his bearded face glistening with melted snow. The fire had burned very low, and was chewing on the last of the pine knots. “While you sleep,” he told them, “death is in the forest.”
Wiktor circled them, his breath ghosting in the chilly air. The hares’ blood was already growing frost. “A berserker,” he said.
“A what?” Franco stood up, reluctantly parting from Alekza’s pregnant warmth.
“A berserker,” Wiktor repeated. “A wolf that kills for the love of killing. That’s what slaughtered Belyi.” He glanced at Pauli with his amber eyes; she was still drugged with sorrow, and quite useless. “A wolf who kills for the love of killing,” he said. “I found his tracks, about two miles north of here. He’s a big bastard, weighs maybe a hundred and eighty pounds. He was going north at a steady pace, so I followed him.” Wiktor knelt down by the feeble fire and wanned his hands. His face was washed with flickering crimson. “He’s a smart one. Somehow he picked up my scent, and I was careful to keep the wind in my face, too. He wasn’t about to let me find his den; he led through a swamp—and I almost fell through a place where he’d cracked the ice to go out from under me.” He smiled faintly, watching the fire. “If I hadn’t smelled his piss on the ice, I’d be dead by now. I know he’s a red one; I found some of his hair snagged on thorns. That’s as close as I got.” He rubbed his hands together, massaging the bruised knuckles, and stood up. “His hunting ground’s getting thin. He wants ours. He knows he’ll have to kill us to get it.” He swept his gaze around the circle of his pack. “From now on, no one goes out alone. Not even for a handful of snow. We’ll hunt in pairs, and we’ll make damned certain we stay in sight of each other. Understood?” He waited until Nikita, Renati, Franco, and Alekza had nodded. Pauli was still dazed, her long brown hair full of bits of hay. Wiktor looked at Mikhail. “Understood?” he repeated.
“Yes, sir,” Mikhail quickly answered.
Time, a dream of days and nights, passed. As Alekza’s belly swelled, Wiktor taught Mikhail from the dusty books in the lower chamber. Mikhail had no problem with Latin and German, but the English stuck in his throat. It, truly, was a foreign tongue. “Enunciate!” Wiktor thundered. “That’s an ‘ing’! Speak it!” The English language was a jungle of thorns, but slowly Mikhail began to cut his way through. “We’re going to read some of this,” Wiktor said one day as he opened a huge, illustrated manuscript written in an English that looked like scrolled woodcarvings. “Listen,” Wiktor said, and began to read:
“Methinks I am a prophet new
And thus, expiring, do foretell of him:
His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last,
For violent fires soon burn out themselves;
Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;
He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;
With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder.”
He looked up. “Do you know who wrote that?” Mikhail shook his head, and Wiktor told him the name. “Now repeat it,” Wiktor said.
“Shak… Shaka… Shakaspir.”
“Shakespeare,” Wiktor enunciated. He read a few more lines, his voice reverent:
“This happy breed of men, this little world;
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this
England.”
He looked into Mikhail’s face. “Now there’s a country where they don’t execute their teachers,” he said. “At least not yet. I always wanted to see England; a man can live free there.” His eyes had taken on the shiny glint of distant lights. “They don’t burn your books in England, and they don’t kill for the love of it.” He brought himself abruptly back. “Well, I’ll never see it. But you might. If you ever leave this place, go to England. You find out if it’s such a blessed plot. All right?”
“Yes, sir,” Mikhail agreed, without fully understanding what he was agreeing to.
And after the gray shadow of one last blizzard had swept across the forest, spring came to Russia; first a torrent of rain, then a green blaze. Mikhail’s dreams became bizarre: he was running on all fours, his body hurtling through a dark realm. When he awakened from them, he was shivering and covered with sweat. Sometimes he caught a brief glimpse of black hair, rippling across his arms, chest, or legs. His bones throbbed, as if they had been broken and rejointed. When he heard the beautiful, echoing calls of Wiktor, Nikita, or Renati out on the hunt, his throat convulsed and his heart ached. The change was coming on him; slowly and surely, the change was taking him over.
On a night in early May, Alekza contorted and screamed while Pauli and Nikita held her, the firelight capering, and Renati’s bloody hands delivered two babies. Mikhail saw them, before Renati whispered to Wiktor and wrapped the bodies in rags; one of the limp things, a small human form, was missing its left arm and leg and was covered with bites. The second corpse, strangled by a gray cord, had claws and fangs. Renati tied the rags tightly around the dead things, before Franco or Alekza could see them. Alekza lifted her head, sweat glistening on her face, and whispered, “Are they boys? Are they boys?”
Mikhail got away before Renati told her. Alekza’s wail rushed past him, and he almost bumped into Franco in the corridor; the man shoved him roughly aside as he hurried by.
When the sun came up, they took the swaddled infants to a place a half mile to the south of the white palace: the Garden, Renati told Mikhail when he asked. The Garden, she said, where all the little ones lay.
It was a place surrounded by towering birches, and arrangements of stones lay on the soft, leaf-covered earth to mark the bodies. Franco and Alekza got on their knees, and together began to dig the graves with their hands as Wiktor held the corpses. At first Mikhail thought this was a cruel thing, because Alekza sobbed and the tears trickled down her face as she dug—but in another few moments her crying was finished, and she worked harder. He realized it was the pack’s way of burying their dead: tears gave way to muscle, and fingers dug resolutely at the earth. Franco and Alekza were allowed to dig as deeply as they wished, and then Wiktor placed the corpses in the graves and they were covered over again with dirt and leaves.
Mikhail looked around at all the small squares of stone. All infants in this section of the Garden; farther away, in the deeper shade, were larger squares. He knew Andrei lay over there, as well as members of the pack who’d died before Mikhail had been bitten. He saw how many infants had died: more than thirty of them. It occurred to him that the pack kept trying to have children, but the babies died. Could there ever be a baby who was part human and part wolf? he wondered as the warm breeze stirred the branches. He didn’t see how an infant’s body could bear the pain; if any baby did survive that torment, it would have to be a very strong soul.
Franco and Alekza found stones and placed them around the graves. Wiktor offered no words, either to them or to God; when the work was finished, he turned and walked away, his sandals crunching in the underbrush. Mikhail saw Alekza reach for Franco’s hand, but he pulled quickly away and walked on without her. She stood there for a moment looking after him, sunlight gleaming in her long golden hair. Mikhail saw her lips shiver, and he thought she was going to cry again. But then she stood up a little straighter, her eyes narrowed with cold disdain. He saw there was no love between her and Franco; with the babies buried, so was all affection. Or perhaps Franco thought less of her now. He watched her as
she seemed to grow before his eyes. And then her head turned, and her ice-blue gaze locked on him. He stared at her without moving.
Alekza said, “I’ll have a boy. I will.”
“Your body’s tired,” Renati told her, standing behind Mikhail. He realized Alekza’s stare was fixed on Renati. “Wait another year.”
“I’ll have a boy,” she repeated firmly. Her gaze went to Mikhail, and lingered. He felt himself tremble, in a deep place. And then she abruptly turned and left the Garden, following Nikita and Pauli.
Renati stood over the fresh graves. She shook her head. “Little ones,” she said softly. “Oh, little ones. I hope you’ll be better brothers in heaven.” She glanced back at Mikhail. “Do you hate me?” she asked.
“Hate you?” The question had shocked him. “No.”
“I would understand if you did,” she said. “After all, I brought you into this life. I hated the one who bit me. She lies over there, right at the edge.” Renati nodded toward the shadows. “I was married to a shoemaker. We were on our way to my sister’s wedding. I told Tiomki he’d taken a wrong turn; did he listen? Of course not.” She motioned toward a larger square of stones. “Tiomki died during the change. That was… oh, twelve springs ago, I think. He was not a well man, anyway; he would’ve made a pitiful wolf. But I loved him.” She smiled, but the smile wouldn’t stick. “All these graves have their stories, but some of them are even before Wiktor’s time. So I guess they’re silent riddles, eh?”
“How long… has the pack been here?” Mikhail asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Wiktor says the old man who died the year after I joined had been here for over twenty years, and the old man knew of others going back twenty years more. Who knows?” She shrugged.
“Has anybody ever been born here? And lived?”
“Wiktor says he’s heard of seven or eight who were born and survived. They all died over the years, of course. But most of the babies are either born dead or they die within a few weeks. Pauli gave up trying. So did I. Alekza’s still young enough to be stubborn, and she’s buried so many babies her heart must look like one of these stones by now. Well, I pity her.” Renati looked around the Garden and up at the towering birches where the sun shone through. “I know your next question,” she said, before Mikhail could ask it. “The answer is: no. No one of the pack has ever left these woods. This is our home; it will always be our home.”
Mikhail, still wearing the tatters of last year’s clothes, nodded. Already the world that used to be—the human world—seemed hazy, like a distant memory. He heard birds singing in the trees, and he watched a few of them fluttering from branch to branch. They were beautiful birds, and Mikhail wondered if they were good to eat.
“Come on, let’s get back.” The ceremony—such as it was—had ended. Renati started walking in the direction of the white palace; and Mikhail followed. They hadn’t gone very far when Mikhail heard a faraway, high-pitched whistle. Perhaps a mile to the southeast, he gauged it. He stopped, listening to the sound. Not a bird, but—
“Ah,” Renati said. “That’s a sign of summer. The train’s running. The tracks go through the woods not too far from here.” She walked on, then paused when Mikhail hadn’t moved. The whistle blew again, a short and shrill note. “Must be deer on the tracks,” Renati observed. “Sometimes you can find a dead one there. It’s not too bad if the sun and the vultures haven’t worked on it.” The train’s whistle faded away. “Mikhail?” she urged.
He listened still; the whistle had made something yearn inside him, but he wasn’t sure what it might be. Renati was waiting for him, and the berserker stalked the forest. It was time to go. Mikhail looked back once at the Garden, with its squares of stones, and he followed Renati home.
2
On the afternoon of the second day after the babies had been buried, Franco grasped Mikhail’s arm as Mikhail was on his knees outside the white palace, searching in the soft dirt for grubs. Franco pulled him up. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got somewhere to go.”
They started off, heading south through the woods. Franco glanced back. No one had seen them; that was good. “Where are we going?” Mikhail asked him as Franco pulled him along.
“The Garden,” he answered. “I want to see my children.”
Mikhail tried to pull free of Franco’s grip, but Franco held his arm tighter. He thought of crying out, for no particular reason other than he didn’t care for Franco, but the pack wouldn’t like that. Wiktor wouldn’t like it; it was up to him to fight his own battles. “What do you need me for?”
“To dig,” Franco said. “Now shut your mouth and walk faster.”
As they left the white palace behind and the forest closed its green gates behind them, Mikhail realized Franco wasn’t supposed to be doing this. Maybe the pack’s laws didn’t want the graves opened after the babies were buried; maybe the father was forbidden to see the dead infants. He wasn’t sure why, but he knew Franco was using him to do something that Wiktor wouldn’t like. He dragged his feet across the earth, but Franco wrenched his arm and pulled him on.
Keeping up with Franco was difficult; the man had a stride that soon made the breath rasp in Mikhail’s lungs. “You’re weak as water!” Franco growled at him. “Walk faster, I said!”
Mikhail stumbled over a root and fell to his knees. Franco yanked him up, and they kept going. There was a ferocity in Franco’s pallid, brown-eyed face; even in his human mask, the wolf’s face shone through. Maybe digging up the graves was bad luck, Mikhail thought. That’s why the Garden was laid so far from the white palace. But Franco’s humanity had taken over; like any human father, he burned to see the results of his seed. “Come on, come on!” he told Mikhail, both of them now racing through the woods.
In another few minutes they burst into the clearing where the squares of stones were, and Franco suddenly stopped dead in his tracks. Mikhail bumped into him, but the collision didn’t jar Franco. The man gave a soft, strengthless gasp.
“Dear God,” Franco whispered.
Mikhail saw it: the Garden’s graves had been torn open, and bones were scattered across the ground. Skulls small and large, some human, some bestial, and some a commingling of both, lay broken around Mikhail’s feet. Franco walked deeper into the Garden, his hands curled into claws at his sides. Almost all of the graves had been dug up, their contents pulled out, broken to pieces and wildly strewn. Mikhail stared down at a grinning skull, its teeth sharpened into fangs and gray streamers of hair on its scalp. Nearby lay the bones of a hand, and over there an arm bone. A small, twisted spinal cord caught Mikhail’s gaze, then an infant’s skull that had been crunched with tremendous force. Franco walked on, drawn toward the place where the fresh corpses had been buried. He stepped over old bones and stepped on a skull whose lower jaw snapped off like a piece of yellowed wood. He stopped, wavering on his feet, and stared at the gouged holes where the infants had been laid two days before. A ripped rag lay on the ground. Franco picked it up—and something torn and red and swarming with flies oozed out and fell into the leaves.
The infant had been cleaved in half. Franco could see the marks of the large fangs. The top half, including the head and the brains, was gone. Flies spun around Franco’s face, and with them the coppery aroma of blood and decay. He looked to his right, at another smear of red in the dirt. A small leg, covered with fine brown hair. He made a soft, terrible moaning sound, and old bones crunched under his feet as he stepped back from the crimson remains.
“The berserker,” Mikhail heard him whisper. The birds sang in the treetops, happy and unaware. All around were uncovered graves and fragments of skeletons, both infant and adult, human and wolf. Franco spun toward Mikhail, and the boy saw his face—the flesh drawn tight around the bones, the eyes glassy and bulging. The pungent reek of rot wafted past Mikhail’s nostrils. “The berserker,” Franco repeated, his voice thin and quavering. The man looked around, his nostrils flared and sweat gleaming on his face. “Where are you?” Franco shout
ed; the bird song instantly ceased. “Where are you, you bastard?” He took a step in one direction, then a step in another; his legs seemed to want to pull him in two halves. “Come out!” he shrieked, his teeth bared and his chest heaving. “I’ll fight you!” He picked up a wolf’s skull and hurled it against a tree trunk, where it shattered with a noise like a gunshot. “God damn you to hell, come out!”
Flies battered into Mikhail’s face and spun away, disturbed by Franco’s turbulence. The man seethed, bright spots of red in his sallow cheeks and his body trembling like a taut and dangerous spring. He screamed, “Come out and fight!” and his voice sent the birds flying from their branches.
Nothing responded to Franco’s challenge. The grinning skulls lay like mute witnesses to a massacre, and the dark curtains of flies closed over the red infant flesh. Before Mikhail could move to defend himself, Franco rushed him. The man lifted him up off his feet and shoved his back against a tree so hard the breath whooshed from Mikhail’s lungs. “You’re nothing!” Franco raged. “Do you hear me?” He shook Mikhail. “You’re nothing!”
There were tears of pain in Mikhail’s eyes, but he didn’t let them fall. Franco wanted to destroy something, as the berserker had destroyed the bodies of his children. He shoved Mikhail’s back against the tree again, harder. “We don’t need you!” he shouted. “You little piece of weak-willed shi—”
It happened very fast. Mikhail wasn’t sure exactly when it happened, because it was a blur. A pit of flame opened within him, and seared his insides; there was a second of blinding pain, and then Mikhail’s right hand—a wolf’s claw covered with sleek black hair that entwined his arm almost to the elbow—streaked up and across Franco’s cheek. The man’s head snapped back, bloody furrows where the nails had slashed. Franco was stunned, and his eyes glinted with fear. He released Mikhail and jerked back, the blood trickling in crimson lines down his face. Mikhail settled to his feet, his heart slamming; he was as surprised as Franco, and he stared at his wolf’s claw, bright red blood and bits of Franco’s skin on the tips of the white nails. The black hair advanced past his elbow, and he felt pressure in his bones as they began to change their shape. There was a hollow pop! as the elbow went out of joint, and his arm shortened, the bones thickening under the moist, black-haired flesh. The hair advanced up his arm, toward his shoulder, and shone with dark blue highlights where the sun touched it. Mikhail felt throbbing pain in his jaws and forehead, as if an iron vise had begun to tighten around his skull. The tears broke from his eyes and ran down his cheeks. His left hand was changing now, the fingers snapping and shortening, growing hair and young white claws. Something was happening to his teeth; they crowded his tongue, and his gums felt ripped. He tasted blood in his mouth. He was terrified, and he looked desperately at Franco for help; Franco just stared at him, glassy-eyed, the blood dripping from his chin. It smelled to Mikhail like the red wine he remembered his father and mother drinking from crystal goblets, in another life. His muscles tensed and shivered, thickening across his shoulders and down his back. Black hair burst wild at his groin, under his dirty clothes.