Margon’s voice was as agreeable and almost humble as it had been the night before. He was a man of persuasion and subtle power, his light golden brown face very plastic and expressive, black eyes rimmed in thick black lashes that gave a drama and an intensity to his expressions that seemed more fierce than his words.
“Never in all my existence,” he continued, gesturing unconsciously with the silver fork, “have I known someone who truly wanted it reversed, but there are those who rush headlong into perdition as the result of it, driven insane by the lust for the hunt, and scorning every other aspect of life until they are destroyed by the weapons of those who hunt them down. But you needn’t worry about this. You are not, any of you”—his eyes took in Laura as he said this—“of the sort to be so foolish or such spendthrifts with the gifts of fate.”
Stuart started to ask something but Margon gestured for silence.
“Allow me to continue,” he cautioned. He went on:
“The Chrism is almost always passed by accident. And it can only be passed by us when we are in the wolfen state. However, my mind, my limited mind, my mortal mind, is haunted by a grim legion of those to whom I refused it and I restrain myself no more. When one is worthy, and one asks, I give the Chrism. I ask only an ardent and informed desire. But this you—Reuben and Stuart—must not seek to do—offer the Chrism, that is. The responsibility’s far too great. You must leave such fateful choices to me, to Felix, to Thibault, even to Frank and Sergei who will be joining us soon.”
Reuben nodded. Now was not the time to press him on Laura, but did it even need to be done? There had not been the slightest suggestion that Laura was not already one of them, and this, in Reuben’s mind, had to mean one thing. Yet he did not know and it tortured him. He did not know.
“Now the Chrism can prove fatal to the infected one,” said Margon, “but this happens very seldom and usually only with the very feeble or the very young, or those who are so severely bitten or otherwise injured that the Chrism can’t overtake the injury and the loss of blood. What I know I know from happenstance. It can kill, but in the main it does not—.”
“But Marrok said that it could,” said Reuben, “and it almost invariably did.”
“Forget Marrok,” said Margon. “Forget what others might have told Marrok to try to curb his desire to fill the world with Morphenkinder like himself. We will say our own Requiem when we dance in the woods soon, together; enough on Marrok for now. Now Marrok knows or does not know because no one knows. And we can’t know which it is.”
He stopped long enough for a bite of the duck, and another chunk of the buttered roll.
“Now when the Chrism is given to young men or women your age, there’s no danger,” he said, “and when it’s given with the deep bite, injecting the Chrism directly into the bloodstream at many points, well, it acts as it did with you, in about seven to fourteen days. The moon has nothing to do with it. Such legends have a different origin and nothing to do with us. But it’s undeniable that in the first few years the change comes only after nightfall, and it is extremely difficult to induce in the light of day. But you can, after a while, if you are very determined, induce it anytime that you like. Your goal should be complete mastery of it. Because if you do not have that, you will never be in charge of it. It will be in charge of you.”
Reuben nodded, murmuring that he had found that out in the most painful and fearful and personal way. “But I thought it was the voices that made me change,” he said. “I thought that the voices triggered it and had to trigger it—.”
“We’ll come to the voices,” said Margon.
“But why do we hear the voices?” asked Stuart. “Why do we hear the voices of people in pain and who are suffering and who need us? My God, I was going crazy in the hospital. It was like hearing souls in hell begging for mercy—.”
“We’ll come to that,” said Margon. He looked at Reuben.
“Of course you worked out how to control it as best you could,” said Margon, “and you did well. You did extremely well. You’re a new generation and you have a strength we never saw in the past. You come to the Chrism with a health and vigor that was only occasional for centuries, in fact, exceptional. And when this is combined with intellect, the Morphenkind is nothing short of superb.”
“Oh, don’t flatter them both too much,” Thibault mumbled in his familiar baritone. “They’re exuberant enough.”
“I want to be perfect!” shouted Stuart, jabbing his thumb at his chest.
“Well, if you would be perfect as I see perfect,” said Margon, “then evaluate all the gifts you possess, not merely the Morphengift. Think about the threads of your human life and what they mean to you.” He turned to Reuben. “Now you are a poet, Reuben, a writer, a potential chronicler of your time. This is a treasure, is it not?” Without waiting for a response, he continued, “Last night, before I took this young one into the woods, I talked at length with your father. He is the parent who has given you your greatest talents, not your brilliant mother whom you so devoutly adore. It’s the man in the shadows behind you who has endowed you with the love of language that shapes the very way you perceive the world.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Reuben. “I failed my mother. I couldn’t be a doctor. Neither could my brother, Jim.”
“Ah, your brother, Jim,” said Margon. “Now that is an enigma—a priest who longs with all his heart to believe in God, but does not.”
“Not so rare at all,” said Reuben, “if you ask me.”
“But to knowingly give one’s life to a God who might never answer?” asked Margon.
“What God has ever answered anyone?” asked Reuben. He fixed on Margon and waited.
“Need I point out that thousands have claimed to hear his voice?”
“Ah but do they really hear it?”
“How are any of us to know?” asked Margon.
“Oh, come now!” said Felix, speaking up for the first time. He put down his knife and fork and scowled at Margon. “You’re going to hedge on religion now with these boy wolves? You’re going to soft-pedal your own nihilism? Why?”
“Oh, forgive me,” said Margon sarcastically, “for acknowledging the abundant evidence that humankind from the beginning of recorded history has claimed to have heard the voices of its gods, that conversions are generally quite emotional and real to the convert.”
“Very well,” said Felix with a little genial gesture. “You go on, Teacher. I need to hear these things once again myself.”
“I don’t know if I can bear it,” said Thibault sonorously with a little mocking smile.
Margon laughed under his breath, eyes sparkling as he looked at Thibault. “It was a dark day when you joined this company,” he said, but this was entirely in a convivial spirit. “Always so bitterly amused, always so droll. I hear that droning bass voice in my sleep.”
Thibault enjoyed this.
“Your point’s clear,” said Felix. “Reuben’s a writer. Perhaps the first Morphenkind who has ever been a writer—.”
“Oh, nonsense, am I the only one with a memory for unpleasant things?” asked Thibault.
“It’s not the chronicle of the Morphenkinder I want to reveal here,” said Margon. “I am saying this.” He looked pointedly at Stuart, who was reaching again for the potatoes. “You are creatures of body and soul, wolfen and human, and balance is indispensable to survival. One can kill the gifts one is given, any of them and all of them, if one is determined to do so, and pride is the parent of destruction; pride eats the mind and the heart and the soul alive.”
Reuben nodded vigorously. He took a deep drink of the red wine. “But surely you’ll agree,” said Reuben, “that human experience pales in comparison to the wolf experience, that every single aspect of the wolf experience is more intense.” He hesitated. Morphenkinder, Morphengift—these were beautiful words.
But he remembered the words he had chosen for this himself when he was entirely alone: the Wolf Gift.
Ye
s, it was a gift.
“We don’t exist at maximum intensity all the time, do we?” Margon replied. “We sleep, we doze, we meditate—we discover ourselves in our passions and our disasters, but also in our slumber, and in our dreams.”
Reuben conceded that.
“This music you’re playing for us, this piano music by Satie. This is not Beethoven’s Ninth, is it?” Margon asked.
No, and it’s not Brahms’s Second Symphony either, Reuben thought, remembering his musings of last night.
“So how many nights is the change going to just come over me,” asked Stuart, “whether I want it or not?”
“Try really fighting it,” said Thibault. “You might be surprised.”
“It’s too soon for you to resist it,” said Margon. “It will come on you every night for perhaps fourteen days. Now, with Reuben he learned to control it after what?—the tenth? But only because he had yielded to it so completely before.”
“Yes. That’s probably so,” said Thibault.
“But it’s always been a fortnight in my experience,” said Felix. “After that, the power is infinitely more controllable. For many, seven nights in any one month is enough to maintain vigor and sanity. Of course, you can learn to keep it down indefinitely. There is often a discernible personal rhythm to it, an individual cycle; but these responses vary greatly, and of course the voices of those in need of protection—the voices can provoke us anytime. But in the beginning, you need that fortnight because the Chrism is still working on your cells.”
“Ah, the cells, the cells,” said Reuben. “What were those words that Marrok used?” He turned to Laura.
“The pluripotent progenitor cells,” said Laura. “He said that the Chrism worked on these cells and triggered the mutation.”
“Well, of course,” said Stuart.
“Or so we theorize,” said Felix, “with the feeble insights we have today.” He took a deep drink of his wine, and sat back. “We reason that those are the only cells which can be responsible for the changes that take place in us—that all humankind has the potential to be Morphenkinder—but that’s based on what we now know of human chemistry, which is more than we knew twenty years ago, or twenty years before that, and so forth and so on.”
“Nobody has yet clearly defined what happens,” said Thibault. “In the early days of modern science, we attempted to grasp things with the new critical vocabulary at our disposal. We had such high hopes. We outfitted laboratories, hired scientists under clever ruses. We thought we’d finally learn all there was to know about ourselves. We learned so little! What we know is what you’ve observed in yourselves.”
“It involves glands, hormones, surely,” said Reuben.
“Indisputably,” said Felix, “but why and how?”
“Well, how did it start?” Stuart asked. He smacked the table with his hand. “Has it always been with us, I mean with human beings? Margon, where did all this begin?”
“There are answers to those questions …,” said Margon under his breath. He was reticent, obviously.
“Who was the very first Morphenkind ever?” asked Stuart. “Come on, you must have a Genesis myth. You have to tell us these things. Cells, glands, chemicals—that’s one thing. But what’s the history of this? What’s the tale?”
Silence. Felix and Thibault were waiting for Margon to answer.
Margon was considering. He appeared troubled, and for a moment lost in his thoughts.
“The ancient history isn’t all that inspiring,” said Margon. “What’s important now is that you learn how to use these gifts.”
There was a pause and very gently Laura spoke up. “Does the hunger increase over time—the desire to hunt and feast?”
“Not really,” said Margon. “It’s always inside us. We feel partial, diminished, spiritually starved if we don’t give in to it, but I would say that is there from the beginning. Indeed, one can get sick of it, and withdraw for long periods, ignoring the voices.” He stopped.
“And your strength, does this increase?” Laura asked.
“Skill increases, of course,” said Margon, “and wisdom. Ideally that increases as well. We have bodies that renew themselves constantly. But our hearing, our vision, our physical abilities—these do not increase.”
He looked at Reuben as though inviting his questions now. He hadn’t done this before.
“The voices,” said Reuben. “Can we talk now about the voices?”
He’d tried to be patient, but this seemed the moment surely to cut to the point.
“Why do we hear the voices?” he asked. “I mean I understand our sensitive hearing, it’s part of the transformation, but why do the voices of people who need us bring on the change? And why would stem cells in our bodies transform us into something that can track the scent of malice and cruelty—it’s the scent of evil, isn’t it—and we’re driven to seek to wipe it out?”
He put down his napkin. He looked intently at Margon.
“This is for me the central mystery,” Reuben continued. “It’s the moral mystery for me. Man into monster, all right, it’s not magic. It’s science and it’s science we don’t know. I can accept that. But why do I smell fear and suffering? Why am I impelled to go to it? Every time I’ve killed, it’s been a consummately evil perpetrator. I’ve never erred.” He looked from Margon to Felix and to Thibault. “Surely it’s the same for you.”
“It is,” said Thibault. “But it’s chemical. It’s in our physical nature. We smell evil and we are driven almost madly to attack it, destroy it. We cannot distinguish between an innocent victim and ourselves. They are one and the same to us. What the victim suffers we suffer.”
“Is this God-given?” asked Stuart. “Are you going to tell me that?”
“I’m telling you just the opposite,” said Thibault. “These are finely developed biological traits, rooted in the elusive chemistry of our glands and our brains.”
“Why is it that particular way?” asked Reuben. “Why aren’t we chemically driven to track the innocent and devour them? They’re sweet enough.”
Margon smiled. “Don’t try it,” he said. “You’ll fail.”
“Oh, I know. This is what undid Marrok. He couldn’t bring himself merely to do away with Laura. He had to ask forgiveness of her, launching into a long confession as to why she had to die.”
Margon nodded.
“How old was Marrok?” asked Reuben. “How much experience had he had? Shouldn’t he have been able to defeat us both?”
Margon nodded. “Marrok wanted to do away with himself,” he said. “Marrok was weary, careless—the shell of the being he’d once been.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” said Laura. “He challenged us to destroy him. At first, I thought he was trying to confuse us, frighten us to death, so to speak. Then I realized he simply couldn’t do what he wanted unless we fought back.”
“That’s exactly right,” said Reuben. “And then when we fought back, he wasn’t able to overmaster us. Certainly he must have, on some level, known that this would be the case.”
“You are going to tell me, aren’t you,” asked Stuart, “who this person was, this Marrok?”
“The story of Marrok is finished,” said Margon. “For reasons of his own he wanted to destroy Reuben. He’d passed the Chrism through carelessness and convinced himself that he had to eliminate the evidence of his mistake.”
“Just as I passed it to you,” murmured Reuben.
“Ah, but you’re very young,” said Thibault. “Marrok was old.”
“And so my life opens up in flaming colors,” said Stuart exuberantly. “And with the blare of trumpets!”
Margon laughed indulgently with a knowing glance at Felix.
“But truly, why do we seek to protect the victims of evil, to prevent them from being murdered or raped?” Reuben asked.
“Little wolf,” said Margon, “you want a splendid answer, don’t you? A moral answer, as you say. I wish I had one for you. I fear it was a matte
r of evolution like everything else.”
“This evolved in Morphenkinder?” asked Reuben.
“No,” said Margon. He shook his head. “It evolved in the species from which the power came to us. And they were not Homo sapiens sapiens as we are. They were something entirely different, rather like Homo ergaster or Homo erectus. Do you know those terms?”
“Yes, I know them,” said Stuart. “And that’s exactly what I suspected. It was an isolated species, thriving somewhere in an out-of-the-way pocket of the world, right? Like Homo floresiensis—the hobbit species in Indonesia—a humanoid offshoot different from everything else we know.”
“What is the hobbit species?” asked Reuben.
“Little people, no more than three feet tall,” said Laura, “skeletons just found a few years ago, evolved completely separately from Homo sapiens sapiens.”
“Oh, I remember this,” said Reuben, “yes.”
“Tell us, tell us about this species,” said Stuart insistently.
Felix appeared uneasy and was about to try to quiet him when Margon gestured that it was all right.
Margon apparently had hoped to avoid this part of the story. He was thoughtful, then agreed to go on.
“First we clear the board,” he said gesturing to the table. “I need a moment in my thoughts.”
39
THE PLATTERS of the feast were relegated to the kitchen island counter, a spread that would sustain the house all evening long.
Once again, the entire company worked swiftly, quietly, replenishing the water, the wine, setting down carafes of hot coffee, and green tea.
The fresh-baked pies were brought into the dining room, apple, cherry, peach. The soft white French cheeses, plates of candies, fruits.
Margon took his place again at the head of the table. He appeared to have misgivings, but one glance at Stuart’s eager face and Reuben’s patient but inquisitive expression appeared to confirm for him that he had to go on.
“Yes,” said Margon, “there was such a species, an isolated and dying species of primates who were not what we are and they did exist on an isolated island, yes, thousands of years ago off the African coast.”