A hand gripped Mikhail by the scruff of the neck and lifted him off the floor. Another hand-the fingers rough and purposeful-twisted his face away from the grisly spectacle. He was pressed into a shoulder, and he smelled the musky odor of deerskin. “Don’t look.” It was Renati’s voice. “Don’t look, little one,” she said, and put her hand firmly against the back of his head.
He could still hear, and that was bad enough. The half-human, half-wolf shrieking went on, coupled with the noise of bones popping. Someone else entered the chamber, and Renati shouted, “Get out!” Whoever it was quickly retreated. The shrieking turned into a high, thin howling that made Mikhail’s skin crawl and drove him to the edge of madness, and he squeezed his eyes shut as Renati gripped the back of his skull. Mikhail realized then that he had put his arms around her neck. The agonized howling echoed through the chamber.
And then there was a choking whine, like a machine losing power and dying down. A last few fits of raspy breathing, and silence.
Renati put Mikhail down. He kept his face averted as she walked to the corpse’s side and knelt down. Nikita, the almond-eyed Mongol with coal-black hair, came into the chamber, glanced quickly at Mikhail and then at the woman. “Andrei’s dead,” he said, a statement of fact.
Renati nodded. “Where’s Wiktor?”
“Gone hunting. For him.” He jerked a thumb at Mikhail.
“Just as well, then.” Renati reached down, scooped up a handful of bloody worms and tossed them on the fire. They writhed and crisped. “Wiktor didn’t want to watch him die.” Nikita came forward to stand beside Renati, and as they talked-something about a garden-Mikhail’s curiosity pulled him across the chamber. He stood between Nikita and Renati and peered down at Andrei’s corpse.
It was the carcass of a wolf with brown fur and dark, sightless eyes. Its tongue lolled in a little pool of blood. Its right leg was the leg of a human being, and at the end of its wiry forelegs were two human hands, the fingers gripping at the stones of the floor as if trying to wrench them apart. Instead of horror, Mikhail felt a stab of pain in his heart. The fingers were pale and skinny, and they were the same fingers that only a few moments ago had been clutching his arm. The absolute power of death hit him with full force, somewhere between the chin and the crown of his head. But it was a blow that cleared his vision, and he saw at that instant that his mother, father, and sister were gone forever, and so were his days of dreaming on the end of a kite.
Renati looked at him and snapped, “Get back!” Mikhail obeyed, and only then did he realize he’d been standing on worms.
Nikita and Renati wrapped the carcass in a deerskin cloak, lifted it between them, and took it away, into a part of the white palace where shadows reigned. Mikhail sat on his haunches next to the fire, his blood moving in his veins like ice-clogged rivers. He stared at Andrei’s dark blood on the stone. Mikhail shivered and held his palms toward the fire glow. You’re going to be sick soon, he remembered Wiktor saying. Very soon.
Mikhail couldn’t get warm. He sat closer to the fire, but even its heat on his face didn’t thaw his bones. There was a tickling in his chest, and he coughed, the noise as explosive as a gunshot between the damp stone walls.
2
The days merged, one into the other, and in the chamber there was neither sunlight nor moonlight, just the fire’s glow and spark as someone-Renati, Franco, Nikita, Pauli, Belyi, or Alekza-fed pine branches to the flames. Wiktor never tended the fire, as if it were understood such a menial task was beneath him. Mikhail felt heavy, and slept most of the time, but when he awakened there was usually a piece of barely cooked meat, berries, and a little water cupped in a hollowed stone beside him. He ate without question or hesitation, but the stone was too heavy to lift so he had to bend over it and lap the water up. Another thing he noticed: whoever was cooking the meat was gradually letting it remain bloodier. And it wasn’t all flesh meat, either. Now and again it was something that was red and purplish, as if torn from a creature’s innards. Mikhail at first refused to touch those grisly tidbits, but nothing new was placed beside him until he ate what was there, and soon he learned not to let anything-no matter how raw or horrid-sit there too long or the flies would come. He also learned that throwing up was futile; no one cleaned it up after him.
Once he awakened, shivering cold on the outside and burning beneath the skin, to a chorus of wolf howls somewhere in the distance. They terrified him at first. He had a few seconds of mad panic when he wanted to get up and claw his way out of the chamber, run through the woods and back to where his parents lay dead so he might find a gun and blow his brains out; but then the panic passed like a shade, and he sat listening to what he heard as music, the notes soaring up into the sky and entwining around each other like summer-passioned vines. He thought even that for a short time he could understand the language of that howling-a strange sensation, as if he’d suddenly learned to think in bits and pieces of Chinese. It was a language of mingled joy and yearning, like the sigh of someone who stands in a field of yellow flowers with the blue sky limitless in all directions and holds a broken string where a kite used to be. It was the language of wanting to live forever, and knowing that life was a cruel beauty. The howling brought tears to Mikhail’s eyes and made him feel small, a fleck of dust floating on a wind current over a land of cliffs and chasms.
Once he awakened and found the maw of a blond-furred wolf over his face, the ice-blue eyes steady and piercing as they stared at him. He lay very still, his heart pounding, as the wolf began to sniff his body. He smelled the wolf, too; a musky, sweet scent of rain-washed hair and breath that held the memory of fresh blood. He shivered, lying as if bound, as the blond wolf sniffed slowly over his chest and throat. Then, with a shake of its skull, the wolf opened its mouth and dropped eleven uncrushed blackberries onto the stones beside Mikhail’s head. The wolf retreated to the edge of the firelight, sat on its haunches, and watched as Mikhail ate the berries and lapped at the hollow, water-filled rock.
A dull, throbbing pain began to build and spread through his bones. Moving-even breathing-became an exercise in agony. And still the pain built, hour after hour, day after day, and someone cleaned him when he voided and someone else folded the deerskin cloaks around him like an infant. He shivered with cold, and the shivering fired the pain that raced through his nerves and made him moan and weep. Through the hazy twilight, he heard voices. Franco’s: “Too small, I tell you. The small ones don’t live. Renati, did you want a child so badly?” And Renati, angered: “I don’t ask a fool for his opinions. You keep to yourself and leave us alone!” Then the voice of Wiktor, slow and precise: “His color’s bad. Do you think he has worms? Feed him something and see if he’ll take it.” A piece of bloody meat was pressed to Mikhail’s lips; Mikhail, adrift in a sea of pain, thought, Don’t eat. I command you not to eat, and he felt defiance ratchet his jaws open. Fresh agony seared him, made the tears stream down his cheeks, but he accepted the food and gripped it with his teeth lest it be snatched away. Nikita’s voice drifted to him, and in it was a hint of admiration: “He’s stronger than he looks. Watch out he doesn’t snap your fingers off!”
Mikhail ate whatever was given to him. His tongue began to crave the blood and fluids, and he could tell what he was eating-rabbit, deer, wild boar, or squirrel, sometimes even the fleshy musk of a rat-and if it was a fresh kill or dead for hours. His mind ceased to revolt from the thought of consuming blood-drenched meat; he ate because he was hungry, and because there was nothing else. Sometimes he was fed only berries or some kind of coarse grass, but it all went down without complaint.