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.