Franco bent down again, scooped away a handful of earth, put the chewed arm into it, and carefully replaced the dirt. He patted it down and covered it over with brown leaves. He sat on his haunches for a long time as flies buzzed around his head in search of the lost flesh. Several of them landed on Franco’s bleeding cheek and feasted there, but he didn’t move. He stared, motionlessly, at the patchwork of earth and leaves before him.
And then, abruptly, he stood up. He turned his back on the ruined Garden, and quickly strode away into the forest without glancing at Mikhail.
Mikhail let him go; he knew the way home. Anyway, if he lost his bearings he could follow the smell of Franco’s blood. His strength was coming back, and his skull and heart had stopped pounding. He looked at the garden of scattered skeletons, wondering exactly where his own bones would lie, and who would cover them. He turned away, shunting those thoughts aside, and trailed Franco by following his tracks on the bruised earth.
3
Three more springs came and passed, and the summer of Mikhail’s twelfth year scorched the forest. During that time, Renati had almost died with worms from an infected boar. Wiktor himself had nursed her to health and hunted for her, showing that granite could be tender. Pauli had given birth to a girl baby that Franco had sired; the baby had died in the night, her body contorting and rippling with light brown hair, when she was two months old. Nikita had seeded a child in Alekza’s belly, but the growth passed away in a rush of blood and tissue when it was less than four months along.
Mikhail wore a deerskin robe and sandals that Renati had made for him, his old clothes much too small and tattered. He was growing, getting gangly, his thick black hair hanging around his shoulders and down his back. His mind was growing, too, from the food of Wiktor’s books: mathematics, Russian history, the languages, classical literature-all were the feast that Wiktor offered. Sometimes it went down easily, other times Mikhail all but choked on it, but Wiktor’s thundering voice in the fire-lit chamber commanded his attention. Mikhail even enjoyed Shakespeare, particularly the gruesomeness and ghosts of Hamlet.
His senses grew as well. There was no longer any true darkness for him; the deepest night was a gray twilight, with flesh-and-blood forms outlined in an eerie pale blue. When he truly concentrated, cutting off all distractions, he could find any of the pack in the white palace by trailing the distinctive rhythm of their heartbeats: Alekza’s, for instance, always beat fast, like a little snare drum, while Wiktor’s beat with slow and stately precision, a finely tuned instrument. Colors, sounds, aromas intensifed. In daylight he could see a deer running through the dense forest at a distance of a hundred yards. Mikhail learned the importance of speed: he caught rats, squirrels, and hares with ease, and added to the pack’s food supply in a small way, but larger game eluded him. He often awakened from sleep to find an arm or leg covered with black hair and contorting into wolfish form, but the totality of the change still terrified him. Though his body may have been ready for it, his mind certainly was not. He marveled at how the others could slip back and forth between worlds, almost as if by wishing it. The fastest of them was Wiktor, of course; it took him less than forty seconds to complete the change from human flesh to gray wolf hide. The next quickest was Nikita, who made the transformation in a little over forty-five seconds. Alekza ·had the prettiest pelt, and Franco the loudest wail. Pauli was the shyest, and Renati the most merciful; she often let the smallest, most defenseless prey escape even when she’d run it to exhaustion. Wiktor scolded her for this frivolity, and Franco scowled at her, but she did as she pleased.
After the destruction of the Garden, a coldly furious Wiktor had taken Nikita and Franco out on a long, fruitless hunt for the berserker’s den. In the three years since, the berserker had made himself known by leaving little piles of excrement around the white palace, and once the pack had heard him wailing in the night: a deep, hoarse taunt that changed direction as the berserker deftly shifted his position. It was a challenge to battle, but Wiktor declined; he chose not to run into the berserker’s trap. Pauli had sworn she’d seen the berserker on a snowy night in early November, when she’d been running at Nikita’s side on the trail of caribou. The red beast had come out of the snow at her, close enough for her to smell his rank madness, and his eyes had been cold black pits of hatred. He had opened slavering jaws to crush her throat-but then Nikita had swerved toward her, and the berserker disappeared into the snowfall. Pauli swore this, but Pauli sometimes mixed nightmares with reality, and Nikita didn’t remember seeing anything but night and whirling flakes.
On a night in mid-July, there were no snowflakes, only the whirl of golden fireflies rising from the forest floor as Mikhail and Nikita, in human form, ran silently through the woods. The herds had been thinned by the drought weather, and hunting had been poor for the last month. Wiktor had ordered Mikhail and Nikita to bring back something-anything-and now Mikhail followed the older man as best he could, Nikita running about twenty feet ahead and breaking a trail. They were heading south at a steady pace, and in a short while Nikita slowed to a brisk walk.
“Where are we going?” Mikhail asked in a whisper. He glanced around through the night’s twilight, looking for anything alive. Not even a squirrel’s eyes glinted with starlight.
“The railroad tracks,” Nikita answered. “We’ll see if we can’t make this an easy hunt.” Often the pack was able to find a dead deer, caribou, or smaller animal that had been hit by the train, which passed through the forest twice a day between May and August, going east in daylight and west at night.
Where the forest was stubbled with large boulders and cliffs fell off to the south, the tracks emerged from a rough-hewn tunnel, curved downhill along the bottom of a wooded gulley for at least six hundred yards, and then entered another tunnel to the west. Mikhail followed Nikita down the embankment, and they walked along the tracks, their eyes searching for the dark shape of a carcass and their nostrils sniffing the warm air for fresh blood. Tonight, no kills lay on the rails. They continued to the eastern tunnel-and then Nikita suddenly said, “Listen.”
Mikhail did, and he heard it, too: a soft rumble of thunder. Except the sky was clear, the stars sparkling behind a gauze of hazy heat. The train was coming.
Nikita bent down, placing his hand against the iron. He could feel it vibrate as the train gathered power, heading into its long downhill run. In another moment it would burst out of the tunnel only a few yards distant.
“We’d better go,” Mikhail told him.
Nikita stayed where he was, his hand on the rail. He stared at the tunnel’s rocky opening, and then Mikhail saw him look toward the western tunnel’s entrance, far away. “I used to come here alone,” Nikita said quietly. “I used to watch the train roar past. That was before the berserker, damn him to hell. But I’ve seen the train go past many times. On its way to Minsk, I think. It comes out of that tunnel”-he nodded toward it-“and goes into that one there. Some nights, if the engineer’s in a hurry to get home, it takes less than thirty seconds to make the distance. If he’s drunk and riding the brake, it takes around thirty-five seconds from one tunnel to the next. I know; I’ve counted them off.”
“Why?” Mikhail asked. The train’s thunder-a traveling storm-was getting closer.
“Because someday I’m going to beat it.” Nikita stood up. “Do you know what, for me, the grandest thing in the world would be?” His almond-shaped, Mongol eyes stared through the darkness at Mikhail. The boy shook his head. “To be fast,” Nikita went on, excitement mounting in his voice. “The fastest of all the pack. The fastest who ever lived. To will the change between the time the train comes out of the first tunnel and reaches the second. Do you see?”