“This way.” He pointed toward the dark trail of the river. “There’s a garden. Maybe you can tell me what kind of flowers are in it. Right?”
Michael heard something in the man’s voice. A hardness, beneath the drunken slurring. His steps slowed. It occurred to him that Sandler was walking faster, keeping his balance on the uneven stones. Sandler wasn’t as drunk as he pretended to be. Now what was this all a-
Sandler said, “Here he is,” in a quiet, sober voice.
A man stepped out from behind a section of broken stone wall. He wore black gloves and a long gray coat.
There was a sound behind Michaeclass="underline" a boot sole, scraping stone. Michael whirled around and saw another man in a gray coat almost upon him. The man took two long strides, and the hand he’d already lifted came down. The blackjack he gripped in his fist hit Michael Gallatin on the side of the head and drove him to his knees.
“Hurry!” Sandler urged. “Get him up, damn it!”
A black car pulled up. Michael, adrift in a haze of pain, heard a door open. No, not a door. Heavier. The trunk lid? He was lifted up, and his scuffed shoes dragged across the stones. He let his body slump; it had all happened so fast, the gears of his brain had been knocked loose. The two men dragged him toward the car trunk. “Hurry!” Sandler hissed. Michael was lifted up, and he realized they were going to fold him up like a piece of luggage and throw him in the musty-smelling trunk. Oh no, he decided. Can’t let them do that, oh no. He tensed his muscles then and drove his right elbow sharply backward. It hit something bony, and he heard one of the men curse. A fist struck him hard in the kidneys, and an arm gripped him around the throat from behind. Michael fought them, trying to get loose. If he could just get his feet on the ground, he thought dazedly, he’d be fine.
He heard the whistle of air, and knew the blackjack was falling again.
It hit the back of his skull, making black explosions burst across the white landscape of a ghost world.
Musty smell. Sound of a coffin lid slamming shut. No. Trunk lid. My head… my head…
He heard the sound of a well-tuned engine. The car was moving.
Michael tried to lift his head, and when he did, an iron fist of pain closed around him, and dragged him under.
EIGHT – Youth’s Last Flower
1
On a morning in the summer of Mikhail’s fourteenth year, as the sun warmed the earth and the forest bloomed green as young dreams, a black wolf ran.
He knew the tricks now: Wiktor and Nikita had taught him. You propelled your body with the back legs, braked and turned with the front. You were always alert to the surface under your paws: soft dirt, mud, rocks, sand. All those called for different touches, different tensions of the body. Sometimes you kept your muscles tight as new springs, sometimes relaxed like old bands of rubber. But-and this was a very important lesson, Wiktor had said sternly-you remained constantly aware. That was a word Wiktor used many times, beating it into Mikhail’s impatient brain like a bent nail. Aware. Of your own body, the keen rumbling of the lungs, the pumping of the blood, the movement of muscles and sinews, and the rhythm of four legs. Of the sun in the sky, and the direction you were traveling. Of your surroundings, and how to get home again. Of not only the world in front of you, but what was happening to right, left, behind, above, and below. Of the scent trails of small game and the sounds of animals fleeing your own scent. Aware of all these things and many more. Mikhail had never realized that being a wolf was such hard work.
But it was becoming second nature. The pain of transformation had lessened, though Wiktor had told him it would never entirely go away. Pain, as Mikhail understood it, was a fact of life. Still, the pain of change paled before the utter, exuberant thrill that Mikhail felt whenever his body bounded on all fours through the forest, his muscles rippling beneath his flesh and the sensation of power beyond anything he’d ever known. He was still a small wolf, but Wiktor said he’d grow. He was a fast learner, Wiktor said. He had a good head on his shoulders. In these burning days of summer Mikhail spent most of his time in the shape of a wolf, feeling naked and pale as a maggot when he wore his boy skin. He slept very little; every day and night there were new explorations to make, new things to see from eyes that missed nothing. Objects that had been matter-of-factly familiar to his human vision were a revelation to his wolf’s gaze: rain was a shower of shimmering colors, the tracks of small animals in high grass were edged with the faint blue of body heat, the wind itself seemed to be a complex living thing that brought news of other lives and deaths from across the forest.
And the moon. Oh, the moon!
The wolf’s eye saw it differently. An endlessly fascinating silver hole in the night, sometimes edged with bright blue, sometimes crimson, sometimes a hue that was beyond description. The moonlight fell in silver spears, lighting the forest like a cathedral. It was the most beautiful glow Mikhail had ever seen, and in that awesome beauty the wolves-even three-legged Franco-gathered on high rocks and sang. The songs were paeans of mingled joy and sadness: We are alive, the songs said, and we wish to live forever. But life is a passing thing, as the moon passes across the sky, and all the eyes of wolves and men must grow dim, and close.
But we’ll sing, while there’s such a light as this!
Mikhail ran for the thrill of running. Sometimes, when he returned to human form after hours spent on four legs, he had trouble balancing on two. They were weak, white stalks, and you couldn’t get them to go fast enough. Speed was what entranced Mikhail; the ability of movement, of cutting left and right and having a tail that acted like a rudder keeping your balance in turns. Wiktor said he was becoming too enraptured with his wolf’s body, and neglecting his studies. It wasn’t only the changing of shape that made the miracle, Wiktor told him; it was the brain in the wolf’s skull that could follow a scent of an injured stag on the wind and recite Shakespeare at the same time.
He burst through the underbrush and found a pond in a hollow rimmed with rocks. The fragrance of the cool water on such a hot, dusty day was a beckoning perfume. There were still some things a human boy could do better than a wolf, and one of them was swimming. He rolled in the soft grass for the mighty pleasure of it. Then he lay on his side, panting, and let the change come over him. How this worked exactly was still a mystery to him: it began by imagining himself as a boy, just as he imagined himself a wolf when he desired to change in the other direction. The more complete and detailed he saw himself in his mind’s eye, the faster and smoother the change. It was a matter of concentration, of training the mind. Of course there were problems; sometimes an arm or leg refused to obey, and once his head had balked. All this led to much merriment for the other members of the pack, but considerable discomfort for Mikhail. But with practice he was getting better. As Wiktor told him, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Mikhail leaped into the water, and it closed over his head. He came up spouting, and then he arched his white body and dove into the depths. As he stroked along the rocky bottom, he remembered how and where he’d first learned to swim: as a child, under the tutelage of his mother, in a huge indoor pool in St. Petersburg. Had that been him, really? A pampered, shy youth who wore shirts with high starched collars and took piano lessons? That seemed like a foreign world now, and all the people who had inhabited it had almost faded away. Nothing was real, except this life and the forest.
He shot up to the surface, and as he shook the water from his hair he heard her laugh.
Startled, he looked around and saw her. She was sitting on a rock, her long hair the color of spun gold in the sunlight. Alekza was as naked as he, but her body was infinitely more interesting. “Oh look!” she said teasingly. “What a minnow I’ve found!”