As the sun began to sink and the sky turned red, Alekza picked up the scent of a rabbit in the breeze. She and Mikhail started following it, racing each other through the woods to see who could track down the rabbit first, and as they ran they bounded back and forth over each other, happy as any lovers on earth.
2
This was a golden time. As autumn passed into winter, Mikhail’s continued dalliances with Alekza resulted in the swelling of her belly. Wiktor demanded more and more of Mikhail’s time as the days shortened and the frost bloomed; the lessons had advanced, and now involved higher mathematics, theories of civilization, religion, and philosophy. But Mikhail, amazingly even to himself, found his mind craving knowledge just as his body craved Alekza. A double doorway had been opened: one to the mysteries of sex, one to the questions of life. Mikhail sat without fidgeting as Wiktor pushed him to think; and not only to think, but to make up his own mind about things. In their discussion of religion, Wiktor raised a question that had no answer: “What is the lycanthrope, in the eye of God? A cursed beast, or a child of miracle?”
The winter was a rare animaclass="underline" a comparatively mild few months in which there were only three blizzards and hunting was almost always easy. It passed, and spring came again, and the pack counted itself blessed. Renati came with news one morning in May: two travelers-a man and a woman-in a wagon on the forest road. Their horse would be good meat, and they might bring the travelers into the fold. Wiktor agreed; the pack, now numbering only five members, could stand some new blood.
It was done with military precision. Nikita and Mikhail stalked the wagon on either side of the road while Renati followed behind and Wiktor went ahead to choose the place of ambush. The signal was given: Wiktor’s strong voice, calling out as the wagon rumbled along beneath the dense pines. At once Nikita and Mikhail struck from both sides, leaping from the underbrush, and Renati bounded in from the rear. Wiktor jumped out of his hiding place, making the horse scream and leap in its traces. Mikhail saw the panic-stricken faces of the travelers; the man was bearded and thin, the woman dressed in a peasant’s sackcloth. Nikita went for the man, biting into the forearm and dragging him off the wagon. Mikhail started to strike for the woman’s shoulder, as Wiktor had instructed him, but he paused with his fangs bared and the saliva drooling. He remembered his own agony, and he couldn’t bear to put another human being through that torment. The woman screamed, her hands up before her face. And then Renati leaped up onto the wagon, sank her fangs into the woman’s shoulder, and knocked her to the ground. Wiktor sprang for the horse’s throat, hanging on as the horse began to run. The animal didn’t get very far before Wiktor brought it down, but Wiktor came out of the encounter covered with scrapes and ugly blue bruises.
In the depths of the white palace, the man died during his rite of passage. The woman survived, at least in body. Her mind, however, did not. She spent all her time huddled up in a corner, her back against the wall, sobbing and praying. No one could get her to speak anything but gibberish, not even to say her name or where she was from. She prayed night and day for death, until finally Wiktor gave her what she asked for, and put her out of her misery. On that day the pack hardly spoke to each other; Mikhail went running far away and back, and one word kept repeating itself over and over in his mind: monster.
Alekza gave birth, at the zenith of summer. Mikhail watched the infant emerge, and when Alekza asked eagerly, “Is it a boy? Is it a boy?” Renati mopped her brow and answered, “Yes. A fine, healthy son.”
The infant lived through its first week. Alekza named him Petyr, after an uncle she remembered from her childhood. Petyr had strong lungs, and Mikhail liked to sing along with him. Even Franco-whose heart had been softened as he learned to get about on three legs-was entranced by the child, but it was Wiktor who spent the most time near the newborn, watching with his amber eyes as Petyr suckled. Alekza giggled like a schoolgirl as she held the infant, but everyone knew what Wiktor was looking for: the first signs of the war between wolf and human in the child’s body. Either it would survive that war, and the body would make a truce between its natures, or it would not. Another week passed, then a month; Petyr still survived, still squalled and suckled.
Winds lashed the forest. A rainstorm was coming; the pack could smell its sweetness. But this was the night of the summer’s last train, on its way east to be caged until next season. Both Nikita and Mikhail had come to see the train as a living thing, as night after night they raced it along the tracks, beginning in human form and trying to cross in front of it as wolves before it roared into the eastern tunnel. They both were getting faster, but it seemed that the train was getting faster, too. Possibly a new engineer, Nikita had said. This man doesn’t know the meaning of brakes. Mikhail agreed; the train had begun to come out of the western tunnel like a hell-bent demon, racing to reach home before the dawn light turned its heart to iron. Twice Nikita had completed the change and almost made the leap that would carry him through the beam of the train’s cyclopean eye, but the train had picked up speed with a gout of black smoke and a rain of cinders and at the last second Nikita’s nerve had faltered. The red lamp on the train’s last car swung as if in mockery, and the light glowed in Nikita’s eyes until it faded away in the long tunnel.
As the pines and oaks swayed on either side of the ravine and all the world seemed in tumultuous motion, Mikhail and Nikita waited in the dark for the summer’s last train. Both of them were naked, having run from the white palace as wolves. They sat on the edge of the tracks, near the western tunnel’s opening, and every so often Nikita would reach out and touch the rails, expecting to feel a trembling. “He’s late,” Nikita said. “He’ll be going faster than ever, trying to make up the time.”
Mikhail nodded thoughtfully and chewed on a weed. He looked up, watching the clouds move like plates of metal in the sky. Then he touched the rails; they were silent. “Maybe he broke down.”
“Maybe he did,” Nikita agreed. Then, frowning: “No, no! It’s the final run! They’ll get that train home tonight if they have to push it!” He tore up a clump of grass and, getting impatient, watched it fly before the wind. “The train will be here,” he said.
They were silent for a few moments, listening to the noise of the trees. Mikhail asked, “Do you think he’ll live?”
That question had never been very far from all their minds. Nikita shrugged. “I don’t know. He seems healthy enough, but… it’s hard to tell.” He felt the rail again; no train. “You must have something strong inside you. Something very special.”
“Like what?” That puzzled Mikhail, because he’d never thought of himself as any different from the rest of the pack.
“Well, look how many times I’ve tried to father a child. Or Franco. Or even Wiktor. My God, you’d think Wiktor could pop them out right and left. But the babies usually died within a few days, and those that lasted any longer were in such pain it was a horror to behold. Now here you are-fifteen years old-and you father a child who’s lasted a month and seems all right. And the way you endured your own change, too; you just held on, long after the rest of us had given you up. Oh, Renati says she always knew you’d live, but she thought of the Garden every time she looked at you. Franco was betting scraps of food that you’d die within a week-and now he thanks God every day that you didn’t!” He tilted his head slightly, listening for the sound of wheels. “Wiktor knows,” he said.