pale brown animal began to howl, then the russet wolf, singing in eerie harmony with blood-smeared muzzles. Finally the gray wolf lifted its head and sang a wailing, discordant note that silenced the others. The note wavered, grew in power and volume, changed pitch, and slid upward. Then the gray wolf abruptly ceased its singing, and all the wolves returned to their horsemeat and human flesh.
From the distance came a howling that lasted maybe fifteen seconds, faded, and died.
Dark motes spun across Mikhail’s vision. He pressed his hand to his shoulder. In the wounds muscle tissue showed bright pink. He almost shouted for his mother and father, but then the images of corpses and murder slammed into his brain again and knocked him witless.
Not witless enough, however, to realize that sooner or later the wolf pack would tear him to pieces.
This was not a game. This was not a fairy tale told to him by his mother in the golden glow of lamplight. This was not Hans Christian Andersen or Aesop’s fables; this was life and death.
He shook his head to force back the twilight. Run, he thought. A Gallatinov never runs. Got to run… got to…
The pale brown, gray-streaked wolf and the blond one I snapped at each other over the red chunks of Danalov’s liver. Then the blond beast backed off, allowing the dominant animal to gobble up the bits of meat. The large-shouldered gray wolf was ripping pieces out of the horse’s flanks.
Mikhail crawled away from them, pushing himself backward with his boots. He kept watching them, expecting an attack: the blond wolf stared at him for a second, blue eyes glittering, then began to feed on the horse’s entrails. Mikhail pushed himself into the thicket, the breath rasping from his lungs, and at the center of thorns and green creepers he lost consciousness and fell into night.
The afternoon passed. The sun began to sink. Blue shadows laced the forest, and chill pockets formed. The corpses shrank, being whittled down to their foundations. Bones cracked, the ghosts of pistol shots, and the red marrow lay exposed.
The wolves ate their fill, then lodged chunks of meat in their gullets to be regurgitated. Their bellies swollen, they began to drift off into the gathering shadows.
Except for one. The large gray wolf sniffed the air and stood near the little boy’s body. It nosed around the oozing wounds on Mikhail’s shoulder, and smelled the tang of blood mingled with wolf saliva. The beast stood staring down into Mikhail’s face for a long time without moving, as if in solemn contemplation.
It sighed.
The sun was almost gone. Faint specks of stars appeared over the forest in the darkening east. A crescent moon hung above Russia.
The wolf leaned forward, pushing the boy over on his stomach with its blood-caked muzzle. Mikhail groaned softly, stirred, then lapsed again into unconsciousness. The wolf clamped its jaws gently but firmly around the back of the child’s neck, lifting the limp body off the ground with muscular ease. The beast began to stride through the forest, its amber-eyed gaze ticking to right and left, its senses questing for the enemy. Behind it, the child’s boots dragged on the ground, and plowed furrows in the leaves.
3
Sometime, somewhere, he heard a chorus of howls. They rang out through the darkness, over the forest and hills, over the lake and the meadow where corpses lay amid the dandelions. The wolf song soared, breaking into discordant notes and returning to harmony again. And Mikhail heard himself moan, in crude emulation of the howling, as pain racked his body. He felt sweat on his face, a savage burning in his wounds. He tried to open his eyes, but the lids were gummed shut by dried tears. In his nostrils was the odor of blood and meat, and he felt hot breath on his face. Something rumbled nearby, like a steady bellows.
The merciful darkness closed around him once more, and he slipped away in its velvet folds.
The high, sweet trilling of birds awakened him. He knew he was conscious, but he wondered for a moment if he were in heaven. If so, God hadn’t healed his shoulder, nor had the angels kiss the sticky tears from his eyes. He had to almost rip the lids open.
Sunlight and shadow. Cold stones and the smell of ancient clay. He sat up, his shoulder shrieking.
No, not heaven, he realized. It was still the hell he’d fallen into yesterday. Or he thought a day must’ve passed, at least. This was a golden morning sun, glinting brightly in the tangle of trees and vines he could see through a large, glassless oval window. The vines had entered the window, and latched on to the wall where a mosaic of figures bearing candles had faded to shades.
He looked up, his neck muscles stiff and aching. Above him was a high ceiling, crossed with wooden beams. He was sitting on the stone floor of a huge room, sunlight streaming through a series of windows, some of which still held fragments of dark red glass. Vines, drunk with the springtime sun, festooned the walls and dangled from the ceiling. The branch of an oak tree had entered one of the windows, and pigeons cooed in the rafters.
It occurred to him, quite simply, that he was a long way from home.
Mother, he thought. Father. Alizia. His heart stuttered, and fresh tears ran down his cheeks. His eyes felt burned, as if scorched by sight. All dead. All gone. He rocked himself, staring at nothing. All dead. All gone. Bye- bye.
He sniffled once, and his nose drooled. And then he sat up straight again, his mind flaming with fear.
The wolves. Where were the wolves?
He could sit here in this place, he decided. Sit right here until someone came for him. It wouldn’t be long. Someone would surely come. Wouldn’t they?
He caught a metallic whiff, and looked to his right. On the mossy stone next to him was a piece of bloody meat that might have been a liver. Beside it lay a dozen or so blueberries.
Mikhail felt his lungs freeze. A scream hung in his bruised throat. He scrambled away from the gruesome offering, making an animalish moaning noise, and he found a corner and wedged himself into it. He shivered and retched, losing the remnants of his picnic lunch.
No one was going to come, he thought. Ever. He shook and moaned. The wolves had been here, and they might be back very soon. If he was going to live, he would have to find his way out of this place. He sat, huddled up and shivering, until he could force himself to stand. His legs were unsteady, and threatened to collapse. But then he got himself all the way up, one hand clamped to the throbbing fang wounds at his shoulder, and he lurched out of the room into a long corridor lined with more mosaics and moss-draped statues without heads or arms.
Mikhail saw an exit to his left and went through the portal. He found himself in what might have been, years-decades-ago, a garden. It was overgrown and choked with dead leaves and goldenrod, but here and there a sturdy flower had sprung from the soil. More statues stood about, gesturing like silent sentinels. In the midst of intersecting paths was a white stone fountain, full of rainwater. Mikhail paused at it, cupped his hands into the water, and drank. Then he splashed it on his face and over the shoulder wounds; the raw flesh burned, and made tears creep down his cheeks. But he bit his lower lip and hung on, then looked around to see exactly where he was.
The sun threw light and shadows upon the walls and turrets of a white palace. Its stones were the hue of bleached bone, and the roofs of its minarets and onion domes were the pale green of ancient bronze. The palace’s turrets stretched up into the treetops. Stone stairways wound upward to observation platforms. Most of the windows had been broken, smashed by invading oak branches, but some of them remained; they were made of multipaned, multicolored glass, some dark red, others blue, emerald, ocher, and violet. The palace, a deserted kingdom, cast walls of white stone around the garden but had failed to keep out the forest. Oaks had burst upward through geometric walkways, shattering man’s order with the brutal fist of nature. Vines had snaked through cracks in the walls, displacing hundred-pound stones. A thicket of black thorns had pushed out of the earth under the feet of a statue, thrown it over, and broken its neck, then embraced its victim. Mikhail walked through the green desolation and saw a crooked bronze gate ahead. He staggered to the gate and used all his strength to pull the heavy, ornate metal open. The hinges squealed. He faced another wall, this one formed of dense forest. In this wall there was no gate. No trails showed the way home. There was nothing but the woods, and Mikhail realized at once that it might go on for many miles and in each mile he might meet his death.
The birds sang, stupidly happy. Mikhail heard another sound as well; a fluttering noise, oddly familiar. He looked back at the palace, lifting his gaze toward the treetops. And there he saw it.
