move. I think…” He blinked slowly, his brain gears sluggish. “I think… that for just one minute… she forgot she was a wolf.”
“They’ll leave now, won’t they?” Alekza asked hopefully, holding the squirming child. “They’ll go away, back to where they came from.” No one answered her. “Won’t they?”
“Pah!” Wiktor spat into the fire. “Who knows what they’ll do? Men are crazy!” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Maybe they’ll go. Maybe seeing Renati scared the shit out of them, and they’re already packing up. Damn it, they know about us now! There’s nothing more dangerous than a frightened Russian with a rifle!” He glanced quickly at Mikhail, then at the child in Alekza’s arms. “Maybe they’ll go,” Wiktor said, “but I won’t count on it. From now on, we keep a constant watch up in the tower. I’ll go first. Mikhail, will you take the second watch?” Mikhail nodded. “We’ll have to divide it among us into six-hour shifts,” Wiktor continued. He looked around at Alekza, Petyr, Franco, and Mikhail: the surviving members of the pack. He didn’t have to speak; his expression spoke for him, and Mikhail could read it. The pack was dying. Wiktor’s gaze wandered around the chamber, as if in search for the lost ones. “Renati’s dead,” he whispered, and Mikhail saw tears bloom in his eyes. “I loved her,” Wiktor said, to no one in particular. And then he gathered the folds of his deerskin robe about himself, abruptly turned away, and went up the stairs.
Three days passed. The sound of saws and axes at work had ceased. On the fourth night after Renati’s death, Wiktor and Mikhail crept to the bluff that had overlooked the circle of tents. The tents were gone, and the campfire was cold. The stench of men was gone as well. Wiktor and Mikhail went northwest, following the swath of stumps, to find the loggers’ main camp. It, too, had been cleared out. The shacks were empty, the wagons gone. But the road they’d cut into the forest remained, like a brown scar on the earth. There was no trace of Renati’s carcass; the men had taken her with them, and what would happen when the eyes of the outside world saw the body of a wolf with a human arm and leg? The road pointed the way to the white palace. From Wiktor’s throat came a low groaning noise, and Mikhail understood what he meant: God help us.
The summer moved on, a trail of scorching days. The loggers didn’t return, and no other wagons cut ruts on the forest road. Mikhail began to go out to the ravine at night again, and watched the train roar past. Its engineer seemed to be going even faster than before. He wondered if the man had heard about Renati, and the stories that would surely follow: in those woods live monsters.
He raced the train a few times, always pulling up short when his body began to change from human to wolf and his balance was in jeopardy. The iron wheels hissed at him, and left him behind.
The summer ended, the forest turned to gold and crimson, the sun’s rays slanted across the earth and the morning mist turned chill and lingered, and the soldiers came.
They arrived with the first frost. There were twenty-two of them, in four horse-drawn wagons, and Wiktor and Mikhail crouched in the underbrush and watched them setting up camp in the logging shacks. All of the soldiers had rifles and some carried pistols, too. One of the wagons was full of supplies, and along with crates marked Danger! Explosives! there was a bulky-looking gun mounted on wheels. Instantly a man who must have been in charge posted sentries around the camp, and the soldiers began to dig trenches and put sharpened wooden stakes at the bottom of them. They unrolled nets and hung them in the trees, with trip wires going in all directions. Of course they left their smell on all the traps, so those nets and wires were easily avoided-but then half of the soldiers took two wagons and went along the logging road to the place where the tents had been set up, and there they set up their own tents, dug new trenches, and strung up more nets. They took the crates of explosives and the wheeled gun off their wagon, and when they test-fired the gun it sounded like the end of the world and slashed thin pines down like the work of a dozen axes.
“A machine gun,” Wiktor said when they were back in the white palace. “They brought a machine gun! To kill us!” He shook his head incredulously, his beard full of white. “My God, they must think there are hundreds of us in here!”
“I say we get out while we can,” Franco urged. “Right now, before those bastards come hunting for us!”
“And where are we going to go, with winter coming? Maybe dig holes and live in them? We couldn’t survive without shelter!”
“We can’t survive where we are! They’re going to start searching the woods, and sooner or later they’ll find us!”
“So what shall we do?” Wiktor asked quietly, the firelight ruddy on his face. “Go to the soldiers and tell them we’re not to be feared? That we’re human beings, just like they are?” He smiled bitterly. “You go first, Franco, and we’ll see how they treat you.” Franco scowled and hobbled away on his staff, much more proficient on three legs than he was on one. Wiktor sat on his haunches and thought. Mikhail could tell what was going through the man’s mind: hunting was going to be much more difficult with the soldiers and their traps out in the woods; Franco was right, sooner or later the soldiers would find them; and what the soldiers might do to them when they were captured was unthinkable. Mikhail looked at Alekza, who held the child close. The soldiers would either kill us or cage us, Mikhail thought. Death would be preferable to iron bars.
“The bastards chased me away from one home,” Wiktor said. “They won’t chase me from a second. I’m staying here, no matter what.” He stood up, his decision made. “The rest of you can try to find somewhere else, if you like. Maybe you can use one of those caves where we hunted the berserker, but I’ll be damned if I’ll crouch and shiver in a cave like a beast. No. This is my home.”
There was a long silence. Alekza broke it, her voice thin and grasping false hope: “Maybe they’ll get tired of looking for us and leave. They won’t stay very long, not with winter almost here. They’ll be gone with the first snow.”
“Yes!” Franco agreed. “They won’t stay when the weather turns cold, that’s for sure!”
It was the first time the pack had ever longed for the icy breath of winter. One good snowfall would clear the soldiers out. But, though the air turned cold, the sky remained clear. Dead leaves fell from the trees, and from the underbrush Wiktor and Mikhail watched the soldiers as they roamed the woods, tight knots of men with rifles aimed in all directions. Once a group of them passed within a hundred yards of the white palace. They dug more trenches, put sharpened stakes at the bottom of them, and covered the trenches over with dirt and leaves. Wolf traps, Wiktor told Mikhail. The snares were of no consequence, but the soldiers were searching in expanding circles, and one terrible day Mikhail and Wiktor watched in agonized silence as the men stumbled upon the Garden. Hands and bayonets went to work, digging up the graves that had been repaired after the berserker’s death. And as those hands pulled the wolf and human bones from the earth, Mikhail lowered his head and turned away, unable to bear the sight.
Snow dusted the forest. The northern wind promised brutality, but still the soldiers remained.
October waned. The sky darkened, burdened with clouds. And on one morning, as Mikhail returned from hunting with a freshly killed rabbit in his jaws, he found the enemy less than fifty yards from the white palace.
There were two of them, both carrying rifles. Mikhail darted into the brush and crouched, watching the soldiers approach. The men were talking to each other, something about Moscow; their voices were nervous, and their fingers clutched the triggers. Mikhail let the rabbit slide from his mouth. Please stop, he told the soldiers in his mind. Please go back. Please…
They didn’t. Their boots crushed the foliage down, and every step took them closer to Wiktor, Franco, Alekza, and the child. Mikhail’s muscles tensed, his heart pounding. Please go back.
The soldiers stopped. One of them lit a cigarette, cupping the match from the wind. “We’ve gone too far,” he said to the other man. “We’d better get back, or Novikov’ll skin us.”
“That bastard’s crazy,” the second man observed, leaning on his rifle. “I say we set the whole damned woods on fire, and be done with it. Why the hell does he want to set up a new camp in this mess?” He looked around at the forest, with the awe and fear that told Mikhail the man was a city dweller. “Burn it to the ground and go home, that’s what I say.”
The first man blew plumes of smoke from his nostrils. “That’s why we’re not officers, Stefan,” he said. “We’re too smart to wear stars. I’ll tell you, if I have to dig another damned trench, I’m going to let Novikov know where he can stick his-” He stopped, smoke whirling past his head, and stared through the trees. “What’s that?” he asked, his voice hushed.
“What’s what?” Stefan looked around.
“There.” The first man took two more steps forward and pointed. “Right there. See it?”
Mikhail closed his eyes.
“It’s a building,” the first man said. “See? There’s a minaret.”
