Lone Wolf (17 page)

Faolan reached the flats all too soon. The wolves closed in on him again, steering him toward something brighter than the sun. Too late Faolan saw it, a wall of fire in the gap between the two lakes. It was a defile. They were hunting him as he and Thunderheart had hunted the caribou.

There was no sound except for the wolves breathing. He was being driven into a wall of fire. He could feel its heat reaching for him. An immense heat. He could hear it now. Crackling. Spitting. The fiery tongues licking the air, gulping, raging. Closer and closer he was driven.
I have no choice but to die.

The words streaking through his mind angered him profoundly. The fire was upon him. The sun reeled in the sky as the word
NO!
exploded in his brain. He opened his jaws and his chest expanded with air, as if he were swallowing the sky.
I have jumped for a tree, jumped for a raven, jumped for a cougar. I shall jump for the sun!

Overhead, the dark shape of an owl’s wings cut the blue-ness of the sky. Gwynneth soared in growing alarm on the warm updrafts of the fire as she began to understand what was happening beneath her. She had seen the smoke from a distance and come to explore, for fire was an unusual occurrence in the region of the salt lagoons. She now hung on the warm ledge of air in horrified dismay.
It’s Faolan, Great Glaux, it’s Faolan! They think he has the foaming—

She never finished the thought, plunging in what the
owls called a kill-spiral toward the wolves, screeching, “Stop! Stop!” But her cries were swallowed by the roar of the fire. And then her wings seemed to seize up, freeze. The wolves jolted to a stop as a silver streak arced over the wall of fire, clearing the highest flames.

“Yeep” was the name of the condition that had afflicted Gwynneth when her wings locked. Luckily, she recovered her wits before smacking into the ground. By the time she had regained her flight instincts, the wolves had begun to howl.

“Idiots! Absolutely idiots!” the Sark of the Slough fumed at the chieftains, who stood with their jaws gaping. The sight that they had just witnessed was one of terrify-ing beauty and grace. Had the wolf sprouted wings? How had he soared so high? It was easier to believe that he might have been scorched by the sun.

“Go ahead and howl, the lot of you! He no more has the foaming mouth than any of you! There was enough evidence. One paw splayed! Not two, not three. Not four, not…not eighteen!” the Sark roared in a thunderous baying.

Duncan MacDuncan limped forward.

“Bow down, bow down,” a captain from the MacDuncan clan growled at the Sark. “Show your respect.”

“No, no need! No one should perform the submission rituals,” the old chieftain said wearily. “It is my fault. I’m too old to be chieftain.”

“Oh, no. No,” several wolves protested.

“Yes!” MacDuncan growled. “When your memory shreds and you forget that a year ago a
malcadh
was born with one splayed paw.” A silence fell upon the wolves. MacDuncan looked about and nodded at a gnaw wolf, a yearling missing its tail and with a crooked hip.

“You have brought your bone?” Duncan MacDuncan asked.

“Of course, honorable chief.” The young wolf named Heep sank to his knees and was grinding his face into the dirt.

“Rise up,” Duncan MacDuncan snapped. “Stop venerating and start carving.” He turned to the others and began to speak in a tremulous voice. “Let it be recorded on the gnaw-bone that in the moon of the frost blossoms, when the river ice still locked the water, a pup was born with one splayed paw to Morag and her mate, Kinnaird. The pup was taken by the late Obea, Shibaan,
to be abandoned. This pup did not die. This pup survived and has now earned its place as a gnaw wolf in the MacDuncan clan.”

The gnaw wolf Heep slid his eyes around nervously as if looking for something and then returned to the bone. Duncan MacDuncan then turned to the Sark. “Where is that wolf now?”

“He’s on the other side of the trap fire with Gwynneth,” the Sark replied.

“Gwynneth, the Rogue smith?”

The Sark nodded.

“He survived the fire?” the chieftain asked.

“He did more than survive,” the Sark answered acidly. “He jumped the wall of fire! You all saw him!” She tried to speak evenly, but she was seething with anger.

“He challenged the order,” a wolf from the MacDuff clan whispered.

Heep looked up again, a glint now in his eyes. Into the bone he began to chisel with his teeth a design depicting the Great Chain. Cleverly, he placed the chain over a large crack in the bone, making it appear broken.

“Can you fetch him and bring him forth?” MacDuncan asked.

The Sark nodded. She soon came back with Faolan. He looked fresher than the outflankers who had chased him so hard. Standing bright and silver, a soft breeze stirred his pelt so that he appeared almost to shimmer. He sensed the wariness of the nearby wolves as he advanced. He kept his eyes forward, focused on the horizon and refused to even glance at the gathering of chieftains to whom he was being led.

Duncan MacDuncan stepped forward. The air began to buzz when the wolf with the splayed paw did not begin to lower himself to the ground, but Duncan MacDuncan took no offense. “Heep, come forward and read what you have recorded thus far in the gnaw-bone.”

Heep quickly trotted up with the bone in his mouth, dropped it, and began an elaborate sequence of movements and postures that soon had maneuvered him into a state of flatness as if a boulder had crushed him.

“Honorable chieftain, highest lord of the MacDuncan clan, I offer what I have carved in respect and profound humiliation.”

“Sycophants, the lot of them,” the Sark whispered to Gwynneth.

“Just get on with it!” Duncan MacDuncan boomed.

So Heep began to read. He did not read the last symbols he had started to carve regarding the Great Chain. He had a feeling that this might not please Duncan MacDuncan.

“Bring the bone you just gnawed, Heep, and show this wolf your work.”

“It is not quite finished, sir.”

“No matter. I just want for this wolf to see examples of gnawing, for this will be his task.”

Faolan walked somewhat stiff legged, his lip nearly cleared his teeth—a silent snarl threatening to break out. He was trying to sort out in his mind what exactly was happening. These were the wolves that had wanted to kill him and now they were staring at him with an odd mixture of wariness and deference. He wasn’t sure what was expected of him. Gwynneth had briefly explained to him about the mistake. That they thought he had been afflicted with the foaming-mouth disease. But no one was saying they were sorry. There were no apologies being offered. Heep dropped the bone between Faolan and the chieftain.

Faolan looked at the bone carefully. He was not impressed. The lines were clumsy, the narration disorganized. There was one part that was not finished. Faolan
had never even lived within a clan and yet the bones he had gnawed were much finer. He thought of the paw bone of Thunderheart on which he had gnawed their story, the story of that glorious summer, fall, and the winter den. He had buried that bone on the other side of the slope he had climbed to see the salt lagoons and had not had time to go back for it. But better that it was buried in a secret place. Better that this young gnaw wolf called Heep never see it.

He was suspicious. Suspicious of all these wolves. But something within him bade him to keep his thoughts to himself.

The chieftain turned to Faolan. “It takes a long time, a very long time to become a fine gnawer. Gnawing is an art. You now qualify to become gnaw wolf, and if you gnaw well, you may go on to join the Watch at the Ring of the Sacred Volcanoes. You will become a member of the clan of the MacDuncans. We shall soon decide which pack you may join, and name you.”

The loneliness that had walked beside him for so long began not to recede, but to contract, to migrate from his side to that hollow within him where it had begun. Now, although he was surrounded by his own kind, he felt more estranged than ever, gaunt with his own loneliness.

So,
Faolan thought,
I am to join a pack.
And a pack was part of a clan.
I am to become a wolf of the Beyond.
He looked now at these wolves, the chieftains, the outflankers, and the others who had comprised the
byrrgis
that had nearly killed him. Was there any wolf that looked remotely like him, one who could have been his mother or father, a sister, a brother? According to Gwynneth his own parents would have had to find new packs that were quite distant from their old one. But they would never have gone to the Outermost. As wary as Faolan now was, he knew that these wolves were decent creatures. They were not outclanners.

“You will join?” It was a question, not a command, that Duncan MacDuncan asked.

Faolan nodded.

“Do you understand?”

Faolan nodded again.

“Do you have any questions?”

Faolan hesitated. “Not a question, sir, but…”

“But what? A comment, perhaps?”

“Yes, a comment,” Faolan said.

Again, there was a surge of whispers. “How dare he?” “A gnaw wolf doesn’t have comments!” “He’ll learn!”

“Go on,” Duncan MacDuncan said softly.

“Sir, let the gnaw-bone show that I have a name.”

“A name?” Duncan MacDuncan blinked. “How did you happen to come by a name?”

The question almost confused Faolan. His name wasn’t an accident. Thunderheart had chosen it for him.

“I was named by my milk mother, the grizzly bear Thunderheart.”

“Your milk mother was a
bear?”
MacDuncan staggered slightly.

“Yes. My name is Faolan. That is the name my milk mother, the grizzly bear Thunderheart, gave me.” He turned his eyes toward the gnaw wolf Heep, then swept the assembled wolves in the green light of his gaze. “Call me Faolan.”