The Silver Wolf (60 page)

Near the couch where they rested was one where Silvia, Gordo, Joseph, and others rested. Most were unconscious, but Silvia, a gleaming mound in the candlelight, tried to crawl off, presumably the remains of the wine had reached her bladder. The couch gave a loud crack and settled to floor level.

Maeniel’s eyes rolled heavenward.

“I hope it wasn’t a valuable antique,” Regeane said.

“Doesn’t matter.” Maeniel helped Regeane to her feet. “When the owner of the villa comes to collect damages from me, it will metamorphose into a cherished heirloom belonging to his family since the days of the Caesars, which cannot be replaced by mere precious metals in the form of coin. But, alas, he will continue, in these degenerate days base metal must compensate for beauty, antiquity, and family pride. He will content himself with something, preferably not in plebeian copper, or mercantile silver, but aristocratic gold.

“Ummm,” Regeane murmured, as she realized she was being steered away from the banquet hall into an empty room. She stopped and dug in her heels for a second.

“It’s all right,” he said. “We’re married.”

The wolf looked at Regeane from her primordial darkness. She seemed concerned. How like her human side to cloud her mind with drugs or drink. Something was wrong. Wrong as it had been the night she feasted with the pope.

Maeniel eased her along, one arm over her shoulder. He was pushing. Away from the braziers in the banquet hall, she could feel the heat rising from his body. He brushed aside a curtain. The sound of rings clattered in Regeane’s ears.

Regeane found herself in a room lit only by a single candle set in a sconce. Maeniel closed the curtain with one hand and pulled her to him with the other.

This kiss pulled no punches. His tongue explored her mouth. His arms and hands molded her to his body, her hips against his.
Her breasts tingled and caught fire as they moved against a chest that seemed plated with steel.

At length, he freed her and she came up for air gasping. Yet again, the prickle of uneasiness stirred in her mind.

“Not quite with me, are you?” he gasped as he clutched her against his body. “But come, drink some of this.”

Regeane saw a beaker and a silver cup on the table.

“These are precious,” Maeniel said, gesturing toward them, “and really old. It is said that Livia, the sister of Augustus Caesar, had them made for her favorite lover and modeled for the female figure herself.”

The figures carved into the beaker in low relief showed a man disrobing a woman, kissing her breasts as he eased the tunic down over her hips.

The cup on the outside was encircled by rubies. A deep bloody fire in the darkened room. The bottom of the cup, modeled in high relief, showed the two figures caught up in love’s embrace. They were fully joined, but she leaned a little back. His hands caressed her and her face showed the preoccupation of ecstacy.

Regeane and the wolf looked down at the culmination of desire. The room spun as though she were falling. The message the wolf sent was one of deep disquiet.
This will not end as you wish
.

But his arms were around her and her desire was rising again, all the stronger for being briefly quelled.

This kiss was less intense, but his searching hands sought and found places that responded to his caresses with shocks of pleasure.

When he’d drawn a few gasps from her, he released her and filled the cup from the flagon. “Drink,” he whispered.

“I don’t know,” Regeane said. “Do you want your bride unconscious? I’ve had quite a lot of wine.”

“No.” His voice was gentle, hypnotic and intoxicating at once. “This is the wine of desire. Spring mead. In spring the bees feed on white poppies blown by March winds. The first fragrant myrtle, wildflowers that dazzle meadows still draped in snow. The wine of love. And it is bestowed on lovers alone.”

Regeane drank. The mead was an inexpressibly sweet essence
of springtime. A liquid dissolving on her tongue. A tingling beginning with her heart and radiating out to the tips of her fingers. Her fears slept. Her consciousness was drenched with desire and had room for nothing else.

He kissed her again. She tasted the mead on his lips.

He lifted her chin with one finger. “Whose are you?” he asked.

“Yours.”

“Take off the dress,” he said.

She did, pulling it over her head and throwing it aside, thinking,
We are never going to reach the bedroom. But who cares …
She wore a linen shift.

He kissed her again. Parts of her body were almost numbed by pleasure and when his fingers brushed them through the shift, they felt as though they burst into flame. She wanted him in a way that was unbearable, simply unbearable. She would die if he did not possess her.

“Will you do anything I want you to do?” he teased.

“Yes.”

“The shift.”

In a second, the shift was on the floor. She was still clad in a sleeveless silk undershift, the strophium at her breast and linen loin cloth.

He reached up under the shift. The strip between her legs fell. His hand moved up. The shift rose with it. He looked down at the soft, curly delta of Venus. She blushed. He could feel the heat against his skin.

He pushed the shift higher and loosened the strophium at her breasts. It fluttered to the floor. Then he let the shift fall and caressed her body through the silken fabric.

“Are you drunk?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you virgin?”

“Yes.” Her answer was an indrawn breath.

“Do you know what a man’s organ is?”

She nodded and noticed he’d spread his mantle and outer tunic on the long table.

“Very well,” he said. “You understand what I’m about to do with mine.”

“Ohooo.”

“At this juncture, I’ll take that as a yes.”

His hands had continued their explorations. As he spoke, Regeane felt lost in a garden of rare delights, except that he was plucking the flowers. Slowly, that part of her, the spirit that whispered of the ancient past and sometimes the dim future sent an image to her mind.

She was standing with him. They were knee-deep in a mountain lake. The lake was a place of wild beauty, bounded by pines and thickets of fern and pink roses. A narrow falls dropped from high-back rock, dotted with green-gray lichen and moss. Mist from the froth at its base dampened her lips and frosted her eyelashes.

Their bodies were joined deeply, almost painfully. She was possessed by the man whose arms were around her.

His body was wet. He wore a crown of yellow-flowering water weed. His shoulders and arms were netted with another bearing white, scented flowers.
What was he?
she wondered. She remembered the tales of maidens ravished by gods who demanded adoration as well as love, and absolute possession of spirit as well as body. Was she not one of those maidens and was he not some sort of god? How does mortal flesh bear immortal fire?

He moved and waves of mind-bending pleasure coursed through her. He moved again. Thought was wiped out. Also, memory. Everything dissolved into the power of what flesh was doing to flesh.

She returned to the darkened room. She rested quietly in his arms. That had been a memory? Dream? The future? No matter. It wasn’t real, but this would be.

He pulled off the shift over her head. She was naked.

“You know what I’m about to do?” he repeated.

“Yes.” Her whole body shuddered. The confining shift off, she spread her legs to receive him. “I think I’ll die if you don’t,” she said ingenuously.

“So be it,” he said, and began lifting her to the table top.

The knife glittered in the air over his shoulder.

Deep in Regeane’s soul, the wolf roared a warning. Desire died.

Her left hand shot out and caught the wrist of the man
holding the knife. The man tried to tear her grip from his wrist. But she was, after all, not a mortal woman. He looked shocked for a split second at the pain she was inflicting. Then he jerked his arm down and, using Maeniel’s shoulder as a fulcrum, he tore his arm free.

Maeniel thrust Regeane away, then turned, whipping around with the speed of a striking snake. The assassin’s knife scored a gash in his shoulder.

Antonius threw back the curtain, torch in one hand, a Roman short sword in the other. Antonius drove the sword in just below and up under the man’s shoulder blade, paralyzing his right arm.

But Maeniel saw the stiletto in his left hand, aimed and rising toward his heart. He stepped in boldly and, catching his attacker by the shoulder and jaw, twisted his head hard right. The killer’s neck snapped.

The sound was a wet one.
Like a green twig
, Regeane thought. When Maeniel flung her away, her head had cracked against the table and, for a moment, her body was numbed. The wolf tried forcefully to take her, but the torch in Antonius’ hand quelled her. She watched as the assassin fell bonelessly to the floor, dead before his skull cracked on the marble tiles.

“Goddamn it, you killed him,” Antonius shouted.

“No choice,” Maeniel said, pointing to the deadly stiletto.

Regeane pulled herself to her feet with one hand while feeling for a scalp wound with the other.

Lucilla ran into the room. She grasped at the curtain for support. It tore. She fell forward, but Maeniel caught her and returned her to an upright position. She stood and stared down at the assassin. “My goodness,” she said, “Petrus.”

“You know him,” Maeniel said very, very softly. In that softness crouched almost infinite menace.

Antonius replied by thrusting his mantle at Regeane. “Woman! You’re naked! Cover yourself.”

Regeane snatched the mantle and wrapped it around her body. Then she hurriedly began gathering up her clothing from the floor.

The few remaining sober guests converged on the doorway.

“Mother knows a lot of people. Some of them are even
quite respectable—some are not,” Antonius said trenchantly to Maeniel.

Regeane slipped into another room. It was very dark, but she could see enough to tell that it was a small storage closet. One small barred window let in the cold night air.

She remembered a story from the Bible. In Genesis, once the grace of God is withdrawn, nakedness is accompanied by shame. This was true. She had gloried in her nakedness with Maeniel. She had felt clothed, glowing with desire. Her fears and inhibitions dissolved at his touch.

The wolf was silent, gazing at the vast spill of stars through the barred window, a dusting of light across the dead black sky.

She remembered the gray one and the clean mountain wind. She remembered Maeniel’s frozen features—the death’s-head grin as he bared his teeth and struck his enemy down. Attractive as the thought of loving him might be to her hot and pulsing body, the night, the wolf, and her cold, incisive human reason told her it would be folly to trust him with her secret. She had just seen him kill a man with his bare hands.

He led his band of ruffians not by any right, human or divine, but because he was the strongest and could quell revolt with fist and sword. They respected him not because he was best, but because he was worst among them. Sooner or later the she-wolf would have to fight for her life.

So … now … she felt no desire. Only the cold, flesh-piercing wind through the open window and shame, deep shame and vulnerability at her nakedness. She was indeed that naked and alone.

Suddenly, beyond the door she heard a woman scream.

REGEANE WOKE. SHE WAS LYING ON ONE OF THE couches in the triclinium, wearing a soft linen robe. Her head ached. She reached up and found a very tender spot on the left side of her head. She turned to sit up and realized the room was strewn with dead men.

One lay across the table, his throat cut. Another was lying in the doorway of the triclinium, his head in a pool of blood. Another lay across the musicians’ fallen chairs, a spear through his body.

The wolf brought Regeane to her feet immediately.
How long had she been unconscious?
Not long. The first gray dawn was filling the peristyle garden outside. She had to find out what had happened before she created a disturbance.

She stumbled from the triclinium into the room where she and Maeniel had their moment of passion. It was empty.

Just ahead was another curtained doorway. She pushed through it and found herself in a narrow Roman bedroom. A mirror rested on a small vanity table near the bed. She picked up the mirror and looked into it. Her features were blurred both by the mirror’s age and the dim light, but her eyes were clear. Her hair was free of blood and there remained only a small swelling on the side of her face.

As she looked, her features blurred again. It seemed as though she smelled smoke. The eyes in the mirror looked back at her through a veil of blowing flame, then smoke obscured them. The metal grew hot in her hand.

She still had the presence of mind to turn and fling the mirror facedown on the bed.

She spun around, realizing that someone was watching her.

The room had, as was the custom in most Roman homes, two doors, one leading into another room and the other to the peristyle.

Matrona was standing in the door to the garden.

“What happened?” Regeane asked.

“Many things,” Matrona replied, “none of them good. Basil’s men attacked right after you went into the other room to dress. Like a fool, you opened the door at the sound of Lucilla’s scream. You were clubbed down. You must have a very hard head. At first, we thought you were killed, but we were too busy trying to defend ourselves to help you.”

“You appear to have been successful,” Regeane said.

“Even so.” Matrona said. “What did you see in the mirror?” Matrona’s eyes were pools of darkness. She seemed to look at Regeane out of infinite time.

“My face,” Regeane said.

“Oh, no,” Matrona chuckled. “You saw more than your face. I know, because that is my mirror and it once belonged to a princess of the great people who lived here long before the Romans made the Tiber stink: they of the painted tombs. Tell me, what did you see? If you tell me, I can help you.”

Regeane’s mouth was dry. “I saw only my face,” she insisted.