Lilith’s Castle. Gill Alderman
her fear. He had stopped moving altogether and was bowing his head, cowering before a lone wolf almost as big as he. The wolf pointed its nose in the air and howled, ‘Foe, foe, foe!’ and the pack answered, ‘Woe, woe, woe!’, its hundred voices reverberating among the rocks and echoing across the sky, loose and terrible among the cold stars.
‘It is their queen,’ whispered the Voice and Gry, in the same moment, thought, ‘It’s the Wolf Mother.’
The great wolf sniffed the air and put out her red tongue. She panted and her tongue lolled over her teeth and moved about her jaw and her thin black lips – ‘She’s smiling,’ Gry said aloud. ‘Just like my Juma when I give her sweet grass to eat,’ – The tail of the wolf thumped audibly on the ground. ‘And they are going to eat us.’
The wolf walked slowly all round the Horse, who had become a horse merely, a poor mesmerised animal stripped of his power; about to die. Again, she circled them and stopped, was approaching, was close, her head level with Gry’s knee. Gry shrank back, and felt the wolf’s wet tongue lick her foot. She looked into the beast’s eyes where a yellow flame flickered in a ring about pupils as dark and deep as wells; soon, when she had enjoyed her triumph, the wolf would pull her by the ankle from her perch.
The wolf continued to lick, smoothly, softly. She backed away and crouched on the ground, her hindquarters high and her tail tucked so far in, it was no longer visible. Her ears shrank; she pulled them tight against her head; she made tiny, puppy-like whining noises.
‘She’s bowing to you.’
‘Oh …’
‘Say something to her!’
‘Good w-wolf,’ stammered Gry.
‘That’s hardly appropriate! She doesn’t speak our language.’
‘What …’ said Gry, ‘Ah –’ and put her hands suddenly to her head, holding them high and confident, like ears. Then she lowered one arm and swung it like a tail. The wolf sprang up, Gry shrank away and, growing bold again, leaned forward, talking with her ‘ears’ until, at last, the wolf persuaded her with whines and gigantic thumpings of her tail upon the ground, to jump from her last refuge on the back of the Red Horse to the certain peril of the hard and open ground.
Gry glanced behind her fearfully. The wolf pack was still, its two hundred eyes upon her and glowing with desire. Her ‘tail’ drooped and all the wolves tremulously lowered their tails and shrank into their skins until they looked more terrified than she.
But wolves are treacherous.
‘Not to their friends.’
Gry looked at the Red Horse. He stood tall, huge and invincible; his ears were up. What did he mean? Meanwhile, the Wolf Mother had crouched down beside her and was delicately sniffing her crotch.
Gry heard the voice in her mind. Its tone was one of amusement and delight:
‘Just like a faithful dog!’
‘It’s you!’ she cried and the Red Horse nodded his head.
‘It’s me.’
‘But –’
‘Not the time to explain – attend to your hostess. She is not interested in me: I’m just your conveyance.’
Gry sniffed the air as close to the tail of the wolf as she dared.
‘Her name is Mogia,’ said the voice of the Red Horse.
‘Mogia?’
‘It means Child of the Lightning.’
The big wolf, when she heard her name, leaned against Gry in a friendly manner, wagged her tail and seemed to invite Gry to walk with her. Over the stony ground they paced, backwards and forwards, while Mogia sang to the stars and the Red Horse walked solemnly behind. Soon Gry was singing,
‘When the bright stars hang clear and still
The grey wolf comes loping o’er the hill,
He is hungry, he is strong, it won’t be very long
Before he has hunted and eaten his fill.’
It was a song her mother, Lemani, had taught her, of fifty-two verses and a chorus repeated fifty-five times. In Verse Thirty, events turned against the hungry wolf and he was pursued, surrounded and hacked to death by brave Ima; but this, Verse Two, fitted the time and place and Gry sang it over and over again, her voice lifting as free and high as that of Mogia, the Child of the Lightning.
Mogia, pressing her right side hard, turned her about and led her across the sky-roofed chamber to a great boulder on the top of which was a lesser, but wide, flat stone; and here girl and wolf sat and sang together while the pack howled and the Red Horse kept time by beating his hooves on the ground.
Presently, the wolf stopped howling and lay down, her nose on her front paws. In the court below, the pack followed her example and the head of the Red Horse nodded, as if he too, would sleep. The wolves’ eyes closed; some of them snored, or dreamed in their sleep, ears and tails twitching, while the legs of the smallest cubs, which had not yet learned to know motion from stillness, moved continually as they slept. Gry lay close to Mogia, her head pillowed on the soft flank of the wolf.
At dawn, Mogia woke, turned her head and licked the bare arm of the sleeping girl tenderly, as she might one of her own cubs. The Red Horse was awake already, staring out into the new day beyond the Wolf’s Castle. Gry, confused, yawned and stretched in her wolfhair bed.
‘Yellow dawn – Good morning!’ The voice of the Horse, sudden and cheerful as a happy thought, woke Gry properly. She was hungry; she was cold – as soon as she moved away from the warm body of the wolf – but, she thought, free and outside, far from the terrible, dark storehouse where Heron had died as he lay on her; very far from the men of her tribe, their Meeting House and their Law; far from her home and every small thing which filled it and her life; a very long way from Leal, whom she had (once upon a time: it was all as distant as a dream or a fairy tale) begun to love. Her dress was torn and bloodstained; she had neither silver nor horsehide on her, no wealth whatsoever.
‘It may be a good morning for some,’ she said.
The pack had also woken. Several young wolves, whose manes were as yet small and brown in colour, were dragging something across the ground and up, across the jagged rocks towards her. It was a chesol deer, tawny as the Plains grasses when they flowered. A number of other wolves – five, six – followed them; these carried groundapples in their mouths. Raw deer and fresh fruit, this was breakfast, Gry realised, when they had all climbed the rock of the throne and laid their burdens in front of her.
‘Wise creatures!’ said the Red Horse. ‘You have eaten my poor relatives, mixed with quail eggs and wild garlic in your Herdsman’s Comfort, Gry; so do not gag at this sacrificial deer. And the groundapple, intelligent choice! You know as well as I do that its juice is as good as fresh water.’
‘But I’m cold,’ moaned Gry.
The food helped warm her. As she ate, quickly swallowing the pieces of deer-meat which the wolves chewed from the carcass for her and sucking the acid juice from the groundapples, she saw that other yearling wolves had come to the deer and were tearing its skin into long strips and rough triangles. Soon, while the Wolf Mother directed them with little barks and sharp nips in their ears, the young wolves had picked up all the golden pieces of the deerskin and were laying them at her feet. Two were bold enough to drop their gifts in her lap.
Mogia wagged her tail and, cocking her head, gave Gry a lop-sided look.
‘Warm clothes,’ murmured the Red Horse.
Gry gathered up the bloody pieces of hide and, too modest to be a true member of Mogia’s pack, retired behind a rock and tried to make a garment from them. When she squatted to evacuate and relieve herself, she found fresh blood on the insides of her thighs – Svarog – Sky! It was her own blood: she should rejoice; she bent forward until her forehead touched